With fundraising in full swing, we didn’t fully activate the WFPL page until last weekend. (NPR is allowing station groups to operate multiple pages, so our other stations, WFPK and Classical 90.5, will launch as soon as NPR gives the go-ahead.)

NPR has wisely decided to let station pages launch with all community features turned off; stations that don’t have time, personnel, or an interest in pursuing this can let it be, and listeners who choose WXXX as their favorite will still see a page with basic information about the station.

But, more adventurous stations can turn on a number of features – an events listing, blog, photo and video upload – and listeners who “favorite” the station can directly contribute to some of the features.

At Louisville Public Media, we’re throwing a few darts at the wall to see what sticks. As soon as we decompress from the membership campaign, we’ll be actively encouraging listeners to join the community on-air, on our web site and on our twitter feeds. Our blog on the Community site will feature 2 or 3 posts a day on weekdays, and we’ll be adding more pics and videos. We’ll also encourage our staff to join the community – some already have.

I wish community membership at npr.org could port over to our station sites, and there are a number of other quibbles (no html view in the blog editor makes embedding video very hard) but this is a great start and it’s exciting to see a lively community already developing.

I can’t remember exactly when I first saw Shakey Jake in downtown Ann Arbor. I’m almost certain it was within weeks of moving there in September 1997. I do know that I quickly noticed the reverence he inspired among Ann Arborites.

I saw him downtown often – sometimes every couple of days. Usually, he was wearing the straw hat, the dark sunglasses and carrying his guitar. Somewhere along the way, he started wearing a full-length fur coat, summer and winter. He was a constant presence, hanging out by Kilwin’s on a Friday night, or at Espresso Royale, sometimes at the corner of Main and Liberty, strumming on his guitar, the one or two strings so loose they rarely produced a note. Not that anyone cared. We’d say hi and drop a dollar in the bucket.
People speculated that he was secretly rich; Shakey Jake enjoyed that rumor and generally enhanced the pool with a few rumors of his own. But he lived off of his earnings on the street, social security, and the generosity of store owners downtown, who made sure Jake had what he needed, no payment required.

I’m sure his life wasn’t easy, but Ann Arborites generally treated him like a star, their Man About Town, and I’ve always thought that said as much about people in Ann Arbor as it said about the very gentlemanly Jake Woods.

You can read more about him here, as well as thoughts from many others who knew him or knew of him.

UPDATE: The number of comments is growing and growing here… a beautiful tribute to Shakey Jake.

He includes comments from Jeff Jarvis and Mike Orren, who point out the value of the content, but also the challenge of getting people to, first, read it, and, second, to contribute to it. Oh yeah, and generating revenue from it.

Is it compelling content? Yes, even if it’s not NEWS. I feel the conflict between NEWS and this other stuff all the time. I can express the journalistic mission of my organization in lofty terms along with the best of them, but I also find myself combing sites trying to find a nearby ethnic grocery or the latest freeway ramp closings.

Gathering the information is hard, but Adrian Holovaty’s announcement this week of a Python library that can scrape the data from a stack of web pages is a step forward. Regardless, it will still take a lot of work. Our newsrooms process tons of information every day, but Holovaty and others make the compelling argument that we waste it.

I came face-to-face with this problem on Friday at a meeting with public TV to discuss an Election ’08 site we’re building together. Our news team knows, every day, which candidates are in Iowa, where they’re going, who they’re speaking to, when they’re going to do it. Our audience wants to know, too. Can we push it to the web easily? No, the information is scattered; it’s on Post-Its, in emails from the campaigns, written on calendars. We have a level of organization that allows us to get our job done, just barely. But now our job is expanding. Is one of my future News openings for a database expert? We can’t easily do all of the work ourselves, so it makes sense to find partners who are in the same business and work together.

What about the revenues? Hell if I know. Terry Heaton says:

The question is how do you make money in a disintermediated, distributed media paradigm? Experiments in hyperlocal media don’t fail because of content; they fail, because they can’t deliver the promise of sustainable revenue. [...] This is why I keep harping on organizing the local web and building databases of knowledge at the local level rather than trying to make another content play. [...] How we put advertisers together with users is the key, and “news content” isn’t the only way to do that.

Content is nothing on its own. It only exists as part of conversations — understood not in the usual ‘blogsphere’ sense of deliberation, but as shared concerns (not my term), concerns that we must partake in to be part of communities. When I buy a novel I choose it not just because I think I might enjoy it, but also because it is also being read by other people, because it’s part of a larger movement that I’m interested in, or because it is relevant to something else I read. Reading is satisfactory only if I bring with me a certain baggage; and reading will add to my baggage, allowing me to appreciate other works and, crucially, to have more of a shared background with people around me. My point is that content–or, more precisely, the transaction of consuming content–is only meaningful as part of a wider conversation that is made up of countless related transactions.

And here is Terry Heaton, from his latest brilliant essay, The On-Demand Trap:

Doug Rushkoff argues effectively that the web is a social phenomenon, not a media phenomenon or a technological phenomenon. This makes traditional media people uncomfortable, because it demands a response other than the content-provider safe haven. [...]

Involving yourself with real people in a real online community setting takes a skillset and values that most broadcasters don’t seem to possess.

If, as the Cluetrain crowd asserts, markets are conversations, then the web is the new marketplace and all “content” is commoditized to a point where it’s a conversation starter at best or merely a diversion at worst. Either way, the “content” concept is far down the priority list of the marketplace, and interactivity with human beings is number one.

One of the conclusions is that our content requires context to have value. Not necessarily earth-shattering – we public broadcasters have long believed that our content needs ears: Think Audience.

We’re adding a slight twist to the “tree in the forest” – someone needs to hear it and then tell someone else about it. That’s not entirely new, either. Public radio’s growth over the last 15 years has happened, in large part, because people listened and then said, “I heard it on NPR.”

The part that we’re struggling with now seems to be realizing the full implications of Nico’s statement: the transaction of consuming content is only meaningful as part of a wider conversation that is made up of countless related transactions. The web can bring the watercooler, the “I heard it” to us, and it will bring it right to our web sites, if we let it. This makes many of us nervous; we’re afraid of what people might say, how they might say it – how they might contaminate the content we’ve labored over so lovingly. But if we’re willing to accept that our listeners have participated with us in making public radio a significant and growing force in American life – with their attention and their money – then we’re going to have to understand and believe that the online manifestation of their participation with us – this more direct and intimate participation – will also strengthen us and make us greater still.

There are lots of paths – from the very basic (comments), to more developed user-generated content (essays, commentaries, blogs), to the complex and fascinating (MPR/APM’s Public Insight Journalism, and allowing users to create content from our content). This isn’t about choosing one of them. It’s about choosing the form(s) of interaction that works for each element of our online presence, experimenting, making deliberate mistakes, learning.

Ultimately, it’s about realizing public media’s potential as a hub of cultural and intellectual life.

Because of a minor issue (let’s call it Autosave), these notes are adapted from Jessica Duda’s excellent summary on the Beyond Broadcast blog. I summarize them here not to pass them off as my own but to have a record here of the sessions.

Diane Mermigas, The Hollywood Reporter

Both commercial and public media need to do the following:

• change their orientation and embrace interactivity
• understand how technology empowers the consumer
• redefine the concept of content
• deepen advertising and commerce
• reinvent business models
• view the process with an entrepreneurial spirit

Focus on the strength of public media – strong content

Public media needs an organized effort of producing content that is creative, independent, diverse, credible, and in-depth, with links to education and problem-solving. This will ensure public media’s survival and their ability to make money.

Media property rights are in flux. Currently, the web is a deliberate system with most online companies posting content through a filtering system and users consuming only what they specifically seek, which narrows their interests and creates an information vacuum. BBC, MTV are examples of the passive broadcast model of web delivery services; they could be more interactive – and more profitable.

The role of public media is thus to fill the void of the marketplace and monetize these ideas. Public media should learn from these models to create the services and interactivity:

• TiVo
• Ipod
• Open TV
• Visible World

Seek strategic partnerships

There are a variety of partnerships that public media should pursue. Serving as a content provider to other businesses can include providing local content, such as to Google. At the April 2006 National Association of Broadcasters conference, they discussed working with cable operators to obtain local advertisers as these operators have a local connection. Media companies with such partnerships have increased local advertising revenue growth by 30 percent in the past four years – as opposed to the usual three to four percent. Public media should do the same and align with consumer technology companies to expand digital delivery options.

There are also many unknowns, especially as old media financial targets and benchmarks are used to evaluate and set new media goals – without knowing how consumers will ultimately use the quickly-evolving technologies that will also affect new, unanticipated forms of expression, [such as Second Life.] Thus, making assumptions is challenging and focusing on the consumer is key. Overall, for every challenge, there are at least two opportunities.

Dan Nova, Highland Capital Partners

There is a problem of the “needle in a haystack” of online media companies/services. A new online firm is funded every day and they are all excited about the Web 2.0 world. Audience trends show that new outlets of public participatory media can grow exponentially as early as the first year, such as YouTube growing up to 6.5 million users and Technorati reaching 1.5 million users.

Low costs of participatory media and attractive business models

The old adage of “If you build it, they will come” has changed to “if they build it, they will come.” Participatory media presents many attractive low cost and high value content that in turn affect the criteria investors use to fund new participatory online sites.

Participatory media costs

• Low costs to attract participatory media
• Low customer acquisition costs
• Low customer retention costs
• Low marketing costs
• Low content development costs
• Low technology costs (open source)

Characteristics of quality content

• Easy to use
• Effective
• Entertaining
• Participatory

Acquisitions are increasing

Traditional media are being squeezed – being cash rich can be a liability. New media have had financial success, but the business models are moving quickly. Now, old media is competing with new media to buy new-new media.

How to evaluate participatory media websites through three main development stages

New opportunities

• Focus on the team
• Assess how the idea compares to the existing competition
• Review the development time and cost
• Don’t emphasize the business model specifics – it is premature
• Look at a valuation range of 0-5 million upfront

Mid-stage value drivers

The mid-stage of participatory media development is a tenuous time and is dangerous for investors as the valuation is based on the initial ‘buzz’ – not hard numbers of tried and true audiences.

Later stage companies

Assessing later stage companies, look for the same fundamentals as the new opportunities.

• Focus on the team
• Assess the revenue streams and sources
• Review the margins
• Confirm the financial sustainability
• Critically assess the business model – very important
• Assess where the biggest windows exist

Other characteristics of the successful later stage companies include: an “insane” customer focus, simple content presentation, huge market, active/missionary leaders, and constant improvement.

Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation

Business models discussed at this conference have largely been based on charity or advertising. In order to for them to be sustainable, public media must have a public purpose. The trends all show the revolution has arrived, especially as the two biggest commercial TV stations are putting their content on the web for free. Once measured by the household (radio, television), media consumption metrics are per the individual (internet, on demand); thus, changing the benchmarks and terms of media.

Changes in the public media audience – new creators

Public media should go to VOD on the internet as attention is the challenge – distribution is not the problem. Of course monetization is another problem for public media. Media cannot be a one-way company in a two-way world. The old media presented a push approach and treated the audience as mute. Now they can see the explosion of self-expression. The old media cannot ignore the public are creators, users, and speakers. The old media will try to make the public ‘feel’ as though we are interactive which may not be the case. A new way to assess media delivery is that old models are broadcast, cable TV, public TV and the new is “Independent Noncommercial TV” and the “networked individual.”

Much growth still needs to occur within the new media users as the current 40 million bloggers amount to less than one percent of the world population – public media need to reach the other 99 percent. At the same time, the internet, while useful, timely and convenient lacks public trust – to the extent local television ranks higher.

Recommendations for membership-based participatory media

One out of every two Americans are apart of member of a cooperative – namely credit unions which are a trust institutions. Information is also trust issue and we can use this concept of a membership-based, participatory organization to create our own credible content. The public should form and pay dues to media membership organizations to create their own local news so that the people can decide what is newsworthy. They should look for a base in civil society organizations and ask people to pay to join a group that allows them cooperatively provide their own content.

Ironically, civic society groups are pushing back on this idea – they believe the government should fund such public media. However, “you can’t speak to power on power’s nickel.” Professional journalists are also suspicious of citizen journalists and such membership organizations. Professionally-trained journalists should conduct the investigative work but media organizations should also have a space for citizen journalists to report other types of news and information.

Overall, the old media format is to report, edit, and control responses and have such [limiting] mottos as “All the news that is fit to print.” The media presented at this conference seek to break this top-down approach – from Google to Wikipedia. All of these models have different functions and are open and closed to varying degrees. If you give participants the chance to be a member and use more functions, the more they will be willing pay dues to have an impact influence beyond their community. We can have a chance to make that revolution.

Brendan Greeley explained Radio Open Source’s approach to community media. The goal was to have the blog be the center, with the show as the outgrowth. Blogs are the new talk radio. Blogs make decisions – you decide what you want to talk about. A blog has motion – quick pace of topic to topic. The webpage is structured with comments posted under articles – so the listeners who want to comment aren’t pushed into a comment ghetto. We need to act like blogs – use permalinks; use Technorati; actually read blogs; act like you mean it; write fewer, more personal emails; don’t ask for links, ask for opinions; link out.

Tom Gerace of Gather: users create content, tag it, comment on it, etc. How to create value in this? You can transform your audience into a broad source network; apply editorial oversight: content selection and fact chekcing; guide the community engaged discussion around diverse and contemporary topics.

Rhea Mokund of Listenup.org: Listen Up is a network of youth media organizations, also funds them to produce content. This is designed to be a real world space for youth media. Site is largely curated by the young people who use the site.

Thomas Kriese of Omidyar talked about managing the community they’ve built.

Asked for the one piece of advice he would give to broadcasters, Gerace said, “Understand that you have to throw out what you know about your audience, and rebuild your understanding based on your audience interacting with each other rather than just with you.” Mokund’s advice was one word: “Intentionality.”

I think the social networking aspect of these and other sites has less potential for public broadcasters – at least for now, while our main demographic is still late-GenX/Baby Boom. This generation discovered the internet as adults and although it’s changed how they interact, it’s not been the revolutionary shift that our next generation of listeners is living through now as teens and 20-somethings.

So to my mind, that pushes networking down the list – and makes interaction the most important concept for us to aim for. And I think it’s hugely important because interaction goes to the heart of what public broadcasting is about. The kinds of experiences that our “founding fathers” envisioned in 1967 – the multi-way conversation that would entwine broadcasters, listeners, culture-makers and public policy-makers – are the experiences we’re actually able to deliver with the Internet. This isn’t just the logical next step, it’s core to our mission as public service broadcasters.

So far, the main model for interaction that we’ve implemented has been comments. It’s a great first step, but it doesn’t fulfill the promise because while it’s a form of interaction, it takes place within a highly-controlled environment – listeners can comment on what we do. And while comment threads may veer off in other directions, they’re forced to exist within the rigid structure we’ve imposed – the original story that sparked the conversation, the thread’s title and category and keywords. The infrastructure of comments channels the river, so to speak.

I think the key to living up to our promise is to open the gates wider and invite listeners to be partners with us in generating content. This causes a lot of fear and consternation but it needn’t. And frankly it shouldn’t since this kind of interaction is really a part of our mandate.

Gather

Gather doesn’t have the strongest interface; it’s cluttered, and despite my efforts at customizing my account, I still don’t feel like I’m finding out about stuff on the site that might interest me. I can’t easily track topic areas with RSS, for instance. I’m not terribly interested in seeing the latest photos people have posted to the site on the front page, etc.

In talking to some people in pubradio about Gather I’ve consistently heard two things: it doesn’t feel like public radio; and a lot of the stuff that users submit isn’t that good.

Here’s what I think, having spent some time on the site: some of the content isn’t that great. But some of it is. The writing that people are doing about current events, politics, arts, restaurant, books, etc, and the comments others submit to these pieces are high level stuff.

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that works and what doesn’t work on Gather, and here’s my opinion: to the extent that Gather is a place for people to share their thoughts on ANY issue they’d like to; to the extent that Gather is a place for others to comment on that work; to the extent that Gather is a place where people can find others who share views or ideas or interests and form sub-groups, it’s great.

It boils down to this, in my view: to the extent that Gather is a public square, it’s a success.

Here’s where I think it doesn’t work as well: it also tries to be your blog. When Gather becomes the place for your pictures of your dog, your daily ramblings about going to the grocery store, etc., it falls down. The blog dilutes its effectiveness as a public square.

Public Action

This is hard to talk about because I’ve seen so little of it, but based on those brief views:

Public Action is trying to be the compromise tool for public broadcasters who feel like they need to have some kind of comment function open and the others who think it might be good, but are afraid of it. It offers a wide range of customization – you can moderate comments, you can let them go live immediately, you can approve groups, you can let listeners vote on groups, you can let a thousand groups bloom.

Users are encouraged to play the social networking game to a certain extent – they can create profiles, I think they can upload a picture, they can choose as their “icon” a favorite show or their station. It’s acceptable, not particularly over-the-top on the Friendster scale of networking.

At stations that follow a more open model, listeners should find it easy to comment on stories, form groups, etc. But I think Public Action – at least as it “exists” now – misses the boat on User Generated Content. The architecture is comments on stories, and not on original content. Yes, someone could write a thoughtful essay on banning smoking in restaurants and bars, and if the station has published a story on that topic, the listener has a place to put it. If there isn’t a story on that topic, where does it go? How does it ever get noticed or read? Do I have to create a “Smoking in Restaurants” group to ever have a chance of seeing that piece? That listener has broken out of the architecture of comments and promptly falls into a black hole.

Comments and groups are the tip of the iceberg of UGC, and it’s hardly the most important part.

The true value of our capability to generate interaction online isn’t the “I agree” or “you’re full of crap” comment. It’s allowing our website to be the place where our smart, thoughtful listeners, with their range of experiences and views, can share that intelligence and experience – a true public square. Some of our listeners will never contribute but will drop by to read what other people are writing. Some people are going to be happy enough leaving a comment. But I think plenty of our listeners are going to feel strongly enough about a topic that they’ll sit down and write 300-500 words of well-reasoned prose about it; or maybe they’ll make an audio or video story. We need to be the place where they go to present this kind of stuff; and the place where they can expect to be engaged by others at that same level.

We need to let our listeners be partners with us.

So, what is this architecture of participation? I’m certainly no expert, but I think it has to include:

• The ability to comment on anything we do or anything anybody else writes;
• The ability for listeners to submit lengthy content – text, audio or video;
• A system that allows open submission but also a level of curatorial responsibility – someone at the station who reads this stuff, pushes the good stuff to the front of the line;
• A process for users to nominate or recommend stuff they see that’s really good;
• A showcase for this great stuff;
• A mechanism for the station to not only ask for submissions in general, but in particular. If you’re working on a series on poverty, its outlines don’t need to be a secret. You can tell your online users what’s coming, what the focus of the series is, and ask them to submit their views on poverty. What you end up with is a richer exploration of the issues of poverty – far richer than you as a station can yourselves create because you’ve drawn on the expertise of your vast audience. (mind you, I don’t mean this to be “tell us how to cover the story”; certainly, this “public insight journalism” component is really good and we should all pursue something like this; but what I want to avoid is always forcing the issue to float around the station; the issue is poverty and its impact on the community, and while some people will express their views to you about how you should cover it in your series, the issue of poverty is bigger than you and your station and its series.);
• A mechanism to feed some of the very best of what listeners submit back to the air – from reading excerpts of essays, to airing portions of audio commentaries;
• At the end of the list, a way for users to get to know each other better, discover people with similar interests, discover others’ personal blog sites, etc.

I feel all of this is important for a few reasons:

• As I said earlier, it’s not a nice thing to do – it’s core to our mission.
• We must respect our audience enough not treat them as the great unwashed. We are taking their money; we are thinking of ten different ways to have a deeper relationship with them, all of them designed to benefit us. We’d better make sure it’s not all one-way. They are our partners.
• Haarsager, Hagel and others have talked about serendipitous discovery, and have reminded us that our podcasts can bring us entirely new audiences. So can this content, if it’s allowed to escape the straitjacket of comments to become a community public square – the website that your community comes to believe is the first place to check out when they want to know what people think about an issue or a hot topic of local discussion. (does this mean the public square should escape your station’s website ala Terry Heaton? Maybe.)

I believe public service broadcasting should be the hub of all important discussions in the community, the place listeners AND citizens look to for leadership in promoting arts and culture, discussion of public policy issues – in short, the vitality of the community.

Social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice.

Thanks, Dennis!

The concept is straightforward: social interaction has enlivened blogs and birthed chat and wikis; social annotation extends the concept of community, interaction and sharing to the entire web. Social Annotation tools allow people to visit any website, comment on stories, share thoughts with others, make notes to themselves. Here’s one description: a giant transparency overlaying all web pages, and users have the markers.

The idea has been around for a long time, with companies like Third Voice offering tools for such interactions in the late 1990′s. I tried a couple of them at the time and while they worked well enough, I couldn’t figure out why I should care about leaving marks on other pages. I remember scanning through many well-trafficked pages without seeing comments, leaving me wondering if I was the only one using the software. And the comments I did find left by others were stupid, infantile.

As Jeremy Wagstaff writes in his blog, social annotation is back. He’s started a list of the various tools that are on the market. His gut feeling seems to be that this time, social annotation is here to stay,

but the [programs] which work will be those that allow either everyone, or groups of users to see each other’s comments on web pages, and to leverage tagging and other new things we’ve gotten used to see comparable pages. And some way of filtering out the silliness would be good.

What nags me about this is the question of identity and utility. Is it comments? Is it bookmarking? Is the sum of the two greater than the parts? Having  a comment function is good but many websites already offer that. The concept is close to social bookmarking, like del.icio.us. Many users of del.icio.us make comments about the pages they visit in the notes section for individual bookmarks. Of course, it’s not interactive, and it’s also located on a separate website.

So let’s look at utility. If a site has a solid comment function with a large number of regular users, why wouldn’t you leave your comment there, rather than using a closed comment system, seen only by users of that particular software? If you use a social bookmarking tool like del.icio.us or any of its competitors, why would you use this tool?

I’m not canning the idea, but I’m trying to figure out whether putting together both the comment and bookmark functions AND removing them from open spaces to spaces walled in by software actually accomplishes anything.

If you have any thoughts, comment away. In the meantime, I’ll try out a couple of the tools and see what I can see.