Microsoft are now play­ing ball. They’re “get­ting” this whole clue­train gig, even for­mal­is­ing their enact­ment of it into a con­fer­ence billed as a 72-hour con­ver­sa­tion. They’re doing blogs. They’re lightly, if at all, mod­er­at­ing those blogs. And they’re respond­ing to con­tent on those blogs as appro­pri­ate (that is, ignor­ing the absolute rub­bish and closed-mind-open-source-supporting-nerds).

In every way what they’re doing and what they’re chang­ing is absolutely awe­some. As an IT com­pany maybe it’d be fair to say they’ve got a head­start on the rest of the world. They’re cer­tainly doing bet­ter than MSM are.

Say, for exam­ple, there was a social networking/photo site to be inte­grated into a TV programme’s com­mu­nity site: one that’s meant to actu­ally con­nect with view­ers, and falls under “Com­mu­nity” in the network’s struc­ture — not the one that mind­lessly pushes top-down con­tent. And that because of con­cerns about mod­er­a­tion — chiefly stem­ming from the notion that pub­lic iden­ti­ties are untouch­able and sacred in the net­work eye, and the arro­gance that comes as a part of that –, the only advan­tages (pol­i­tics and free band­width because of deep-linked pho­tos aside) of inte­grat­ing an exter­nal photo ser­vice are negated, and users have absolutely no incen­tive to sign up for a wider Yahoo! sign-on (which would allow them to com­ment on pho­tos at Flickr, amongst other things).

So MSM struc­tures are still win­ning. I expected this would be the case. I think it’s going to take another five years before peo­ple can get over them­selves enough to realise that allow­ing peo­ple to com­ment (not anony­mously — that was never on the cards!) isn’t an intrin­si­cally dan­ger­ous thing. The idea that the greater fool is the one stop­ping to make flip­pant dis­parag­ing (even just seem­ingly so!) remarks about peo­ple they’ve never met is, in fact, turned on its head by the recog­ni­tion of such remarks. To acknowl­edge a fool’s power surely isn’t the most intel­li­gent thing one could do in response.

I digress. The point is, for as long as they’re think­ing they have any chance of con­trol­ling what’s going on, this isn’t going to work. Wanna stop peo­ple com­ment­ing on a photo you stuck up on Flickr? Sure thing, feel free to dis­able it. If the com­ment is of con­se­quence they’ll blog it any­way and the dam­age is out there and you’ve got a hell of a lot more work to do if you want to purge that blight on your carefully-constructed-cult-of-celebrity-image from the web… and if it’s not of con­se­quence they won’t bother to pub­lish it any­where else, and, in all prob­a­bil­i­tiy, it wouldn’t have done a great deal of harm were it to be pub­lished in the photo’s com­ments any­way. In many ways, inline com­ment­ing is actu­ally a more restric­tive form of social inter­ac­tion in the online sphere because it’s cen­tralised. I’m advo­cat­ing it here because the audi­ence has appalling elec­tronic lit­er­acy (which is, I take it, typ­i­cal of the bulk of the Aus­tralian pop­u­la­tion still: even if the SMH writes about blogs, only peo­ple who blog will bother to read an arti­cle that has “blog” in the head­line… and then they’ll go and blog about it), so the blog thing is still, prob­a­bly, 5 or so years off hit­ting “main­stream” audi­ences. (Inci­den­tally, any­one pro­claim­ing the death of radio/rise of pod­cast­ing should sim­i­larly antic­i­pate no-one is even know­ing what they are talk­ing about for a sim­i­lar period of time — and no, the fact that iTunes has an obscure fea­ture doesn’t help matters).

Must fin­ish with this price­less grab from a weekly newslet­ter, regard­ing viewer-directed con­tent cho­sen via an online sur­vey: “We always say our show is your show, so I think this seg­ment makes a lot of sense.” And yet they’d rather not give view­ers a voice at all. This isn’t giv­ing view­ers a say, it’s allow­ing them to effec­tively switch meta-channels (almost, pre­sum­ing they’re vot­ing with the major­ity). The seg­ment makes sense from a MSM per­spec­tive, but the far­ci­cal nature of this “open­ness” comes to light pretty quickly as soon as any tru­ely multi-directional com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nels come into play.

I think it’s going to be great fun watch­ing “them” (MSM gen­er­ally) slowly come to terms with this idea over the next cou­ple of years. MSM isn’t going away, but I think any of these “social” shows are going to flop unless they rad­i­cally re-think strate­gies (hybrid broadcast/Internet model, any­one?) or stop pretending…

A quick note: I haven’t men­tioned any­thing by name here because, well, no-one else is both­er­ing to blog about the site in ques­tion (an ear­lier blog post is on the first page of results for a par­tic­u­lar key­word, I’d rather not do that again!) Actu­ally it’s kind of funny because my site + seman­tic markup, etc., is blitz­ing the network’s core site (i.e. not our ancil­lary com­mu­nity site) in search engine rank­ings (well, Google at least, heh), but I digress! Not that I’ve writ­ten about any­thing sen­si­tive… every­thing here is digested pub­lic infor­ma­tion (or will be by the time this pub­lishes tomor­row) and is con­sis­tent with my usual rant­i­ngs and opin­ions about social media, IT, etcetera, and my usual cyn­i­cism and dis­dain for com­mer­cial (pri­mar­ily broad­cast — print is (paint­ing broad strokes) gen­er­ally less obvi­ously tainted) media! Good fun.