Hot stuff, yo? The solution to complex infographic ideas? These guys have chops that give Edward Tufte and The New York Times infographics squad a run for their money.

But what a letdown. Where’s the beef? The data? The way to bake in the intelligence of the network—people, aggregated and curated news, comments and real time tweets? Where is it?

If you’re going to work in Flash, at least work in Flex so you can include data below those pretty pictures. (And by the way, wouldn’t it be great to be able to bring underlying Flex databases together so that you could build in a mashup with, say, Facebook? Where’s Facebook Connect in all this?)

I’m puzzling through an idea–of extreme poles in new editorial models…and curious how you foresee a media landscape that allows for Demand Media (this) and and Mediastorm (this). There are some really interesting commonalities under the hood of how these products are assembled and how execs at various companies see licensing and syndication and the future of content. What’s your take?

Great questions.

As I understand it, the Demand model is predicated on extreme micromedia production. Early on, Demand bought top level domains of users’ spelling errors: you typed deman.com instead of demand.com, Demand bought deman.com and filled the page with content that would sell related Google ads. Eventually, Demand began to generate new authored content to fill those pages. And now it has a micromedia “own & operate” model that makes it more lethal than, say About.com—which relies upon expensive journalistically legitimized authoring.

What’s interesting about the Demand model is that it seems to prove out Umair Haque’s Media Economics theory that new technologies have vaporized production costs and created new economies of scale and scope in search, production, and distribution, making production far less expensive relative to buying attention. Smart aggregators in the micromedia world such as Demand are now becoming major media players, using behavioral matches to SERP to place their bets on which subject areas to invest: an efficient relationship of content production to customer need. In the long run this has a chance of becoming an irresistable black box portfolio investment model of content production. Demand isn’t a “nichepaper” as Haque recently called for in his “Nichepaper manfesto”: it’s the extreme of micromedia, but imo it’s the extreme that will ultimately push nichepapers to real innovation at the margin. (I’ll write about Haque’s Nichepaper manifesto at a later date, but this piece actually contains some of my qualms about it.)

The X Games: Xtreme Micro meets Xtreme Macro

So what about the other side of my friend’s question How can you have a big enough tent to support experiementation at the level of narrative. Mediastorm, like the work Jonathan Harris does with Sputnik Observatory, is an artisanal multimedia company creating new journalistic narratives; both it and Harris’s Sptnk are also non-profits. They seem to fly  in the face of the smart aggregation theme. How can they survive in the same ecosystem when economies of scale seem to congregate around low margin data plays?

My answer: I don’t think they can, at least not outside the non-profit realm. Artisanal production doesn’t scale. Not that what they are doing isn’t valuable: this is exactly the right kind of innovation at the front-end of narrative remix that magazines  need to cozy up with if they intend to survive in an e-book world where there are higher margins and costs. And there’s good economics here too: as Haque says, companies that invest in “altering, remixing, and filtering microchunks” are the aggregator 3.0: he calls ‘em Reconstructors. They consolidate vertically and then fragment vertically. They are in essence  “broadcatchers” who believe that “people will consume the media they like best.”

But wait a minute: That sounds just like the Demand model.

A more likely model for the production side is what Demand is doing in terms of cheap production, what Visible World is doing in terms of cheap, modularized TV ad production—in case you missed it, Google did a deal with Visible World last week to abet its tv advertising—and to get increasingly focused using metadata production and semantic technologies such as DITA to mesh taxonomical CMS categories along with SERP and user-based tags and create dynamically generated aggregated results pages. (Let’s also mention Mahalo while we’re at it: Jason Calcanis’s company is combining high- and low-touch elements together to make search more authentic and matched to customer need.)

Touch me, baby

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think high level editorial touch is going anywhere. You can’t use machines to generate moral purpose and one thing that’s perpetually left out of this debate about the future of newspapers and the scale economies that Reconstructors and Broadcatchers can achieve—the essential impact editors can bring to aggregation. That’s one reason I think the AOL model will be a winner: someone (editors) needs to bring the moral outrage, aesthetic value, and connective heart to content, and machines can’t do that.

So we’re stuck somewhere in the middle between the extreme micromedia and extreme artisanal remix production. Just where we should be, because the truth is that what’s needed is different strokes for different folks: different kinds of companies and even different units within companies have different needs.

If you have a big vertical database of SERP in something like real estate, autos, or dating. you’re going to need much more data efficiency at levels of geography and cost than you would if you were publishing politics or gossip or movies. The data needs are very different. Gossip and politics and personal finance can also benefit from the principles of Reconstruction—on both the front-and-back-end.

Conversely, microniches and vertical segments with strong SERP need real human touch to come alive: Consumers want more than data. They want passionate engagement and love for real estate porn or for more consumer transparency with auto dealers or more focus on sustainable transportationwhen in addition to—maybe even as an engine of—search. But as I said, your mileage may vary depending on how close you are to SERPs.

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Ted Levitt, the late, great Harvard marketing theorist, turned this idea on its head. People don’t buy products, said Levitt. They buy solutions to problems; advertising is panacea to nothing. To sell, to succeed, companies must innovate—at very least, pursue incremental, non-disruptive innovation: e.g., the sixth blade on a new razor. Give customers more value than rival products, a better mousetrap, a better solution to their problems, and they’ll beat a line to your door. Advertising plays a role here too, but strategically speaking, it’s a different role, advancing the notion of customers as intelligent agents actively calculating and organizing their needs and values—albeit still as less-than-equal players in the determination of how demand is created and sustained.

Recently, I’ve been wondering about what Levitt would say if he had witnessed our revolution, the one wrought by the Internet. What happens when customers become the equal, or even the better, of advertising and marketers? What happens when advertising no longer plays the dominant, pursuers’ role in this relationship, and consumers hold the cards because their choice—e.g., their Google searches—is the leading edge of need and demand? Or to put this another way: When advertising becomes commoditized and consumer intent becomes self-organizing, how do companies organize self-organizing demand?

Post-advertising solutions

As AdSense and AdWords and PageRank show, it’s not as if you can count out the importance of advertising. Birds do it, bees do it, even Google does it, so it must be good: Advertising still serves a purpose in the atomized, anarchic world of search, even if that purpose is now merely to make algorithmically relevant matches between consumer need and products.

Even in this world of predictive matching, however, advertising, even advertising with well-written SEO, is losing its edge. This is particularly true of brand advertising’s expensive flattery (banners and brand campaigns). Not because brand ads don’t tell good stories or rivet brands to emotion (take a look at American Express’s My Life, My Card campaign), but rather because (as Chris Anderson says in his new book), customers basically orgasm when they get shit for free, and brands haven’t yet figured out how to compete in this environment. As long as price is a major consumer pain point—and that’s forever—you can bet your bottom dollar that advertising will continue to decline against Free. You can build the best mousetrap in the world, but if consumers find a mousetrap that delivers 90% of the value at zero percent of the cost—you’re sunk, dude.

Of course, most companies still haven’t accepted the idea that free products in free markets are good-enough consumer substitutes. They still think they are competing against advertised rivals instead of these reviled free purveyors/pirates. “The way to compete with Free,” says Anderson, “is to move past the abundance to find the adjacent scarcity.” I agree. But “adjacent scarcity”—e.g., the premium content consumers you supposedly going to offer for purchase to customers—isn’t easy to sell either. And it doesn’t leave you with much of a business model for the free stuff you’re giving away. So it’s back to square one: what’s advertised (and supposedly higher quality) versus what is free and frequently good-enough.

Another solution is to get consumers to do your advertising for you—what passes for much of what is called social media today. The theory goes that if advertising won’t work, influence will. You can zap a commercial, but you won’t zap your best friend’s blog or the tweets and (surreptitiously sponsored) Facebook status updates of someone you sortakinda trust. This kind of “social marketing” certainly seems to be gaining traction right now, at least among so-called social marketers. But saying you need social marketing strategy today is a little like saying you need dial tone strategy. The promotional stuff you load up on Facebook or Twitter isn’t social media, it’s social selling. Slathering “Follow us on Twitter” on your websites, emails, products is a kind of pure silliness that mistakes advertising for engagement. It falls absurdly short of the sophistication that self-organizing audiences require. And it reminds me of nothing less than the bubble pronouncements of Web 1.0, when every company trying to “get the web” slathered “Follow us at www.anycompany.com” on its products. It doesn’t work, except to create awareness that you’re advertising in a new medium. To which most consumer say: meh. (Counterexample: Coke.com. Its home page is nothing but a link to Facebook.)

Social media 2.0

So, if advertising is commoditized and “social marketing” is commoditized, what’s left? How do you organize self-organizing demand?

Well, first let’s look again at why purely promotionally focused marketing in nano-niches over Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin items doesn’t work. Why shouldn’t you advertise the latest feature by Author A in the new issue on a Facebook page; promote that new concert via a MySpace page; advertise a 10% discount off “allready [sic] low prices” via Tweets. After all, these do their part to a media buy.

But compared to the real gains these companies could create by creating service to their customer base through conversation and engagement—or conversely, concentrating promotional power at the touchpoints of specific use-cases—these promotions look like wasted spend chasing cheap dollars from customer segments. There’s no margin worth chasing here, and the instant someone else makes a better offer (or this consumer is convinced that Torrents aren’t the end of the moral universe), they’ll be gone. (See the recent Stephen Fry brouhaha on this very subject.) Of course, the counter argument is that the power of cheap promotion is all in the long-tail—it’s a volume game. But if you’re going to be in the shmatte business instead of branded fashion, you’d better be prepared for low margins, heavy debt to support inventory, and nasty, fast-paced churn as your customers run. I’m not saying it’s never worth it, only if you’re building a brand, it’s a distracton from finding that “adjacent scarcity.” A tough game to play

A more interesting game—more rewarding to brands and more lucrative, with less churn and higher margins—is the one that builds conversational and engagement gambits based on already existing social relationships, digging into what John Seely Brown and John Hagel called the social life of information: the information that lives, breathes, and functions in and through social relationships, online and off.

From this point of view, all media are social—the big question is how you unlock their social power. Just as we say that the only communities worth building online are those that already exist between people—that our job in building community should be to unearth and facilitate the communities that already exist—we can also say that the only media that can break free of commoditization are those that exist within an inherently social construct. The trick is finding the social tentacles  already at work in the DNA of the brand.

Of course that’s easier said than done. Where’s your brand DNA? Cue the consultants, right?

Well, here’s a different answer, one thankfully less indebted to bright shiny object syndrome but still somewhat novel: Don’t think of social media as a construct placed on top of your media, instructing or seducing consumers to accept the ventriloquistic subterfuge of influence., of advertising. Don’t even think of it as sharing or collaborating or creating a conversation. (Although that’s certainly better.) Think of social media as the social construct of every piece of data your organization already owns or can own. Not as an object in a database but rather as part of an exchange—between customer and company. That involves understanding every single utterance your company (and your customers) make as a scarce social bits that must be organized into context(s) and arrayed with that understanding.

Condensed to a single thought: social media can’t exist without content strategy—and vice versa.

Without social context, content strategy is arid taxonomical merchandizing contained by (and girding) user architecture. But social media without content strategy is typically promotion-by-another-name. Together, audience creation and social connection make beautiful music. Together, content strategy and social media perform superhuman feats of revenue creation. Together, they create real service to the customer, unlocking the riddle of “organizing self-0rganizing demand” over the lifetime value of the customer, and not in response to a cheap promo.

And what’s cool is that they don’t do it through Flashy multimedia SEO-immune trickery by the Silverlight of the moon. (And please don’t tell me the solution is custom publishing, unless you’re willing to put your custom published content into the market against paid content.) They do it through the remix and mashup of the content already in the storehouse, the treasure trove of digital assets most companies build or aggregate every day—whatever objects they generate through data creation, including documents, text objects (captions, pullquotes, etc.—) photos, music, video, Tweets… no matter whether they are made by your authors and contributors or your users.

As Andrew Savikas says, Content is a Service Business, but how, exactly? How do you go from “we have a lot of tweets about business that intersect our brand” to ExecTweets, a Tweet aggregator about business; from “we have stuffed suggestion boxes about how to improve our stores” to MyStarbucksIdea; from “we have a ton of blogs about small business” to OPENForum. From registered Democrats to the Obama campaign’s amazing social strategy? Or (to borrow from my own examples above) from promotional chitchat about the latest performance at that big Las Vegas hotel to an entertainment community that brings aggregated news of who’s playing with user comments from FB, MS, etc. Or travel listings that bring aggregated news and blogs about hot destinations with users’ tweets, geodata, and photos—and rankings of hotels, travel agents, and airlines.

The secret sauce

In fact, it’s not so secret—and if you’ve been prescient enough to have some kind of end-to-end XML-based CMS behind your operation, you probably already have a start. Because all it takes it the metadata you and, one hopes, your users, attached to those assets.

Why metadata?

Because that’s the system—on either the authors’ or users’ sides—through which you’ve made yourself searchable. Increasingly, tags are no longer second-order data—they’re the brass lamp in Aladdin’s cave, without which nothing can be illumined. Rub the lamp, and you can turn all those programming stacks into the most scalable, continuously profitable revenue generating data you own. Leave it as pure content or a promotional bolt-on from advertising, and you’re not only failing to create the layer of customer service that drives user loyalty, you’re failing to create the rich and inherently social content experience that users expect today. And as the metadata get better and richer, as the capabilities of OWL and RDF and SPARQL and the rest of the anagrammatic programs of the semantic web (sometimes called web 3.0) become more mainstream—and newsier: like these International Press Telecommumications Council “newscodes” (now being ripped off by AP)—we’ll get to evercooler and more useful mashups of news data, with greater revenue earning potential than ever.

So is anyone doing this now? (Apart from the OpenCalais project already initiated, albeit phlegmatically, in a handful of websites.) OK, here’s a trick question: What is the most successful media company in the world using metatag data to whip-up self-organizing demand?

OK, I give: It’s Apple.

As Kontra (a self-described “veteran design and management surgeon”) wrote in a post a few weeks ago on counternotions, Apple has created an entire universe of metatag strategy and dynamic metatag management via the App Store. Kontra points out that there’s always been a trove of metatag data in iTunes, more relevant to pre-packaged, static content than dynamically updated content. But thanks to changes in iPhone OS3, the App Store now allows for content to be upgraded recurringly and connected to other apps—you can even alert customers that new data is available via push-based numbered badges hovering over your app icon.

You don’t have to be a genius to see where this can go, but in case you can’t, Apple tells you about potential business opportunities push notification and metadata open up in black and white right  on its website: “Create a subscription magazine app where you ask for payment on a monthly, yearly or periodic basis of your choice. Sell extra levels to extend the experience of your game. Build a general-purpose city travel guide app and let your customers pick the city guides they want to purchase.” Obviously a lot more too.

So what’s this got to do with media? After all, publishing hasn’t been central to Apple’s business model until now. Bob Cringely, the brilliant tech (and now mortgage) writer I read as soon as he posts, recently said that Apple is moving slowly and steadily toward becoming primarily a content provider with Apple TV as Jobs’s Trojan Horse. Preposterous though it sounds, Cringely may be right: I’m a (hacked) ATV lover, and I can see where and how Apple might use the aggregated metadata knowledge it acquires from my purchases to create new programming. Genius playlists, in my experience, already do this so well, they’re a total substitute for dj playlists and mixtapes. Could ATV do the same thing for networks and channels? Scary thought if you’re NBC.

But now start to apply Apple’s brilliantly counterintuitive strategy—using broad distributed networks as the foundation for a moated ecosystem—to drive revenue in other media. To steal Jarvis’s WWGD idea: WWAD (What Would Apple Do?): How would you build a metadata strategy for more traditional media companies (magazine companies, newspapers, book publishers, online programmers) using Apple’s model? For book publishing? For a candy company? A digital camera manufacturer? For vertical search with travel, real estate, or auto listings?

This post is long enough as is—mea culpa—but let me finish by pointing to one of the biggest companies to have applied Apple’s lessons to its own business to date, creating a wave of disruptive innovation that may actually succeed where so many others have failed. I’m talking, obviously, about Amazon’s amazin’ Kindle. The correspondence isn’t one to one. You can’t compare the depth or pricing genius behind the App Store with the more conventionally priced Amazon Kindle bookstore. And—to return to the argument I made above about finding “adjacent scarcity” in competition with free models—I’m not so sure how much I’d bet on a DRM-based publishing model when there are so many amazing substitutes out in the wild.

On the other hand, Kindle—or maybe an Apple tablet, we’ll soon see—will I believe one day change the whole way we think of the media product. No longer will we buy a “book”—one day we will buy a relationship to a title. Home reno: we’ll buy a title and a continuing stream of articles and community relationships. (Or you can flip this into a freemium strategy—we’ll get involved in nano-niche communities, and buy their books and teeshirts when they finally appear.) Nothing, not even fiction, will be untouched by the Kindle model: Instead of buying fixed narrative, we will be purchasing a touchpoint in a story, one likely to have living prequel(s) and sequel(s). Whether we fix a badge to the content unit to let you know there’s new material waiting to be pushed or whether you just download it per Kindle, the key to organizing the self-organizing community will lie in unlocking the value of the socially affective (and effective) metatags that can power revenue-generating media. Call it social media, call it content strategy, call it whatever you want. I think it’s the future, but it’s already well under way today.

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From Max Kalehoff:

One of the most innovative and addictive aspects of Tetris is the perpetual, intensifying stream of bricks the player must align without spaces. In fact, this very element foreshadowed howwe now consume most news content and personal status updates on the Web: in reverse chronological streams. Tetris’s layers of bricks fall with greater speed and complexity as you master the ability to arrange them in straight, crumbling rows. That is not unlike news feeds and status updates that funnel into your desktop and mobile interfaces, intensifying as your ability to sort and digest them increases. Indeed, there are classical elements of game mechanics in both examples.

It’s true. I was a Tetris addict the same way that I am now a Google addict. A former flame of mine used to complain about my Tetriholism,…until she started playing herself. Next I knew she’d bought a handheld Tetris gameplayer to keep at it.

The truth is Tetris—like Google—hits many of the same nerve centers. The increasing velocity. The sense that you are building something with each addition to your media profile. The simplicity of the color schemes. I’ve often wondered if there wasn’t some great flowering of digital culture before glasnost and perestroika. Not just Tetris, but Paragraph (a predecessor to Graffiti), and of course Triz, which is older (by a generation) but found a new wave of adherents thanks to digital technology.

Too bad Tetris is a locked and closed system…

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When I first heard he was creating Junta42, a marketplace for custom publishers and brands, I thought we were in for another ad network play, a jobsite, or a competitor to the Custom Publishing Council’s referral service. J42 is most of that and a whole lot more. Pulizzi is one smart dude: When he sees a wind blowing, he tacks right into it. Custom: got that. Publishers’ referrals: got that. Digg-like aggregation about custom content: got that too. J42 has even managed the trick of coopetition with the CPC, no easy feat.

Pulizzi’s best trick, however, is turning this little windup toy about custom publishing into a model for his business: he really eats his own dogfood. J42  collects user-submitted articles to be voted up by registrants, and Pulizzi emails the best to his user, marketing his own custom publishing company (Z Squared) while simultaneously taking a cut on referrals—at this point more than 100 matches between brands and custom publishers who pay $4395USD a year—compared to membership in the CPC (from $1,700-21K/year (depending on company revenue) for roughly the same service. Between sales and referrals (no real advertising here), that’s a nice business. You have to give this guy props.

And yet.

As a onetime custom magazine publisher whose roots and tendrils have always been unambiguously digital even when he was working with print, I can’t reconcile the reality of custom publishing with distributed brand intelligence.

I sense Pulizzi knows this too: his definition of custom is nothing dogmatic, rather a big tent accommodating everything from the classic brand monologue, print or online, no matter how well or poorly produced, to the most up-to-the-minute social media and content marketing schemes. The Junta42 model, which Pulizzi explains in a white paper is based on the rising costs of interruption economics (brand advertising), the sinking fortunes of media companies, and the seeming bliss of consumers who seem to be just as open to blogs as they once were to big media brands and their partners in brand advertising. Inside this big tent, it’s all content marketing and it’s all good. As brands get bigger, savvier, and realize that their content—even their spec content—is gold, they will only pay more to bet smarter about content strategy, content marketing tactics, and content management, and Junta42 will be there to guide them.

Good stuff. Pulizzi is clearly onto something. If I had money, I might even join J42; I could use a new client or two, and if he’s doing as much volume as it seems, the $4K might even be a good investment. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have the cash—and (perhaps more important) can’t summon up the same enthusiasm for custom publishing. Don’t misunderstand: I believe there’s plenty of good brand-sponsored publishing to be done, nearly all of it online. Brands ignore the remixed associated value of their content—repeat: remixed, associated value of their content—at their peril. Understanding how to innovate down to the bit, relearning brand storytelling across the datasphere in new story forms is why I’m here.

Custom for dummies?

But that’s not custom publishing. The competitive essence of custom publishing is its ability to write and publish in the style of popular journalism—mimicking the real thing in look and feel—but wholly disassociated from the credibility and competence of newsgathering. Custom aims to boost and protect a brand. It’s not about you. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There’s plenty of consumers who could care less about the news curve. But let’s call this what it is: a disguise, a feint, a kind of editorial ventriloquism. As if readers/users won’t know the difference between content related to news and content related to marketing, promotion, and sales. Here: take this magazine and remember us the next time you have a problem with your car! Here: take this magazine and remember us the next time you accuse us of not having any imagination! Here: take this magazine and remember us the next time you can’t find a product in our giant database. Here: take this magazine and FOR PETE’S SAKE WOULD YOU SHUT UP—we’re giving you this gorgeous magazine FOR FREE!

Charlie McCarthy: Editorial ventriloquist

This is why Luce wanted a Chinese wall between editors and business, Church and State. Why ASME still insists on labeling advertorials. Why nearly all custom cannot compete for brand advertising, even in unrelated categories. (Custom publishers say they create high perceived value with consumers but if that was the case, why wouldn’t they compete for customers and advertisers?) And (perhaps I don’t need to say this), it is why user generated content exists. To blow a hole in this mockery of independent judgment and reporting, of pseudo-news and real news. To put an end to dummy-to-dummy publishing—passive consumer to monologuing customer publisher.

Making the bridge from conversational farce (ventriloquism) to conversational, customer dialogue and customer service seems to me an almost impossible leap. As I said above: I just can’t square custom publishing with distributed brand intelligence. Juntas aren’t distributive democracies. Period. (Does anyone see the irony in naming a business that promotes popular ideas about publishing for a term that is all about a military brand monologue?)

Of course the custom publisher/content marketers of the world don’t see it this way. Since most big companies are dropping their expensive custom magazines, all they see is fresh opportunities, whether by sticking with the magazine model—locking content behind DRM systems such as Zinio and Idio or DRM-protected emags or even PDFs fit for the utopian ideal of a color Kindle. Or they are going the social media route, adding marketing blogs or other social media conventions to massive online brand destinations. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum: Follow us on Twitter! Check us out on Facebook! Hear our brand soundtrack on MySpace! Join our FunClub/Ambassadors Club/MeClub. We get it—even if we don’t know what we get out of it (but check out our white paper for the mumbo jumbo on why you should be promoting your brand on My Twitface including the 10 best ways to turn 140 characters into great marketing 22 times a day!). Welcome the age of content marketing!

Not. The problem with all of this is that content marketing, like custom before it, craves control and abhors real conversation. You don’t need a paternity test to see it’s the same DNA. This is the same ol’ same ol’. Content marketing prefers the lopsided asymmetry of promotion to real customer dialogue. Why do you think Twitter is the tool du jour of content marketers? If you have something to promote, what better way than getting into a realtime stream with asymmetrical follow? Why do ya think company after company is craving so-called social media experts and why an army of self-proclaimed social media expert is rising up to meet this demand. The whole thing gives me a strong sense  of déjà vu. I’ve seen this movie before, maybe even a couple times already: These are the same folks who made the “dot com” revolution. Who crowed about Web 2.0. And who are now heralding a new age of content marketing.

Conversation for dummies

Not all content marketing is so ugly. Since one of the hats I wear is “content strategist,” I’m among the first to recognize that there’s significant value in propping up marketing in the Orwellian newspeak of the distributive web. My experience is that when content marketing is conversational marketing—when it maintains authentic dialogue and conversation rooted in the use cases of real people who actually use the products, when it aims at participation instead of passive ingestion of brand factoids—it has the potential to be way cool. Conversational marketing may sound oxymoronic but it is a job that needs to be done. I’ve been saying for a decade that the web turns every company into a media company, whether they like it or not. A Citibank/HP/BP/Audi/Levi Strauss can spend money on brand advertising or they can touch consumers directly with brand-associated content through self-assembling evangelists. (By the way, I take it as obvious in the extreme that the first job of content strategy is helping companies get a grip on the fundamental audit, positioning, CMS, sort, and content creation routines that are the bread and butter of CS.)

But evangelism, especially self-organized evangelism, ain’t easy. Brand advertising works less and less. Web-site destinations are plummeting in popularity. Last week, David Armano, a top UX designer now working on Jeff Dachis’s stealth SaaS collaboration software,  wrote that he was killing his own website, and that almost everyone else should too. “Your website should provide value to all of your users,” wrote Armano. “If you can get them to participate, then do what ever it takes achieve that. In other words, it doesn’t matter if your site looks more or less like a blog, what matters is if you’re doing something to transform behavior from the passive to the active.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’m not saying companies shouldn’t have brand publishing initiatives, or websites, or that they not undertake marketing initiatives via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest. Go for it. But if you do, try to make such initiatives be an invitation to active participation, to dialogue, to content that enjoins and extends a company content into a shared customer ecosystem of connection, conversation, and collaboration that is inherently uncontrollable—and highly prone to influence.

Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize: it’s an unrehearsed adventure. More like playing to gamble than to win or lose. It’s all about the bet, about the place where different universes meet, acknowledge each other, and enjoy an oblique relationship which doesn’t require or forecast assimilation. It’s the one place where difference really matters.

And as long as brands insist on control, they’re playing a losing bet.

Surrender with your hands up!

So how do you start a conversation? How do you give up control? How do you turn passive brand factoiding into active participation where the inmates are liberated from the asylum of the brand?

There’s a whole ‘nother post to be written about this. But it can be done. In print, online, and in just about any kind of application you’re interested in betting on. Blogs help a lot. Blogs establish voice, deepen authenticity, provide insight and create instant culture. Gawker, for example, is planning to grow its sponsored advertising faster than its brand advertising. Take a look at Bloodcopy, its recent experiment with HBO’s True Blood. Just as Valleywag no longer exists independently of Gawker, so Gawker is publishing Bloodcopy across its various properties— pretty much indistinguishable from its typical editorial “except [said Chris Batty, Gawker’s vice president of sales and marketing] that the blog is written by an undead, bloodsucking ghoul…“If we’re around in three or four years, the majority of our advertising revenue will be in sponsored posts like this.”.

OK, I know what you’re saying. That’s not participatory. It’s not on the newscurve. And it’s not very scalable. But what would happen if, say Dell, sponsored a beat on Jezebel, a Gawker property catering to women, about galtoys—and almost entirely unrelated to Dell technology. Or if Volkswagen sponsored a reporter to test drive a dozen cars running on biodiesel. Or if American Express sponsored a blog about small business and really let it rip, competing directly with the Wall Street Journal. (Oh wait: Amex is already more than halfway there with openforum.com— maybe the best site on small business anywhere.) What if your favorite hotel chain started using Facebook to let you tell the hotel what was terrific—or sucked—about its facilities? What if it helped you connect to someone on the other side of the pool? Whichever side of the continuum of social media avails we choose to enter—from blogs that can potentially exist on the newscurve to Tweets and Facebook pages that go beyond promotion to active engagement with products—the opportunity to engage in conversation over promotion must be true north for content marketing. This is most definitely not custom publishing.  

Indeed as a former ink stained wretch, one of the things I like best about this model is that it contains the opportunity for  brands to expand the reported environment through their own thirst for user intimacy. This works particularly well in microdistributed contexts (Twitter and Facebook) and provides far more returns—quantitatively (and maybe qualitatively)— in terms of content and sponsor value than both mainstream media and branded content marketing (i.e., custom publishing online).

Caveats? You betcha. First: Your Monetize May Vary. If you think this is the way to increased brand ROI, you might be disappointed. You might also be delighted. ROI direct to sales may be limited. But ROI related to brand strength may be strengthened. The question you have to ask is: What job does this campaign need to do? So if you go this route, do it because you want to touch a specific audience who will associate reporting on this subject with your brand. Think associatively, act directly. If you do it because you want to spread info about your company, raise its brand, or even have people think your company is on the ball, you lose. This is about authenticity and independence.

Second caveat: Custom publishing can’t do this. Once you go this route, you become the media. You are making the same wager media companies have taken for years, betting that your brand is strong enough to support and even shine on associated content and vice versa. You are no longer in the realm of brand boosting but consumer interaction in and through media.

So don’t screw it up with layers of control. It’s a conversation—not a monologue. Any dummy knows that!

Are they dummies? Are they custom publishers?

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This That morning, in a very smart piece about the demise of newspapers, Razorfish’s Michael Barnwell wryly blogged on Scatter/Gather, the Razorfish CS blog, how “content strategy has long been interested in the relational sphere of stories”  and now  visionary computer scientist David Gelertner’s idea of “lifestreams” might be one creative solution.

Then Upendra Shardnand, Daylife’s CEO, wrote Storytelling Is Stuck In A Rut—What Publishers Can Do About It, a quick essay about how newspapers seem willing to talk about changing their IT, distribution, and revenue strategies but rarely question “the actual craft of writing and telling stories.” “On one side you have parties that produce what were once finished products, but are now just data for parties on the other side who take that fodder and reconstruct it,” Shardnand writes.  ”It’d be much easier for everyone if the authors took matters into their own hands, and wrote stories in a new language, with new tools, for the web.”

Story? What story? Whose story?

We all seem to be pointing to the same stifling lack of new tools out there to help editors and writers integrate, aggregate, reconstruct and re-narrativize story from relatively random microchunks of data in many formats in real time, but each of us wants to assign different job reqs to the folks who would do this.

Gelernter (whose comments are taken from an interview in Edge with NYU/ITP prof Clay Shirky and NY Times uber-tech writer John Markoff), doesn’t really care much who does this job: For him, it’s all about the construction—and definition—of “lifestreams,” a key element in his thinking about computer interfaces that ultimately become mirrors of the mind. Lifestreams as he defines them are ”[sequences] of all kinds of documents — all the electronic documents, digital photos, applications, Web bookmarks, rolodex cards, email messages and every other digital information chunk in your life  …appearing on your screen as a receding parade of index cards.” For Gelertner, this is the newsroom of the future:

[Instead] of the managing editor, the city editor, or whatever, being a bigshot, there’s something more like a producer of the stream in real time. So the producer of the stream has lots of feeds. A reporter is posting a new story. Another reporter is posting a new story. AP is doing stuff. Photographs are coming in. Videos are coming in. But each person looks at one thing at one time. Okay, so I as the producer want to say, “Okay, put that on the stream now. And now put this on the stream. And now put two of these on the stream.”

In other words, a curator.

Barnwell says that this is good news for editors—and content strategists. He says that editors’ legacy role as curators—”assisted [of course] by an intelligent software agent to help in sifting the relevance of the news and discovering related stories”— will be one of the “bright prospects” for the continuation of journalistic organizations. As for content strategists, Barnwell says that their job is to  ”[maintain] the smooth functioning and insightfulness of the digital lifestream. In fact, content strategy has long been interested in the relational sphere of stories.”

Well, I’m not so sure this is as good for editors as Barnwell—in my experience, editors are good at curating the stories in their own magazines or newspapers, but they are rarely focused on aggregating context, especially from the web. That’s the writer’s job. And as for presenting that context to readers, for a long time—even now—many, many publications won’t link outside themselves. They still think a linking reader is a lost reader! (Way to show confidence in your product, editors!)

Not who but how

So is this what content strategists should be doing?

When I wrote yesterday about “taxonomical narratives” this is part of what I was thinking. Someone has to kick off, organize, strategize, and render author-side metatagging and data hierarchies for readers and match that to readers’ expectations and needs on a continual basis. Relevancy and related-story technologies from Daylife to Inform to Zemanta to Publish2 will all be useful.

But as Upendra says, it’s not enough. We still need someone to understand storytelling at the level of the bit—and please not by turning it into megabyte multimedia, constructing yet another metanarrative, this time built by editors instead of authors. (It also should be additively accesible to users in the form of user-side meta-tagging, ranking and commenting, but let’s leave the ugc side of this alone for a minute, ok?)

It doesn’t finally matter what you call this person. It probably depends on the company and agency. Like Barnwell, I suspect CS is more involved in systemic maintenance and strategy (d’oh) than storytelling itself, especially in journalistic situations. In agencies, it seems to me CS and creative need to be part of a collaborative effort.

The real question though is not who should do this, but what the economic incentives are for it. You can train editors or content strategists to think through these issues, but before any of that happens, you need new tools. As Shardanand says, the problem is “The tools haven’t changed. Whether it’s Microsoft Word or Wordpress, it’s all still word processing. The workflow in newsrooms hasn’t changed. Authors, rarely being software developers themselves, can’t develop the tools they would want. Usually some third-party CMS company makes it for them…Publishers haven’t committed significant R&D to the development of new tools. If they, did they’d have a competitive advantage, much like Apple developing its own chips or Amazon tinkering with its shopping experiences.”

Indeed, while publishers are committing tens of millions of dollars to installation of terrific end to end XML-based, network capable CMS systems such as Eidos’s amazing Methode, they aren’t much willing to innovate at the front end of a story. In other words, as Shardanand says, the story is still just words and pictures, with these bits over here isolated from those bits over there, both in terms of internal story structure and external links. (And yes, the Times is doing a great job with reporting stories with interactive components, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

So when will it take to make story change? Much as some CS people believe they have the ability to make it change, I very much doubt it. At agencies, content is typically held in the creatives’ silo; at magazines and newspapers, it’s the province of either editors or producers—over there on the “online side.” (Stage direction: usually followed by someone pointing across the floor to the other side of the newsroom.  ”Uh, those guys over there–can you see ‘em?” Oh yes we see.)

So what comes before a new job req and a rockin’ CMS? Probably this: Behavioral innovation at the brand level—the brand promise that these companies, either newspapers or media organizations or agencies (on behalf of brands or on their own) deliver—driven down to the level of customer service.

It’s easy to say aggregate. As Barnwell points out, you can aggregate with machines, rebundle by metatag. Smart aggregation is more though. As Umair Haque suggests in his in-depth, very toughly argued dek on the economics of new media—one of the few things I’d say is truly a must read in digital media analysis—it requires leveraging deep information about content including customers’ information, expectations, and preferences about content, then reflitering, altering, remixing microchunks into something new and different. A story. A new story. That’s brand in customer terms, not brand as grand narrative story, brand marketing. That’s is the difference that makes a difference for Google pagerank.

As Shirky and Markoff’s question to Gelertner implies—and as Haque, Shirky, Jarvis and a growing chorus of others  now say—this isn’t a matter of R&D anymore, but a struggle for the future existence of media. No innovation at the level of story is likely, as Haque says, to lead to abrupt hyperdeflation of news products by smart aggregators who don’t care about anything more than the revelation of new ideas and repackaging, remixing, and rebundling reportage to support their piratical ways. I hope we figure it out before that.

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What’s that you say? Who needs content professionals in a distributed environment? It’s time to say bye-bye to editors? The era of the amateur is nigh?

Not so fast, say content strategists. First, who you callin an editor. Second, who the hell do you think is minding all that content? And third: we’ve got a distinctive competence that not only makes your content—which is, let’s face it, the face of your firm—shine: we’re the difference between competitive success or failure in the Googleplex. Every company, say the content strategists, has a content strategy, but only the ones that know it can turn on the Googlejuice. Whether they like it or not, pay for it or not, CS is a distinctive competence all its own and a source of competitive advantage no company can do without.

Good pitch. Logic? Er, not so much

That’s a good pitch, but I’m not sure how well it holds up. Is the argument that content strategy is a functional competence every agency, airline, bank, media company has to have (like accountants)? Or is it that CS is a necessary ingredient of a company’s distinctive competence, positioning, competitive advantage?

People in the tiny CS community have been all over on this. You could see the hairs stand up on a lot of CS necks when Campbell-Ewald’s brill Chris Moritz softballed a tweet about the difference between content strategy big or small a week or two ago. Some worried Moritz was being a splitist, trying to separate those who do little CS—the meat and potatoes of content inventories, taxonomies, editorial calendars, style books, integrated into UI—from the bigger strategic issues of messaging and competitive differentiation. (Moritz says he was just pointing out that it’d be a tragedy if CS fell into the same trap as IA where you’re defined by the deliverables.)

Most CSers seemed to reject the whole idea of big and little, strategic and tactical: If you have a CS job, count your blessings, big, little or anywhere in between. Some don’t want to make the big/little split because CS itself is nowhere yet recognized as a functional necessity, especially in a recession. Eat Media’s Ian Alexander asked whether CS would ever be anything more than a rounding error in a client budget. IA/UX: OK but if a CS tree falls in the forest, no one will hear it (much less pay for it.) Another CS brain, Jeff Macintyre, takes a resolutely big tent approach, pointing out that CS has one meaning in an agency context (where it’s about the deliverables: content audits, gap analysis, taxonomy and tagging, and style guides) and another in the rest of contentworld, whether marketing- or editorially-based. Why split, he says. The whole point of this evolving discipline is its fludity.

Size doesn’t matter. Really.

Well that’s what they say. You may know different:)

But to me it seems obvious that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: both CS big and little are bubbling out of the same tap: It’s all about XML (or its many siblings such as DITA, SGML, etc.) surrounding content in the distributed search network of Googleland.

As far as I can see, this is the real differentiator between CS and most other content work: Unlike traditional editorial work, content strategy isn’t steeped in grand narratives so much as in bits, in data. “CS big” isn’t custom publishing (although there are definitely narrative and brand strategies one wants to be aware of). And “CS little” isn’t just those deliverables: content without context, from the container to the brand, is all essential if you want to sell in the Googlesphere.

WARNING: Technical language ahead

Another way of saying this: content strategy pushes authorial voice and traditional marketing monologues to the side in favor of taxonomical narratives that assist users in connecting their own dots, driving their own containers. (Don’t forget that the Latin root of content is contentere from “to be contained.”)

Let me repeat those two very odd sounding words together: “taxonimical narratives.” This is, I think, the big innovation of CS, and why firms that are pursuing it are on the right track and firms that are ignoring it are likely to lose their edge.

The way I see it, CS isn’t about big vs little, or strategy vs tactics so much as it’s about the sinking power of traditional brand narrative and the rise of data driven content. CS is about mastering the tiny—the power of data, contained and defined in those XML containers to bubble up via SEO and SEM—in the realm of the massive. As destination websites and traditional brand marketing give way to the artful arrangement and deployment of billions of nuggets of containerized info that can be reused, recycled, retweeted, reblogged, and otherwise recirculated in the vast data anarchy of the Googleplex, content strategy is the only measured response marketers and media companies have to get their stuff out there.

That’s why traditional brand marketing is getting eaten up by search. And why CS little without CS big could just as easily be done by information architects. And (paradoxically) why CS big without CS little is usually just another name for digital custom publishing or other traditionally brand narratives.

So if you want to know why CS matters and why it matters now, it’s because without it, you don’t have a shot at playing the Google game. And that’s where real competitive advantage—and media innovation—is today, whether your company is as big as The New York Times or as tiny as a blog.

Either way, size seems to matter less, frequency (of bit circulation) more. Just do it.

1.   Saturation:  The first chart they show you in a b-school is a 2×2 of size v. saturation. Big unsaturated markets are where opportunity lives. Small unsaturated markets are where nichemakers rise. But big and small saturated markets are a waste of time—without marketing or disruptive innovation. Portfolio had neither. In magazines, “editorial” IS brand marketing, but when the editorial lacks positioning, it’s the same thing as torching money. And as for disruptive innovation—what’s the opposite of disruptive innovation? Conformism, imitation, similarity, an editorial idea unrelated to digital life, to a working business model, or to meaningful differentiation. Why bother? Readers didn’t. Advertisers didn’t.

2. Fragmentation: Trying to cap a fragmented media market with generalist coverage is either very bold or very foolish. You pick.

3. Print. D’oh. I still think it can be done, but not without a compelling digital strategy that would rethink the role of narrative journalism.  There was zero effort to do that here.

4. Money. What’s the ROI on a 600-day-launch prep, $4/word stories, $150,000+ contracts, $200,000+ editors, and no digital strategy? Can $100 millon launches really break even in this economy? Unlikely.

5. Mission: Conde would have you believe Portfolio invented the genre of business mag with style. Vogue Business? Not quite. So was there a market here? Consider: Only 10% of the WSJ’s readers are women. That’s why Lipman’s hiring made good sense: she launched the WSJ’s Weekend Journal. But the proof is in the pudding, and Lipman showed she didn’t get it, in just the same way Weekend Journal didn’t really change the pickup with women or younger readers until Murdoch. Even Tina Gaudoin hasn’t figured it out yet, and she knows style in her sleep.

6. Editorial: Long-form business journalism? Hello? See above. Despite 600 days of prep, Portfolio never had a well-thought through editorial positioning to differentiate in saturated markets. Yvette Kantrow writes in The Deal that Portfolio wanted to be the business magazine for people who don’t like business, but that doesn’t seem right to me: I think Lipman just had a shallow idea of business journalism that was distinguished solely by the idea that longer pieces could explain the complexities of business better than business magazines with known business writers. But it turns out that Lipman hired the same people, writing more or less the same kinds  of pieces with the same kinds of spin. Sure she won a few awards for this, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. You could have put almost any competent business editor in Lipman’s job and won a few awards if that person had CN’s resources  (see number 4 above). I defy anyone to tell me what Portfolio stood for except a committment to spending money on long-form journalism.

7.    Credibility: From day 1, Lipman gave readers all the wrong signals. She put all her marbles on long form journalism when everyone was talking about digital journalism, then chose many of the same old prize-winners from Michael Lewis to Tom Wolfe. Her covers showed a complete lack of comprehension about her audience and the economy. Remember the golden skycrapers, the gears, the hairy apes, the spy—one cliché after another—followed by Dov Charney, Sarah Palin, and the fallen bull? What’s that you say?  She shouldn’t have been expected to cover the Zombieconomy when she was hired to celebrate it? Rubbish. She could have covered everything from recession economics and its style to derivative disasters  to Obama and his style—right from the start.  (That fallen bull was apparently stuck on the cover after Lipman feared she’d be seen as a Barry cheerleader, a copycat, or both.) She could have signalled outrage. Instead she signaled that she was personally offended by the fallout and incapable of explaining it. And flying to Davos first class didn’t help. (Gawker really excelled on its coverage of this point.)
8.    Digital strategy: Did I say strategy? (Disclosure: I interviewed with both the business and edit side before Portfolio was launched; it’s one of the few times I was happy not to get the job.) Yes, Ari Brandt and Chris Jones attracted talented bloggers—Jeff Bercovici and Felix Salmon were doing great work. But to what end? Despite a well-designed site, there was never any thought to how Portfolio would deal with its competitive set in the digital space, whether the competition was NYT DealBook, WSJ, TechCrunch, Seeking Alpha, Dealbreaker, Bloomberg, or even Slate’s The Big Money, which has no resources but is constantly working to distinguish its tone and positioning.

Portfolio had all the resources money could buy but no competitive strategy, no editorial strategy, no content strategy, no technology strategy. In any sector —fashion to rocknroll, tech to celebrity—there is a wealth of web-based data to be aggregated, scraped, curated, ranked, and regurgitated, but nowhere more so than in business media where data streams run the gamut from rich to richer. To have failed even to consider what that opportunity—the opportunity to deliver real reader value—means—and to have spent an estimated $100 million over two years on this ignominous failure—is just shameful.

Even as I write this, I’m reading media critics who are saying that Portfolio’s failure is merely an example of the failure of advertising or the failure to reinvent advertising. It’s the economy’s fault: “From an advertising standpoint, the goal was advertisers new to the company and new to the category,” David Carey told AdAge. “Strategically, check the boxes on all this stuff: a different voice, a different style, a different type of advertiser. All of that was on its way to being accomplished, and then of course, a significant hit to advertising from the recession.”

But none of that is true. Portfolio is simply the story of yet another media venture convinced that having a few digital trends and tactics—a blog here, a feed there, water as often as you can—is the same thing as having a real digital strategy. Well, here’s some news, friends: That’s merely another brand advertising outsert stuck on the web, and it doesn’t work. Even if you pour money into it.

Bye-bye Portfolio. You won’t be missed.

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How about yoga with media? To stretch beyond—for real innovation to take place—you need new business models. But not just. You also need an innovation culture that creates living, breathing media experiments across business and editorial and technology. All of them together. All-One, as Dr. Bronner likes to say. In an agile, networked world where attention is scarce and most news is just randomly filtered data, change in any one of these three chakras by itself won’t cut it. Good content disconnected from context—people or data—is just data. If you want to be seen, you need to do the yoga that twists business requirements together with editorial and technology. And you better get down with the data baby because if you don’t know your XML from your HTML, your metatags from your master narratives, you ain’t going nowhere.

Unfortunately most media companies today are stuck when it comes to innovation. Newspapers still assign writers a single story a day instead of putting themon a beat over the course of a day with constant mini-updates. Business folks are still struggling to balance selling brands and search; seo still seems like a naughty word. Selective inkjet printing and supposed mass-customization are stand-ins for developing products that really embrace context. Designers are still more interested in pretty designs than persona-based user architectures. And although it’s changing,  lots of companies (media or otherwise) are still stuck with five year old content management systems that don’t give them the power of end- to-end XML, seo, metatagging, and multiple outputs to web, mobile, whatever.

So yoga: union. If you want to swim the blue oceans, innovate beyond your competition, the only way forward is to twist together. At the end of the day, editorial unsupported by business strategy and tech is just random data. You’ll be lucky to be spidered.

As I’ve written before, part of what holds back innovation is the rudimentary silos of static church/state (business/edit) relationshp of most media companies. But it’s not just at the operational level. Even the pundits don’t do yoga. Even now, even when there is more momentum to innovate across the wall than ever before, few if any, of our friends are connecting business model to content model: yoga.

Jeff Jarvis has been putting the pedal to the medal with his New Business Models for News project at CUNY. It’s a brillaint study, interrogating the financial dynamics of news companies, asking the fundamental questions of customer acquisition costs, pricing, bundling, net ROI of Googlejuice vs other measurable audience and advertiser metrics (churn, linking, etc.) Jarvis wants to collect the data, model it, and see what implications it has for news companies. Bravo. But it’s still business modeling. Jarvis isn’t reintenting the wheel—nor should he; his objective is to bust out the numbers in order to figure out how news organizations make money.

“The question is not whether content should be free or whether readers should pay; “should” is an irrelevant verb. The question, very simply, is how more money can be made. What will the market support?

The other question, then, is how much journalism the market will pay for? What kind of journalism will it support? This doesn’t necessarily start with the current spending on current newsrooms. Part of the equation, especially in the other models, will be new efficiencies (e.g., do what you do best, link to the rest) and new opportunities to work in collaboration and in networks.

The question Jarvis is raising is what those new efficiencies will consist in: what’s the value of user participation and increased collaboration, inside and outside the newsroom. What’s the value of innovation? His book, What Would Google Do?, provides many examples of media innovation but without the economics; his study will presumably provide financial ballast for new business models. But Jeff’s post begs the question of how you’re supposed to model stuff you haven’t built before. Again, what’s the value of innovation? If you’ve been reading this blog or Jarvis’s post on what he calls The Great Restructuring—or Umair Haque, the guy that inspired both of those posts—you’ll know another answer here is to put monetization (or at least overt monetization) beneath innovation, beneath community. But that’s not yoga either.

So what is media yoga? Wednesday’s FT had a piece about Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt’s new teaching gig at the Univ. of Chicago’s Booth called “Using Experiments in Firms.” I’m a little afraid that Levitt and  his co-teacher John List, both economists, will scientize this, but I suppose it’s a start, and it’s interesting that it’s taking place in a B-School. (Where’s similar focus on innovation in J-School?) There’s a giant world of innovation methods—from the Bass Diffusion curve to Christensen’s Disruptive innovation theory to Kaizen and TRIZ and beyond (way beyond)—some of which emphasize incremental increases in value and others (Christensen and Blue Oceans) that go for more profound leaps in value and technological transformation. We’ll see what comes out of Levitt’s new class, but I’m a little skeptical—economists and business modelers tend to get caught up in scenario setting, and what we need now more than ever is yoga. Left brain, right brain. Business and editorial and tech together. (Which is why, I think, supple management practices such as Agile and Scrum—and disciplines that look across the entire breadth of the media value chain such as IA/UX and content strategy—are beginning to get a bigger toehold today.)

So do media yoga. Fail often. Fall occasionally. And make sure you warm up all your muscles before you get on the mat. Otherwise, it’s savasana for you, bud.

Om.

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The title of Time’s “experiment” in free, customized content: Mine,  Here’s how it works. You go to the Mine website, pick five of eight offered magazines (Time, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Money, Travel&Leisure, InStyle, Golf, Food+Wine), and about six weeks later, get a magazine composed of articles poached by  Time Inc. from those five titles, om print or digital format, customized to your zipcode. (Free info: mine were Time, T&L, Instyle, F+W, Money.)

Wow, you’re saying. That’s a lot of free content. Great value to the advertiser (Lexus sponsors the whole shebang). Geo-targeted. Wow, cool stuff.

Except, um, no. You can only get either digital or print edition. (You can also put an rss widget on your iGoogle page.) And the content, apparently,  runs from 2005 to 2009—let’s repeat that too, shall we: from 2005 to 2009—and is organized less like a single magazine than a bunch of magazines each separated in its own tidy branded cordon sanitaire with ad pages marking it off from the other brands. I haven’t seen the digital edition, so I won’t comment on its execution, but I think I have something to say about its general concept. After all, I was part of the team that first suggested this idea back in 1995…

15 years ago

Turns out this is an idea that’s been kicking around at least since the days of what was known first as Time Inc New Media and then, after ATT and MCI failed to convince us proprietary X25 networks were tomorrow’s big thing, the Time Inc Internet Project and finally Pathfinder. Locked in a bake-off for the top job, Jim Kinsella and I set out our competing visions of Time Inc’s internet future for our boss, Walter Isaacson.

My vision was Calliope. Unfortunately that domain was already taken—already in 1994! (If the domain was available, who knows what would have happened!) Calliope was to be a unitary effort from all of Time’s (then) 35 brands. One article from here, another from over there, sometimes even on the same subject, with community comments and email underlying the whole shebang.

Kinsella’s idea was Pathfinder: a home page designed to send you to each of those brand’s websites, and minimal editorial resources under that. Just what the name says. As I said to Jim (who ever let me forget it), Calliope was centrifugal, Pathfinder, centripetal. Kinsella, who has had an amazing career and is now chairman of Interoute, one of the largest European network providers, was right though: by pledging to keep Pathfinder limited in its intent and range, he could cobble enough resources to build the ostensibly decentralized brand into a strong centralized organization. (A brilliant corporate insight, I came to recognize much later.) My way would have meant the brands wouldn’t have had a base to build from without spending their own money (which they didn’t have or didn’t want to spend online) and would have created a new editorial hierarchy, presumably with Isaacson as king. (To his credit, he didn’t go for that, and 15 years later, he’s still just as savvy, kicking off the recent debate about  micropayments with a TIME cover.) One publisher flatly told me to go F myself. Isaacson didn’t support me. And as for getting the brands to collaborate? On his way out the door, Curt Viebranz, who came to TINM from HBO (and was later president of Tacoda and a top exec at AOL until Falco etc. pushed him out), famously said that working at Pathfinder was like trying to herd a group of cats. (A lot of this ancient history is in John Motavalli’s rather misguided Bamboozled at the Revolution.)

One more person should be mentioned in all of this: Bruce Judson, a talented exec who came to Pathfinder with dual JD/MBA degrees and the rep of a Time Inc superstar thanks to his championing selective inkjet printing—the same (or very very similar) technology they’re using to print Mine.

Dumb and dumber

So why is a dumb idea from 1995 any better regurgitated fifteen years later?

It’s not. It’s even dumber.

Here’s why: in the Google era, mass customization, giving consumers the choice to design their own product from the limited set of a firm’s products, is not customer service for the masses. If anything it is the opposite—it is innovation with a limited set of consumers—and healthy margins—in mind. If you love Time Inc magazines more than all other content and think it deserves a privileged place in your home, then perhaps this is media for you. Of course if you really thought this way, you’d subscribe to all the magzines independently. As Scott Anthony says, this is innovation through the wrong lens: the lens of the guy who works at Time Inc and grabs copies of all the magazines that used to be given away free to employees in the lobby; he reads a few articles and chucks the rest in the john and the garbage. This is innovation to help himself, not the customer. As Anthony writes:

The general point here is to make sure you evaluate innovations through the proper lens. The trap companies often run into is they think their view of quality is the same as the markets’. That’s not always true. If the innovation isn’t perceived to be better by the consumer, customer, partner, or supplier to whom it is targeted, then adoption could slow and frustration could grow.

If Time Inc’s poobahs—the url says timecmg.com, so this is likely some consumer marketing group Ann Moore has lashed together including her publishers, Time Inc Custom Solutions, and somebody in online (i.e., the rump of Pathfinder)—were truly interested in innovating customer service in the media context—and if their CMS was up to it—they’d be looking for taxonomical matches between articles and metatagged subjects and user metatags. They’d be taking a page from the New York Times, specifically Times Extra, which lets you see the Times’s own headlines and stories right on the same page with external links to competing versions of the same stories. They’d be hackging the hello out of the Daylife API, creating filtered news programs running across the range of all Time Inc. content and affiliates. Or maybe they’d just do Time’s Mahalo, allowing search under the banner of high touch contextual curation. Yeah, I know it’s an experiment, but it’s not a good one. What’s the next experiment? Subscriptions for your customized magazine and micropayments for the online version?

This is how a dumb idea from 1995 is being made even dumber in 2009, relying on the hubris of publishers who think customers want customized magazine content over and above context created from across the entire web of news resources. What was innovative—but wrong in 1995—is no more innovative in 2009.

Some people never learn.

CODA, 4/19: The AP reports—and Time Inc is now apologizing—for botching the personalization of Mine’s first issue. Apparently few readers got the five titles they actually picked; most of the articles were evergreen, dating back to summer 2008, and at least one person, Joshua Benton, director of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, found the personalized ads—all featuring Lexus— “’slightly creepy’ because they referred to where he lives, included his name and described him driving one on Route 6 to Cape Cod.” Argh.

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