Thumbs down on small payments, says Shirkey

Clay Shirky: Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers:

The invocation of micropayments involves a displaced fantasy that the publishers of digital content can re-assert control over we unruly users in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition.

What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers;

All of which seems sensible to me with regard to commodified news. But what about other sorts of publishing and archival marketeering? He's at FASTforward09, and seems not yet to have moderated his comments. Here's one I left earlier today:

Clay, do you see no role for microeconomics for vended content? One area where one has imagined it proving useful is academic treasure houses like JSTOR, ProjectMUSE, which simply close themselves off to potential readers by operating within an institutional subscription format.

What sort of model would you prefer?

Purposive representation of groups

Clay Shirky has an intriguing thought about formalizing and legitimating groups:

to create a corporate form that allows groups to come together easily and quickly in the ways now made possible by our digital and social tools, while giving those groups the legitimacy that incorporation provides, which includes the ability to raise and spend money, to offer and enter into contracts, and to adopt binding forms of governance.

My interest is more in how groups can be represented and interact with other groups - how systems of groups are represented and defined.

One thought that has occurred to me, and I am curious what others might think, is to look at something like the AllVoices map, above. Suppose your neighborhood - the one where your body, not your avatar, actually lives - wanted to share and explore common issues, problems, with other neighborhoods in your area.

Such a map could serve to show which other neighborhoods in your locality (however defined - county, city, state, province etc.) were bringing up news from their locations. This would be the awareness function.

Then, the various items posted by the neighborhoods could be tagged and searched -- enabling discovery of common ground. "Oh, they have the same problem with speeders/road deterioration/code enforcement laggardness etc. that we have!"

Then those neighborhood groups could move into a forum where ideas, best practices, planned actions are shared. "We will all meet next Tuesday at the county - bring your brickbats."

etc.

[add: Neighborhood" is merely par exemple. Could of course be any kind of group or constellated entities seeking relations with other entities with similar concerns.]

Shirking the dialog, Beaming the enigma

Jon Husband emailed a pointer to this new blog seemingly by Clay Shirky (no author identified on the blog) and having something to do with his new book, Here Comes Everybody. Jon and I had mentioned the book in prior emails, but the blog was new to us.

The current post: What businesses need to know about social media... addressed the question by citing an email that Shirky had sent to Penguin books. In that, Shirky says, in part:

There is both opportunity and threat in this environment. The opportunity is getting these groups to amplify your message or help improve your product.

Something here bothered me, so I tried to post a comment. Shirky's WordPress blog refused to accept the comment, telling me to register. It might be helpful to clue people in on this requirement ahead of their spending time trying to comment. (Like, socially aware software.)

So I registered, was promised a password, which I'm still waiting for. Let's assume Clay is busy with his book appearances and he's not exactly focused on his book blog.

Anyway, what I had in mind to say, quite briefly, because I couldn't quite put my finger on what was bothering me, was this (I saved my comment because this experience with blog condoms was not my first):

I'm not yet "courant" on the new book, which of course interests me, but I'm a tad disappointed to find your reflection on biz effects to be content with "amplify your message." Hasn't it already for some time been time to stop believing that a corporation should even exist via "message?"

"Improve product," fine - tho' how? But if it's about amplification of pre-packaged media unsense, let's hear it for diminution. Or better: dialogue, enhanced articulation, the like.

A few minutes later, I happened to visit BMO's blog, where -- and this has happened before -- I found his latest post to more or less be reading not so much my mind, as the unthought thing it was stuck on:

And so, to answer the question: can corporations manage the migration to social media?

No.

And who fucking cares really.

For about a dozen good reasons, which I’ll get into as we move along here. But number one: corporations - or more accurately, those that work for corporations - hate their customers, even when and if they acknowledge them. That’s not about to change, and it’s not about to change any time soon. And it bears repeating over and over again. HATE.

Now we're getting somewhere: The whole thing.
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