I’ve sometimes experienced people who won’t accept invitations to connect with me on social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Sometimes because they don’t know me or believe they don’t know me. “Knowing someone” is an extremely relative concept with the advent of the internet, though I can also see the grounds on which LinkedIn would want to hold on to this concept.
In other cases, people are afraid they may get spammed or get tricked into spending lots and lots of precious time on meaningless online jabbering and “click this to see who’s on your page” kind of stuff. Others, like my friend the science fiction writer Palle Juul Holm, simply hates what he calls the “americanized categories” of LinkedIn which doesn’t even allow “retired” or “literature” as categories.
To tell you the truth, I hate this too. I hate and dislike fixed categories, because they shape people’s minds in bad ways. In fact, I hate social networks. Social relations there are rarely true and meaningful relations, and I don’t want to waste my time installing useless applications which waste other people’s time. I hate to waste my time on useless crap. I like quality and I like meaningful conversations.
Yet I am a member of more than a handful social networks, and will add a lot more as we go along in Kaplak. Why? I’ll tell you why in a minute.
I have and have always had great contempt for people, institutions or societies which seek to enslave people. Be it slaves to certain kings or rulers, or slaves to certain ideas or modes of thought. The worst idea is probably the habit of believing that one can do no difference in one’s life, which one grows into, when one is not free. “The slave is not free, as long as he considers himself a slave”, to paraphrase one of my heroes, the German philosopher Max Stirner.
I believe people grow, create and live their lives best as free, empowered individuals, and that the world will be a greater place to be when as many people can be and can do so. I believe people who are free, and free to seek and find information, will be wiser people.
One of my greatest passions is tools and services, which empower individuals to create their own online architectures. Because using and building our own tools (i.e. free software) is what makes us free, knowledgeable and capable of change. With free software, i.e. software which can be freely distributed and tinkered with, we can modify the online as well as the offline digital architectures we use ourselves.
This is why I love wikis, why I love decentralized structures and p2p-based architectures, which empower individual members to exercise their influence, bandwidth, harddrive spaces and every bit and byte of their communicative and hacking capabilities to mold what they use so that it fits their needs.
The antithesis to this, of course is any “system”, which create architectures, that cannot be changed by it’s individual users. Systems which are the fruits of what Richard Stallman (visit Stallman’s personal website here) with disdain and contempt in his voice calls “proprietary software”. Facebook and LinkedIn are prime cases of such enormous systems, which are based on fixed categories and variables, which cannot be modified by users. Within this system, of course, there are lots of things which can be modified, but only after you accept the premises of say Facebook’s view of the world, which is “users”, “friends”, “pages”, “groups”, “walls”, “applications” and so on. One cannot break up and shape the architecture itself.
These systems are clearly bad, IMO, for our freedoms and capabilities of building our own architectures.
Why do I support and encourage the use of these systems then? Why do I invite others to take part in services such as these? One very important reason is that we can’t do anything, unless we’re connected. And as long as any platform gives me the opportunity to reach out and connect with others – most importantly those I want to know and who wants to know me, but don’t know about me – I will use it, as long as it’s free and doesn’t give me headaches. As long as it gives others an opportunity to reach out and communicate back, it’s a tool we may be able to use in our broader scope of things to come. It’s a tool for connecting, so that we may share and shape those much deeper and meaningful conversations – which will form more durable relations, which are beneficial to us in the long term. Which may help us break down the walls and empower more people to create their own architectures.
If we can, for instance, use the Facebook platform to promote Kaplak’s widgets and allow our users to sell products there, we’ll do it with this perspective in mind. We have a focus beyond the categories of “knowing someone” or being someone’s “friend” on social networks, which is crucial to what we do in Kaplak. It is not just about “selling things” and making money, when we try to expand on social networks. We do not dislike money or earning them, but as a company we want to add real value. Our primary capital for doing this is durable connections and ressourceful people, not money or “friends” on Facebook.
If this post resonates with you, we’d like to invite you to join our new Kaplak group on Linkedin, or alternatively, to ‘become a fan’ or group member of our Facebook group. Not just as a number in our friend count, but as someone capable of speaking back, here, there or in other contexts or platforms of your preference and choosing. As always, you’ll find us on Twitter and del.icio.us, among other places :-)
I’d like to share some of the insights which motivated me to deliberately, willfully and consciously choose to spend a considerable number of years of my life enduring the hardships of building a startup business from scratch. What motivated me to found Kaplak? What motivates me to work on Kaplak, each and every day?
There are a number of avenues to take to answer these questions. One of these is Dreams of a Diva (org. Danish title Diva Drømme), a documentary film I produced/directed in 2005. This trailer for the film gives you an idea of what kind of film this is :
The film was produced under the FilmTrain program, and therefore, to a certain extent, sponsored as part of my participation in this program. FilmTrain was financed as an Interreg IIIA project, which basically means it was funded by the EU. It was a cross-border Danish-German project of which one particular objective was to try and develop and keep young and independent media professionals in the regions of Odense/Funen and Kiel/Schleswig, rather than “lose them” to the big cities of Copenhagen and Hamburg.
I’ve never been very good at thinking about how to market any film I produced. In short, because I never cared. Every current project interested me, and older ones were soon shelved, after airings on local or national television, or screenings at festivals. None of my films have attracted or tried to attract a mainstream audience. I made films about subjects I liked and which interested me, despite the fact I never earned more than a little on any of them. In 2004 I met Sofie Krog, which is a world-class puppeteer, and she hired me to do a promotional video for her. I knew already then, that it would be great to eventually do a longer film about her and her show, and decided to make the film the following year.
Much hard work later, the film had a blast of a premiere in a local movie theatre in Odense in January 2006, with an invited audience of about 100 people. The following week, when the film stood it’s ground in the theatre on it’s own merits, it attracted as many as two paying moviegoers, of which one was my aunt. And this was after what I’d say was decent local press coverage, on television, in radio and in the printed press.
Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed. Some rational analysis later, this was hardly surprising, even though we’d hoped for more. The film had a niche subject, puppeteering, which was little known about locally, featured an up-and-coming star in this field, which were little known outside theatrical circles – and to top it, it was a documentary film. Apparently, documentaries never do very well in theatres (with the rare exception).
This was what I call an eye-opener to me. What may have been latent knowledge before then, was then crystal. It was clear to me, that I couldn’t rely on any traditional distribution channel, such as movie theatres, for my work – and nor for financing my work, if I wanted to continue to do the kind of non-mainstream creative works I wanted to do.
At the same time I released the film on the bittorrent-indexsite The Pirate Bay, from where the torrent spread to other torrent-indexsites. Also the official FilmTrain DVD (which was free) was later leaked to the bittorrent network. While none of these files were ever big hits on the torrent networks, the traffic they brought from as far away as Greece and Japan revealed new avenues of distribution. Gargantuan amounts of data were transported to far away places – not with the speed of light – but comparatively hazzle-free, for such a young technology. It was in fact possible to distribute large amounts of data to the other end of the world with comparative ease and very little cost. It was clear, there were problems. Lots of problems. At one point I managed to send 13 GB or so across the Atlantic. It took 14 days or so to do it, though. With just two people connected, this was not the economical method of doing this, but it still amazed me. Shipping this amount of data from a home computer to another through the internet was unthinkable just 5-10 years ago. Eventually I got tired of seeding myself, which basically made the torrents unavailable (and they are so now, not just this film, but most of the stuff I put up there). But the possibility existed. We “just” needed some method to pay for the bandwidth and hosting. We needed to make it even easier.
I can’t possibly go back to directing and producing a film, before I get to a point where I can rely on the architectures of it’s distribution to actually bring the film to those interested in it, and give me a decent living from it, which helps finance my work. Sending a film in 100 physical copies to 100 different film festivals around the world can’t do this for me, it’s only further expenses. Now, we have a global, open architecture of distribution at our feet. We “just” need to tweak and improve the tools at our hands to enable us to create new business models.
I can’t publish my work online without a method of making a living from what I do. I found back then, that there were a ton of videosites and p2p networks which enabled internet users to distribute their stuff. Yet, amazingly none took seriously aim to crack what I increasingly saw as “the niche producer’s problem”; financing, and what’s going to get a niche production financing : increased and targeted visibility towards it’s niche market. I also found that there were lots of methods to put advertising on one’s website – and earn a dime doing so. But what if you don’t have a website? What if you don’t want to become entangled in online advertising, but would rather go about your business doing what you do well? Or what if you can attract so little traffic, that it isn’t really worth your while? I found none which were interested in appealing to niche markets, on what I refer to as “the slim end” of the long tail. This was the situation Kaplak was founded to remedy. Not just for myself, but for anyone for whom this resonates.
Bootstrapping the Long Tail in Peer to Peer
Bernardo Huberman and Fang Wu from HP labs have just released a paper describing a way to help P2P networks deal well with niche content. “It is difficult to satisfy the diversity of demand without having to resort to client server architectures and specialized network protocols… We solve this by creating an incentive mechanism that ensures the existence of a diverse set of offerings regardless of content and size. While the system delivers favorite mainstream content, it can also provide files that constitute small niche markets which only in the aggregate can generate large revenues.”
Going to dive into the research of Huberman and Wu during the following days, as their work seem to complement the thinking about p2p incentives we’re doing in Kaplak. This is what I call important stuff.
I found this classic Disney cartoon on YouTube, which is a wonderful source for videos like this; short, classics, fun. It will no doubt later be removed by the YouTube admins at the request of the copyright owners, as I’ve experienced it countless times before with this kind of material, so enjoy it while you can. Thankfully, fans never cease to upload new versions of videos like this again later.
Let me take this opportunity to take a quick look at the landscape we meet today as cultural niche producers.
The merits of metadata
One of the great merits of YouTube has been to blur and erode the sharp distinctions of copyright on the internet. When I post the video above on this blog, the material is nowhere near the webservers, which host this site. It is all orchestrated by metadata, passing between our site, your computer and YouTube. Before YouTube, most would be very careful about posting a video like this on a website. Now, few would object to it. Piracy, as the entertainment industry defines it, has moved from underground p2p networks into the broad open.
Bittorrent index-sites such as The Pirate Bay has found the orchestration of metadata to be a powerful blow against the forces, who want to keep cultural distribution the way it’s always been. The torrent-files of the bittorrent protocol contain only metadata, which can be freely published and copied by anyone. The metadata consists of pointers to material on the user’s computers, exchanged only with other computers which ask for access to the material, using the client software, which reads the information contained in the torrents and takes care of orchestrating the traffic of the real data.
Thus, with their emphasis on metadata, services such as YouTube and decentralized distribution tools such as bittorrent has made it easy to distribute popular material without being hampered too much by copyright concerns. Finding this kind of stuff is easy, simply search for it, using the sites’ own built-in search mechanisms, or a general web search engine such as Google.
But it is not so easy, if you’re either looking for a product or material, which is less popular, or if you are a producer of a niche product looking for a solution to solve your distribution problems. First, you can only search for what you know about, and you must actively perform a search for it. Second, the niche producer must perform a great effort to make you as a customer “know” his product before you can search for it.
Google’s Ads
There are two solutions to this problem so far. The first is to use mass media-like advertising, on the web (banner ads) or in other media. The second is to use more direct marketing tools. In the latter category, Google has sought to refine current solutions elegantly, with their Google Ads offering. In short, Google’s ad program couples advertisers’ keywords (Adwords) with users’ searches as well as websites signing up for the ads (Adsense). This means that Google’s ads (theoretically) become far more meaningful to the user (actively searching for information), than the dumb banner ads meeting every visitor on the same site, without differentiating between those interested and those who aren’t.
We’ll take a closer look at Google’s ad services at a later stage, but it is worth noting just a few things about their model. It presumes, that “search” is the way people find information on the web. It presumes that the web consists of meaningful, differentiated entities called websites. It is difficult to see, if the model is capable of differentiating between different types of products, or if it treats all the same. The model is good for niche products, in the sense that it reaches the users, who actively search for information about them. The obvious drawback for the niche producer is that he or she will have to pay up front, before any product has been sold (pay per click/view), and that he or she will have to invest a lot of time in creating and administrating a website and a payment system, in order to ‘monetize’ the traffic the ads bring in.
Bittorrent
Bittorrent provides a brilliant, decentralized distribution method, but it comes without tools to make products seen or charged for, which makes it less of an ideal solution, unless matched with other methods to create visibility and earn money (from traffic, for instance).
Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer technology, which allocates resources on a p2p network very effectively, by utilizing locally excess bandwidth and harddrive space. But, just as no method exists to charge for access, no method exists to provide incentive to continually host and seed files, especially files, which are less commonly in demand. This means, that while bittorrent is an effective, decentralized method of distributing large files, most torrents, which are less than popular, become “dead”, once the initial interest has faded. This leaves later peers emptyhanded and with no obvious way to obtain the material. Additionally, the bittorrent index-sites inherit the notion of “search” as the key to finding information. This means, that niche torrents are even harder off, as no method exists within the bittorrent model to make torrents more or less visible or known by peers, to make them able to search for them. Of course, if one utilizes bittorrent as a distribution model, one could easily match bittorrent with Google’s ad offerings. But this, then, leaves a producer with only expenditure, no income method, apart from what Adsense or other sideshow-income streams may pay.
For p2p networks, step one may have been to come out in the open, to publicize these vast indexes of mostly copyrighted material openly on the web. Now, step two must be to start finding ways to make it easy to utilize p2p networks as proper distribution channels.
In each their ways, these two examples contribute pieces to an image facing an online niche distributor, of which the key challenges are visibility and financing. The first installment of Kaplak will seek to answer these two challenges before others. What do you think? What are the primary challenges meeting you, as a niche producer using the internet?
