Broadly, the concept of information democracy is that an increasingly large number of people are able to influence how information is aggregated.  Wikipedia is a clear and simple example of allowing anybody to contribute to what used to be authored by a select few — “The Encyclopedia.”  Google’s Pagerank algorithm democratized web search.  Today’s most successful software is democratizing the feature set by allowing users to vote on how they want to use it.  The general principal is that large numbers of individuals can together make better decisions than any small group.  Applying this principal to culture, we can predict that a cultural democracy will produce “better culture” than what was available before.

Information technology makes it cheaper and easier to both create and to distribute culture.  With the right software, any laptop today has all the power of a professional music or video studio.  Sure the quality won’t be as good without professional inputs (microphones, cameras, etc) but the cheap stuff is good enough for a lot of things.  Obviously the internet makes distribution of this content trivially easy, which is disrupting traditional media businesses.  Easy creation and distribution of cultural content is an important part of creating a cultural democracy, but it is not the critical enabling step.

The key to democratizing culture is in the editorial process.  If everybody is contributing cultural content that is easily distributed, but there’s still a small group deciding which pieces everybody watches, we’re still in a cultural dictatorship.  Enabling the mass public to “vote” on content is the democratizing step.  That enables the collective intelligence of all media consumers to help choose what should become part of mass culture.  So instead of some programming executive trying to guess what will be popular, the question almost becomes moot — whatever is popular becomes popular culture.  Actually making this work is not at all straightforward.  I’ll save a full description of the necessary ingredients for another post, but we can look at a couple examples.

Youtube does this quite well.  It blurs the line between sharing a video clip with your friends and publishing it as a piece of mass culture.  Any video that isn’t marked private is submitted into a kind of massive popularity contest.  Videos that get millions of views are undeniably bits of popular culture.  For music, last.fm does a good job of being inclusive, but hasn’t quite taken off.  When I started building social features into Rhapsody I hoped they could democratize the music editorial process but that hasn’t happened yet.  Like many things in social media there’s a chicken and egg problem with scale which Youtube has clearly gotten past, but music is still struggling with.

Cultural Democracy is “retro”?!

This post is inspired by a recent story by Heather Chaplin that NPR aired describing participatory culture in video games.  The surprising part of the story for me was the assertion that this trend is not modern but in fact “retro.”  The story points out that before analog broadcast media, most culture was participatory — singing, dancing, crafts, etc.  Analog technology created the possibility of cultural hegemonies, and digital technology is breaking them down. A fine point, implying that the 20th century will likely be unique as the only period in human history when popular culture was dictated by an elite group of editors.  Thanks for the interesting tidbit.

]]> http://www.embracingchaos.com/2009/12/participatory-culture-and-the-democratization-of-information.html/feed 1 http://www.embracingchaos.com/2009/01/rhapsody-profil.html http://www.embracingchaos.com/2009/01/rhapsody-profil.html#comments Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:00:00 +0000 leodirac http://wp.embracingchaos.com/2009/01/rhapsody-profil.html Excuse my newbie exuberance, but OMG Rhapsody.com finally launched profile pages!!!  They’ve been up for a while now, which makes me think they’re for real this time.  A couple of you might remember that this feature was live for something like a week in early 2007.  But it was very slow and didn’t live long.  Sniff.

I worked hard to make this feature possible when I was working at Real.  The fact that I couldn’t get it re-launched was a big motivator for me to move on to greener pastures.  I saw making Rhapsody social as an important evolution of the music catalog’s organizational schema.  It’s also an attempt to bring the product into what Tim O’Reilly would call Web 2.0.  Tim’s canonical essay is long-winded, but I really liked how he summarized it in a recent interview on NPR — basically the product gets better as people use it.  The millions of people who use Rhapsody are an asset that has been almost completely unused, except to take their money.  I saw it as a way to take on one of the product’s biggest shortcomings.

Rhapsody has tons of music.  TONS.  Rhapsody almost certainly has something you want to listen to right now, regardless of who you are or what your current mood or situation is.  It’s a strong statement, but there really is that much music.  The problem is figuring out what you want to listen to.  Rhapsody has a great categorical index of music, so if you know you want to listen to D&B or Emo or Vocal Jazz, no problem.  Or if you know specifically the name of something you want to listen, just search for it.  Other than that, you can take the homepage recommendations, browse the catalog manually, or sift through Playlist Central, a dumping ground for unvetted playlists that is a case study in how not to use user-generated-content (UGC) on a website.

Picking good music is difficult.  This is what DJ’s get paid for.  I originally wanted this feature to be called "DJ Pages."  The idea was to give a voice to the small fraction of Rhapsody users who are fanatical about the product.  People who are serious music buffs love Rhapsody, and if given a voice would and still might add tremendous value to the music catalog.  Right now the editorial voice in Rhapsody is controlled by a politburo of paid editors.  They’re really good, but they’re just a handful of hands.  DJ Pages would democratize the music editorial process so anybody with an opinion can contribute.  The social graph becomes the voting process to select who’s worth paying attention to, just like with pagerank.  What Tim calls Web 2.0, I like to refer to the democratization of information.  Partly because it’s fun to call people Communists when they cling to control of information, but mostly because the analogy is apt and helpful.

The Rhapsody team has made an important step in this direction of openness.  I hope they keep running with it.  If you want to see what’s been playing on my Sonos at home, check out my profile page.  But most importantly, I’d like to express my CONGRATULATIONS to everybody who made this possible again and the first time!!!!11!!1

Original Web 1.0

Universal access to massive volumes of data.  Being able to search
through masses of data and find what you want.  Connecting people to
huge databases really well.  Key examples:

• Online telephone books
• Web search
• Huge e-commerce sites

But in all of these applications, the data set is static.  User activity will not change the data for anybody else.

Web 2.0.1: Democratizing use of the data

The users of these data make the data better.  They can collectively
organize the data.  (i.e. tags)  They can help filter good data from
junk.  (i.e. voting)  Or they can help you find the data that are most
interesting to you.  (i.e. collaborative filtering).  In other words,
you can interact with the data.

Any "Web 2.0 company" worth their salt has an API that federates out their raw data.  This enables other sites to use the data in new and novel ways.  But the primary problem with this paradigm is that anything built using these API’s is done from the ground up.  Using the gmail POP interface, it’s possible to build a better UI for gmail.  But to do so you need to first build an entire AJAX mail client — no small feat.  Better would be the ability to add features into the gmail UI itself.  But this is really the standard in web 2.0 API’s today.

Web 2.0.2: Democratizing the feature set

The next big trend will be enabling users to make more compelling ways to interact with
the data.  Users can change not just the data, but how other users see
and use the data.  Sometimes this means API’s with UI hooks.  Or other ways to enable new functionality into an existing site.  This kind of platform enables Independent Software Vendors to improve upon the UI’s that the original sites created.

Facebook is doing this by allowing ISV’s to add new communications features to their site.  Google Maps is doing this through maplets that allow developers to create new ways to interact with mapping data from within the fabulous Maps UI.  Right now these are the only two examples of web 2.0.2 platforms that I’m aware of.

Building this kind of API is very challenging.  There are several very different ways to go about doing it.  Here are a couple of ideas:

• Provide a server-server API that includes content generated from the ISV’s servers into the main experience.  Facebook style.
• Allow developers to author XML files that define new algorithms that are interpreted on the primary host’s servers.  Yahoo pipes is a service in this style, but they’re not doing anything to enhance an existing service so it doesn’t really meet my 2.0.2 criteria.
• Allow developers to author javascript plugins to run on the client machine.  Greasemonkey is essentially doing this.  This strategy has the best shot for a lot of applications in the long term, IMHO.  But it comes with some serious problems right now.

Doing this correctly would allow ISV’s to add new features to Gmail.  Think about it — if I wanted to change the way gmail messages were displayed, or how addressing happened, or whatever it was, this kind of platform could provide hooks for making gmail better in a way that a POP interface never would.  And even though a POP-style interface theoretically could do this, there would never be momentum because having a high-level base to build upon means that there are network effects from the extensions.  (Rails achieves a similar advantage over other web frameworks — just having a standard, any standard, means people will build upon that standard rather than argue over which library to use and extend none of them.)

3rd-party javascript

The big problem with this approach is security.  There is none.  You need to completely trust the ISV before you should allow their code to run in the context of your site.  The kind of editorial review required to do this today would completely kill the democratic goal of such a platform.

The world needs a security sandbox to run third-party javascript code inside.  This way primary site hosts could allow ISV’s to run their code on client machines safely.  Here are a few examples of places this kind of tool could be used.

ISV’s could…

• Add UI features to Gmail
• Create alternate ways to share and discuss images on Flickr
• Define new mathematical formulas to run client-side on a web spreadsheet
• Create new playlist selection / shuffling algorithms for Rhapsody

… and much more.  Even better, individual users (not developers) could pick which UI extensions they wanted to use.  Any site which provides such an API has democratized the feature development process in a very important way.  Not only does it provide a distributed mechanism to figure out which features are best, but it allows users to self-segment as to which features work for them.  Without such a mechanism the entire service must have the same features for everybody, which means product designers must play a political game where they’ll never make everybody happy.  Right now I think really only Facebook has solved this problem.

Building a security sandbox is an area that Microsoft could probably do best and fastest.  They are good at code API’s and layered security models,a nd they have a perfect place to do it with Silverlight and the CLR.  They’re trying to position Silverlight as a faster way to run DHTML, which is something else the world desperately needs right now.  But I just can’t imagine them doing anything this innovative or generally valuable.  Doesn’t sell more Office.  Doesn’t sell more Windows.  They don’t even really have many services that could use third party extensions, and they’ve lost touch with the ISV’s who might build such extensions too.  Google Gears could conceivably add such an extension.  There’s precedent there considering the javascript threading extensions they provide.

This will be a difficult problem to solve, I have no doubt.  But I hope somebody with the resources to leverage a solution takes it on, because I think it would really make the world a better place.

What I’ve been thinking about building in my copious spare time is a web-based feed-reader that assumes you over-subscribe to feeds.  That is, it expects you to "subscribe" to more feeds than you can fully consume.  These days many of the most popular feeds on the web meet this criterion even if that’s all you subscribe too.  I don’t have time to follow any one of TechCrunch, Scobleizer, Engadget, or even Radar in their entirety — I generally don’t even get to skim all their headlines.  But I know people in my social network do, and when they do it would be a small extra effort for them to help me identify the posts that are worth me reading.

This could be done by explicitly recommending articles to friends, or by tagging, or rating, or any of a number of well-understood-yet-often-poorly-implemented mechanisms.  Additionally, I could subscribe to a meta-feed coming out of a single-friend or a set of people in the social network graph that could expand several levels.  And of course there would be meta-feeds covering the aggregate opinions of all users.  The result would be that I could "express mild interest" in a feed by "subscribing to it" and the system would help me figure out which of the voluminous posts were actually worth reading.  Or if other users tagged posts, I could find good posts on a particular topic.  It would encompass a lot of the utility of digg, techmeme and link blogs all at once.  Another step in the process of democratizing information consumption.

I’ve been talking with friends about building this in the context of a facebook app for reasonably obvious reasons.  I’d call it "the outside world" as a reference to the fact that college kids are generally so isolated from external news, and this would be a social way for those few who do read the traditional-news to share good things with their friends.  Facebook’s restrictions on apps processing social networking metadata would make somegood features difficult, but the advantages in marketing and lower barrier to entry probably outweigh that.  Now my idea is out there for the world, so I’m not getting a jump on anybody.  If anybody wants to take this idea and run with it, drop me a line and I’d be happy to help advise.  I might just do it anyway because the Facebook market and the Google Reader market are both healthy and the basics just aren’t that hard.

But it sounds like you’ll have stiff competition.  Quoting from Blogoscoped’s analysis of the video:

Google’s recent big social effort is called Mocha-Mocha (or
Mocka-Mocka?), and will become the infrastructure for all social stuff
across all of their applications. As a part of this, a new
feature called Activity Streams will be introduced or at least
implemented in Reader this quarter. This will be comparable to
Facebook’s News Feed (Minifeed?) feature, and integrate Gmail’s
addressbook and contact list.

Also there will be some other Gmail and Orkut integration, but this might just mean there will be links to Reader.

Hearing that Brad Fitzpatrick has joined Google and because it’s the kind of thing I do, I’ve been putting some thought into how Google could reasonably add social networking features to their services.  I’ve been talking to folks about how Facebook is currently Google’s biggest strategic threat because they’ve done such a good job integrating the social network into new feature development, and in doing so have democratized new feature development in a way the world has never before seen.  This need struck me as a good way to start integrating social networking features into Google. 

Orkut is and only ever will be a toy IMHO.  Let the Brazilians keep playing with it and don’t push it on the rest of us.  Between contacts and knowledge about whom we chat and e-mail with, gmail has vastly more meaningful set of social networking data.  As we’ve learned watching LinkedIn and okcupid and other social networks thrive side by side, it makes sense to have different social networks for different purposes.  Orkut is a toy network and should not be the basis of anything more meaningful.  Sorry, Orkut.

Amazon makes extensive use of so-called A/B testing to try out new UI’s and optimize the user flow.  This works very well for them because their end goal is very well defined: they want people to buy stuff.  They are facing a very hard optimization problem, but their objective function is clear and easy to measure.  So they can try out new UI’s for 1% of users, and if it does well according to this well-defined metric, roll it out to a broader audience.  This is essentially best practice for any modern successful online company.

Google has done a lot to democratize the internet — notably by democratizing search through PageRank which allows anybody to implicitly vote on the relative merit of a web page.  They have also democratized the way some product development choices are made through through their policy of encouraging developers to build whatever they want in 20% of their time.  The result is that everything you can possibly imagine is probably being worked on by at least one googler, and the ideas with merit gain momentum and get built into real services.  But before they get launched to the public they still must be approved by a central authority.  Sure Google does A/B testing like everybody else, which is great for UI tweaks and to verify that new services won’t crash when hit with massive traffic.  But it’s extremely difficult to do A/B testing on major changes to functionality.  For example, it’s hard to imagine testing a change to how g-mail delivers mail through this kind of test.  Moreover, depending on how the test goes, the change is either rolled out to the entire user base or not at all.

Facebook’s platform offers another alternative.  ISV’s have the opportunity to offer major new kinds of functionality to Facebook users in a very democratic way.  Users can try out the new features, and if they like it, they’ll tell their friends about it, and the feature will spread.  Some features which are only appropriate for a certain segment of a user base can naturally find that segment.  This mechanism doesn’t really lower the cost of adding new functionality compared to how Google does it — Google is always launching new features that you’d never know about without reading their dozens of product blogs.  But it democratizes the process of figuring out which of these new features are valuable enough for a mass audience.  To continue with the democracy analog, these decisions are still made by a communist-style central-planning committee in Google’s world, whereas Facebook users can vote with their keyboards on what features are worth using.  This will make the Facebook platform very competitive in the arena of user’s attention.

There were lots of page-search engines along the lines of Alta Vista.  They crawled the web and indexed the contents of each web page.  They would try to figure out which web page best matched your search keywords based entirely on the contents of the pages themselves.  This didn’t work very well since spammers could fill their pages with keywords they liked that didn’t necessarily add any value to you.

Yahoo searched a database that was built manually instead of by crawling.  Yahoo’s staff would catalog thousands of web sites and categorize them according to keywords.  This provided a higher level of quality since a human reviewed every entry, but they were having trouble keeping up with the explosive growth of the net.

Then there was these two punk Stanford kids with their upstart Google.  Google was a lot more like Alta Vista than Yahoo in that they automatically crawled and indexed the entire web.  But they judged which pages were useful not based on what was on the page itself, but on other pages on the net that link to it.

We all know who won.  But I’d like to share a perspective on why that uses a political analogy. Google democratized search.  Yahoo was based on a communist model.  Alta Vista was complete anarchy.  Democracy won because it gives power to the people, and the aggregate opinion of millions of people is almost always better than even a carefully chosen set of experts.

Yahoo’s model was analogous to having a central politburo that makes all decisions.  Provided the politburo is skilled and benevolent, this can be a great solution.  But if the system they control gets too big, it just won’t work.  Alta Vista’s ranking system gave everybody speaking equal say in what happened, which amounted to total anarchy.  Google allowed every web page on the net to cast a vote on which pages were the most important ones.  (Beyond that, the pagerank system iterates so that some votes coming from more important pages count more than other votes — the details of implementation are always key.)  Information democracy is achieved by giving everybody a say in what’s important and aggregating the reults.

There are numerous examples of democratic services completely obsoleteing services based on communist editorial systems.  Wikipedia democratized the encyclopedia and has replaced Encarta.  Youtube democratized internet video clips and replaced iFilm.  In many more cases, the democratic service hasn’t replaced the centrally-controlled services, but provides a strong alternative.  E-Bay democratized shopping.  Blogs have democratized news.  Open-source software has democratized software development.

Clearly democratization isn’t a silver bullet for every problem.  Expertise is much more rare and valuable in some fields than others.  But if your business today is based on having a database that your staff maintains, take note!  Somebody’s probably out there right now figuring out how to build a competing business where anybody in the world can contribute to their database.  And pretty soon they’re gonna be taking pot-shots at your market.  Managing user-generated content is really hard.  Counting votes is really hard.  But if it’s done well, it will dominate any system based on central editorial control.  With the help of computers, groups of people can solve problems far more effectively than individuals can.  This truth will not change.

(I brought this idea up at the Decibel Festival talking about music editorial systems and received a lot of positive feedback about it, so I wanted to post it.  But I must give credit for the vocabulary to my good friend Ramez Naam — I first heard it when he was critiquing a startup’s business model as being communist.  At first I laughed, but later I appreciated his wisdom.)