Category: Discovery and Curation

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Data Custody Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto

Use cases for real world crypto

This bit an interview with the founder of the ecommerce checkout system Fast:

Most of what people have predicted with cryptocurrency hasn’t happened. They’ve identified the right problems – payments need to be easier, identification needs to be better, we need to remove friction – but cryptocurrency isn’t the right technology for that. Part of the reason is the solution needs to be formed within the sphere of existing regulations and government identification.

It’s a strikingly different take and it’s articulated clearly what I have felt for so long. Blockchain-based alternatives to existing regulated use cases will have to fight a series of uphill battles to get traction. With regulators and governments, as the founder Allison points out. With entrenched interests and incumbents, and their vendors/suppliers. And with customers, who’re used to known processes and norms.

This is why tokenized real estate offered as investment has not taken off. Ditto with tokenized financial instruments such as ETFs. Or KYC on-the-blockchain. Or why Facebook’s Libra is highly unlikely to make it in its original avataar. All are great ideas, but there are too many entities that militate against them.

However. There are other problems that have no good solution today. Online trust is a problem that, as Facebook’s story has shown, is far too valuable to place in the hands of a single entity. Just yesterday we saw how in the news media, new institutions may emerge that become custodians of online reputation. Of brokering trustless relationships between source and publisher, between producer and writer.

DLT is also uniquely suited to solve issues with non-repudiation. Some weeks ago a consultant had reached out asking about a potential blockhain-based solution to problems of data access within a client company. It turned out that the problem was one of non-repudiation, and I suggested a fairly simple framework around an existing workflow that could have used either private or public blockchain (explaining the pros and cons of each). It was simple precisely because non-repudiation is inherent to DLT.

I also see provenance, or similar problems in supply chains, as an opportunity where the value of DLT hasn’t yet been captured by an company. This is not for lack of trying; it’s just very hard for all participants in a supply chain to sign up for it, both technically and because it disrupts special interests. It’s likely it’ll take off in a relatively self-contained subsection of a supply chain, and expand from there outwards. Perhaps it’ll even be this trial that the port of Rotterdam recently kicked off.

DLT – real world crypto – is a paradigm shift in the truest sense of that overused term. For instance solutions to the problem of online identity have so far tried to create improved versions of physical-world implementations, but because DLT makes possible trustless transactions, if obviates the need for verifiable identity itself for many use cases.

The killer app for Blockchain isn’t going to be an app that has killed before.

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Real-World Crypto

From trust in institutions to trust in individuals – Part 2

(Part 1)

Like we saw in the series on Linear Commerce and communities, we are in the early stages of emergence of thousands of people, each a trusted source in their niche area of interest. When this comes to news, we’re going to see the golden era of independent journalism, where the person, not the institution, is the brand, is where trust resides.

The problem with this is one of longevity. Simply: institutions outlive individuals.

The person who you end up trusting for information and insight into an area that matters to you could take a break, come down with illness, retire or pass away. They are the brand. The trust you repose in that brand isn’t transferable, even to the staff they work with.

A small example of this is Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles newsletter. It was ambitious, and it delivered. His introduction:

There’s no shortage of good Amazon stories, and good Amazon coverage… I think stories like this are just as important and just as interesting (more so, actually) as the latest on Jeff Bezos’s sex life or speculation about Amazon’s earnings and stock price. I like stories that help me see how a company like Amazon, with its tangled web of services and products, entwines itself into our lives, both consumer and commercial… But who is going to gather stories like these and help put them into context? Who, really, is able to take the time to get the big picture when it comes to what’s intermittently the biggest and most influential company in the world?

Also—it’s been a while, so I’ll forgive you if you don’t remember—I was a damned good Amazon reporter. At Wired and The Verge, I wrote stories about Amazon, its reach, and its ambition before it was clear to everyone that Amazon was going to be AMAZON. I’m proud of those stories. It was my favorite beat. I missed it, and wanted to find a way to cover it again.

– Statement of Purpose

The less than two dozen posts between Jan and August 2019 were each some of the best writing I have read on the matter.

But sometime last year, Tim underwent a shoulder replacement surgery and put the newsletter “on hiatus”. He brought it back for a couple more months later in the year, but the last post on was 1st August. He also seems to be off social media so the status of the newsletter is unclear.

This would be different if it were set up and run as a media operation. There’d be other cons, for sure, and perhaps Tim himself wouldn’t have liked to run it as one. But it would be about more than one person, with some provisions for continuity.

Institutions vs individuals also reminds me of the book Sapiens, which in one chapter discusses how humans’ ability to think in the abstract as a group meant they could create virtual entities vastly more powerful than themselves. As this review states:

Yuval uses the example of Peugeot, a limited liability corporation intersubjective. You could kill every employee and stakeholder in Peugeot, but the corporate entity would still exist. The building isn’t Peugeot — it can move offices. Peugeot could make planes rather than cars, so it isn’t what they do that defines them. The only thing that makes Peugeot Peugeot is everyone’s agreement that Peugeot exists, duly noted in the papers of some lawyer.

Yuval also goes on to state how a judge could decree Peugeot disbanded and the company would cease to exist, despite the factory, employees, supply chain exactly as they were before the judgement. The point is that institutions aren’t subject to human limitations: they can’t fall physically sick, there are no physical constraints on their growth, no natural caps on their lifespans.

I think that the shift of trust from institutions to individuals, while real, welcome and exciting, is a pendulum that’ll soon swing back towards institutions, although of a different kind. It may be that some of these new institutions are custodians of reputations of individual publishers, of social norms that define reputation. That trust may reside on a distributed ledger; those social norms codified in a contract. Other institutions that solve the problem of discovery of online publishers may emerge. Their mechanisms of discovery too may be published on blockchains. Still others will broker trustless cooperation between these tens of thousands (more?) of independent publishers – again using DLT.

This is going to be fascinating to watch.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation

From trust in institutions to trust in individuals – Part 1

It’s worth writing about this single question and its answer from an interview with Casey Newton, a writer for the online publication the Verge, and who also runs his own newsletter (that I am subscribed to).

The question itself frames the problem well:

People often say that “people who can tell stories rule the world”. It seems to me that we’re at one of those historical inflection points where the ability to speak convincingly about what is going on and how we ought to feel about it are shifting towards an entirely new kind of competency and expertise on the part of the storyteller. The world (including the tech world we live in) is getting super complex!  So on the one hand, this compounding complexity makes it harder for journalists, PR people, salespeople, storytellers of all kinds, to actually have a complete understanding of what they’re talking about. But on the other hand, that very same complexity gives their stories more power: people need a narrative; they need explanations that make sense to them…

The writer Casey answers well too. Some excerpts:

I think it’s been hard on average citizens and news consumers. There is much more high-quality information available to them at their fingertips, often for free, than there ever has been before. But there’s also an incalculable amount of bullshit all around them — much of it being pushed by those influencers and content marketers and PR people. There are now six PR people for every working journalist in the United States, by the way, and it feels like most of them are in my inbox daily.

The rise of content marketers and influencers have given [founders] friendly new channels to promote their work — ones that won’t ask the more difficult questions that journalists will. 

A weird phenomenon in our current era is that while trust in institutions is generally declining, trust in individuals is increasing. A journalist can become of those trusted individuals — either by gaining access to a big platform perch (anchoring a CNN show, say) or by developing deep expertise on a subject of growing importance. Either way, there are new ways to win now.

See also: the series we did on 21st Century Media.

(Part 2 – what about long-term trust?)

Categories
Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Timeboxing

David Sparks of the popular blog Macsparky, on his dealing with the online news. His observation:

It takes a lot of time. I need to make a living and support my family. Excessive time with the news gets in the way of that.

It closes my mind. With the way modern algorithms work, once I read one story, the computers decide what kind of news I like and try to feed me more of that. The longer I go, the more biased and extreme the feed gets.

It wipes me out. This year. This year. Do I need to explain how reading too much news drains me of the will and energy to do anything productive?

His plan on dealing with it? Timeboxing:

So, I am taking steps. I am rerunning my timers, this time with the idea of putting a 30-minute box around the news every day. Once I hit 30 minutes, I am done. Rather than get lost in the news, I would rather use that time for something else. Maybe I can spend a bit of it trying to make things better.

By and large I have stayed away from news about day to day politics for over a year, and that has been a big benefit for my peace of mind. But what David is doing is similar to how I timebox my other sources of distraction, Reddit and Twitter, even after my 30-day isolation.

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Reflections on the 30 day Twitter-Reddit isolation

A month ago, I had committed to a 30-day isolation from Twitter and Reddit based on a similar exercise that the writer Cal Newport had his followers perform. The objective was to not dip into these two destinations during the snippets of spare time that I had. As I wrote in that blog post, the one piece in the original article that stayed with me was

The ability to lift your phone at any moment is slicing good hours into time confetti. It’s preventing us from accomplishing big things and focusing…

That was enough to convince me to give my own isolation a shot. That 30 day period ended on Monday, 20th July 2020. Here are some reflections of that period.

  • The early withdrawal symptoms were unconscious. As I had logged on the first day, “[I] Once launched Twitter app without realising, scrolled, even screenshot-ed an interesting tweet before realising I had even unlocked the phone, tapped Twitter and was in the app”
  • I didn’t miss Twitter much, but I found that disconnecting from Reddit took some joy away from my life. So I added twenty minutes of Reddit into my wind-down routine. That did not take away from the objective of reducing fragmentation. Unfortunately, I have found it hard to limit the time on Reddit to twenty minutes only. This is something I am working on.
  • I realised how much the endless rapid scroll-and-read tired my brain out. I was starting each working day with a depleted brain, right after I had refreshed it overnight. Starting my day with my small list of websites and my RSS instead of scrolling through Twitter and Reddit makes for a much clearer rest of the day
  • Similarly, last year I had been bothered by a mental fog. The act of committing to write daily, and the required structured reading, thinking and synthesis reduced it, the distancing from continuous casual reading has had an even sharper beneficial effect. I wonder if it is the relief from the continuous dopamine hit that scrolling gives you.
  • As I had written before, I have been spending some time, about twenty minutes, daily in solitude – not meditation, simply spending time by myself not doing anything. I have found that the temptation to reach for my phone has significantly reduced. If at all, it is now often to note down something that I am thinking about, or something that I want to remind myself of. While I don’t think that using my phone for quick note-taking will send me into a rabbit-hole of browsing, I nevertheless use a pen and notebook.

I am still not sure how I will use these sites again after the isolation.

But as an immediate step, I plan to use Twitter time-boxed to twenty minutes just like with Reddit. I will probably do this early in the day along with my RSS feeds and sites, since Twitter is also a source for a lot of articles and essays that are relevant to this site. I’m also going to use Twitter Lists even more to take friends and high-frequency posters off the main feed into their own separate lists.

I considered using Nuzzel, an app that displays a list of websites that people in your twitter feed have linked to. That may have been useful a few years ago, but people’s use of Twitter has changed in the last year. The cumulative effect of the doubling of character limits, the ease of creating Twitter threads, the grouped display of conversations and Twitter’s own quality-filtering is that there are interesting, valuable discussions on Twitter itself, making reading worthwhile.

In short, the plan is to use Twitter and Reddit by deliberation instead of by default. Twitter, as we have seen, is probably more a professional network for the passion economy than a typical social network, and therefore useful to me. Reddit is important to me simply because it brings me joy. The plan is to enjoy their benefits without letting them fatigue my brain.

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Communities

We discussed the coming explosion of independent publishers in a large number of niches that combine content, community and commerce.

Steading a community is different from having a large number of followers. The former venture capitalist Li Jin describes the hallmarks of a true community:

I believe the following need to be present: high intentionality, P2P interactions, & UGC content.

1) Intentionality: Members seek out the community as a destination, not just as part of a broader platform’s feed

2) P2P interactions: Strong engagement and ties between members

3) UGC content: Members contribute content vs. just engaging w/ what’s broadcasted to them

Just like a publisher’s content can be across a site, Instagram, Twitter, newsletter, a YouTube channel, the corresponding communities can exist in a variety of places. 

The journalist Jon Russel, currently of The Ken, runs his own group on Telegram that, as of this writing, has over five hundred and seventy members. 

The writer Jacob Lund Fisker‘s Early Retirement Extreme community runs as a bulletin board. 

Azeem Azhar runs both his newsletter and his community on Substack using Substack’s discussion threads feature named, well, Community. Here is an example paid newsletter issue with its community.

Many others run private Slack groups. 

Interesting to me is that these communities are almost all off the public web and in the dark forests of the Internet, not indexable by Google and other search engines. As Li Jin describes above, truly vibrant communities may form because of a common interest in the publisher’s content, but it is their discussion that adds the most value. Their not being open to the internet if what engenders their openness.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

Twitter as professional network

The newsletter Not Boring had a very different view of Twitter in a recent issue:

Twitter thinks it’s Facebook, but it’s LinkedIn. 

Twitter thinks it’s an ad product, but it’s a subscription product. It thinks it’s an Aggregator, but it’s a Platform. It thinks it’s a social network, but it’s a professional network: one built for the Passion Economy, based on the strength of ideas instead of past experience.

That realization should be liberating for Twitter and Jack Dorsey. Instead of being the world’s least innovative social network, it can be its mostinnovative professional network. Twitter should be the beating heart of the Passion Economy, and begin capturing some of the tremendous value it creates. 

The newsletter goes on to make the point that with this shifty in positioning comes a shift in monetisation. Like Linkedin, which generates a large part of its revenue from what it calls ‘talent solutions’ as opposed to from ads , Twitter too could create paid products for people who use it like a professional network. As it says, 10% of its users generate 80% of its tweets, so there are clear power users who would be willing to pay for access to privileges and tool.

I think this has merit. This tweet from three years ago resulted in a lot of replies from people across many fields:

For many, Twitter is an invaluable aid to their careers. Their network of followers and the people they follow is their professional network. I have seen people among those I follow use Twitter to build a brand, communicate with prospects, promote clients, build a reputation, just like they would on Linkedin. When we use the terms VC Twitter, Investing Twitter, Crypto Twitter, Science Twitter we’re not just talking about interest-based communities, but the extraordinarily deep engagement between professionals in those fields and their followers. Both derive value from it in a way well beyond what you would expect in a typical social network. There are almost certainly hundreds of such “{Interest} Twitter”s.

End-note: In fact professionals are very likely more effective on Twitter than on Linkedin.

Linkedin’s Facebook-like 2-way connection model means that people are flooded with connection requests (that are solely meant for low-effort lead generation). The volume is now such that the norm is to accept by default, leading to people’s feed being inundated with posts from connections they have no affinity to and no desire to hear from. The signal-to-noise ration is much weaker on Linkedin than Twitter.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet

Infinite reach, micro-brands and linear commerce – Part 2

(Part 1)

In his piece ‘Never-ending Niches‘, the writer Ben Thompson articulates in a new way some points we have discussed before in the context how the Internet has opened up exponential opportunities for people to build powerful micro-brands. In this post we look at one of these points.

So it was with the Internet and the trade-off between reach and time: suddenly every single media entity on earth, no matter how large or small, and no matter its medium of choice, could reach anyone instantly. To put it another way, reach went to infinity, and time went to zero…

… there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human interest stories that had the potential of going viral. Both approaches, though, favored media entities with the best cost structures, not the best content, a particularly difficult road to travel given the massive amounts of content on the Internet created for free.

That left a single alternative: going around Google and Facebook and directly to users.

Old Media relies on paid social for reach and discovery. 21st Century Media relies on organic social. Old Media gamifies sharing on social and on dark forests. 21st Century Media is shared because it speaks directly to readers’ interests.

Put another way, Old Media optimises for reach and hopes that will create a relationship. 21st Century Media optimises for relationships because it knows that will create its own reach.

This reminds me strongly of the upside-down funnel that the cofounder of the email service Mailchimp described seven years ago:

What he describes is, in a nutshell, what drives independent publishers:

When you start a business, you don’t have a budget for marketing. You probably don’t have the time or talent for it, either. The only thing you’ve got is your passion. That damned, trouble-making passion that suckered you into starting your business in the first place. Take that passion and point it at your customers.

(Part 3 – a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of direct-to-consumer companies)

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

Infinite reach, micro-brands and linear commerce – Part 1

The writer and media entrepreneur John Battelle describes a form of media arbitrage in the ad industry today:

A big publisher like Buzzfeed or Cheddar sells a million-dollar advertising deal to a marketing brand. The media company guarantees the marketer’s message will collect a certain number of audience impressions or views, charging the marketer a “cost per thousand” for those impressions. (Known as “CPM,” cost per thousand pricing ranges widely, from a few pennies to $25-40 for “premium” placements)…

Because (Facebook and Google are cheaper, have better targeting), publishers have become audience buyers on Facebook, Google, and other networks. Enterprising publishers began packaging their own content with marketing messages from their sponsors, then they got busy promoting that bundle to audiences on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube, among others.

This is where “the arb” comes in: The publisher will charge the marketer, say, a $15 CPM, but acquire their audiences on Facebook for $7, clearing an $8 profit on every thousand impressions.

But marketers still prefer this approach to simply advertising on social themselves because they

… still believe that the context of a media brand can help their messaging perform better, and they’re not wrong in that belief. So they’ll pay a bit more to have their messaging associated with what they believe is quality editorial.

These practices – “packaging their own content with marketing messages from their sponsors” on social media – will lead to the erosion of the media company’s brand.

The one way sponsorship works is when the publisher has a direct relationship with a defined, loyal audience. Think of websites like Daring Fireball, podcasts like Joe Rogan’s or newsletters like the Morning Brew, each of them their own micro-brand. In this case when the sponsor’s message is packaged with the publisher’s content, the targeting is sharper, it happens on the publisher’s medium, the publisher controls the narrative, and the audience hears about it in a transparent context – this last is Battelle’s main point, the intermixing of content and marketing on social ruins context, which is why it’s disingenuous.

Sponsorship via direct-to-audience properties becomes the norm in the 21st century. This value that these independent publishers capture is the return they see on the capital they have built up in the form of their audience.

(Part 2 – what about the Internet makes micro-brands more attractive than large publishers)

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet

For newsletters to become the new blogs, discovery is the missing piece

The last couple of posts described why online archival of sites and blogs is something I’m interested in. Specifically, the web is getting old, domains expire, blog hosting services change. That reminded me of this article from 2013 by the blogger Jason Kottke:

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.

Kottke himself is one of the Internet’s most well-known, longest-published bloggers, having written for twenty-two years running, with well over ten of those full-time. But his essay highlighted a trend that has continued unabated. There are more people writing online than ever before, but that has increasingly been on closed platforms like Medium.

The trend around newsletters is encouraging. We have talked before of how major journalists moving to their own newsletters could even spawn a wave of independent, reader-supported journalism. There are many hundreds of high-quality newsletters now, to the point where discovering them is going to be an issue. There is no good search/browse/recommend for newsletters yet.

Newsletters are email, a technology much older than the web itself. But they’re easier to keep track of someone’s writing than a blog. RSS and RSS Readers never really caught one because it was one more piece of software readers had to use, but everyone has an email inbox. For the writer, publishing an email is as simple as, probably simpler than publishing a blog post.

The downside is discovery – where do you find interesting things people are writing?

Discovery is going to particularly important if newsletters are to thrive as an easy means of causal writing and distribution for the average person – because while newsletters have been around from very early on in the form of people just mailing a group of friends and growing organically from there, the latest wave of newsletter services typefied by the venture-funded Substack for who monetization is an important goal. That changes what the service optimizes discovery and promotion for: newsletters about topics that are ‘current’, that have the highest chance of conversion to paid, and not the long tail. It starts looking like other Silicon Valley businesses:

Arguably, it’s another example of money and prestige coming for an internet-age creative format that was better when it was a hush-hush community activity—non-remunerative, an anti-discovery algorithm, full of in-speak, artistically strange (see: podcasts, blogs, fan fiction, memes).

Without discovery, newsletters aren’t going to replace social media as the place most people share what’s interesting to them. Nevertheless, they remain an extremely hopeful medium for independent, direct-to-reader journalism.