Notes de l'éditeur

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2. - Hi. I’m so happy to be here today.\n\n- My talk today is called “Blogging in an Age of Participation”. \n\n- I gave a talk introducing this idea to a group of bloggers about 5 years ago.\n\n- And when I went back to my notes to see what my thinking had been, that talk seemed so old-fashioned.\n\n- The Web has changed so much.\n\n- So I was happy to have an opportunity to revisit this subject and to consider what the Age of Participation really means.\n\n- Because I don’t think it was at all apparent when I first started talking about this shift.\n\n\n\n
3. - I started blogging in 1999. \n\n- At the time, blogging software didn’t even exist. \n\n- There were programmers who wrote or modified software to update their blogs. \n\n- Those of us who were Web designers updated our sites by hand, typing in HTML and then FTPing it to our sites. \n\n- We called them “weblogs”.\n\n- Today there are probably millions of blogs, dozens of social networking sites, and billions of apps for your smart phones.\n\n- So how did we get here? I think I see a clear path. And to trace that path, I’m going to go back -- briefly -- to Ancient Greece.\n
4. - This is Era-TOS-thenes\n\n- In 240 BC, Era-TOS-thenes calculated the circumference of the Earth.\n\n- Science used to be a matter of human observation and deduction.\n\n- Era-TOS-thenes calculated the circumference of the Earth by looking down a well when the Sun was overhead.\n\n- And then he thought really hard.\n\n- He may have had an abacus.\n\n- But starting in the Middle Ages, Science increasingly became a province of technology.\n
5. - La-YOU-wen-hook needed a microscope to discover bacteria.\n\n- Galileo needed a telescope. And so it went. Through the 18th century, through the 19th century, and on.\n\n- By the 20th century, science was ever more dependent on advanced technology.\n\n- We invented the electron microscope.\n\n- We sent a man to the moon.\n\n- We built the Hubble Space Telescope.\n\n- And we began amassing more data than any human being could process.\n
6. - And we invented the computer.\n\n- Which enabled us to process more data than any human being could ever hope to absorb.\n
7. - And that's when they started talking about the Information Age.\n\n- But as it turns out, that wasn’t the right name at all.\n\n- 2 critical things happened that changed the trajectory of the Information Age:\n\n- The first thing is that we hooked the computers together.\n\n
8. - Do you remember those days?\n\n- On every desk, in every office, there was a typewriter. And there was a computer in the corner that the whole office could share.\n\n- But just 30 years later, when you walk into an office, this is what you see:\n
9. - A computer on every desk, and if there is a typewriter, it’s in the corner or in a closet for the entire office to share.\n\n- Once a computer was on every desk, someone got the bright idea to hook them to each other...\n- ... and then you could send email to the other people in the room.\n\n- But once people started hooking their computers to the Internet, you could send email to anyone else in the world, provided they, too had an Internet connection.\n
10. - You could call this the Age of Connection, or the Age of Communication - and it started to look like that’s where we were headed.\n\n-But that’s not where we landed either.\n\n- Parallel to these developments in science and technology, something else was going on in the evolution of human culture.\n\n
11. - The Industrial Age marked the shift from home production to professional production.\n\n- In the Agrarian Age, nearly everything was produced in the home: food, medicine, cloth.\n\n- With the Industrial Age, machines sped up these processes, and enabled a man - or a boy - with the machine to do much more than any individual could do.\n\n- To maximize efficiency, companies learned to produce large amounts of their product and to ship it to the largest number of people.\n\n- So the technology needs (for both production & distribution) kept the amateurs out.\n
12. - This is a picture of a woman playing a mandolin.\n- My sister has a mandolin that once belonged to my great-grandmother. It looks very much like the one in this picture.\n\n- There was a mandolin craze during my great-grandmother’s youth. People went out and bought mandolins and learned how to play them.\n\n- In her day, if you wanted music at a party, or in the evening, you made it.\n\n- But in the course of her lifetime, during the 20th century, technology - the phonograph and the radio - turned music-making into a specialist activity.\n\n- And that went out of our homes.\n\n- We became entertainment consumers.\n
13. - And of course, for the consumer, buying clothing or crackers or music is more efficient than making those things at home.\n\n- So we see the movement of all kinds of goods - food, clothing, medicine, even entertainment - from the home and into the commercial realm.\n\n- Into the realm of specialists.\n\n- The 20th century was the pinnacle of that movement.\n\n- Right now we're at the beginning of a counter-movement.\n\n- So what we're witnessing is the closing of the Industrial Age.\n
14. - 5 years ago, people were saying that this new era would be marked by amateurs participating at a professional level in activities that were – for a time – the domain of experts.\n\n- So that the way of the 20th century - the Industrial Age, the Age of Specialists - was dissolving.\n\n- People talked about Mass Amateurization.\n\n
15. - Some called it the Pro-Am Revolution (the Professional-Amateur Revolution).\n\n- Clearly, blogging was a perfect example of this shift. \n\n- And I think this trend of amateurs participating at a professional level will continue to be important. \n\n
16. - But there are so many things happening now that are different from what anyone was projecting even 5 years ago.\n\n- And these new changes are bigger than blogging.\n\n- And I think we need to look at those things to start to really understand the Age of Participation.\n\n\n
17. - There’s a basic dyad that I’ve been thinking about.\n\n- And to some extent it drives all of human culture, in all of human history.\n
18. - That basic dyad is: Technology plus skill.\n\n
19. - Tools plus know-how.\n\n- If a man has a knife and a gourd, he can carve out the interior of the gourd to make for himself...\n\n\n\n
20. ... a container from which he can drink water, or in this case, palm wine. And almost anyone could figure that out.\n
21. - Generally speaking, the better your tools, the better your work can be.\n \n- And this is the basic premise of the Pro-Am Revolution: that access to better technology is leveling the playing field between amateurs and professionals\n\n- As high-tech equipment comes down in price, amateur astronomers, for example, can afford equipment that enables them to observe deeper into space, and they are able to contribute in significant ways to the field of astronomy. And this has happened.\n\n- Amateur photographers can afford cameras and lenses that enable them to produce higher-quality photography than they could with the old point-and-shoot cameras.\n\n
22. - Skill is equally important. A good photographer can produce wonderful photos with very limited equipment. This photo was taken with a pinhole camera. (Bushmills, Northern Ireland, GB.)\n\n- This was the case with the bloggers of my era. We were programmers and Web designers, and so we could create HTML documents and post them to the Web to create our weblogs.\n\n- We didn’t need blogging software to blog.\n\n- It’s still the case with the bloggers of today. Blogging software can do so many things now, but it takes a great deal of skill to configure that software.\n\n- So bloggers don’t need to be programmers anymore, but they do need to be highly motivated amateurs.\n
23. - Technology plus skill.\n\n- You could put me in the Space Shuttle, and I wouldn’t have the first idea how to make it go. Extremely sophisticated technology, but I don’t have the skill to use it.\n\n- Conversely, you can put an astronaut into a car, and she may be able to drive - but she won’t be able to fly it to the International Space Station, because it the technology to do that just isn’t there.\n\n- The world’s most gifted programmer can to create beautiful Web pages only if he has an Internet connection.\n\n- And you can put my grandmother in front of a Movable Type Installation, and she might as well be sitting on the Space Shuttle.\n\n- Both components must be in place.\n\n\n\n\n\n
24. - So this Dyad is - I think - one of the main drivers of what’s happening now around us.\n\n\n\n
25. - In the case of weblogs, when I started you had to be an expert.\n\n- You had to know HTML at the very least. With programming expertise, you could build blogging software. But you had to be an expert.\n\n- In 1999 then came blogging software, and suddenly you had to know less.\n\n- The software could do some things for you.\n\n- But you still needed to have some expertise to set it up, and to design templates, to customize it in various ways.\n\n\n- And you still do. So blogging is, for the most part, still in the realm of the hobbyist. The interested Amateur. \n\n- In spite of those constraints, blogging has had a very powerful effect. People started writing on the Web. Without the need to pitch to an editor and have an article approved, anyone with a strong enough interest in a topic could write a paragraph or a page and publish it right on their own site.\n\n- Passionate amateurs began publishing work that other people wanted to read. Non-professionals developed followings and in some cases moved into the professional world. \n
26. - So, in 1999, computer programmers and Web designers blogged. \n\n- In 2002, hobbyists blogged.\n\n- Today, your Mother posts links to Facebook and your dental hygienist blogs in Twitter. \n\n- You no longer need your own website, very much time, or even much motivation to do what we bloggers have been doing for the last 10 years.\n\n- Blogging has transformed from a do-it-yourself activity to a mainstream pastime.\n\n- And this is a true mainstreaming: not familiarity with the meaning of the word - some of these people have never heard the word “blog” in their lives.\n\n- Not the acceptance of blogs in mainstream media publications.\n\n- This is actual blogging, on a regular basis, by ordinary people who would not in any stretch of the imagination consider themselves to be bloggers.\n\n- And I would argue that the principles driving the uptake and the behavior of the mainstream in social media today are the very principles that have driven blogging from the beginning.\n\n
27. - I’ve been thinking about “The Principles of Participation”. \n\n- And there are 5 of these principles that I think are driving what is happening on the Web today.\n\n
28. - Curation\n\n- At the beginning, we were link bloggers, remember? The webloggers acquired readers - and status - by finding and passing along the best links.\n\n- We worked hard to craft link text that would motivate our readers to click the links we posted.\n\n- The people who complained that we were providing no original content overlooked our real craft: curation. \n
29. - Amplification\n\n- Sometimes another blogger would post one of our links on their weblog.\n\n- It was common to credit the blog on which you had found the link, to credit the discoverer of that link.\n\n- So we amplified each others voices by linking to each other.\n\n- By linking, we created an organic distribution network through which content could circulate.\n\n- When someone did that, they were also introducing their audience to us or rather to our weblog.\n\n- And the hope was to be linked by someone with a larger audience, because then their audience could become my audience.\n
30. - Incrementalism.\n\n- Sometimes a news story would catch fire within the weblog community and people would share links, find new ones, and post their thoughts on the situation.\n\n- Other bloggers, considering the new information, would post again, adding their revised thoughts in light of another piece of information, or someone else’s opinion.\n\n- And so we learned that we could think together in public, each person adding to the other’s thoughts.\n\n- We could dig up background information that others had overlooked, or apply our own expertise to shed light on the situation.\n\n- Each piece of information, no matter how small, added to the larger picture. \n\n- Each piece of information might provide a perspective that might not have exist elsewhere.\n\n- So each of could add incrementally to the larger story.\n\n
31. - Concentration\n\n- In 1999, Cameron Barrett of Camworld posted a list of “sites like his” in his sidebar - the first blog portal.\n\n- Everyone who had a weblog sent their URL to be added to the list, and for a while, it was enough to just be another weblog to be added to that list.\n\n- So for a time, Camworld was the place to go to find the list of “all the blogs that existed”\n\n
32. - So these are the main drivers of mainstream participation on the Web today, as I see them.\n\n- Curation, Amplification, Incrementalism, and Concentration.\n\n- There’s no arguing that, for those of us who were active on the Web even 5 years ago, the landscape has completely changed.\n\n- It’s simply not the same Web.\n\n- So let’s look at how these principles apply to some key websites, and how they apply to the changes that we are now seeing.\n
33. - Amazon and Wikipedia\n\n- The dinosaurs. They’ve been around forever, and their success is driven by 2 of the principles of participation.\n
34. - Incrementalism\n\n- You don’t have to post every day to any of these services. Just one review on Amazon, or one article on Wikipedia makes the entire service better for everyone.\n\n- And in fact, to contribute, you don’t need to post a review or an article at all.\n\n
35. - On Wikipedia, you can correct one fact, and improve the utility of the service for everyone. One correction can make the difference between an article that is accurate or one that is false.\n\n- On Amazon, if you don’t feel like posting a review, you can rate other people’s reviews as useful or not useful -- adding value for everyone else that refers to that review.\n\n- It’s a very low bar for participation, but it is participation, and it does offer value to every other person who is interested in purchasing that book.\n\n- WIkipedia now asks you to so the same thing at the end of every article.\n\n
36. - Concentration is obviously the second principle that has driven the success of both of these sites.\n\n- At each of these sites, thousands of people have preceded you. There are hundreds of thousands of reviews and articles to choose from.\n\n- It makes sense to go to the site that you know will have the information you need.\n\n- Now, of course it takes time to accumulate a critical mass of reviews or articles.\n\n- But while these services were among the first of their kind on the Web, that’s not enough to explain why they have remained the most popular of their kind.\n\n- Websites and services become popular and then are abandoned for newer sites all the time.\n\n- These services have remained popular because of a 5th principle of participation.\n\n
37. - Frictionlessness.\n\n- It might not even be a real word, actually. \n
38. - It means “resistance-free”.\n\n- So we are talking about ease of use, and of the principles I’m talking about today, it is the only one that comes from outside.\n
39. - In other words, the first 4 principles - Curation, Amplification, Incrementalism, and Concentration - are activities generated by the participants themselves.\n\n- Frictionlessness, when it exists, comes from the software they are using. \n\n- It is a deliberate design choice. \n\n
40. - Okay, frictionlessness doesn’t apply to Wikipedia. Or any wiki I’ve ever used.\n\n- But when Amazon includes a “useful” button next to each review on its site, it is inviting participation in the easiest form possible.\n\n- It takes almost no trouble to click a button that says “Useful” or “Not Useful” at the end of a review that you were already reading.\n\n- It’s much, much easier than writing a review yourself.\n\n- So frictionlessness - this extreme ease of use - is the 5th element, because makes it easy for people to participate.\n
41. - Now let’s look at lightweight blogging on the Web.\n\n- You may wonder why I’ve grouped these services together, because they seem to do very different things.\n\n- Do you know Delicious?\n\n- Delicious is a social bookmarking service. You can bookmark any webpage to your Delicious account, add a brief description, if you like, and organize these bookmarks by tags. Anyone can follow your account. \n\n- It doesn’t have a huge user base, but it has been hugely influential.\n\n
42. - Twitter, of course, allows you to post a link or a thought in 140 characters.\n- Distributing other people’s tweets is as simple as clicking a button to retweet it.\n\n
43. - And then there is Tumblr, which is an actual blogging service.\n- Do you know Tumblr?\n- Importantly, Tumblr has tripled its audience during the last year, for reasons that I’ll get into in a minute.\n\n
44. - All 3 of these services rely heavily on curation. \n- You can always post something original on any of these sites. And you probably do, part of the time.\n- But part of the fun of all of these sites is seeing what the people you follow have posted, and sharing it with the people who follow you.\n- And of course, another part of the fun is seeing which pieces of your posts is shared with others. \n\n
45. - When you’re logged into your Tumblr account, whenever you visit any other Tumblr blog, there is a “reblog” button at the top of the page.\n- To pass on a post from any other Tumblr blog, you just click a button and it appears on your site. “Re-blogging” is built into the system.\n- Again, amplification relies on a distribution network through which content circulates.\n- And all of these sites provide mechanisms for users to pass on other user’s posts.\n- So amplification is built into each of these services in different ways.\n\n\n
46. - And finally, of course, frictionlessness. \n- This, I would argue, it the major reason for Tumblr’s success.\n\n\n\n\n
47. - To post content on Tumblr, you can type your posts in, you can email your posts in, you can telephone your posts in, you can automatically tweet your posts, you can publish them to Facebook, you can use a bookmarklet to post links to your Tumblr site, you can follow other users...oh, and its free.\n- To pass on a post from any other Tumblr blog, you just click a button and it appears on your site. “Re-blogging” is built into the system.\n- It’s the same on all of these services. \n- By simply clicking a button, you can save a bookmark or duplicate someone else’s content.\n- And if you do, it’s not stealing.\n- You are curating.\n\n\n
48. - This institutionalization of amplification means that sharing/retweeting/reblogging becomes part of the culture of that online community.\n\n
49. - You could actually be a very active user of any of these services and never post any original content at all, not even an original comment.\n- But you could become famous as a gifted curator.\n
50. - Perhaps the biggest change I’ve seen in the past 5 years is the rise of Facebook.\n- For a while it was one social network after another - Friendster, then Orkut, then MySpace and I’m sure I’m leaving many other contenders out.\n- And these sites would become popular for about 6 months, and then a new one would appear, and everyone would shift to that one, and then it would be out and a new one would be in, and so it went.\n- LinkedIn seems to have held pretty steady as the place for business networking. But of course, that could change by next year.\n- It remains to be seen whether Google+ can overtake or even equal Facebook.\n\n
51. - Interestingly, to me, these services are filling niches that used to be filled by blogging:\n- The first of these niches is: Personal Branding and Networking. \n- LinkedIn, in particular, provides users with a public face on the Web. \n- Just a few years ago, we were recommending that any freelancer or anyone who wanted to impress future employers should start a blog.\n- People will see how smart you are, and how funny you are, and how interesting you are, and there will be an about page for people who want to hire you. Oh, and Google will be able to find you.\n- It’s no longer necessary. All you need now is a profile on LinkedIn, for Google and the rest of the world to see what you can do. And updating your profile on LinkedIn is a lot easier than updating a blog a few times a week.\n
52. - The second niche these social networks is filling is: Keeping in touch with family and friends.\n- Reporters used to ask me over and over again, “Why would anyone want to share the details of their personal lives on the Web?” Over and over I would tell them, “Many people want to share those things with just their friends and family. They aren’t interested in strangers reading their blogs.”\n- And that’s exactly what Facebook is for. It’s no longer necessary to start a blog to do that.\n- Now which of our principles apply to social networks?\n
53. - Even though these sites are ostensibly about keeping in touch with friends or networking with colleagues, all of them allow you to post links and pictures and video.\n- I have friends who have never had the slightest interest in blogging. But now, their Facebook feed is a stream of links to news articles with a bit of commentary.\n- That’s exactly what we were doing back in 1999 and we were calling it blogging.\n- It is blogging. But now you don’t need your own website to do it.\n\n
54. - I first got on MySpace 4 years ago because my nieces and nephews were there, and I wanted to keep in touch with them.\n- Then when they all switched to Facebook, I followed them there.\n- So, it seems, did everyone else.\n- My friends are on Facebook. My professional colleagues are on Facebook. My high school classmates are on Facebook. My sisters are on Facebook. Even my mother is on Facebook now.\n- And the single biggest reason everyone is on Facebook is this:\n
55. - Concentration.\n- In the United States, at least, it’s where everyone you know already is.\n- And I think LinkedIn is successful on the same principle for business connections.\n- Why would you go anywhere else?\n- You could join a social network that caters to artists or filmmakers, or geeks (Google+).\n- But if you are just a regular person who wants to get in on this thing they’ve been hearing about, Facebook is the name they hear over and over again, because Facebook is where all their friends are at.\n\n
56. - So where does blogging fit into all of this?\n- Well, one question you could ask is this:\n- Why would anyone want to curate content on Delicious or on Twitter instead of on their own site?\n- But conversely, why would anyone go to the trouble to buy a domain, design a template, and learn and manage blogging software when they could just post their thoughts on Facebook instead?\n\n
57. - Online participation comes in many forms. Some of the ones that come to mind are:\n- Sharing (narrowcasting to your network).\n- Broadcasting.\n- Distribution.\n- Contribution (commenting and annotating).\n- and Collaboration.\n
58. - For each of these activities there are a number of considerations, whether they are consciously made or not:\n- Who controls the space? \n- Access to audience. Are all your friends already on Facebook?\n- Scale of audience. Do I want my family to read my posts, or do I aspire to more?\n- Scale of participation. Do I want a hobby, or simply a venue?\n- Level of contribution: Do I want to write an essay, a comment, or 140 characters?\n\n
59. So let’s come back to the social networks.\n\n
60. - Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ are all working hard to make their sites as Frictionless as possible.\n- They will suggest people you might know. You can easily re-share other people’s posts. You can “like” or “plus” those posts, all by clicking a button. This is the Tumblr/Twitter model of frictionless sharing.\n- Facebook now allows you to subscribe to other people, so that certain people’s posts never get lost in your newsfeed.\n
61. - So when we talk about “frictionlessness” we really are talking about...\n
62. ...software. \n\n
63. - User interface design.\n- Engineers have finally realized that good design is good business. \n- When your software is easy to use, more people will use it. \n
64. - And this brings us back to my basic dyad: Technology plus skill.\n\n
65. - In this case, the user’s skill hasn’t necessarily increased. \n- The user-interface has been made dead-easy to use. \n- It’s easy to share, it’s easy to friend someone, it’s easy like a review or a post.\n- You click a button.\n- Anyone can do it, so everyone does it.\n- The software requires little or no skill to use.\n\n
66. - On the other side of the dyad is technology. And by that, I mean the hardware.\n- The other huge driver in the mainstreaming of participation on the Web is mainstreaming of mobile devices, particularly the smart phone.\n- In the past 5 years, the smart phone market has exploded, both in number of units, but in the infrastructure that has been built to support it.\n- There are fewer and fewer dead-zones in the world - places where you can’t pick up a signal. \n- There was a signal at Burning Man 2 years ago.\n- And the speed with which data can now be transferred to mobile devices was unthinkable in 2007 when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone.\n\n\n
67. - In San Francisco, at least, it seems that everyone but me owns a smart phone.\n- And what can a smart phone do besides make phone calls?\n- Text, email, surf the Web, GPS, audio recording, still photographs, high definition video, play music, play games, and apps, apps, apps.\n- I remember attending a conference with a boyfriend in 1999 and noticing everyone with their mobile phones and cameras and PDAs and telling him “I want one device that does all these things. I don’t want to have to carry that many devices around.”\n- “Well, that’s impossible,” he said. \n- And now here we are.\n\n\n\n
68. - Mobile devices have reshaped the landscape.\n- Participation can happen now wherever you are. \n- And participatory experiences can be designed to exploit your mobility. To leverage the fact that you’re not home.\n\n\n\n\n
69. - This brings us to the rise of location-based services. In the San Francisco Bay area, at least, Foursquare is very popular. \n- People can “check in” and send an announcement to Twitter, Facebook and their friends telling where they are.\n- And people really seem to enjoy announcing their whereabouts to the world.\n- People I know have found this to be very useful at conferences, when they want to know where the biggest and best parties are, where to find the other attendees.\n\n
70. - Foodspotting allows users to find and recommend food - not restaurants - to others. \n- So if you were in San Francisco and wanted to know where to find the very best spaghetti, you could consult Foodspotting to find out where to go for that specific dish.\n- Conversely, when you find an especially good dish, you can photograph it, recommend it to others, right from your restaurant table.\n- So these products are leveraging the capabilities of the hardware that people are already carrying around with them every day, to create new businesses built on the participation of ordinary people.\n\n
71. - As I said at the beginning of this talk, the landscape really has changed.\n\n
72. - When I began blogging, I thought we would always be in a minority.\n- That just a small number of us would even be interested in blogging.\n- Then suddenly there were millions of blogs, and it seemed like eventually everyone was going to have a blog.\n
73. - And now I think the trend is reversing. Social networks and services of all kinds are giving people an opportunity to do the things they are most interested in with the lowest possible commitment.\n- Those of us who are still blogging are doing it in addition to these other, more mainstream, activities.\n-We're blogging because it serves a purpose - or scratches an itch - that mainstream participation doesn't.\n- I'm proud to be in your company.\n
74. - Thank you.\n