I feel reinforced, as he picked up on the same key elements of Gillmor's post mortem that I did. And they bear repeating in Tim's nutshell form, so I'll quote it here. Also, it is worthwhile to repeat what Tim's commenter, Dan Conover, adds to the discussion. That, I think, is the best part.
Link: First Draft by Tim Porter: Citizen Journalism: Making New Mistakes.
[...]
I don't think it's wise to draw any deep conclusions about the future of citizen journalism or grassroots media - and there is a difference -- from Bayosphere's short-lived existence. We are very early into the we-media cycle. The technology is still developing, the user curve is still rising and there hasn't yet emerged a large-scale viable business model based on media creation (vs. selling the tools).
That said, I see three principles from the Bayosphere experience that are key for newspapers and other entities that hope to use citizen journalism as part or all of their business:
Community can't be forced.
Community can't be forced. Dan alluded to this when he said, "Tools matter, but they're no substitute for community building." I would amend this to say, "Tools matter because they allow people to build communities."
[...]
There are many others who have thought more deeply than I about virtual communities (start with Howard Rheingold), but I think it's fair to say (and please correct me if I'm off base) that most successful online communities thrive because their users feed, nuture and police them, not because they were built by an entrepreneur or incumbent media company.
I have been using Flickr as a recent example. The site now contains more than 70 million photos uploaded by users, who sort the images by tags, rate them as favorites, and share them with friends and family. Within this vast digital warehouse, hundreds and hundreds of communities have formed, groups devoted to locations (California), pets (cats) or objects (doors). Flickr provided the tools, invited members of the digital camera revolution and got out of the way.
HEAR HEAR!
[...]
One of the differences between "forced community" sites like Your Hub and Flickr is well articulated by Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, in a comment on Grubisich's piece:
"With online journalism, the less you structure your grassroots initiative like a workplace newsroom, and the more you structure it like a social community, the more successful your initiative will be."
[...]
In his post, Dan Gillmor said that "citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words." True. It is also about communities telling their own stories. Newspapers must now decide if they want to be a part of those communities.
Posted by Tim Porter at January 25, 2006 10:03 AM
Now that I'm advising an actual newspaper on these topics, one of the most important things I tell people is that they simply cannot look at these new forms as traditional business ventures to be planned, staffed, marketed and "launched." You cannot "launch" a community. You can serve one, tend one, nurture one, grow it, but you cannot launch one.
Nor can you control one. A community you control is a plantation. God knows we have enough of those.
Posted by: dan conover on January 26, 2006 07:05 AM
What Dan says is something I've been meditating on since working on my dissertation, and I think it is just essential. From the very beginning, tech wonks got excited about building tools and platforms, but they neglected to pay attention to what happens at the place where community or cyberculture meets interface, where the rubber meets the road, or more importantly still, how cultures construct interfaces.
I remember when I was just beginning my dissertation research into the Xenaverse, and I happened to be hanging around in the MIT Media Lab with one of my friends, picking the brains of the grad students around there. At a party I was telling one guy a little bit about my project, and he loved it, but he kept coming back to this one point... what kind of an interface or a platform could you build for those people?
And I was so frustrated in trying to explain to him that the community or culture was organically constructing its own interfaces, its own virtual landscape, and peopling it, enacting it, authoring it, cross-linking it. True, the Xenaverse didn't have blog tools, but especially when it came to fan fiction, some of the best fan fiction index sites made powerful use of database tools, interaction design principles, and other organic elements of self-organizing sites (ratings, reviews, comments). Not to mention the extensive beta-reader network that grew up around the different groups of fan writers, essentially writing workshops.
Then the tail end of the 1990s came along, with all that top-down, VC-driven frenzy of force-feeding audiences and force-feeding cultures, with no magnetic draw, no reason for surfers to return for enriched experiences and repeat visits. But they WERE doing that in the Xenaverse, to the tune of millions of hits on the top sites, or crashing servers when new story installments were posted. All those top-down people could not force what the Xenaverse and other vital online communities like it created AND AUTHORED organically.
That is why I had to laugh a bit when Jason Calacanis came charging into the blog movement like he was going to own it (OK, so he did get a $25M deal out of it, but there are suckers born every minute). He came in thinking money and top down, and maybe he succeeded and maybe he didn't. It depends on how you measure success. I look at it in terms of the vitality and longevity of a community or cyberculture. The blog movement is/was a wonderful revenge against those top-down skim-meisters. Calacanis may have skimmed his piece off the top of the blog movement, but he still doesn't have a handle on what bottom-up grassroots really is, and it can't be faked, manufactured, freeped, stapled, mutilated, or folded.
I'm not saying it's the be-all and end-all, or even that it will last forever, any more than the Xenaverse in its heyday did. But it does posit the impossibly simplistic dichotomy of central control vs organic distribution. And that is worth thinking about for a while.
And for a lot of people, most of that thinking entails ways to take control of that which cannot be controlled and still remain what it essentially is, fencing the wild west, making walled gardens, creating bridges and installing oneself as a Troll to charge a toll to the Billy Goats Gruff, creating artificial choke points of power, until the network routes around them.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the people thinking so hard about ways to control the herd of wild horses were instead devoting all that energy to how to foster more herds?
- Control model of power= value through scarcity.
- Distributed model of power = value through circulation.
Always, there are those who are thinking intensely about ways to harvest value from an enterprise. What is interesting to me is to observe the different routes through which they attempt to get it.
>> he still doesn't have a handle on what bottom-up
>> grassroots really is, and it can't be faked,
>> manufactured, freeped, stapled, mutilated, or folded.
Curious, what do you base that on?
We have 150 unfiltered bloggers getting paid to blog about what they are passionate about--how is that not bottom up?
>> He came in thinking money and top down
That is not true. I never thought about the money or be top down--that's laughable in fact.
We never tried to control our bloggers--they would leave if we did! We simply took on all the grunt work (tech, accountings, sales, etc) and let blogger do their thing.
Posted by: Jason | January 26, 2006 at 03:03 PM
Hi Jason, thanx for stopping by. I'm assuming this is really you and not a spoofer.
Sorry if it seemed like I was taking a cheap swipe. Top down vs bottom up stuff is a bit of an ongoing meme I have on here, and I think I blogged something on your $25M deal back when it came out, I'll have to look up the permalink.
I will try to respectfully address your questions here, tho.
I will agree that you came into the blog movement fairly respectful of its forms and mores. In other words, yup, you certainly do let your people run and focus on platform and promotional issues. You were building a stable of bloggers, and I see nothing wrong with that. You did a good job of it. Others (Huffington) are doing the same thing in different forms, and I think there can be power in creating an influential stable of folks.
So in respect to form, I have no quarrel.
Where iss-ewws kick in with me is with concepts and terms that were carried over, like cobwebs still clinging to our clothing, from the late 1990s buzzwords. You were a guy of that moment, and I read your magazine quite often.
So you came in with big talk about how to "monetize" this thing, and with huge numbers about the potential you saw in it. Now you can make the case, justifiably, that your prediction certainly came to pass, at least for Weblogs, Inc. I'll grant you that. The focused energy and work you put into it paid off.
Critics have chimed in that the pay scale for your bloggers is a tad out of whack in relation to that $25M valuation, but of all I've seen of they way those things break down, you base it on traffic, but with a fairly low base rate. It could provide incentive for bloggers in your stable to adopt an "anything for a hit" kind of senasational appeal, but that isn't what fuels Engadget, which is your big anchor.
When you take a comparison to Gillmor's Bayosphere venture, or Jonathan Weber's NewWest.net, you see some of the different values I'm looking at, citizen journalism values, community-building values, both failures and successes and inbetween. I don't mean to compare apples and oranges, but I am casting around looking all different types of stables of bloggers and writers and how they function. You might argue that those ventures aren't reaching for higher valuations, VC, or big buy-outs (for that matter, to some extent they eschew that world and its vocabulary), so maybe there's no comparison at all, except that you are all part of this blog-media landscape.
I want to make sure I don't ramble too much and address the issues you raise above. I'd guess I make the claim that you came in thinking money and top down because of the statements I read from you quoted in the press back at the time of your launch, because you invoked all those dot.com bubble words, talked big valuations, talked about how much gold might be in these hills. I don't have the links to those articles handy, but I may have blogged about them at the time, so I can probably dig a little and find them.
If those articles were not true representations of your position at that time, perhaps you did try to correct the inaccurate reporting that I base my assumptions on, and somehow I missed reading the corrections. If so, I apologise, as I'd be happy to give you the benefit of the doubt.
The fact that you were looking for and found a buyer so quickly (and in interests of full disclosure, I should note that your buyer was a division of the company I work for, my day job. You could be giving my stock options a boost, dude) does imply that the desire for high valuations, perhaps inflated valuations (a matter of opinion, but you of all people should know how sensitive the whiff of inflated valuations is to many folks in this biz), is perhaps not as laughable as you claim above.
Where I won't split hairs is on whether my grassroots is better than someone's else's grassroots. You know the tech community, and if that is your grassroots, then I'll let you claim it. I tend to think of the tech community as more related to the elites of our culture in general, people who have access to privileged technology, the newest toys, the cutting edge stuff. But just because they are elite and many ordinary folks can't get their hands on a lot of that stuff doesn't make them any less rank and file than they wanna be, I guess.
But in the frame I'm looking at, I want things to trickle down further, and bubble up more. Maybe I'm still not out in the land of Joe Six Pack (except perhaps in my day job), because the citizen journalism stuff I'm thinking about are people who still do have online access, even if on machines in libraries or cybercafes.
I mean, one of the neatest things I saw NewWest.net doing around Missoula, an area that is definitely not dripping with money and rich people, is sponsoring branded WiFi hot spots at all kinds of Joe & Jane Six Pack restaurants and coffeeshops around town, because Missoula is a town that isn't dominated by big chain generica. The point was to reach the people who weren't the elites, and to give them avenues to participate in the citizen journalism in their community.
Reaching ordinary folks, that's what I see as the biggest challenge for ventures like NewWest.net and Bayosphere. That was, I think, the thorn in Dan Gillmor's side in making Bayosphere work. I don't know how it will go for NewWest, but I like the things Jonathan and Courtney are trying.
So that's the context I was commenting in. You can probably still take issue with what I wrote, but that would depend on how married you are to the statements you made in the press at the time you first launched your venture. You know how folks buzzed and characterized it at that time, and later, with the sale. You are primarily a franchiser, not a content provider. I guess that's the way I'd characterize it. You're looking to increase the value of your franchise, regardless of the value of your content, or the communities connected with it. That's a matter of emphasis, and not necessarily a value judgment. Although it could be.
Thank you for pressing me on the issue, as it gave me an opportunity to justify myself and not just fall into sloppy or lazy thinking, or hasty generalizations.
Chris
Posted by: Chris | January 26, 2006 at 03:47 PM
There are so many errors in what you're saying that it would take me hours to fix them. I'll just take on this one for now:
>> You are primarily a franchiser, not a content
>> provider.
Not true. Take a look at the coverage we did of CES. Take a look at the two Bill Gates interviews we did in the last year. Or the tell the six bloggers doing sundance with me right now that we are not a content provider. That is a silly statement... we produce content all day long. We reviewed more movies than Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Indiewire--COMBINED--at this sundance.
>> You're looking to increase the value of your
>> franchise, regardless of the value of your content,
>> or the communities connected with it. That's a matter
>> of emphasis, and not necessarily a value judgment.
That is just dumb. Of course we care about our community--both the readers and our bloggers. BloggingBaby, Cinematical, Engadget, and Autoblog all have huge communities associated with them These folks read the sites multiple times a day, post comments, and our bloggers are recruited from our readers!
We are obsessed with the quality of our content.
If you want to base your opinion on quotes you can't even remember that's fine, but I think you should go look at Engadget, TVSquad, etc. and talk to the bloggers who work really hard to make those sites before you make blanket statements.
Posted by: Jason | January 27, 2006 at 08:20 PM