If you love your content, set it free

hello

- I am Mike Ellis- I have spent 10+ years working on the [content] web- I am a user experience zealot, strategist, social(web)-ist- I work for a not for profit IT company called Eduserv

number of slides >

pain

bearable

n

childbirth

frankly, quite unreasonable

10

today, I am going to try the “n-slide experiment”

rest assured, however: there is no comic sans,

and no clip art...

why are we all holding hands?

• what value and free mean in a web world• how the network has changed us• what to do about it

what does “value” mean?

scarcity

if we havevaluable things, we:

lock them away,guard them,hide them,charge for them,protect them

“...any particular unit becomes worth less to people as the supply increases..”

scarcity is ok until the content arrives on a global network like the web...

1. radically reduced cost of distribution

“It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public – has stopped being a problem.”Clay Shirky // “Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable” // http://bit.ly/YoqJi

“17 million fewer CD buyers in 2008 compared to the prior year”

ZDNet UK // “CD sales drop, digital downloads on the rise”// http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=14758

2. nearly ubiquitouspiracy opportunities

“If the product you make becomes digital, expect that the product you make will be copied”

Seth Godin // “Music Lessons” // http://bit.ly/aJehN6

(an exercise in usability rather than scarcity...)

3. a profound and lasting change in our relationship with content

“..for my generation you partly constructed your identity around what you owned..but for the digital generation this strong link with ownership has been broken.

It took time and money to build up any of those collections. Therefore they demonstrated a commitment which was worth exhibiting.

In a digital world this effort is greatly reduced, and as a result so is the emotional attachment one feels towards them.”

Martin Weller // “Ownership ain’t what it used to be” // http://bit.ly/2vU1oB

users: native, lazy, fickle, “mobile”,search-focused...and expecting free

these 3 things are fairly radical

so how should we respond?

#1: recognise thatthis isn’t just a blip

...after whichthings will return to normal

..this cannot be ostriched

#2: notice that the valueprobably hasn’t disappeared, just shifted somewhere else

“So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… and I created a site called The Pirate Coelho”

“...she explains she doesn’t mind about people downloading her music for free, ‘because you know how much you can earn off touring, right?’ ”Lady Gaga // “Come party with...” // http://bit.ly/93YZ0A

Paulo Coelho // “Author pirates himself” // http://bit.ly/ceaoeO

closer to home..

#3: ask: what can’t be copied?

“the value in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention”Kevin Kelly // “Better than Free” // http://bit.ly/blNo9b

things like trust, authenticity, immediacy

#4: realise that your content is like a teenager

(you may want to protect them, but if you try, they’ll just climb out of the window and go clubbing anyway)

#5: if you can’t re-use it, you’ve wasted it

http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/single.htm?ipg=8727

http://unicorn.lib.ic.ac.uk/uhtbin/opac/webcentral

http://www.ucas.com/instit/i/h60.html

#6: this is, has been, and always will be about content and users

(not technology)

#7: the future is uncertain

open stuff helps with uncertainty

#8: it doesn’t really matter how you do it

APIRSS

RDF

RDFa

REST

OpenSearch

JSON

microformats

iCal

..as long as what emerges is loosely joined

#9: recognise that open and free = eyeballs

Dion Hinchcliffe // “Open API’s” // http://bit.ly/9yBIN7

“stuff moves

around the network

freely”

sharing

web scale

meaningextraction

usergeneratedcontent

personalisation

real-time

“Losers wish for scarcity. Winners leverage scale”Ian Rogers // “fistfullofyen” // http://bit.ly/9DVnDN

thank you to these people for free stuff

free birds http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmybrown/2886088004/barbed wirehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/jonycunha/4278434497/free beerhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/16038409@N

02/2327138220/teenager http://www.flickr.com/photos/watt_dabney/2329373883/valuable original contenthttp://www.flickr.com/photos/10ch/3347658610/taphttp://www.flickr.com/photos/vinothchandar/4415664247/store your valuables out of site http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalsextant/4491922646/internet http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/916142/explosion http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaibara/3518861937/value man http://www.flickr.com/photos/dacosta1/3383367663/bookshelf

http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/729822/lonely treehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/tomasrotger/3174249161/copy-pastehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/newrafael/2247763119/addictedhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/theredproject/3686402702/jealousy http://www.flickr.com/photos/gibbons/273524604/man blowing bubblehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/37387749@N02/4236410524/sizes/o/louvre

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aeter/2437071133/moving rock http://www.flickr.com/photos/dennisbarnes/2430956891/bird on wirehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/antanask/137069119/ascii soup

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jessicareeder/3276844349/glass candyhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/fred_dela/4046297366/

and thank you, too

slideshare.net/dmje

@m1ke_ellis

labs.eduserv.org.uk