Deb's SM Survey:

I’m going out of town for a few days, but I’ll throw out links to a couple of interesting articles I’ve read to keep you busy while I’m away.

First, a student’s Facebook group to track progress on a civil unions bill in Illinois has become an effective tool for activism. The group now has 9,000 members. Like many of these online activism efforts, it wasn’t started by anyone formally affiliated with any organization. Which makes these efforts both more amazing and, possibly, more ephemeral. Without the collected wisdom of an organization behind it, will these spontaneous efforts eventually reach a limit to their effectiveness? We’ve barely begun to harness the power of the web for activism, but many people much smarter than I, like Clay Shirky, have begun exploring this question already.

Second, via Slog, comes an item about a new web 2.0 initiative for writers. Authonomy (now in private beta), run by Harper Collins, allows aspiring authors to post excerpts of their work for voting and commenting by the community. I may have to give this site a try. They can’t be more critical than some members of writing groups I’ve been in (yes, it was constructive criticism). You can read more at the Authonomy blog.

I went to hear Clay Shirky speak about his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. Shirky explores the “ridiculously easy group forming” inherent in the internet, and how this has the potential to radically change society. Now that many groups can assume that all their members are online, these groups can use the internet to assist in more complicated activities.

Shirky sets up a hierarchy of online group function, with increasing levels of coordination required. The first is simple sharing, then conversation, then collaboration, with collective action the final rung on the ladder. In his talk, Shirky gave fascinating examples of online collective action, from a movement to create an airline passengers’ bill of rights to the use of flash mobs for political protest in Belarus.

This stage is in its infancy, however, and there is still no formula for successful online-based collective action. (In fact, as the subtitle of Shirky’s book suggests, successful online collective actions right now are not spearheaded by traditional organizations which might have the ability to formalize the process.)

The potential for new ways of initiating successful collective action was one of the dreams that got me interested in the internet and social media to begin with, and its exciting to think that the journey is just beginning.

Another beginning that I’m keeping an eye on is Totspot, a new social publishing site for babies and parents that just announced its private beta. I met some of the Totspot team through the local Web Innovators group, and its exciting to see their launch, complete with a write up yesterday in Techcrunch. Good luck, Totspot.

Reading the comments on the Techcrunch article, including parents who buy domain names for their babies and start blogs there (hoping the kids will take them over someday), really drives home the changes that are occurring. We already have a millennial generation with different norms around privacy, technology, and work. Once we have a generation in which online group forming and participation has literally been part of their lives from birth, will we see an even more radical shift toward constant networking, openness and immediate content gratification? What will the discussion of internet-based collective action look like in 2026, when the first Totspot kids are 18?

(Will they laugh at today’s fledgling efforts? Or celebrate today’s pioneers? I can’t wait to find out.)

A new discovery in my research has been the New Media Consortium (NMC), an organization spurring creativity and innovation with many academic, artistic, and corporate partners.   They are putting on a Symposium on the Future of Communication  on December 4-5, 2007.  The location is in Second Life, but there is a still a registration fee.

Another site that looks promising at a quick glance is fuel4arts, an artists’ marketing site.  Free registration is required to access the materials; a cross-section of creative endeavors are represented with lots of useful information available.

The NMC site led me to the wiki for a workshop “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story.”  The wiki includes a list of 50 free tools that can be used to combine audio, video, images, and sometimes cartoons.  A slide cast summary is also available.

I admit my Facebook profile is boring (but go ahead and friend me, anyway).  But with all the controversy over Facebook’s new Beacon advertising program  I’m glad I didn’t take the time to list every band or movie I like.  Who owns this data, and how can users take control back?  Among the many commentators on this issue,  Jason Calacanis and Doc Searls weigh in with two valuable and somewhat different perspectives.

(Which is how I found out that Doc’s role as a Berkman Center fellow is to head a project on Vendor Relationship Management.  How cool is that?)

I went to a great event tonight, a kickoff to MIT’s Future of Entertainment 2 Conference. Co-executive producer and writer Jesse Alexander and transmedia specialist Mark Warshaw from the TV show Heroes were at MIT to discuss the show and how they use transmedia elements.

I haven’t watched the show – yet. But I was impressed by what I learned at the panel and the commitment of the Heroes’ team to ensure that all products fit into the show’s cannon properly. They also discussed the balance between creating a multi-episode serial structure versus an episodic structure for more casual viewers. With the popularity of DVRs (they claim over 20% of their audience use one) and online viewing or downloading, complex stories can be taken in at the viewer’s own pace. But the networks are still focused on the broadcast audience.

The Heroes’ universe contains far more than the show, with multiple official websites featuring comics, interactive novels, games, webisodes, background mythology and more. A printed graphic novel is also available (and there are other products, like novels and video games, either in production or already available). Some characters were designed specifically to be utilized primarily on the web or in other spinoffs, not on the TV show.

On the economic side, this expansion of the story into many different forms is paying off. Advertisers are not only demanding product placement in the show, but also an online presence. This has included sponsorship that covered the production costs of online webisodes. (Commenting on the motivations behind the current writers’ strike, Alexander and Warshaw noted that most of these expansion materials are considered “promotional” and the writers don’t get any residuals from their sales or from advertising revenue associated with them.)

This transmedia approach is still new and changing rapidly. Networks are beginning to adapt on a national level, but haven’t yet realized that the internet means all shows have a global audience the moment they go on the air (or the net) in one country.

This discussion will be available in various forms from MIT. The official NBC page for the show is a great way to start your exploration if you’re a new fan, as I suspect I will be very shortly.