Webcracy

The concept of decentralized, or portable, social networks is actually great for business. So great that it might even be worth considering sponsoring full time work on DiSo. In this post, I explore a case for online advertising.

Hugh MacLeod will be my example. He recently expressed his “need to come up with a viable advertising model for [his blog] gapingvoid.com”. He creates and delivers great content on his blog and here are some results (that he happily advertises): he is among UK’s top Facebookers, is on Techmeme’s LeaderBoard, is followed by more than 2000 people on Twitter, etc. As he himself claims, he’s trying to run a Global Microbrand. And it’s gotta be working, since I know all these things about him without knowing him.

DiSo is “an umbrella project for various open source social networking components”. It aims at providing open technologies and practices for creating distributed social networks. A distributed social network is like Facebook, but without the facebook.com website, only the goodness. It’s about making people’s websites talk to each other in new ways. It’s about finding open ways to have activity feeds, lifestreams, statuses, photos, videos, applications, etc., etc., to flow openly and securely from person to person. Today, DiSo efforts concentrate on hacking the WordPress blogging software to quickly come up with the first results. There’s more about this here, here and on Google.

Facebook’s success is, ironicaly, proof that the decentralization effort is right on. It’s said that Facebook’s model is the best there is: advertising, application/widget distribution, stickiness, even design and usability. But users, apart from the experience and maybe some fame, have nothing to gain from using Facebook. So take everything that Facebook has and put it in the hands of the people. I exemplify with blogger Hugh MacLeod.

Gapingvoid.com is a blog and is therefore relevant to my argument: that DiSo is great for the online advertising business.

It is Hugh MacLeod’s richest communication channel (in terms of content quality/diversity). Visit any of his “channels” (blog, twitter, facebook, etc.) and ask who’s making money, and how? On his blog, there’s no advertising to be seen so it’s at best a lead generator and a tool for brand awareness; no cash. On Facebook, there is. On other sites he uses or where I can read about him, there most often is. And these sites make the money. “Show me the money”, he might say! Since he’s wondering how he might manage that, let’s shoot.

In a DiSo-enabled world, we presume his readers have their OpenID and a profile where they store all the usual information that web services ask for (email, name, etc.) and even some commercially apt information that some services demand in an indirect way (age, sex, location, even household revenue back in the days, etc.). With OAuth, an authorization technology, Hugh can ask his readers to feed him some of their commercially apt profile information for him to run ads on his blog. Why would they? Because they trust him: his whole process is very open, from the software and services he uses to the content he delivers; his community uses the same tools as he does; his community wants him to keep delivering good content; his community should knowingly prefer to give their info to Hugh than to closed silos (like Facebook and others); it’s way easier than filling a rather boring survey; it’s more transparent and accurate than having some cookie-tracking company telling Hugh who his readers are; etc.

With that information, Hugh has the ability to do better than Facebook: use his blog to deliver excellent advertising to his audience, and make money. And by excellent I mean well targeted, endorsed, risky: Facebook’s values are not in the game (we have to bend them to ours), Hugh’s values are in the game; I don’t look at Facebook’s ads, I’ll judge Hugh’s ads. If, like some magazines, he choses to have a “Special advertising section” that takes up entire blog posts… that’s some balls. But he can manage the risk. Maybe he’ll lose me as a reader if I really hate advertising; but he can/should ask me if I want to be served some ads with the soup in the first place. Maybe he would let me use his “Special advertising section” to advertise something, not only the typical players. Not to mention that Hugh’s advertisers could even deliver Microformatted ads about events, restaurants, whatever, so that I could directly interact with the ads. We are talking about open web technology, widgets and all, transporting and delivering open data. Really, there’s no limit to the possibilities.

The social aspect of advertising can be explored more freely, largely and deeply, on the open web than in closed silos. In an OpenSocial world, could gapingvoid.com be a “container”? Maybe! Sexy terminology to start with, “container”. And whereas with Google’s AdSense (“Soon in a Container near you”) you trust the process to deliver relevant ads, in a DiSo world you should have endorsed ads because you trust the publisher and his process, over which he has more control. More signal, less noise.
With DiSo (and alike), gapingvoid.com is a meaningful, resourceful, interesting node, where both Hugh and his readers are playing the same old game but with brand new, flexible, rules. There’s a new level of trust, responsibility and engagement to be reached and explored, and it’s good for business.

So maybe it’s not too early for big time bloggers, advertisers, media placement agencies, technology companies et al. to start thinking about sponsoring DiSo (or alike) efforts. IBM can do the math for you: ask them why they back Linux and talk about community so much (answer: modest localized investments, huge multiple returns).

So let’s rock. It’s all open and everyone can contribute. Maybe it’s interesting to you to have people working on it full time?

PS: Not even talking about how important it is that consumers start to care about, and learn to manage, their personal information on the web. It’s up to us, those who care, to deliver good options along with good reasons, with no FUD but lots of love.

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