"Erosion of power: Users in charge."

Today's mail brought a reminder of PC Forum 2006 (March 12-19). This year's theme will be: "Erosion of power: Users in charge". As usual, Esther Dyson and her team at Release 1.0 have put their finger on the pulse. They say:

We have already found tremendous energy and excitement in the IT industry around this year's theme, Erosion of power: Users in charge. As transparency wins and information flows faster and faster, individuals are getting the upper hand. In a growing number of cases, systems are being designed on the premise that the user is in control. But will consumers rise to the challenge of controlling their own data, let alone their own destinies?

Putting users in charge (as both publishers and readers/subscribers) is the core thrust behind what we're trying to do with Structured Blogging and our other efforts at PubSub to break down the "Gray Web" of changing and structured data that is captured in walled gardens today.

Some thoughts on what will be possible once Structured Blogging becomes common can be found on Peter Caputa's blog where he discusses Peter Brown's recent review of WhizSpark. (Note: Brown used the Structured Blogging WordPress extension to write his review.)

Brown says:"I’d like to have the ability to automagically promote my events to various public calendar sites, such as Upcomming." (I assume that he'd also like to be able to do this without having to pay one of the "event posting" sites to do it for him... You've seen the ads: "We'll post your events to xxx calendar sites for only $xx.xx!") Peter Caputa responds:

... imagine if we adopt the structured blogging formats that Marc Canter and Bob Wyman are coming up with and that Joe Reger is ready to support -  and made it easy for people to one click publish structured event information to their weblog?

If sites like Upcomming, WhizSpark, Eventful, zvents, etc. were to accept new event postings based on structured postings to individuals' and organizations' blogs, we'd find that in at least this area of event publishing, we would have an "economy of information" much like that which we have today for simple web pages. In the "HTML Page information economy" we generally assume that all useful page search engines have full and equal access to all the "visible" pages on the web. This is very unlike the current situation for data such as events that requires some understanding of item-specific structure and data types for proper support. Traditionally, we've built walled-garden, dedicated sites to handle the structured data since we haven't had a means to publish such structured data in the same "visible web" as we do less structured web pages.

In the future, what we'll see is that when people like Peter Brown post a website review on their blog or an announcement of a new event, a whole host of sites that consume review or event data will be able to discover the post and incorporate it into their databases for searching and/or alerting. In such an environment, sites like WhizSpark, Upcomming, etc. won't compete based on the data that they have managed to capture within walled-gardens -- since we'll all assume that like HTML page search engines, all event services will have access to the same data. These sites will instead compete based on the services that they provide on top of the data. i.e. just like the various page search engines today compete based on things like their UI, their spam detection, their relevance ranking, etc. rather than just how many pages they index.

By providing the means for people and organizations to publish their structured data in the Visible Web rather than the Gray Web or the walled-garden's Hidden Web, we'll be taking a great deal of "power" away from the walled-garden search sites and giving it back to the users and publishers. Consumers of data will be able to choose which site to use for searching for events rather than being forced to simply seek out that site which has the most data. Publishers will be confident that by simply publishing their events on their own sites (and probably pinging some number of ping servers) that their announcements will be incorporated into a wide variety of competing services that each addresses the needs of some differentiated user group. Users will get choice and the benefit of competition-driven innovation while publishers get broader and easier distribution of their data. It's basically a win-win for all concerned. Even the event site managers will benefit since they will be able to focus less on convincing people to hand over their data and more on building competitive and differentiated services that can provide a source of sustainable advantage.

It will be fascinating to see how things have progressed by March when PC Forum 2006's will dig into their theme of "Erosion of power: Users in charge." By then we'll have a greatly enhanced and expanded range of structured publishing plug-ins (for WordPress, MoveableType, and Drupal at least) as well as support for many more kinds of structured data. Hopefully, we'll be able to demonstrate real progress in eroding the power of the walled-gardens and in giving that power to the users. But while we may be implementing the technology needed to enable this new world of open structured publishing, PC Forum's question remains: "will consumers rise to the challenge of controlling their own data, let alone their own destinies?"

bob wyman

Comments

[peter caputa]

This is a great post, Bob. You'll have to point out those XXX event directories to me. :)

I do think users (event attendees) will rise to the challenge. We are seeing it already. For a specific event that we marketed, attendees could grab a banner ad (with their unique code in the url) and paste it anywhere on the web. We served 55,000 impressions via myspace.com alone for this music festival. Over 100 people sent invitations to 4,000 people. The people want to be engaged. We just need to build the systems and ACHIEVE the INTEROPABILITY, so that it is easier for them.

[Robert Douglass]

Drupal has a module that not only allows events to be published automatically on Upcoming.org, but Drupal sites can use the same module to share events with each other.

http://drupal.org/node/27953

[robb thurston]

Dear Bob Wyman;
I want to exit from PUBSUB SIDEBAR FOR FIIREFOX. I have firefox and it exists as a sidebar, and i want to remove it.
I have tried several times to contact PubSub and the messages get returned. Please do me a favor, please, please!:
SEND ME THE ALGORYTHM/KEY STROKES TO REMOVE SIDEBAR FROM FIREFOX AND EXIT FROM PUBSUB TOTALLY.
Thanks for minding this business, and I appreciate your help. If i could have contacted Pubsub, maybe I would have stayed, but I could not get through.
HELP ME EXIT PLEASE.
Sincerely,
Robb Thurston

[Benoit Brookens]

Great Post Bob!

[Nancy Tubbs]

Hey, now, I run one of those "event posting" sites, created long before structured blogging and microformats existed. Since when are you against free enterprise, and the use of technology to solve a problem?

Look, I think SB is great, even though in your world it would destroy the service I created, or at least impact it significantly. SB increases choice for users. But to say that currently the user (ie, event poster) doesn't have control, and with SB s/he will, seems a stretch.

The vast majority of (at least event) listings include a link to web content that the event organizer has created. Folks write listings on their blogs and sites every day. What SB does is make it easier for aggregator sites to find and understand that data.

But aggregators control how those listings are found: ranking, visibility of content, etc. Perhaps they'll display the listing information and conveniently forget the link to the original. Perhaps they won't feel like including my Knitting Meetup in Tulsa. Perhaps they'll charge for being in the first 50 listings. And what if the venue changes or the event is cancelled - will they stay updated?

Don't aggregators become new walled gardens? Is the ultimate location of the listing anywhere near as important as where the pointers to it are?

Craigslist, your favorite walled garden example, is about as open as possible. It's almost entirely free to use, listings are designed by the user, and they can be changed or deleted at any time (handy once you've sold your used couch and don't want any more calls). Listings are displayed chronologically, not determined by the website. The user has an enormous amount of control.

Again, I like Structured Blogging and microformats, but to say they are putting all the power into the hands of the users seems like spin.