Business is boring

 Via RethinkingMedia I came upon this lecture (in Dutch, sorry) by Martijn Aslander from Lifehacking.nl in which he talks about bookhacking. Although his lecture is filled with hip marketing one-liners, he does give a clear overview of how an online business model based on the giving away of free content could work. As he shows, it is all about creating networks in the online environment, based around the value you create. This value is again based on your previous actions and doings (focusing on integrity and trust) and the selections you make and present to your networks, which again creates more value.

 Aslander states he is fascinated by value. We should focus more on value and not on profit. Aslander has not asked any money for his services for years, as he believes people can only decide what he is worth after he has delivered his services. As he states, he does not work for people he works with people.

 Martijn Aslander on bookhacking op InCTformatie 2009 from henkjan on Vimeo.
Filmed by Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat, via Marketingfacts.

At Lifehacking.nl he started with disseminating books free online. These books generated a lot more print sales than expected, based on the idea that if people like a book, people buy the book, they don’t print it. The added value also lies in the fact that this model gives you the opportunity to connect on a closer level with your customer base. Unlike bookshops, in the online environment you know who your customers are. Lifehacking.nl simply asked for an email address before any download and 70% of the people actually filled in an email address. This of course created a huge marketing potential. You can for instance send an email to your customer base, Aslander states, when you have a new free book to download. In this way the free book does not have to be a threat to the print sales. You can even make more money by giving the book away for free.

 

The trick is creating some noise around your free content. People start blogging about it and its fame is spread. This of course in combination with the power of selection: you create a trusted base, a network around the content you provide. As Aslander states, this is the basis of the network and information society; you create a network which again creates network effects. Through your network you are able to move (other) networks of people. This means, according to Aslander, that we should no longer look from the old business paradigms to profit and value. The new online paradigm is about engagement, it is about listening to the people. Communicate with your network, ask them for suggestions, engage them. Aslander has created, as he calls it (referring to his great example Seth Godin) a tribe around himself. Things start spreading from there: you create value and movement and you create a relationship with your customers, within your network. You build profiles around the people in your network. Thus an ecosystem rises up not based on money and profit but on value and network effects. Aslander remarks that Web 2.0 is about a radical change, it is about new ways of working together and engaging with your customers: it is (again) about creating value and listening to your customers. As he says: ‘I deliver value and then I just see what happens.’ In the online environment an IOU is worth more than money. Aslander thus thinks and works foremost from an idea of access and not from an idea of possession.

 

These ideas are maybe not new and not even as innovative as Aslander might present them, I like the way he is trying to promote them to make people enthusiastic about thinking ‘out of the box’ and thinking from the idea of free as a basis and a reality in today’s online networked culture. And then see what you can do from that position and where it can bring you. That I find inspiring. You can find more passionate thoughts from Aslander on his website.

You can find an older interview with Martijn Aslander in which he also summarises his views on book publishing below.

 

In praise of Eleutheria

‘Beauty is pregnant with potentiality’ – Bracha Ettinger

 

Again, delving deeper into the rabbit hole, let’s try to entangle the concepts in the web of free knowledge definitions.

In the previous post we mainly discussed the difference between free information and free knowledge. But we were not quite finished. We were still basically stuck when we hit the Cyberpunk definition which gave information an inherent entelechy towards freedom, making it in a way into an active agent.

 

But maybe we shouldn’t interpret the cyberpunk aphorism of ‘information wants to be free’ in such a way. For as we established before, information in itself is not active. Information needs an agent. If we again look closer at the DIKW definition, we find that knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, it is thus deterministic. Information has (or can have) use and meaning, but only becomes knowledge when it is ‘made active’, when it is put to use, involving an action/actor. Again, in other words to make it clearer: information without action might have meaning and may be useful, only when it is put to use can it become knowledge. As the definition says: the intent of knowledge is to be useful, information does not have this intent, it only has the potential.

Information needs an action/actor to combine information into knowledge: to give it meaning in context.

 

Now as we look at it in this way, the cyberpunk definition of information should be free or wants to be free, can be interpreted as in order to be able to become knowledge. And this is the possibility the web offers increasingly.

 

Now this potentiality of information entails two things:

 

-         -     It entails an actor, who acts upon the information, collecting and combining it in such a manner and applying it to the appropriate context so that it can become knowledge. Since it is the actor (or actors in this respect, for of course in many occasions it is groups of people working together turning information into knowledge) who is responsible for the creation of this knowledge, it is in a way his or her interpretation, combination and contextualization of the information. This explains why people have moral rights or even claim copyright or intellectual ownership over their active creation of knowledge out of information (if they publish it that is, there is no such thing as copyright on thoughts, unfortunately one thinks sometimes…).

 

-         It also entails a movement, a dynamic, as already expressed in the Cyberpunk definition. Not a dynamic inherent in information however, but a dynamic from information towards knowledge (a force in between information and knowledge in a way). It is the potentiality itself that creates the dynamic, the need towards. As the Cyberpunk movement argues, the digital age and the coming of the Internet, which has freed information from its mostly physical and print based constraints, has enlarged this potentiality of information enormously, making the dynamic or movement seem in a way more urgent, or more logical. In this way one can say that it is the digital age that makes information want to be free.

 

As a final remark, what is interesting in even more recent developments is that the actor can now also be a computer: with the rise of the semantic web the computer can turn/turns information into knowledge or at least into networked information, conceptualizing and contextualizing it and thus combining it in a useful manner. Maybe this means information and communication technologies as well as social media are adding a new layer to the DIKW hierarchy: Connectionism, or connected, interlinked information. As Kevin Kelly says when speaking about social media: ‘we are connecting everything to everything’, and: ‘when connected into a swarm, small thoughts become smart.’

Bits of Freedom

As promised before, I would like to dig a little deeper into the meaning and complexities of the concept of free information, referring to the well known aphorism ‘information wants to be free’. No better way to start than by throwing in some good old definitions we can all find scattered on the web.

So stay tuned (or run away screaming) for Everything you always wanted to know about….free information, free knowledge, open knowledge, gratis knowledge, open science, open access, open content, copyright, copyleft and Creative Commons and most importantly, what the difference is between the lot of them.

 

First of all we need to establish the difference between information and knowledge. Often a distinction is made between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. Together they form the knowledge hierarchy. One can find a lot of sources for the origin of this model, but it seems the original distinction was born in poetry. As T.S. Eliot wrote in 1934 in the opening stanza of the choruses from his play “The Rock“:

 

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

            Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

            Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

 

Milan Zeleny (who quotes Albert Einstein on his website with ‘information is not knowledge’, although I can find no source for this quote online nor can others) and Russell Ackoff are both said to have expanded the DIKW definition. The difference between the concepts comes down to something like this:

 

Data… data is raw. It simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself. In computer parlance, a spreadsheet generally starts out by holding data.

Information… information is data that has been given meaning by way of relational connection. This “meaning” can be useful, but does not have to be. In computer parlance, a relational database makes information from the data stored within it.

Knowledge… knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, such that it’s intent is to be useful. Knowledge is a deterministic process. When someone “memorizes” information (as less-aspiring test-bound students often do), then they have amassed knowledge. This knowledge has useful meaning to them, but it does not provide for, in and of itself, an integration such as would infer further knowledge. For example, elementary school children memorize, or amass knowledge of, the “times table”. They can tell you that “2 x 2 = 4″ because they have amassed that knowledge (it being included in the times table). But when asked what is “1267 x 300″, they can not respond correctly because that entry is not in their times table. To correctly answer such a question requires a true cognitive and analytical ability that is only encompassed in the next level… understanding. In computer parlance, most of the applications we use (modeling, simulation, etc.) exercise some type of stored knowledge.” (source: http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm)

Important in this respect is that both information and knowledge are in this definition already seen as processed data. However, knowledge has an utilitarian streak to it, for, as the above definition says, its intend is to be useful. Information does not have this intent. It is just there, you can do with it what you want, make it knowledgeable in a fashion you see fit. Information already has meaning conveyed in it but lacks in a way direction, it needs an actor. The most important aspect to remember in this respect is that knowledge is information that has been put to use, adding another layer of value to the raw data (they also speak of the DIKW pyramid). This is an important difference which we will come back to later.

Now that we have established the difference between knowledge and information, let’s go back to the free-bit. What is the difference between free information and free knowledge?

When one googles free information, Wikipedia brings up ‘information wants to be free’, the slogan first coined by Stewart Brand. It has been, as Wikipedia says, given a normative spin by hacker Richard Stallman:

“I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses… When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.”

Interestingly enough, Stallman here combines usefulness with information, into useful information. Is he talking about knowledge here? Not necessarily, information can be useful of course (as also mentioned in the definition above), only when it is put to use (again by an actor, requiring an action) does it become knowledge or knowledgeable. Information always also is potential knowledge and this is also what makes it potentially valuable (in the right hands). The Cyberpunk movement goes even further according to Wikipedia, arguing that information ánd knowledge should be free since ‘its internal force or entelechy makes it essentially incompatible with proprietary notions. Information is dynamic, ever-growing and evolving and cannot be contained within (any) ideological structure.’

I like the way Wikipedia says that with these notions ‘desire’ is put into information, it is brought to life in a way, craving freedom, needing to be liberated. But if one makes information come to life in this fashion (giving it an internal drive), doesn’t one also create a sort of living Frankenstein, putting agency in a lifeless abstract and in itself (though not potentially) useless concept? Doesn’t the Cyberpunk movement in this way destroy the distinction between information and knowledge? Or do they simply not approve of the above definition? Or do cyberpunks see themselves as the agency ‘liberating’ information, in the form of the so-called hacker?

And now what is exactly the difference with free knowledge?

I will get back to that later.

Open Your Mind

In previous blog posts I mentioned the rise of video surfing and the development of the Internet from a text based medium to one based on remixed mediality, increasingly dominated by an image based culture. This YouTubification of the Internet is seen by some people as a bad development which can be detrimental to our culture. Next to that, as also mentioned before, this development can mean an inevitable loss to the mental and social capabilities of the human species as a whole and could ruin its further cognitive development.

 

Luckily, there is also good news! Using Andrew Keens figure of speech, the experts are fighting back! The last years have seen an up rise of high quality video content on the web. For today I would like to focus on one specific sub category: video lectures. Probably the most well-known video lecture site on the web is TED. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design and goes by the motto ‘ideas worth spreading’. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. TED has a very nice visual based interface and the site can be searched by theme, by speaker, by most watched etc. From the website:

 

“The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. Today, TED is therefore best thought of as a global community. It’s a community welcoming people from every discipline and culture who have just two things in common: they seek a deeper understanding of the world, and they hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all.

FORA.tv has a broader scope and is in this way more eclectic, and although it lacks the nice interface it does also harvest some very interesting lectures and other kinds of video content. It includes a very nice section on music, which not only covers lectures on different kinds of music but also lectures about the music business and lectures from some renowned musicians and performers. From the website:

“FORA.tv is the leading interactive viewing experience of the smartest, most entertaining video content in the world. —The world of ideas and knowledge—all drawn from the live-event speeches, discussions, interviews and debates going on everywhere all the time at the world’s leading conferences, ideas festivals, think tanks and other major centers of thought and discourse.”

 

Where the above mentioned sites mostly aggregate content from – let’s just call it more – ‘popular science’ and lectures given at specific conferences, there is also a movement towards high quality scientific video content on the web. Videolectures.net was discussed in a previous post and states that it uses a peer review process as a filter mechanism for quality content. The team from videolectures.net is flying all over the world to tape top conferences in order to serve the scientific community. From the Website:

 

“The main purpose of the project Videolectures.Net is to provide free and open access of a high quality video lectures presented by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science. The portal is aimed at promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing by providing high quality didactic contents not only to a scientific community but also to a general public. All lectures, accompanying documents, information and links are systematically selected and classified through the editorial process taking into account also users’ comments.”

 

YouTube is also pitching in however! In cooperation with some of the most renowned institutions for higher education in the world, you can find recordings of all different kinds of lectures on the institutions own YouTube channels. My new favorite channel is the one from the European Graduate School (http://nl.youtube.com/user/egsvideo). Since I have a philosophy background and an immense fondness for everything that has anything remotely to do with culture and society, the European Graduate School is a perfect resource. Here you can find lectures from some of the greatest thinkers like Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou and many others.

Next to the EGS, many other top institutions have their own YouTube channel, for instance Berkeley and MIT.  Just think about all the opportunities this offers you to broaden your world and expand your mind, all from the convenience of your own lazy chair! Just skip your favorite Soap Opera for once and watch and listen to one or more of these genius minds! As a final statement, here is one from Slavoj Zizek, promoting the EGS:

 

The Full Monty – For Free!

 

Two updates on things I wrote about in previous posts. First of all, The New York Times picked up the discussion on the use of You Tube as a search engine, or better yet, as the NYT calls it, as a reference tool. They wrote a very nice article (published in print on January 18th) which summarizes the different things that were already mentioned about this phenomenon in the blogosphere. The article also mentions Blinkx, a video search engine, which is actually very cool and indexes various online video platforms (YouTube, MySpace, Google Video etc.) so check it out. Funny though, how an established (print) medium like The New York Times uses the blogosphere to retrieve its content on current issues….

 

The second update is on some new evidence for the, what I have now rebaptised as, NIN-model (sorry Radiohead), based on the new digital Maecenic (now community based) culture, or as an article in Techdirt calls it, the turning-your-fans-into-promoters model. At the Monty Python’s YouTube channel, videos from Britains best comedy show ever, are streamed online, in High Quality versions. From the site:

 

“No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing – HQ videos delivered straight from our vault. What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”

 

They have of course linked to Amazon, where you can buy their DVD’s directly, and yes, it worked again, helping them climb to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list.

Way to go Pythons!

 

 

Nails and Books

Happy days for Creative Commons and NIN! Trent Reznor managed to make a huge profit selling his bands 2008 album Ghosts I-IV online, topping Amazon’s best selling list for 2008. Strange enough, the album was legally available for free at the same time (even on the same website). This nice article over at Ars Technica gives one possible reason for this phenomenon (next to obviously the much heralded ease of using Amazon, and might I note the lack of awareness of many law abiding citizens of the existence or workings of sites like The Pirate Bay, where the album could also be downloaded legally for free). According to the article in Ars Technica, the music lovers bought the album on Amazon because ‘fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked’. (One wonders though, wouldn’t the ‘fans’ buy the album from NIN’s website rather than from Amazon?). It’s like the Radiohead model all over again (didn’t NIN invent that basic model anyway?) but now even better! The same article makes the suggestion that small indie record labels could probably profit from this model too: use that dedicated fan base that does not mind to pay a little extra money to support their favorite artists.

 

It looks like we might be slowly returning to the old Maecenas system, or Maecenate, when it comes to culture, flourishing as it did in the old Rome of Virgil and Horace, and still visible today in many a countries’ subsidy system, stimulating (historically) mostly the so called ‘high arts’ which in some cases and some countries have known some kind of patronage or state subsidy for ages (the Dutch system is a good example in this respect). 

What seems clear however is that this new digital Maecenic culture will be quite different in many respects from so called subsidy systems. It will be way more ‘democratic’ for one, no longer favoring art picked out by committees of wise experts but directly benefiting those chosen by the public to merit their money. It will also not be a ‘traditional’ Maecenic culture in which a few rich people out of philanthropy and the goodness of their hearth give their money to the arts or the projects they endorse. This new Maecenic culture will probably be upheld by large communities of people of all income classes, all offering a little money to support their favorite band, artist or cultural entrepreneur (think of those small labels again).

 

Now is this a bad development? Does this mean that, might such a system in the future prevail, all art should be foremost about marketing, about creating a sustainable community and those with the most fans get the most money? Not necessarily. Sure there will be large communities supporting crappy artists, but as NIN shows (which although definitely a big band you will find harder to categorize as ‘mainstream’ like you might do with for instance Radiohead, and by the way, both bands have been credited with making qualitatively high and good music according to ‘artistic standards’, whatever they are), ‘alternative’ bands can also make an income this way, maybe supplementing this new kind of business model with added value products, merchandising and intensive touring, so it does surely also offer possibilities for those small little indie pearls out there.

Finally, and I will go in to this some more in the future for sure: could this model work for books? Why not? Some have tried already: Cory Doctorow is one of the most successful examples of this model. He has given his books away for free for years already and has made a lot of money with this scheme. The difference between music and books in this day and age of course being that the made the profit from his printed books, whilst the digital versions are available for free online. And a lot of these print sales can be explained by the by some felt ‘awful screen reading experience’. But with the rise of digital books and with Kindle editions being available of a growing amount of various book titles, competition will begin to rise between free digital books and paid for digital content in this segment of the media market too. And why not help out good old Cory and his mates by sponsoring them in the good old Roman way, thanking them for their generous sharing of their cultural creations in an alternative way? I know some artists who would like such a model…. Interesting times, interesting developments….

An ontology of free – or: is there such a thing as freedom of knowledge?

 

The last couple of days I have started thinking about what the concept of free knowledge exactly entails. I want to dedicate a few future posts to this subject, in order to explore the idea to its fullest and to give it a proper categorization (at least I will try to). This can be seen as a first outline for a series on free.

 

A few thoughts come to mind when thinking about freedom if information:

 

- What does free exactly mean? What distinguishes free knowledge from or relates it to other concepts such as open science or open access, libre or gratis knowledge and ideas like creative commons, open content and copyleft?

 

- Is there a fundamental difference between freedom of information and freedom of knowledge?

 

- Is freedom of knowledge possible? And if so, what are the pros and cons of such a development; do we really want our knowledge to be free?

 

- Where does the idea of ‘information wants to be free’ originate form, and what is its historical context?

 

- What kind of different economic, political, social and philosophical issues play a role when we talk about free knowledge?

 

- Can we develop an economy of free, or a business model that revolves around free access? If so, what kind of possibilities or models are there (and which are sustainable?) and what are their pros and cons?