During her presentation at PAB2008, Whitney Hoffman provided her analysis of a fledgling and still relatively unknown podcast network that had great promise when it was launched last September. Whitney outlined what appears to be a breakdown in communications, lack of transparency and possibly the use of bloated claims to market the network to would-be members and sponsors. The problem is that the network never gelled as a cohesive group and has been unable to establish a community among members and audience.

In fairness, most podcast networks have had a difficult time making a success of themselves; the most public of these being Podshow which is trying to distance itself from its earlier mistakes as it goes through its reinvention as an entertainment company.

I believe that there are two types of networks in this space: the Rabbit Network and the Turtle Network.

The Rabbit Network seeks to build market share for financial reasons. These networks face two distinct challenges. First, the early adopters of new media (including podcasting) were hobbyists that struggled with the delivery and/or production of their content. This is in no way a knock at the content creators because most of the content that was (and still is) being produced was fresh and (in some cases) edgy. The content they were creating, though, was marketed to commercial interests that had a difficult time identifying any commercial appeal. This is particularly true where the second challenge comes in — the business model. It’s hard to convince potential sponsors and investors to take a financial risk on an unproven and relatively disruptive technology. The value couldn’t be measured so the potential sponsors avoided the risk. Traditional business models were used where new business models were merited. Because the big players preferred to play safe, the word about the podcasting didn’t move as quickly. This means that it was hard to establish, and ultimately appreciate, the value of the media.

Having said that, there have been some notable sponsorships. As Whitney points out, though, it is unclear whether the sponsorships were achieved based on genuine metrics. Regardless, there is data that suggests some so-called small scale podcasts have greater penetration and engagement than the shows that are getting the big sponsorship deals.

The Rabbit Networks usually make a big splash when they launch and become marginalized over time. Some people believe this is because mainstream media loses interest or that the latest and greatest Rabbit Network has come along to replace the one thatís making the same mistakes as its predecessors. Based on my understanding, the Rabbit Networks almost always disintegrate because of hidden agendas and lack of communication.

The Turtle Network is a group of like-minded content producers that band together in a show of support and to help promote one-another’s shows. There is no expectation of financial gain and in many cases the bond is a mutual (and sometimes vocal) disinterest in sponsorship and advertising. These networks have no specific goals and, for the outsider, appear to be nothing more than a public pronouncement of friendship and a way to help listeners identify content that the producer(s) enjoy.

It’s easy to be dismissive of the Turtle Networks since they never really seem to accomplish anything. However, their organic approach to building and engaging an audience, and their quietly-chug-away approach to creating programs, means that they serve a niche that will follow them and forgive them their absences and production mistakes. The Turtles survive because of their regular, honest and transparent communication.

Perhaps networks haven’t succeeded, yet, because noone’s figured out a way to cross-breed a Rabbit and a Turtle.

The number of conferences with a social media slant has been increasing over the last few years. I have attended a few of them and have found each to have their own unique style of promoting knowledge, community and collaboration. I decided that I’d take a few moments to share my experiences and offer my thoughts on three social media conferences.

PODCAMP

Even within the PodCamp unconference movement, each event has its own style. PodCamp Boston 1 and 2 were strong in their efforts to promote community and the media of podcasting. PodCamp Toronto 07 and 08 catered very well to the marketing interest and had strong focus on podcast promotion and technology. PodCamp Philly had a decided education and community flair. PodCamp Ottawa was truly unplugged. Of course, these conferences had a lot of breadth of coverage in many domain areas and became the catalyst of conversation that stretches beyond what I mention here. What PodCamps have in wide-angle scope, they lack in specific depth of focus. Being a free event that is community organized offers the ability for the community to decide what it wants to share and that gives the movement a lot to grow on.

MESH

This event attracts a lot of key players from pop-culture, marketing, communications and social media. Mesh was packed from end-to-end with innovators and thought leaders who were excellent at delivering on the promise of the Mesh motto, “connect, share, inspire”. The panel discussions and keynote format (in which there was no real speech, but a discussion between a guest and co-organizer) offered the audience some amazing insight into some incredible projects and people. However, I felt that because there were so many panels and keynotes, there was little opportunity for many of the speakers to dig deep into their subjects and propel innovation beyond its current state. Those sessions where more a discussion of the past and present and offered little to push the envelope of innovation. For me, the best sessions at Mesh were those delivered by an individual or team that shared details of a specific project or idea. They made me want to get up and do more.

PODCASTERS ACROSS BORDERS

What started out as a grassroots event aimed at helping the community advance together in a meetup-meets-conference format has become something more credible and formal. Being a co-organizer, I am both proud and critical of our accomplishments to date. Our first two years were vastly different from each other and that has allowed us to examine the stuff that works (lots of engagement with the community) and the stuff that doesn’t (too much programming, insufficient breaks) and find a way to make the best of our event meet the stuff I love most about other events to hit one out of the park with PAB2008. My lofty vision is that PAB establishes itself as the TED of social media — a conference that changes the way people think in twenty minute segments and then offers a forum to explore those ideas as a group. I believe that this year’s program represents experience and a maturing of the conference and community. I’m looking forward to this year’s conference which we can almost start counting down to in hours.

PARTING THOUGHT

People often talk about the best part of conferences being the networking and socializing. In fact, I often hear of people attending one conference in particular (name withheld) just to socialize and have given up attending the sessions because, for them, the sessions lack substance. I believe that conferences should always excel at providing worthwhile networking opportunities, but never at the expense of offering high quality sessions and high quality speakers.

Bryan Person started it all in Boston, now Simon Chen, Ryan Anderson and Rob Lane bring the franchise to Ottawa when Ramius hosts the first Social Media Breakfast Ottawa on Tuesday, June 10 beginning at 7:30am.

The event features guest speaker, Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of DNA11, a company that pioneered the creation of personalized artwork from the DNA of its customers.  Adrian will tell the story of how buzz about DNA11 spread from blogs, to magazines, to TV and mainstream media.

At the time of this post, there are seven spaces left for the event.  You can register here.

See you on Tuesday.

First off, I want copies of the monologues by The Voice. Like day one, today opened with a great introduction which was both entertaining and shockingly realistic.

The first ‘keynote’ featured a discussion between Mesh organizer Stuart MacDonald and Lane Merrifield, Executive Vice President Walt Disney Internet Group, Co-founder and General Manager Club Penguin. Club Penguin is an online virtual world for children which boasts twelve million users and more than seven-hundred thousand paid subscribers. Where the free service is sustained by advertisements, the subscription service offers an ad-free environment.

There are many critics that claim Club Penguin indoctrinates children into the consumer culture. Lane defends the world by pointing out the lessons that can be learned about currency and the need to save money in order to buy what you want. Lane is quite up front that Club Penguin is not specifically an education experience nor is it meant to be. It’s a place for children to play online.

Safety is a high profile concern of Club Penguin. Personal information is blocked and there is a team of moderators that monitor and sanitize the environment of unacceptable content. Apparently ‘lollipop’ is on the chopping block at the moment. They measure their success by ‘reportable incidents’ and have never had an incident in which a child’s safety was at risk.

A lot of thought has gone into marketing the environment. Lane talked about the struggle that Club Penguin has gone through to describe itself. He rejects the idea that it’s a social network since they block all personal information. I wonder if a social network is defined simply by the presence or exchange of personal information. They ended up deciding to call the online world a virtual playground and established a mantra that drives their marketing decisions “if it doesn’t matter to an eight-year-old, it doesn’t matter”. The result is that they don’t participate in many conferences (Mesh being an exception).

The Disney part of the Club Penguin story is particularly interesting. Lane gave the impression that the purchase was not necessarily an objective and he spent time with John Lassiter to gauge how Disney treats their employees and holdings. More significantly, Disney has given Lane and the Club Penguin team the freedom to decide how their virtual playground will unfold without imposing Disney characters on it. Disney offered characters like Mickey Mouse and Buzz Lightyear if they were wanted. Club Penguin operates without those easy grabs.

Club Penguin is about the personal experience. Personal emails from the community are answered, personally, by real people on the team. That means that when they get a fractured email from a child asking a technical question and describing their character and that their character’s pet says ‘hi’, someone will reply with an answer to the question and will respond to the mention of the character and send regards back to the pet.

Violation of the site’s terms of use notwithstanding, a Brandon, Manitoba teen is facing several criminal charges for impersonating one of his teachers in Facebook.  The charges relate to impersonation with criminal intent.

Let’s get a few things out of the way.  I haven’t seen the Facebook profile in question, nor am I an expert in Canadian Law.  Clearly, the student overstepped some serious bounds.  After all, criminal charges don’t run out of your tap like water.  There has to be some significant evidence to merit charges.

In preparing for an interview I did with Calgary’s AM770 CHQR this evening, I initially considered the following to be my key points:

• most (if not all) of what ends up on the web is indexed and cached for all to enjoy in perpetuity
• Facebook is famous for its overcomplicated process to remove profile data and related links

I was wrong.

There is a moral, ethical and legal component to this issue.  And while parents bear a significant amount of the responsibility to educate their children on the use and abuse of the Internet, schools need to take a leadership role on access and education.

ACCESS

If the media is to be believed, schools have been increasing the amount of computer technology and Internet access available in the classroom over the last few years.  In some cases, schools limit what students are able to access.  That is to say, students can only access specific websites for specific purposes.  Content can be regulated specifically (by website name) or dynamically (by filtering by embedded content).  In other cases, schools explicitly allow access without control and then implicitly block access when sites or content become a problem.  In other words, they set the ball rolling and then wash their hands of the problem.  They take a “not in my house” approach after they’ve already made allowances “in their house”.

Having said that, most of what’s happening in Facebook is likely not happening on school computers during school hours.  A growing number of children have unlimited, high speed Internet access in their homes.  This leads me to my next point.

EDUCATION

I am confident that there is very little if any education on moral, ethical and legal concerns when using the Internet.  While “we” may be putting a lot of energy into helping children identify some of the more tangible threats (stalking, sexual harassment, hate crimes, etc…), I don’t believe much is being done to help students understand Acceptable Use and Terms of Use agreements on sites like Facebook.  A majority of people, students and adults alike, flock to the sites that are popular and blindly select any checkbox that is required of them in order to gain access to the site.  I would argue that many school administrations don’t understand the Facebook Terms of Use.  And yet, at least some schools have at one time allowed students to access these sites from school networks.

When I was in elementary school, library orientation was used to help us understand how to find information, how information was stored and related, how to synthesize the information and how to behave in the library.  Elmer the Safety Elephant taught us seven safety rules including how to cross the road and who we could and couldn’t accept candy from.  Both were integrated into our elementary school education.

Today’s children face more complex problems — and more of them.  The problems are ethereal and obfuscated for corporate interests.  We need to make sure students understand the moral, ethical and legal reasons for conducting themselves with respect for others.  We’re not doing that.

The thirty-somethings that use the social web were raised in a true social ecosystem and (for the most part) have managed to port their social skills to the digital world in an effective and productive way.  The digital natives are being raised in a digital social ecosystem where real-life interaction, and the appreciation of real people is limited or completely absent.  It would seem it’s easier for them to not be affected by nefarious Internet-based activities.

What’s the solution to the problem?

I believe education and simplification are key to any solution.  Since schools have taken it upon themselves to direct their students to the Internet to conduct research, they need to do more than just tell students how to do a Google search and then filter the results for their assignment.  The schools need to educate students to understand the digital culture.  And, it’s time for the corporate world, particularly the legal departments, to shorten and simplify their user agreements.  It’s no longer appropriate to put the onus on your uninformed and/or confused users and wash your hands of any responsibility.

In the last twelve hours I’ve received several identical (and supposedly personal) Facebook messages from legitimate friends urging me to check out an application that will identify who has a crush on me by sending text messages to my phone (I can only imagine the flood of spam and advertisements that this service has in mind).

It was just a matter of time before hackers and spammers directed their efforts at Facebook. One can only hope that Facebook is taking good care of the personal data based on the settings we have selected within their ‘privacy settings’. Would there be any reason to doubt them?

Following the Facing up to Facebook session at the University of Ottawa on Wednesday, Bob LeDrew and I chatted for quite a while about the privacy implications of social media. Specifically, we talked about services like Facebook and how they exploit trust and personal information for corporate gains — their own and their clients’. These companies do warn you on some level that, by accepting their terms of service, you forfeit your claims to privacy of your information and that you also assign full licensing rights (including for their own financial gain) for your content (text, photos, videos, etc…) to the them. However, they do this through obscure (certainly not plain English) terms and conditions. They also serve up what I call a ‘crippling and confusing suite’ of information sharing controls disguised as privacy controls.

Bob and I came to the realization that the key element in the discussion about privacy and an individual’s right to privacy in social media tools is the amount of complexity and confusion in the way the agreements are structured and what our real rights are. This is further complicated by the fact that privacy laws differ from country to country and while most countries have adopted strict privacy regulations in order to do business with the EU, the United States has managed to get by with a more relaxed set of rules called Safe Harbor.

From the Safe Harbor main webpage:

While the United States and the European Union share the goal of enhancing privacy protection for their citizens, the United States takes a different approach to privacy from that taken by the European Union.

This raises a lot of concerns when Canadian companies like Flickr move their data servers to the United States.

As we talked, I mentioned to Bob that what the world needs is a Privacy Commons — a simple and easy to understand deed to privacy which clearly communicates the privacy (or absence of privacy) controls built in to a service (I blogged about this in November). We fantasized about a simple Privacy Commons modeled after the Creative Commons that would elegantly and concisely allow service providers to designate privacy features in a deed-like interface, indicating elements like:

• do they collect personal identifying data
• is the data stored and transferred in a way that protects confidentiality
• is the data shared or sold
• does the company expect blanket consent to share/sell private information or do they require case-specific consent
• how long data is kept
• how data is destroyed

Some would argue that it would be hard to get companies to adopt this model. I suggest that companies that are committed to privacy would have no issues adopting a model which would make that immediately obvious to people.  At the very least, it will help people understand the privacy features of the site. In the same way that the Creative Commons took a while to stick and connect those with a common vision of making creative works available under specific implicit terms as well as send a message to licensing bodies, the Privacy Commons would take some time to prove that taking privacy seriously is good business.

Many cultural, political, business and media revolutions have taken place online over the last few years. A revolution for simplified privacy in an increasingly public world seems like a logical next step.

Two questions come to mind:

• Who would build a Privacy Commons?
• Does anyone else see a Privacy Commons as being beneficial?

Yesterday, after Bryan Person pointed out that there were some problems with it, I removed the FriendsRoll block from my site.  Steve, one of the developers at 76design, whipped into action and released a corrected v1.2 beta.

My FriendsRoll block is back online.

I attended the Facing up to Facebook session at the University of Ottawa, yesterday. It was a panel discussion with Law and Technology Faculty Professors Jeremy de Beer, Ian Kerr, Jane Bailey, Val Steeves and Michael Geist and it was moderated by Andy Kaplan-Myrth.

The discussion was lively and informative and had a unique mix of social media participants (Profs de Beer, Kerr and Geist) and observers/researchers (Profs Bailey and Steeves). While there was a clear recognition of the role of social media tools such as Facebook, the discussion focussed largely on the impacts of these technological gathering places on culture and privacy, and their not-so-subtle use for corporate interests.

I found it particularly interesting when the panel explored the influence of culture on the need for social media tools and influence of social media tools on culture. Prof. de Beer introduced the room to John Fiske’s concept of Semiotic Democracy, “the delegation of the production of meanings and pleasures to viewers”.

The majority of the conversation focused on privacy concerns, the misrepresentation of information sharing controls as privacy controls and the use of aggregate information (not specific information) to generate consumer profiles. Prof. Bailey wondered if privacy is now passé. Indeed, social media tools are about publicity and micro-celebrity rather than privacy.

The session reinforced my realization that businesses that have stood up social media services (such as Facebook) are manufacturing a three-tiered privacy-crippled environment:

• crippling amounts of information that creates an environment in which privacy may be possible through obscurity
• crippling suite of options designed to perpetuate a false sense of privacy
• crippling terms of use agreements designed to protect the interests of companies through obscure language, excessive text and circular references beyond the patience and comprehension of most people

Excerpts of the Facing up to Facebook session are available in this week’s episode (#95) of the Canadian Podcast Buffet. The entire session will be released as a podcast through the University of Ottawa.

There has been a growing trend of online services designed to build social networks in centralized and sometimes closed environments. While there are merits to this approach, the abundance of options is crippling and confusing. Invariably, everyone must join every site and we’re left chasing each other around. This has created an artificial sense of centralization in a decidedly decentralized environment.

No matter how many different tools are made available, I know I can always find my social network at the home base of each of its individuals. In most cases that’s the blog site of each individual.

Last week, 76 design launched two new WordPress plugins designed to put the power of social networking back where it belongs… in the hands of the community. I particularly like the idea of their FriendsRoll plugin (which I have installed on my site ***). It allows members of my network to connect with me on my own site, and I on theirs. And because the plugin goes with my own site, there are no concerns about privacy. I will not share or sell the information that my network provides to me. I will not post targetted advertisements on my website based on aggregate marketing information collected during the process of establishing the technological friendship. Indeed, the 76 design plugins don’t even allow the collection of this information.

Facebook may be convenient, but it’s far from respectful. To that end, expect a post from me tonight or tomorrow on yesterday’s Facing up to Facebook session at the University of Ottawa.