The main problem they’re addressing is the atomization of information and how it gets delivered on the Web. You know how it goes: We get pinged every second by micro-updates, snippets and interruptions, all often arriving without context or background. The result? Everything becomes noise. Ads, it turns out, annoy us to the point of anger.

Here’s the report’s big-picture fix to this problem: To cut through the clutter of the Internet, we need to abandon one-way missives, and embrace two-way conversations that inspire loyalty and trust.

Sounds good, but sounds hard, too. I’m not even sure how you define what a conversation is. Being deeply authentic in any one-on-many conversation is nearly impossible, no matter how open you are to comments and submissions. And how much time can a company realistically invest in responding to every individual’s question and comment (there is of course a limit, unless you push the work, I mean conversation, onto a network)? But maybe that’s not the goal. And I have a suspicion that most consumers will provide sarcastic floggings of any brand trying to use authenticity and friendly chats in the service of making sales. Because that is the result that companies pay marketers for, right?

In the process of this research, the mad scientists discovered a strong consumer demand for, as mentioned above, two-way conversations that are transparent and honest. People “seek a new relationship that is built on trust, not simply on the value of the content or advertising itself.” (pages 4-5).

This idea is described as not just a communication technique, but a new communication environment – a new context for chit chatting about your favorite vacuum cleaner. That environment gets a name: Communitas, with which there “is no such thing as one-way communication.” The transition to this environment is perhaps the answer to a Web world that has left me a bit rattled.

A lot of this is confirming what many media freaks already suspected, so my questions after reading the report are along the lines of, “OK, but how do you actually do this in terms of cost, time, authenticity and efficacy?” The report does go into the AP’s specific efforts to do so around news on page 59 (AP’s engagement model), but I’ll let you dig into that.

Here are the general recommendations:

1. Match Your Organization’s Principles to the Attributes of Communitas
   > How do your strategies, products, ser- vices and people fare in terms of collaboration, adhering to the social contract, developing kinship, reciprocity and relevance?
2. Create Environments for Communitas to Break Out
   > The solution is not just to create more engaging content. The solution is to create better environments for engaging with content.
3. Embrace the Challenge, No Matter the Size of Your Organization
   > Information companies and advertisers of all sizes should benefit from strengthening their relationship with the audience.
4. Parting Thought: Give Real Communication a Chance
   > Whether you are a student of anthropology or not, the message from this research is that a new path is opening for both

And the ad folks were inspired to come up with the campaign Stop the Adness. Its principles:

1. Collaboration – We must work with the marketplace — coming together with mutual respect for each other’s roles — to determine what more effective communication looks like.
2. Social Contract – The unwritten code that defines our behavior has been broken by advertisers, agencies and the media. We must show consumers that with their help we can rebuild it.
3. Kinship – We must recognize mutual respon- sibility and accountability within the marketplace as a means toward building better communication.
4. Honesty – Marketing spin and hype will no longer be tolerated in the new communications landscape, so we must be honest and transparent.
5. Reciprocity – Good communication requires give and take; so we must listen and respond accordingly.
6. Relevance – The market will listen when our message is relevant and targeted; so we must do more to better craft our messages.
7. Information – We must provide solid facts on which to base our communication and advertising.
8. Investigation – We must provide a clear roadmap for people who want to dig deeper.
9. Overload – We must be careful how much and how often we communicate so as not to overload consumers.
10. Sharing – When our information and ad- vertising is shared we will know we are doing our job right.

For about $1,300, the ad (see 3:01 point):

1. Showed 7 times on Glenn Beck episodes
2. Ran 54 times on four cable networks
3. Picked up 1.3 million total views
4. Generated more than 1,000 visitors to vcantellyouwhy.com, a site they set up to track the ad’s efficacy

Here is the ad and a description of its creation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As the narrator says at about 3:19, “The advertising industry won’t crumble overnight. But it’s easy to see that the barriers to entry have been lowered. And it might not be long before you’re promoting your blog or your punk band or your line of Christmas ornaments with an ad campaign on national TV.”

Yep, the Web again puts the tools of distribution into the hands of the people who need them, reducing the cost and inefficiency of using a middle man.

If you don’t have the time or skill to create your own ad, Google will find someone to do it in its ad creation marketplace. I see an opportunity here with the slow turnaround times of even the simplest ads; one firm needed 7 days to supply a roughly $500 montage of images with bad text.

Would it be possible, for example, to leverage your personal or business’s network to make an ad of satisfied customers? You know, Customer A does a short Web cam clip of saying how great your product is. Customer B repeats. So on and so forth.  To see how one band did just this for a music video, check out this post I wrote about it: To make your media masterpiece with the masses, divide projects into specific steps.

Of course, SlateV’s video about the process itself is an even better ad for the site than the one it made for national TV. That’s for a couple of reasons that demonstrate why “advertising” needs to become more like journalism:

1. It does not overtly attempt to persuade; it respects my time and attempts to provide information; it is helping me, not (overtly) manipulating me; it is “how to,” not attempted hypnosis
2. It is open to sharing and embedding; as a result, SlateV gets linked to from this blog

However, if this CamChat clone  were restricted to registered users on your site, you might be able to produce a targeted conversation channel.

So, for example, on the flyingflashlight.com/yogurtwatchers page (so sorry, it doesn’t really exist), registered yogurt watchers could randomly connect with others in a video chat room.

Larry Magid at the Safe and Secure blog on CNET wrote about this concept.

Again and again, I see it demonstrated that technical capabilities are quickly reproduced and spread across the Web. It’s like a gigantic toolbox that everyone can use to push their content however they want. So is software the path to making it big? Perhaps, if you’re first to market. That allows you to build a community around a particular type of service (like microblogging) before anyone else. The community (audience) later becomes the main value of the service. You can extract data from the community’s activities, then supply that information to others for a price.

To simplify, here’s the formula for modern Web businesses:

1. Make nifty (and free) tool that allows people to communicate and share information on the Web
2. Gather data about that tool’s users and their messages and activities
3. Sell that information to others

I expect we’ll soon see Chatroulette offer its technology — and audience — to other Web sites as some sort of embeddable feature. Twitter recently announced its own version of this.

Of course, you can have all the talky talk gizmos in the world, but people need something to communicate about. That’s where content providers come in. The interesting thing is that everyone is a content provider now, and every moment of life can be a candidate for being content-inized due to the ubiquity and ease-of-use of these tools.

And for an example of one of the more entertaining uses of Chatroulette:

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Denver journalism students are writing Wikipedia entries as part of a curriculum that stresses online writing and content creation as readers move to the web en masse.”

“‘I see journalism as being completely online within the next two to five years,’ said a journalism instructor at the University of Denver. ‘If you’re not trained to expect that and write for that, then you’re not going to be ready for the work world.’”

Hm. Training for the next “work world” involves producing content for a site that runs on volunteer labor.

I expect journalism as a career path to more and more go the way of the fine arts. It will, like painting or creative writing, become much more a mostly unpaid pursuit of passion that occasionally blooms into something financially rewarding if your piece of work happens to raise enough interest (and you’re able to work incredibly hard and long without a promise of any monetary payment). It will go from holding down a position as a human factory of regular content to a floating freelance dance responding to requests or praying for a hit. From marketing to connecting. From telling to conversing. From self-expression to self-positioning. From performing to channeling. From exploiting to evolving. From audience to collaborator.

On the campus of Penn State University, a rivalry between a rogue campus blog and the official newspaper has become a fascinating mirror of the strife between old and new media.

Don’t look at old and new media, look at old and new media customers. What does each want? Are they distinct? Can one organization provide everything? Oh, and why is the blog described as “rogue”?

Onward State happily promotes a competitor’s story with direct links, while The Collegian questions the very logic of such a strategy. …  A symbolic move which tells readers to “go read our competition” would be devastating to the trust they’ve worked for over a century to gain, according to The Collegian’s editor.

This represents an attitude toward people’s attention. On one hand, “old media” sees attention as something to be captured, exploited and isolated, even to the information disadvantage of the person supplying the attention. “New media” sees attention as something to direct to the greatest information advantage of the person supplying the attention. I believe an information service that best meets a customer’s needs, even at a short-term sacrifice of its business interests, will prevail in the competition for attention (but getting people’s money is a whole other problem; advertising is a business built on failures that in large part no longer exist).

“Money making is not something that we’ve really embraced yet,” said Davis Shaver, founder of Onward State.

Via

In case cookies evaded your understanding, this gizmo simplifies your control of them when it comes to an encounter with a paywall or registration request.

The journalism business was never the content. It was the distribution; it was the channel. Media companies had a road and a dellivery van to people’s minds that nobody else did. Now there is a plethora of roads and the customers are the ones doing the driving; they visit a business whenever they want. Information is easy now. Meaning, always difficult, is even harder.

Via Journerdism

Why did GM put the gas tanks there?

“A review by FairWarning found that at least 100 people have perished by fire since federal authorities dropped an investigation that could have led to the” recall of the C/K, a GM pickup.

Safety is OK, as long as it doesn’t hurt sales?

“More than 10,000 people have been killed in all-terrain vehicle crashes since the 1980s. … ATV manufacturers profess a strong interest in safety, especially for kids, but critics accuse the industry of talking up safety measures, then watching while off-roaders and dealers rise up to kill or water them down.”

A record accomplishment

“Official statistics show remarkable declines in injury rates for workers, not only at Smurfit, but at U.S. companies generally. But the estimates rely exclusively on injury logs kept by employers. Officials cite mounting evidence of gross undercounting, even for injuries as serious as amputations.”

The video archives of the network that records numerous official proceedings of Washington are now online for your streaming and embedding pleasure.

Editor please.

But, no, you can’t download the videos yet. The director of the archives says that option was “on his agenda.” I don’t know of anyone offering a tool to overcome this, like has been done with YouTube.

Until then, enjoy all 64 minutes of the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. Monsieur Biden was there, along with comedian Joe Wong.

There is a reason Steve Jobs kept saying the iPad was like the Internet in your hands. Implied in the statement is a reduction of operationally infinite medium into a discrete package, and businesses sure like discrete units because they fit into neat revenue formulas that don’t require an endless chase after page views in an infinitely expanding advertising space (though, interestingly, Google would seem to like this). The only problem with treating digital goodies like real-world ones is that you rip a good chunk of the Internet’s power right out of its guts. I suspect we will look back upon this era of remarkably free information with envy and awe in the coming decades. Bummer.