Social Media Club Phoenix

Social Media Now: UGC and its Discontents

 Live by the link, die by the link. Yesterday’s Digg user revolt was an object lesson in the power and peril of user generated media.

I won’t give a blow by blow recap of the events–Techmeme is already overburdened by links to recap stories. You can read a first hand account of how the snowball got rolling here; and Danny Sullivan has an excellent wrap up of events at Search Engine Land. What you need to know is that someone posted to Digg a link to the hexadecimal key to cracking HD-DVD’s DRM. Digg pulled the link down, together with several other stories, after receiving a takedown request. Digg users then began bombing Digg with the code in links and by early this morning Digg founder Kevin Rose had capitulated:

 

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

 

Social media triumphalists and anti-encryption cyberlibertarians are crowing about a great victory. Duncan Riley’s response was typical:

 

Will the Digg Revolt of 2007 result in a renaissance in listening to users? maybe, and hopefully it will at Digg, but others should also take note: corporate arrogance towards the user base shouldn’t have a place in Web 2.0, and companies that continue to act in this old fashioned way can now look at a case study of what collectively users can say and do when you won’t listen to them.

 

Grant Robertson’s was the most ludicrously over the top, comparing the mass postings to Digg with the last great schism in Christianity!

Witness the modern equivalent of the 95 thesis’ Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenburg church. We, digital citizens –commonly referred to by the vulgar term of ‘consumers’ — have had enough of content lock-in. We’ve bought and re-bought entertainment media — repackaged and regurgitated digital vomitus — until we’re blue in the face. We’ve been told time and time again that DRM is for our own protection, and we’re finally and inconsolably fed up.

 

Others looked for nefarious, conspiratorial motives in Digg’s actions :

 

Episodes of the DiggNation video show were sponsored by the HD DVD Promotion Group. DiggNation is produced by Revision3, a company run by Digg founders, Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose. Rose is also a co-host of the DiggNation show.

 

Inside the fishbowl its easy to be seduced by the transformative power of collective intelligence, but history has taught us that the mob mentality can also produce the most dangerous and destructive behavior of which human beings are capable. We’re hardly talking about blood in the streets of Paris following the French Revolution here, but what happens to a social media company if its users get it wrong?

 

That’s the provocative question asked by Andrew Lih whose excellent blog item is the best I’ve read on the subject this morning:

 

This is quite unprecedented — you basically have a multi-million dollar enterprise intimidated by its mob community into taking a stance that is rather clearly against the law.

 

Andrew gives us the relevant text from the DCMA:

 

 

(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

 

 

If the Digg situation results in legal action, Digg’s only defense will be to challenge the constitutionality of the DCMA provision, dicey proposition at best. And it will be interesting to see if all those armchair revolutionaries who posted links and comments will pony up money for Digg’s legal defense–Pete at Mashable proposes taking up a collection.

 

The industry fall out will also be interesting to watch. Will the Digg fiasco chill investment in user generated content? What about Wikipedia and other sites to which users posted the offending code? Those sites were able to remove the illegal material without being over run. What processes do they have in place that are lacking at Digg? And is there some difference between the communities of contributors at Digg and at Wikipedia that accounts for the fact that Wikipedia wasn’t surrounded by surfers with virtual torches and pitchforks?

 

Stay tuned.

 

 

 

Social Media Now: Confusion over DIY Media at NAB, Facebook Widget Friendly?

Reports coming in from the National Association of Broadcasters offer an interesting look at the evolving relationship between traditional media and DIY media. On the one hand you had David K. Rehr, CEO and President of the NAB, kicking off the conference by suggesting that broadcasters are being challenged by the Internet not because anything substantive has changed but because broadcasters are using the wrong words to describe why they old ways are better than the new ones:

Internet radio sounds like the future.  Wireless sounds like the future.  Digital television sounds like the future. High def sounds like the future. YouTube, Google, iBiquity sound like the future. 

What does “free over-the-air broadcasting” sound like?  I think you know.

We were wireless before it was hot, but we are captives of the language of decades gone by.  The language of our past is confusing and perhaps obsolete.  We need to update and clarify.  We need to reframe and rebrand.

….

The NAB right now has a team working on finding the best words to define us and take us into the future.  This will be a long and continuing effort. But, we need your help.  We need your ideas.  We need your self-discipline, so that we all speak the same language. 

Pitiful. Sounds like when athletes and politicians blame the media for their failings.

Meanwhile, NAB members seem to be adapting by co-opting, aggregating and framing user generated content. At Lost Remote Cory Bergman tells the tale of television station WKRN in Nashville which created a blog, NashvilleisTalking, to aggregate information from local blogs already being produced in and around Nashville. In addition the station has launched other blogs under its own domains:

Our traffic has grown phenomenally. 60 percent of our traffic is WKRN and 40 percent is the blogs,” he said. NashvilleisTalking — which aggregates content from 435 local blogs — averages 5,000 unique visitors a day (yesterday the number hit 9,000 due to the Virginia shooting). And what about revenue? “We’re making more money this year than we’ve ever made,” Sechrist said. “And it’s from the pre-rolls on the videos.” He said WKRN is averaging 600,000 videos played a month, and much of that success is due to video’s exposure on the blogs (although he admits a reluctance to push too many ads to the blogs themselves.) But beyond money, Sechrist says “a lot of (our users) are never going to watch us on TV, but they’ll come to us on the web when something big happens. We have a relationship now.”

Meanwhile, programmers continue to try to graft social functionality on to traditional media. The Los Angeles Times has a story today about MTV’s plan to attach online components to all it’s programming:

The key for MTV will be developing shows that will drive viewers to spend time on series-related online games, in Web communities or on cellphones coughing up jokes of the day.

“We can either stay in the mass business,” Graden said, “or we can be in the hyper-specialty business where the shows may not have broad appeal but in the Digital Age would better engage our viewers.”

He said that the current series “Scarred” and “Human Giant” are examples of the new strategy. “User-generated content has to become reflected in our programming,” Graden said. “Something like ‘Scarred,’ which tells the stories behind the Web’s most gruesome clips of crashes, wipeouts and accidents, “is based on footage that may already be infamous, but it’s our own narrative accompanying it.”

It just may be that the tradition media players who thrive will be those who most effectively absorb socially created media, not those sitting around with PR agencies trying to figure out different words to use to describe TV and radio

Facebook to go Widget-Friendly, Direct Challenge to MySpace: Eliot Van Buskurk reported yesterday in Wired News that Facebook plans to open it’s network to third party widgets, taking a precisely opposite approach from its chief competitor MySpace, which has declared war on third-party widgets. If it happens the effort will allow us to gauge the value of openness and widgets to social networking hubs. At Mashable, Pete Cashmore thinks open widgets are the best strategy for wresting the social networking crown from MySpace. I don’t know if widgets will be the difference maker, but I and anyone invested in the widget business will certainly be watching to find out.