The Skinny: Stephen Harper’s Conservative Government has axed the following programs over the course of the past two weeks:

• PromArt, a grant program supporting foreign travel for artists ($4.7 million)
• Canadian Memory Fund, which gives federal agencies money to digitize collections and mount them online ($11.7 million)
• Culture.ca Web portal ($3.8 million)
• Canadian Cultural Observatory ($560,000)
• Research and Development component of Canadian Culture Online ($5.64-million)
• Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund ($1.5 million)
• Audio Visual Trust ($300,000)
• National Training Program for the Film and Video Sector ($2.5 million)
• Trade Routes, supporting international tours by Canadian performers ($7.8 million)
• Northern Distribution Program, which distributes the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network signal to 96 Northern communities. ($2.1 million)

There are many reasons that these cuts are wrong.

They are economically wrong because investing in Canadian cultural infrastructure through programs such as those that have been chopped has proven to be a VERY successful means of creating a nationally and internationally acclaimed cultural industry sector that continues to be a growth area creating jobs, skills and brand recognition for Canada around the world. Those who mistakenly characterize such programs as ‘charity’ for ‘navel-gazing lefty artists’ have no understanding whatsover of the enormous role that Canada’s cultural sector plays in our economy, nor of the fact that the majority of these funds typically support the most mainstream of arts groups.

Supporters of these cuts certainly have no grasp of the significance of Richard Florida’s work on the Cultural Class, in which it is clearly and comprehensively demonstrated that there is a direct correlation between the number of creative professionals in a given city (of which artists are a prominent group, along with tech workers, educators, marketing folks and others) and the overall level of prosperity within that city. In other words, with his detailed statistical study of 30 North American urban economies, Florida proved that contrary to conservative economic dogma (such as that which motivates Harper) the best way to help everybody prosper in the age of networked knowledge is to invest in cultural infrastructure. And this is what is happening in Boston, in Chicago, in Pittsburgh, in Seattle, and all over the UK, where massive investment in urban cultural redevelopment in previously decimated northern industrial towns has yielded an extraordinary cultural and economic renaissance in places like Newcastle and Birmingham. But here in Canada? Here we chop training for the film and television industry, we chop funding for research and development online, we chop our online web portal, we chop the Canadian Memory Fund, and more.

In Canada we chop $2.1 million dollars that paid for the Aboriginal Television Network to broadcast to 96 northern communities. Was this an economic decision? Very difficult to see how it could be. No more than it was an economic decision when Brian Mulroney’s government chopped the entire annual budget for the Native Friendship Centres Radio Network back in the 1980s. How much did we save back then in exchange for eliminating what was a truly cherished institution? A measly $500,000. And today, for our $2.1 million, a drop in the annual surplus budget, we get to chop an essential cultural lifeline and unifying educational tool for native people across Canada. It’s foolish and it’s destructive. And It’s wrong.

A while back I joined the Canadian Music Creator’s Coalition, an organization of musicians and composers supporting copyright reform from an artist-centric and fan-centric perspective. Led by some famous Canadian musicians, it arose to counter the lobbying efforts of the CRIA (the Canadian Recording Industry Association), which is dominated by corporate interests that parrot the predatory and exploitative verbiage of its mothership, the RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America), such as supporting the suing of kids who share mp3s.

More recently, I left the CMCC as a protest against that organization’s baffling endorsement of a terrible copyright reform plan put forward by the Songwriter’s Association of Canada. There are a lot of problems with the Songwriter’s plan, chief among them:

1. According to the proposal “Virtually all sharing on the internet and wireless devices would be tracked. ” The privacy issues here are obvious and profoundly concerning. Is there anybody that wants every file they share to be tracked by law? What kinds of slippery slope does this place us on? Strike # 1.

2. The plan proposes the imposition of a $5 universal user fee to be added to every Internet user’s account that would then be divvied up by ‘the music industry’ based on whose files were shared most often. This would be an administrative, technical and public relations nightmare. It is so backwards-looking that it amazes me that anyone would take it seriously. Strike #2.

3. Clause 8 of the proposal says: “the amount of income generated annually could adequately compensate the industry for years of declining sales and lost revenues”. But is this for artists or for the majors? Moreover the plan never mentions how or on what basis the cash that would be generated would be divvied up. Who gets what share? ‘The ‘devil is in the details’, as every one who has ever negotiated a deal knows, which makes it all the more surprising that the CMCC supported this plan. Strike #3 and this proposal is out.

I made my feelings known to the CMCC but they stuck to their guns, so I left. And while it’s no great loss to the CMCC, I admit, I do want to let people know that despite their positive intentions, this organization is heading in a dangerous and largely unhelpful direction.

I mention this because I just joined another copyright reform group, one founded on Facebook by Michael Geist. The group is dedicated to defeating the apalling and alarming copyright legislation that the Conservative government of Canada is about to introduce. I am all for defeating this bill, which is based (remarkably, after all that we have learned since it was passed) on the USA’s disastrous Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998.

But while I know what the group is against, given my recent experience with the CMCC, I can’t help wondering what we are all for.

One thing at a time I guess. Our immediate need is to stop this legislation in its tracks. But if we succeed, it will be interesting to see whether the same sort of common ground can be found in favour of truly progressive copyright reform.

I’ve been part of a terrific listserv for a couple years now. For those of you too young to remember listservs, they are an old-fashioned email-based form of community forum, many of which still thrive in the e-hinterlands, including the this one, run by the Institute for Distributed Creativity. And it rocks.

A lot of very very smart people contribute to it and the conversations tend to very sophisticated, very informed and often very provocative. Ok, I will admit that I do my part to make sure the provocation quotient remains comfortably in the red.
Which brings us to a most excellent thread that has been running on the list for the past couple of weeks. It’s titled “Immaterial Labor and Life Beyond Utility” and I’ve contributed several posts to the thread. We’re hashing out some fascinating ideas relating to the character of the socially networked ‘experience economy’, its relationship to wealth and to the environment, to Marxism, to “sovereign media’, the Italian mercato, the French philosopher George Bataille, the mechanics of YouTube and beyond. Very interesting stuff. For me it has been an excellent forum to articulate some of the theoretical issues underlying our new secret project, which is definitely plugged into the ‘experience economy’.

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of proud of some of my posts, but rather than simply pasting them in here, where they would be out of context, here’s a link to the iDC thread archive, where you can find the entire discussion. If you’re interested in the topics mentioned above, check it out here.

Last week I saw a play called The Four Horsemen Project at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa. Created by Toronto’s Volcano Theatre, the play has received rave reviews both here in Ottawa and during its recent run at Factory Theatre in Toronto. I’d like to comment a bit on the play, and also point out how it connects - somewhat tangentially, but significantly - to social media.

The play is a fun, energetic and hyper-kinetic tribute to the legendary Canadian performance poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen. This was a group of 4 poets (bpnichol, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery and Rafael Barreto-Rivera) who studiously and ecstatically explored the limits of human vocal communication in a poetic context throughout the 70s and early 80s.

As someone who has also spent many years exploring the same fertile terrain as a poetic performer, the Four Horsemen were always an inspiration to me. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to perform and record with the amazing soundsinger Paul Dutton on several occasions, and count him as a fine friend. (Hi Paul!) For what it’s worth, I also once won a poetry battle with bpnichol, but that’s a story nobody knows and I won’t recount here. Regardless, the point is that these guys were true poets - vocal angels and vocal demons, seekers, soothsayers and shit-disturbers - and as a result, despite a sudden and belated interest in their work due to this new play, they were by and large avoided and ignored, like all real poets, in their day. Basically, they scared the shit out of most people, even tho they inspired, enthralled and enraptured many others. That’s inevitably how it is with poets, the real ones anyway, til they are dead (R.I.P. bp) or disbanded.

As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog, I believe that oral communication technologies are extremely relevant to our understanding of digital communication technologies. In other words if social media is all about ‘conversations’, then it makes sense to seek to understand the familiar dynamics of oral conversations as a means of gaining insight into new digital conversational models. More than this, I feel that the two technologies share fundamental commonalities that distinguish them from literate communication technologies, and that as a result oralists and digitalists need each other. They actively need to be allies if either hopes to fend off the predatory tactics of literate capitalists seeking to enslave the digital realm (via WIPO and copyright, via Geolocking content, via DRM, via penalties for sharing, etc.) as they have colonized oral cultures (a quick review of the legal clampdown on sampling in HipHop would be very relevant here, as would an examination of the negligible legal value of hearsay - i.e. hear-say as trumped by texts, writs, deeds, contracts, etc.).
All of this is to say that those people who push the limits of oral communication are important, they are juggernauts exploding hegemonic literate norms and positing radically new models of engagement, expression and communion. The Four Horsemen were ahead of their time, as were peers like John Giorno (another brilliant poet-friend and a wise and beautiful man) and his lower-east side poet’s posse, which included the likes of Patti Smith, David Johansen, Jayne Cortez, and his roommate, William S. Burroughs.
But it may be that their day has come, that a playful polyvocal poetics of improvisation, of dynamic digital engagement vs. static mechanical textuality, is on the horizon. It may be that the blogosphere, chat, messenger and the rest do not represent a pathologically pointless logorrhea, as some fear, but rather a liberatory linguistic lasciviousness, a collective rush to babble, to squawk, to sing - together. No longer fearing The Four Horsemen in their bardic beards, but becoming ourselves The 4 billion babblers of the networked talkalypse, making meaning, making media, making money.

We shall see.

I was sent an email recently that was written by Mark Surman, Director of Telecentre.org, with the subject heading: Get involved: Help create new Community Media Foundation from CTV / CHUM merger. The gist of the email was an appeal to Canadian new media activists to lobby the feds to promote the idea that the merger of two of Canada’s largest online and broadcast content players should only be approved if accompanied by a commitment to invest substantially in community media in Canada. This is a great idea and should be supported. The email includes a form letter that you can personalize and instructions about how to send it to the CRTC. Hit me back and I’ll forward it to you if you are interested in learning more.

I think community media is in dire straits in Canada at present and that the CRTC has a responsibility to be proactive in addressing the profound lack of leadership in this area, particularly with regard to online content. One of the great incongruities of online macro-economics is the disincentive Canadian access players (i.e. cablecos and telcos who own Canada’s broadband infrastructure) have in investing in Canadian content. See, in radio and TV, there is a symbiotic relationship between content producers and content distributors. Without the artists and labels, radio cannot survive. And similarly, without TV producers, broadcasters can’t operate. But this basic interdependence breaks down in the online sphere, where the broadband ISPs can sell access to the entire www without feeling any impulse to invest in the creation of content. And by and large, they don’t. When it comes to creating Canadian content champions online, as we have done in music and TV and film, Rogers’ track record, dating back to the days of Wave, @Home and Excite all the way up to the present, is pitiful, dwarfed only by Bell’s brainless lethargy for pure backwardness and stultifying disinterest in Canadian content, community-driven media and p2p creativity.

8 years ago I created a non-profit called the Community Media Lab that produced a number of online projects with street kids and other young folks. Since then the void in this area has only become more and more obvious, and yet almost nothing is being done to address it. When Alan Rock’ $3.5 billion Telecommunications Highway initiative was disemboweled by Paul Martin we lost a huge opportunity. It wasn’t a good plan, containing a measly $50 million for community media, but it was a start. Today Canada is wasting its global competitive advantage as a multilingual, educated and supremely wired environment because of the failure to invest in those strengths. Community media is one important area in which Canada could easily become a global leader, but our complacency and greed is blinding us to the necessity and the opportunity to look ahead, look around and look within. But there’s still a chance to turn things around. Let’s see if we can’t use our networked power to inspire some movement at the political level.

Finally, it’s back to my blog! The past few months have been brutal as far as workload - which is of course good - but bad news for blogging! I have a slew of topics I’m going to try to get to over the next couple weeks but first off just a quick announcement that I’ll be moderating a panel at ICE 2007 in Toronto on March 21. It’s a discussion with Joseph Pilotta of BIG Research and Bill James of The James Gang Advertising called Tipping, Slipping and Tripping:The Power – and Perils – of Word of Mouth Advertising. Here’s the descriptive blurb in the program:

Viral Marketing and Community Building have long promised to be the new “secret weapon” for online communities. And there have been some outstanding successes. But there have also been some failures that reveal that viral marketing can greatly amplify the power of Negative Word of Mouth. Is Word of Mouth the best thing since the invention of the ice cube tray? Or is it a slippery strategy that can lead to a tipping point – or a tripping point?

Can social media lead to a PR backlash? That’s certainly one of the big fears of clients considering taking the p2p plunge. We’ll hash it out at ICE. Hope to see you there…

This may be the first time anyone has ever tried to link two such disparate practices as jazz and Public Relations, but bear with me a bit and I think you’ll see that the comparison is useful and revealing.

The first principle of jazz is: “mean what you say”. If you cannot commit yourself completely to a musical statement, if you cannot breathe yourself fully into your sound, your solo, your story - then you will fail as a jazz musician. You have to believe in yourself before others can believe in you.

Now this principle runs directly counter to the popular notion of the public relations practitioner as a ’spin doctor’, i.e. as a shill, a sophist whose duplicitousness is a given and whose silvery speech and sly strategies are sold to the highest bidder without ethical consideration.

I’m not going to argue that such spin doctors aren’t real. Obviously they are, and I despise them as much as any citizen should. But I will argue that there is another model, an emerging model, for public relations practice, that is aligned more closely to the core principle of jazz expression: “mean what you say”. I will even go so far as to argue that in the era of instant access to all information, this emerging model should be considered a ‘best practice’ in the PR industry.
The model I’m referring to is one based on the understanding that stories define a business organization. The stories that are told by employees to each other about their company, that are told by customers to each other, told by management to staff, told by marketers to the public, told by executives at conferences, told by the media - a company’s reputation, its business objectives, its brand, its products and services, its recruiting and much much more, are all deeply bound up in this matrix of living stories that are told by and about a company. Someone needs to be thinking about those stories - as coherent meaningful forces and not as shallow fragments to be manipulated - within an organization, or else this vital factor shaping the success or failure of a business burns like a wild fire out of its control.

In other words, every organization needs a Chief Storytelling Officer who considers how stories work their way through an organization’s ecosystem (internal and external, top to bottom) and ensures that their impact is as positive as possible. And in this age of unprecedented transparency and global communication that means ‘not bullshitting’, i.e. not relying on spin, not trying to fool people with phony promises or silly distractions or lame excuses. Because people see through that today. As a professional culture, employees today are too empowered as communicators (with our blogs, emails, TVs, phones, etc.) and too media savvy to be easily taken in by old-style PR. Unless you ‘mean what you say’ your stories will be dismissed as bumpf and your business will suffer on many levels.

People want to be given the straight goods. And they know when they aren’t. And increasingly, they aren’t taking it any more. They are talking back, through the countless channels available to them. And any business that thinks those conversations don’t matter is just plain dumb. And as more and more young workers who have grown up expressing themselves and sharing information without restrictions enter the workforce, expectations of transparency will only increase.

Because the No Logo folks have it wrong. Kids by and large aren’t against branding, against logos for life. They just want to know that the brand is honest, that it is what it claims to be in its marketing. And they won’t give their allegiance to brands that can’t walk the talk. Nor to employers. “You must mean what you say,” is pretty much their motto. And it’s not a bad one either.
So what I’m suggesting is that the emerging role for public relations is that of an individudal or profession charged with managing the stories that shape an organization, and ensuring that they accurately reflect the life and purpose of the business. Which means that to some extent this person becomes, rather than a dishonest spin doctor, an ethical watchdog (to borrow a phrase from my colleague Stephen Heckbert) who actually works to see that the stories that are peddled (i.e. we are a customer-centric innovative and creative company) are not bogus pap but are actually standards to which an organization can and must aspire. And in so doing he (or, of course she) gives those stories legitimacy, the company ‘means what it says’ and as a result wins on numerous fronts. (Hey, we really are customer-centric and innovative now!).

So once again, jazz comes to the rescue, offering a model for progressive and profitable business practices. Once again, The Talking Shop explains how to make meaning, make media and make money. See ya next time!

Now that I’ve had a chance to get a few initial posts up on this blog it’s time to get down to business. I want to start by stripping the web down to its most essential level so that we can all see what is really going on , and why. Here is a an extremely simple idea that should be the basis for every single web-based application, campaign or website, but that seems very difficult for many people to grasp, and even more so to apply. The most fundamental principle of the Internet is:

What Works is Enabling Exchange

What this means is that successful web applications are almost always about helping people connect to one another. They enable exchange. After all, that is the end and purpose of networks. They are for sharing and connecting. And there are a zillion examples of this. Off the top of my head I can think of

• email
• hyperlinks
• web browsers
• search engines (Yahoo, Google, etc.)
• chat apps like MSN Messenger
• message boards/forums
• listservs
• World of Warcraft
• Runescape
• Skype
• YouTube
• MySpace
• Flickr
• del.icio.us
• eBay
• Napster
• Torrents
• Blogs

And the list goes on and on…In other words, most of the basic elements of the Internet as we know it today are tools that were developed to enable people to connect and exchange information.

Seems obvious, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. What’s obvious to most people is that if they invent the next YouTube they have a chance to become billionaires. But for the average CEO whose business is selling stuff - real stuff, not virtual stuff - it is less obvious just how to make use of this principle to increase sales and generate profits.

Well, here’s the answer:

1) identify communities that you engage with (supplier communities, client communities, geographic communities, demographic communities, etc.)

2) build and lightly brand a user-friendly online website themed around your industry that enable members of one or more of your communities to easily connect and exchange information and stories using words, pictures, audio and even video

3) actively promote your site among your target communities in the physical world to build critical mass and to offer people as much as possible a living human bridge to your online space

That’s it. That is the key to successful online marketing. Or at least one way to achieve it. It’s simple. And it’s real. And it works.

For example, if you build sailboats, develop a website that lets people who love sailing exchange sailing pictures, swap information about pleasant harbours and scary shoals, find crew members and learn about boatbuilding. Promote your site at boat shows and major marinas by setting up a video kiosk and asking people “What is the most beautiful (or strangest) thing you’ve ever seen from your deck?” Post their videos on the site and get them to spread the word virally to their friends via email. Invite comments and other stories. Then sit back and watch as your brand becomes more and important, meaningful and far-reaching at very little cost. Watch customers and potential customers become members of your community. And the same applies whether you make boats, clothes (just check out the extraordinary success of www.threadless.com) or anything else that some people somewhere care about.

Of course, you do have to get the design of your online community right. Fortunately that’s where we come in. Drop me a line if you want to make it happen. sobol@76design.com

Steve sent around an interesting link the other day:

http://www.37signals.com/papers/introtopatterns/index.html

It’s an article that seeks to apply to web design the notion of A Pattern Language that was famously and wondrously developed by Christopher Alexander several decades ago in a book of the same name. Alexander’s book (the second of a trilogy actually) was about architecture, but his unique approach to thinking about how we create and use space has spawned a kind of minor cult, of which I’d say I’m a fringe member. Which is only to say that when I first came across Alexander’s book many years ago I was deeply affected by his approach to structuring knowledge via patterns, and it has remained an inspiration ever since, though somehow I keep giving away the copies I obtain and never have one of my own (sigh).

Alexander’s ‘pattern languages’ are sort of worlds within worlds, a way of expressing networked relations between objects so that when you think one you necessarily engage the others. In many ways his book entirely accidentally foresaw the basic structure of the hypertextual web, and has proven useful in devising and managing database taxonomies too (just learned this through a quick google search…google is all about pattern languages too I suppose). When I look at this very blog with its categories and trackbacks and various hierarchies, it too is a kind of pattern language.

Here is a link to a site that offers a surf-able (tho stripped down) version of his book:

http://downlode.org/etext/patterns/

One of the things that the 37signals essay picks up on is what I’d call the ’scribble’ effect that Alexander used, or what maybe is sometimes called back-of-a-napkin thinking. It’s a quick and dirty but amazingly effective way of conveying information and organizing thoughts. Of course it has become a bit trendy too, not always in a good way. I remember seeing the napkin on which Daniel Liebeskind submitted his $170-million design for the Royal Ontario Museum redesign, which he won. but it seems that in Liebeskind’s case his quick-and-dirty approach was really something of a masquerade for a lack of insight and research because the project’s way over budget and has gone back to the drawing board numerous times.

Anyway, I think Alexander’s pattern languages are as useful now as they were when he created them, if not more so. The book is an extraordinary resource for thinking about networks and knowledge and design. Not to mention building a house!