Why MSM and open paradigms don’t mix

24 Feb 2006

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.