Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:00:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - March 21





                        SuitWatch -- March 21, 2007

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   Dear SuitWatch Reader,

   Enclosed is the March 21st edition of the SuitWatch e-newsletter.  Due
   to a technical error on our part, our text subscribers did not receive
   this issue.  We sincerely thank you for patience and your continued
   readership of SuitWatch and Linux Journal.

   With sincere thanks,
   Doc Searls and the Linux Journal Editorial Team


  A Public Market for Public Radio

   On the one hand, it's a bummer that the new per-song/per-listener royalty
   rates threaten to put Internet radio out of business (at least in the U.S.
   http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000196).  On the other hand, I don't mind
   paying Radio Paradise $.0019 (that's under 2/10ths of one cent) to hear
   Joseph Arthur singing "In the Sun" or to pay the same to RadioKAOS
   (http://www.radiokaos.com)for Jo Jo Gunne singing "Run Run Run". (To name
   two songs I like that are being played right now.) I can afford that.
   What's more, I'd like artists to get paid for their work.  Intermediaries
   too.  And not just by advertisers.

   That's why I'm thinking we can re-frame this whole thing by giving radio's
   consumers an easy way to become customers -- with tools that let them pay on
   a voluntary, a la carte basis for stuff that's available for free but worth
   more than that.

   I'm not talking about doing the RIAA's bidding here.  I'm talking about
   seeing their bet and raising it.  I'm talking about changing the whole game
   by creating a new economy for music on radio that's led by listeners rather
   than followed by them.  I'm talking about solving common problems in ways
   that work for everybody because they're conceived as common opportunities.
   I'm talking about taking the "willing seller/willing buyer" concept out of
   the realm of abstraction and guesswork and making it real and useful.

   This is the first challenge I'd like to see VRM (Vendor Relationship
   Management) developers take up.  I'd like to make it ambitious too.  Let's
   take it beyond streaming alone.  Let's make VRM tools that let us pay for
   all sources and all forms of programming -- including all radio signals,
   streams, downloaded files and contents of files.  (The latter would apply to
   multiple songs found in programs such as Tony Steidler-Dennison's Roadhouse
   Podcasts.)

   It's more than coincidental that the Copyright Royalty Board decided to make
   commercial and noncommercial stations pay the same royalty rates.  No more
   "carve-outs" for CPB-funded stations (which enjoyed special treatment under
   a now-obsolete agreement with SoundExchange -- the RIAA's collection
   agency).  No more special treatment for small webcasters.  Now everybody
   offering valuable free goods is in the same situation, and therefore on the
   same team.  Dark cloud, silver lining.

   First, we need a project name and description.  For now let's call it
   Project Pay4Play, or p4p.  With p4p tools, I should be able to say "I'll pay
   for that" when I hear a song or a program I like.  I want to be able to do
   this with any podcast or stream that I hear on my browser, my mobile phone,
   my PDA, my iPod, my iTunes -- even my car radio.

   As it turns out, p4p already has a meaning that's so close to what we're
   talking about here that I'd like to hijack it for its own good: "pay for
   performance".  As Wikipedia currently puts it,
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P4P)

     P4P is an abbreviation of the term "Pay for Performance".  The concept was
     invented at Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) and later adopted by
     their competitors, most famously Google's AdWords.  Under the model
     advertisers bid on the rights to present a search result for a specific
     search terms in an open auction.  When someone enters a search term that
     has been bid on, the results from the auction on that search term are
     presented, ranked from highest bid to lowest.  It is also referred to as
     Pay per click advertising.

   Not coincidentally, copyright law now comprehends music on Internet radio --
   web streams -- as "performances".  That's what they want somebody to pay up
   to $.0019 for, on a per-listener basis.  The problem with the old p4p
   (described above) is that it's an advertising system.  We're talking about
   putting economic control in the hands of the users, by making them actual
   customers.  But again, on a voluntary basis.

   We can make it voluntary because the goods we pay for are non-coercive.  No
   DRM required.  No distrust or control freakage on the supply side.  No
   scarcity games.  No inventory system with SKUs or barcodes or security guys
   checking packages at the door.  Just free goods, on display for everybody to
   see and use.  Plus something new: the ability, on the user's side, to
   actually pay for usage, at their own discretion.

   And something more: the means to mediate relationships -- with artists, with
   stations, with podcasters, with program producers -- that originate with the
   customer and not with first sources or intermediaries.  In other words, the
   means to scaffold real relationships built on mutual respect and mutual
   interests and not on coercion.  Or, in the case of public broadcasting, the
   belief that a listener is a "member" just because they sent in fifty bucks
   and got back a CD plus an excuse to send junk mail until the end of time.

   Sure, the means are not yet there for doing this.  But how hard will it be
   to put them together? If this were ten or even five years ago I'd say it's
   impossible.  But today there are well over 145,000 open source projects in
   the world, and that's on SourceForge alone.  There are countless open
   standards, countless new and better ways to mash up all kinds of stuff,
   thanks to Web services, open APIs and Lego-like approaches to putting code
   and practices together in useful ways.

   On the supply side every webcast already carries identifying data about
   itself, its programs and about the musical selections it plays.  So does
   every satellite channel on XM and Sirius (which currently have business
   models based on subscriptions and advertising, but there is no reason they
   should be limited to that).  And surprise: so do lots of FM stations.
   Thanks to a standard called RDS, for Radio Data System, stations can carry
   the same kind of identifying data.  This means RDS can be used to provide
   necessary data as digital output to p4p tools.

   On the demand side, there are already ideas from real programmers who make
   useful tools.  For example, here's David Sifry of Technorati
   (http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000481.html):

     I posed a thought experiment: What if we made it really easy to pay for
     things that we liked on public radio and TV? How about using a shortcode
     from your mobile phone to 'vote' on your favorite shows while they're
     playing? Think 'American Idol' style, and you'll immediately see how
     interesting and lucrative this could be.  First off, you're getting your
     listeners and viewers more active, and what they do has an immediate
     effect.  But what also happens is that the people formerly known as the
     audience are then in control - they don't get signed up on a list, they
     don't have to give their name, address, and credit card number .  So here
     was the thought experiment: What if you made a policy that you'd never
     collect or sell personal information about your donors? And what if you
     made it really really easy for people to become donors, like using that
     mobile code to vote for the story they just heard? What if you really put
     the listener in charge?

   And that's just one idea -- one I consider important because we can't limit
   our solutions just to browsers.  We need p4p to work on devices that aren't
   computers.

   At Beyond Broadcast (http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000481.html), one
   of the sixteen working groups
   (http://www.beyondbroadcast.net/wiki07/index.php?title=Working_Groups) was
   Public Radio and Open Source, which pushed forward on open source efforts
   around PubForge.org (http://pubforge.org/).  There a venue already exists
   where efforts can be joined and code can be gathered.  The IMA 2007 blog
   (http://webresources.org/ima2007blog/) has a post titled PBCore for
   publishing, sharing, and preservation
   (http://webresources.org/ima2007blog/2007/02/28/pbcore-for-publishing-sharin
   g-and-preservation/) that loops together RSS, XML, metadata, the Open
   Archives Institute (http://www.openarchives.org/) and PBCore
   (http://www.pbcore.org/), the Public Broadcasting Metadirectory Dictionary.

   Leading up to Beyond Broadcast I spent two days at NPR in Washington
   followed by a week at the Interactive Media Association conference in
   Boston, where I gave the closing talk.  In the course of all this I was
   involved in VRM conversations with folks from NPR, KQED, WXPN, WGBH, PRX,
   Public Interactive, WNYC, Vermont Public Television, ThoughtCast, Jazkarta
   (http://www.jazkarta.com/), IT Conversations, KPBS, WBUR, radeo, Public
   Radio Capital, KUSP, WUNC, Wisconsin Public Radio, North Country Public
   Radio, the Radio Foundation and WAMU -- to name just a few among many.
   Across the board, everybody is ready and eager to move forward.

   Two weeks from today some of the folks in the list above will be meeting at
   the Berkman Center at Harvard to talk about next steps.  Don't worry if you
   can't make it; there will be other opportunities in other locations.  A few
   are Identity Open Space
   (https://events.projectliberty.org/details.php?id=11) in Brussels on April
   26-27;, the Internet Identity Workshop
   (http://www.windley.com/events/iiw2007a/announcement) in Mountain View on
   May 14-16; Supernova (http://www.supernova2007.com/) in San Francisco on
   June 20-22; OSCon (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2007/) in Portland on
   July 23-27.  In some cases (such as the last two), we'll be meeting
   alongside those events rather than inside them.

   Meanwhile, if you'd like to help, join the effort at projectvrm.org,
   pubforge.org or any of the other efforts that are moving in the same
   complementary direction.  We have irons here that need to be struck while
   they're hot.

   And even if it's not your iron, what we'll be doing here will still have
   relevance to any business that needs to actually relate to its customers,
   and not just to harbor data about them for promotional purposes.  Markets
   are going public.  Private silo'd markets are going to be subordinated to
   public open ones.  Customers will lead the way.  VRM is how.

     -- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with
     the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and
     a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
     University.
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