cc  >> Andrew Taylor: I'd like to  introduce you to Doug McLennan,  who's been a good colleague and  friend of mine for many years  now, since he started  ArtsJournal.com in 1999.  I think from almost the moment  you saw it, you knew it was a  game changer, because it was the  first time somebody really  looked seriously at cross  international publications to  look for arts and cultural news,  and commentary, and to create a  site that really was intended to  generate conversation about arts  and culture.  And it was coming at an  extraordinary time, when you can  imagine, arts journalism has  transformed since then,  not because of Doug.  He's a good force in that.  It's really given Doug a  platform, the perspective and  the ability to really make a  difference.  And so Doug, you can see he's  all sorts of things.  He's an arts journalist himself,  written for "Newsweek,"  "New York Times," "LA Times,"  "Wall Street Journal,"  founder of Arts Journal,  and also director of  the National Arts Journalism  Program, which is trying to  re-think how we train and engage  arts and cultural commentary,  professionals who can write well  and speak well.  He's also a concert pianist and  a Juilliard grad, one of their,  what, top 100 outstanding  graduates.  All the others are slackers.  (laughter)  But the top 100 are  extraordinary. 

 So I'm thrilled to introduce  Doug.  I hope he talks a little bit  more about himself.  But this is Doug McLennan.  (applause)  >> Doug McLennan: Thank you.  Thank you.  Is this on?  Can you all hear me?  Great.  First responders, eh, that  sounds like they ought to know  CPR, or something.  Hi, for ten years, I've been  locked in a little room, looking  at 2,000 art stories every day.  And what happens when you do  that, besides knowing,  accumulating an awful lot of  information that not all that  many people are interested in,  you know, ridiculous amounts  about very arcane things.  You start to see ways in which  culture changes in large scale. 

 So, a couple years ago, I  started putting some of these  observations down and talking  about what it is that I see.  So, the name of this talk  is "Arts Journalism 2.0."  As all of you know, probably,  journalism generally is in some  difficulty right now.  Business models are collapsing,  and newspapers are going out of  business.  And so, there's a big change  going on in the media world.  At the same time there is in  culture, generally.  If you look at mass culture  models, television shows,  movies, whatever, the market  share, the audience that you're  able to accumulate with these  formerly mass market types of  publications are losing their  audience on the order of 30%,  40%, 50%.  So it's changing the whole way  in which we get culture, the way  in which we consume culture, and  the ways in which we interact  with it.  By the way, you'll notice at the  top of the screen, there's a  phone number.  Usually, you're used to people  saying, please turn off your  cell phones.  In this case, I'd like you to  keep your cell phone out,  because if you have any  questions along the way, just  text them to me, to that number. 

 And I will interrupt what I'm  saying and answer it, if I can,  in the spirit of being  interactive.  So, one of the things that's  happened in the arts is that 50%  of all arts journalism jobs,  critics, staff jobs in media in  the United States have  disappeared in the last couple  of years.  And we're largely becoming a  freelance occupation.  It's changing the way in which  there's a public discourse in  the arts.  Advertising, just this past  year, has been down anywhere  from 25% to 50%, so that's a  huge game changer for the way  that media is supported.  And there are at least half a  dozen major media companies  right now in bankruptcy.  And it's expected sometime  within the next year that there  will be at least one major metro  in this country that loses its  daily newspaper.  This is a real change in the way  in which we get news.  So, I don't want to dwell on the  bad stuff at this point.  But I do want to suggest some  ways in which it's changing. 

 This is a graphic of the  "Wall Street Journal" in blue,  the "Huffington Post" in red,  and the "Washington Post."  And you can see, actually,  it's turned around a bit.  The "Huffington Post" should be  in yellow at the end.  I don't know how  it got mixed up.  But you can see, the  "Huffington Post" didn't even  exist a couple of years ago.  You can see that just as of this  summer, finally, "Huffington  Post" overtook the traffic  of the "Wall Street Journal."  And you can see the big lump in  the middle is for the election  last year, so everything has  generally trended a little bit  down.  But we now have a series of  media companies that just simply  didn't exist a couple of years  ago.  So this is really changing.  And it's changing the role, the  perception, of what arts  journalism and what critics are.  In the traditional role of  critics, the critic would take a  look at the whole range of  things that were happening, and  focus it through this one  person, and spit it out to an  audience in a lot of different  ways.  And that's not how the world  works anymore. 

 The great thing about the  Internet, is that it doesn't  have any kind of choke point.  It doesn't have a place where  everything has to funnel  through.  It goes in what we call peer to  peer, where it finds the path of  least resistance.  It separates up into little  bits, and then reassembles in  places that you want.  If you think about that in a  cultural model, then, the critic  is actually the choke point, or  one of the choke points.  And so, it's not surprising that  as the culture changes, as the  Internet has changed the  culture, that some things in the  real world start to mimic it.  And peer to peer transmission of  information really changes who  we trust and how we get our  information.  We'll look a little bit at how  people are making cultural  decisions.  These points come from the Curb  Center, which Bill Ivey runs,  and USC Annenberg School Center  for the Digital Future.  How are people making their  choices?  In the 12-24 demographic,  community is at the center of  what it is. 

 It used to be that people went  to the Internet for information.  They went to gather up things.  But the Web 2.0,  in social networking,  actually, people are going  for community.  So, they go to talk to one  another.  They go to interact with one  another, and that's what they  want to use the Web for.  They trust unknown peers more  than experts.  So it's kind of a stake through  the heart of anybody who  believes in the traditional  critic, because it's thought by  many people, that if you  encounter information randomly,  that there's not an agenda  somehow, and it's more  trustable.  It's the first generation that  watches less television than the  generation before it.  And it prefers the online  experience.  And it also does not use email. 

 It thinks that email is for your  parents.  And they're much more likely to  use Facebook and social  networking.  In case you think that's just  for the 12-24 bracket, when you  look at how useful or important  is your online community, the  yellow bars are for people over  the age of 50, and the blue bars  are for under 50.  So you'll see that for extremely  important or very important,  constitutes something like 70%.  And it's actually the fastest  growing demographic on Facebook,  is the over 70 range.  Somebody just asked what the  axis of that first graph that I  showed of traffic.  In the vertical axis was number  of viewers, unique viewers.  And it capped out around a  million.  Then the lower axis was years.  It goes back a year from where  we are now. 

 This next slide shows trust of  media.  So, the idea here is that the  farther this direction, is lower  trust.  The farther this way is high  trust.  Going up, the more editorial  control you have, the higher  people trust you.  The less editorial control that  you allow to your community, the  less they trust you.  So the most trusted stuff, in  the middle there, is your  friends, the Facebook, MySpace,  the social networks, the people  that you get to know.  It's the traditional word of  mouth.  The next ring out is word on the  street, like Yelp or Trip  Advisor.  Then there's City Search,  Amazon, those kinds of anonymous  reviews.  Look at this. 

 The least trusted are things  like the "Wall Street Journal"  and BBC.  Now, is this literally true?  Probably not.  People say they don't trust the  mainstream media, and likely  they do.  But the point I think that this  is trying to make is that people  have a growing expectation that  they should be able to interact  with whatever it is that they  choose to spend their time with.  And they don't like it when  something is simply given to  them, and they're expected to  take it, no matter what.  So if you're able to make it  more of an interactive  experience, they trust it more.  They tend to use it more.  If you want to get a sense of  why this is a really kind of  powerful thing to think about,  this is a graphic that shows  LinkedIn, which is a popular  social network.  And you know those viral videos  everyone talks about going  viral?  Here's the best way to explain  this that I've seen so far.  This person has 334 friends,  which is actually a lot of  friends. 

 And most people who are on the  Internet, they're what we call  lurkers.  They are people who look.  They find something interesting,  and then they move on.  The home run in the Web  department these days, if you're  a Web company, is to get  somebody to contribute something  to your site, either leave a  comment, you know, favorite  something, share something.  It's, they are creating content  for you.  So you want to provoke them  enough that they'll do something  with it.  In this case, if I could,  theoretically, provoke all 334  of my friends, and they all  delivered, passed on my message,  then in one ring, if they do it  to all of their friends, you're  reaching 84,000 people.  And if it's such a compelling  thing, one more ring,  you've suddenly reached  3.5 million people.  Now, that's an incredibly  powerful way of sharing  information.  You can see how quickly viral  stuff can catch on. 

 It doesn't depend on thousands  of people passing, passing,  passing through rings like this.  It's, you can do it, just within  two rings, and reach an  incredible number of people.  So you can see that if you're a  traditional critic, and you're  at this little choke point, that  not only do they trust you less,  but you're ability to spread  information, your ability to  reach a lot of people is simply  less than what you can do on a  social network.  Somebody here is asking, what's  the source of the trust graphic.  That was something that Mashable  developed and put up, which is  where I got it.  It's a social networking blog.  Okay, so, the other kind of  major dynamic that's in play  here, is that once the Internet  got up and going.  The kind of miraculous thing  that happened first, was that it  made accessible everything  that's out there.  Where we are now, 15 or 20 years  into the Internet, is that  there's so much attention, so  much stuff out there, that  people literally feel  overwhelmed with the kind of  stuff that's there.  It's impossible to sort  everything through. 

 Partly what makes Google such a  wealthy company is they at least  help us find the things that we  think that we want.  But most arts organizations,  most artists are still behaving  as though we're in an economy  that runs the old way, where  it's a scarcity issue, right?  We used to be a manufacturing  economy, where we made things,  and whoever made the best  things, they became wealthy.  Then we outsourced all of that  to other countries.  We became a transportation  company.  So if you controlled the  transportation, you were able to  import things.  That was the person, the point  at which you controlled the  economy.  Then we became into the  experience economy, where you  take two cents worth of coffee  beans, put it in a nice package,  in a nice setting, and you can  sell it for five bucks, right?  But we're not in that anymore.  We're in something that we call  the attention economy.  The problem is, that with access  to everything, and the  incomprehensibility, incoherence  of everything, that if you have  so many choices, the problem is  just getting somebody's  attention, getting in front of  somebody.  To be able to deliver whatever  it is that you want is  increasingly difficult. 

 So, pick your favorite product.  Pick a product that you really  use.  How are you going to find it in  that?  That's a really difficult thing.  And imagine if you're a theater  company or an opera company, and  you're turning out a product.  Twenty years ago, you were  probably competing with 15 or  20, 30, or 50 things.  Now you're competing with  thousands of things that people  can do.  And it's a real problem.  The problem of getting traction  in this economy is not because  people don't like what it is  that you have to do, or your  product, it's that they don't  know about it, because there's  just too much stuff.  And more and more, we tune  things out.  The sociologist, Barry Schwartz,  talks a lot about choice, and  how people make choices. 

 And we have more choice now that  we ever had before.  We generally think that choice  is a really, really good thing.  But listen to him talk about it.  >> Barry Schwartz: Escalation of  expectations.  This hit me when I went to  replace my jeans.  I wear jeans almost all the  time.  And there was a time when jeans  came in one flavor, and you  bought 'em, and they fit like  crap, and they were incredibly  uncomfortable.  And if you wore them long enough  and washed them enough times,  they started to feel okay.  So I went to replace my jeans  after years and years of wearing  these old ones.  And I said, you know, I want a  pair of jeans, here's my size. 

 The shopkeeper said, do you want  slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit.  Do you want button fly or zipper  fly.  Do you want stone washed or acid  washed.  Do you want them distressed?  Do you want boot cut?  Do you want tapered?  Blah, blah, blah.  My jaw dropped.  And after I recovered I said, I  want the kind that used to be  the only kind.  (laughter)  He had know idea what that was.  (laughter)  So I spent an hour trying on all  these damn jeans, and I walked  out of the store, truth, with  the best fitting jeans I had  ever had.  I did better.  All this choice made it possible  for me to do better. 

 But, I felt worse.  Why?  I wrote a whole book to try  to explain this to myself.  The reason is...  (laughter)  The reason I felt worse is that  with all these options  available, my expectations about  how good a pair of jeans should  be went up.  I had very low, I had no  particular expectations when  they only came in one flavor.  When they came in 100 flavors,  damn it, one of them should've  been perfect.  And what I got was good, but it  wasn't perfect.  And so, I compared what I got to  what I expected.  And what I got was disappointing  in comparison to what I  expected.  Adding options to people's lives  can't help but increase the  expectations people have about  how good those options will be. 

 And what's that's going to  produce is less satisfaction  with results, even when they're  good results.  Nobody in the world of marketing  knows this.  (laughter)  Because if they did, you  wouldn't all know what this was  about.  The truth is more like this.  (laughter)  The reason that everything was  better back when everything was  worse, is that when everything  was worse, it was actually  possible for people to have  experiences that were a pleasant  surprise.  Nowadays, the world we live in,  we affluent industrialized  citizens, with perfection the  expectation, the best you can  ever hope for is that stuff is  as good as you expect it to be.  You will never be pleasantly  surprised, because your  expectations, my expectations,  have gone through the roof.  The secret to happiness, this is  what you all came for, the  secret to happiness is  low expectations.  (laughter)  >> McLennan: Okay, I mean, but  that's true.  The more you make somebody work  to make a decision, the more  onerous it is for them. 

 They tend to put off that  decision.  You know, you spend all this  time deciding.  You finally decide that you're  going to go to something, and  you spend the whole time  thinking, if I'd gone to the  other thing, I might have had a  better time, right?  This is the tyranny of choice  that makes you less happy than  more happy.  And so, what we end up having is  a kind of incoherency of  information that's so crowded.  And part of this plays into  what's happened now in the  commercial marketplace, where  there are so many ads, there's  so much content out there,  there's so much information out  there, that these things, these  ads, which companies pay a lot  of money to put up, are  increasingly ineffective.  We may, in fact, be at a time  where we're close to the death  of advertising.  Because just getting out there  and intruding on somebody's  space is an annoyance, and it  ends up being to your detriment,  rather than being a positive  thing.  So what some people are trying  to do is create content around  the products that they're  delivering.  So every time you have an  encounter with somebody, whether  it's a theater company, whether  it's a bottle of whiskey, it's a  positive experience.  Maybe not so always. 

 And people are doing it in kind  of an interesting way.  You probably are thinking at  this point, what the hell does  this have to do with arts  journalism.  I'll get there in a second.  But this is a guy called Gary  Vaynerchuk, and he runs a wine  shop in New Jersey.  And about four years ago, he  started a little podcast, a  Webcast video, a daily show,  where he just sits there and  talks about wine.  He now has 80,000 people a day  who check this out.  He took his sales from his wine  shop from $4 million a year to  $60 million a year.  And he talks about wine in such  an offbeat and unusual kind of  way, that he has become a kind  of celebrity himself.  § §  >> Gary Vaynerchuk: Hello,  everybody, and welcome to Wine  Library TV.  I am your host, Gary Vaynerchuk. 

 And this my friends, is the  thunder show, aka the Internet's  most passionate wine program.  Mr. Mott, I'm very excited about  this show.  I have cereal and wine pairings  for maybe three years now.  And I don't know why it's taken  us so long to be the official  what wine pairs with cereal  show, but we've finally done it.  Now, I've not had these wines,  but these are stylistically the  wines that I would pair with  these other cereals.  These are three iconic cereals.  >> McLennan: Okay, so the guy is  unconventional.  (laughter)  But he's enormously  entertaining.  And he has become such a hit  that he's written a book called  "Crush It," and he's now on the  inspirational speaker circuit.  He's become this phenomenon. 

 People like it because he brings  value to them every time they  have an encounter with them.  And that is not to be  underestimated.  What's also interesting about  this is that it allows anybody  with something going on to  become their own radio show, to  become their own TV show, to  become their own magazine,  whatever it is.  And people create content around  it.  It's also changing the ways in  which we interact with  information.  This is a screen shot of Twitter  during the Iran elections.  And if you remember, there were  big riots and demonstrations  after the Iran elections.  And they wouldn't let  conventional media come in and  cover it.  So what happened was, people  started Tweeting.  Thousands and thousands of  people started Tweeting. 

 At the height of this, there was  something like 2,500 Tweets a  minute that were coming in.  And people would not just put  little pieces of text, but they  would upload video, they would  upload pictures.  And they'd say, check this out,  there's something happening over  here, there's something  happening over there.  Other people on the Internet  started gathering it up and  curate it in interesting ways.  So you ended up with a coverage  that was not only as good as  what network television would  have brought you, it was  actually better for a number of  reasons.  For a long time, for 50 years,  we've kind of thought that TV  was the most compelling way of  telling a story immediately.  We all remember that riveting  picture of the guy in Tianamen  Square standing in front of the  tanks.  That's a really compelling  image.  And that's what you watch  coverage on TV for, is to see  those moments that really count.  But in reality, it's a really  inefficient way to be able to  get your news. 

 Because surrounding that 40  seconds of video, and are they  going to run this guy over or  not, you've got four hours of  Wolf Blitzer nattering on about  something that doesn't  necessarily advance the story.  And there's no way you can skip  through the timeline and pick  and choose the things that you  want.  You've got to do it in real  time.  So isn't it ironic, then, if  text-- we've thought of text for  the last 50 years, the newspaper  story, as being the cleanup  batter, the thing that comes out  the next day and explains all  the stuff that happened on TV  yesterday.  Wouldn't it be kind of ironic if  text now is the most compelling  way of telling a story, because  it's easy to scan text.  It's easy to pick out the stuff  that you want, and that matters  to you, and you can change your  coverage of it, in terms of  what's most compelling.  This is kind of a flipping of  how media works in this country.  And what it means, actually, is  that the reporting of news, or  if you're an artist, the  performance that you do isn't  complete until the audience that  receives it chooses to do  something with it.  The old way of doing it was a  broadcast model, where I produce  a play, or whatever, I give it  to you.  You come and you see it, and  then you go away and I don't  know what happens after that. 

 Then, the next way is, we're  going to be interactive.  So, I produce the play, I give  it to you, and I allow you to  comment back to me.  But that's not really  interactive.  The real interactive is if I  create a place where I create  something.  You come see it because I'm  creating something that you find  worthwhile.  But the second part of it, I  also create a space so that you  can interact with one another  and build on that, and make it  better in some way, improve it  in some way.  It's an accretion of information  so that something gets better as  it goes along, it doesn't decay,  as what happens in the  traditional broadcast mode.  The texts are piling up here.  (laughs)  And my phone has-- okay.  But what about accuracy,  somebody says. 

 So, what happens when you have a  lot of people Tweeting, is how  do you know that what they say  is true?  Well, what happens is if you've  got a mass of people focused on  something, people start checking  each other out.  There becomes a kind of  community norm that checks  things.  And all you have to be is wrong  a couple of times, and people  stop trusting you.  So it doesn't ensure that  everything is accurate, but it  turns news, or the reporting of  news, into a process, rather  than a finished product.  And people are willing to say,  oh, this is what we know at this  time, but we're still working on  that.  They want to see the process.  They want to be involved in that  process.  So, who's kind of figured this  out?  Britney Spears.  You can't really see this here,  but this is Britney Spears'  Twitter feed.  And right up there, she's  got 3.5 million fans on Twitter. 

 Now, if you think about the  morning TV shows, they're not  getting 3.5 million people  watching them.  This makes her have a media  outlet of her own, which she  totally controls, that's on the  order of "People" magazine.  "People," coincidentally,  has about 3.6 million readers.  What happened was, when she  recently released an album a  couple of weeks ago, what she  did was she made three  five-second versions, excerpts  from her video, and she released  them on Twitter.  And interestingly enough, sales  just went like that.  Because she's created this  community that really wants to  interact with her in some way.  And when she has something that  she wants them to see, they  respond and they do something  about it.  But it's also a double edged  sword.  This is Whitney Houston.  And this is at her concert at  Central Park a few weeks ago, or  this summer. 

 She was doing a comeback  concert.  In her first concert, she went  for the high note and guess  what, she cracked it.  Immediately, there was a whole  Twitter thing about oh, she  killed her notes.  And there was buzz about how  this concert, she wasn't really  doing so well.  Now, what happens if you booked  arenas across the country, and  you put millions of dollars on  the line, and the instant  Twitter feed says that this is  not worth buying tickets for?  It becomes a problem.  And the movie studios found that  out this summer, when "Bruno,"  remember "Bruno," the "Borat"  follow-up?  The audience that went to the  first shows of that were  overwhelmingly negative.  And the box office died so  quickly their heads were  spinning.  So it can have a positive  effect, but it can also have a  very negative effect.  People tend to follow people  that they trust.  And if those people that they  trust say negative things about  something, then they're liable  to believe them. 

 But it also puts a megaphone in  the hands of anybody who has a  grievance.  This guy.  Have you heard about this guy?  This guy is a musician from  Halifax, Nova Scotia.  He was changing planes in  Chicago.  And he looked down, out the  plane window, and he saw the  baggage handlers throwing his  guitars.  They damaged one of them.  And so, when he got to the other  end, he tried to get them to pay  for it.  They wouldn't do it.  He tried and tried, and it  wouldn't happen.  So he made a video. 

 This video has been watched  six million times.  § §  § I flew United Airlines §  § On my way to Nebraska §  § The plane departed Halifax §  § Connecting §  § in Chicago's O'Hare §  § §  § While on the ground §  § A passenger said §  § From the seat behind me §  § My god §  § They're throwing guitars §  § Out there §  § §  § The band and I §  § Exchanged a look §  § Best described as terror §  § At the action on the tarmac §  § And knowing whose §  § Projectiles these would be §  § §  § So before I left Chicago §  § I alerted three employees §  § Who showed §  § Complete indifference §  § Towards me §  § §  § United, United §  § You broke my Taylor guitar §  § United §  § Some big help you are §  § You broke it §  § You should fix it §  § You lied §  § Just admit it §  § I should've flown §  § With someone else §  § Or gone by car §  § §  § 'Cause United breaks guitars §  § §  (laughter)  >> McLennan: So, like I said,  six million times  that this has been watched,  which is sort of interesting  on its own.  But what happens if you do a  search on YouTube on it, you'll  find that hundreds of people  have made tribute videos,  sharing their experience about  this.  And these guys got such a bump  from it that they just turned it  into a trilogy.  So there's United Breaks Guitars  2, and now a third one, which  they've gotten progressively  more elaborate.  Now a lot of companies monitor  social media.  And if you complain about  something with a tag, often  they'll contact you within an  hour or two, to find out if  there's something that they can  do to help you.  So, it's changing the  relationship between consumer  and producer.  This next thing is a bit, aside  from just a vehicle for  complaining about something or  recommending something, it can  also be used to help your brand  and to accomplish things that  you yourself can't accomplish.  In the case of Netflix--  You all know Netflix, right?  Netflix, one of the successes of  Netflix is that they have this  algorithm that as you start to  use their service, it starts to  recognize what it is that you're  watching, and it starts making  recommendations. 

 And part of the deal is, this  algorithm has to keep improving  over time, because they have  competitors.  This is a real competitive  advantage for them.  So in the beginning, it was  really easy to improve things.  But by two years ago, it  suddenly became difficult, and  they couldn't improve it much  more.  So, when it came time to improve  it again, they decided to  announce a Netflix Prize.  And they said that they would  give a million dollars to  anybody who could improve their  algorithm by ten percent.  So within weeks, months, there  were about 40,000 programmers   worldwide working on this,  because they all wanted to win  the million dollars.  And what happened was, about a  year and a half into this, they  all kind of stalled out  at about 8.5%, because this  is really hard.  When suddenly, four of the  groups decided to band together,  work together.  And lo and behold, a couple of  months later, they announced  that they had beaten it by ten  percent. 

 You'll see up here, by 10.09%.  Now, the rules of the Netflix  Prize was that once somebody  declared themselves the winner,  everybody else had 30 days in  which to beat that.  And if they could, they would  get the million dollars instead.  So, the rest of the people on  the leader board, I think it was  about 400 people, they sort of  went wait, four of you joined  up?  We'll all join up.  And they formed something called  The Ensemble.  And lo and behold,  on the 29th day,  they beat it by .01%  Now, there are really  interesting lessons about this,  because one is, that open  systems always beat closed  systems.  Having all of these programmers,  thousands of programmers,  working on this, they could  accomplish something that just  this small proprietary group  couldn't.  And opening it up made it, there  was an incentive for a huge  crowd of people to work on this.  Second of all, they created a  community around Netflix that  was an incredible branding  opportunity.  If you're thinking that 40,000  of the most talented developers  out there are working on this  and trying to make it better,  and being thwarted for two  years, what does that say to you  about the Netflix algorithm. 

 It says that it must be pretty  damn good.  So, they got plenty of, it was  like a win-win situation for  everybody.  If you think about this in an  arts context, most of our arts  organizations are run in a very  proprietary way.  We don't want to give up  control.  But if you take this idea, and  there are lots and lots of  examples of it.  And if you take this as a  principle that's true, what  would happen if arts    organizations became, in a  sense, community sourced.  If you give up some control, you  actually ultimately in an odd  way, get more control in the  end.  Because you're able to get more  done.  You're able to accomplish more.  And when you broaden it out so  that it's not just a proprietary  thing, you get a lot more  accomplished. 

 So some people think that the  next big auto company, one of  the problems with the auto  companies is that they were all  proprietary, and that all the  innovations had to come from  within the companies themselves.  And they just, you know, they  just weren't very good at it.  If the next great auto company  could be a packager, taking the  most innovative components from  lots of different places.  That's how PCs are packaged.  That's how they're made.  That's how the modern movies are  made.  Movie studios no longer have  back lots and costume shops, and  all of that.  They exist in skyscrapers and  there are people who put  together the deals.  They have access to talent.  They have access to the money. 

 They have access to the creative  ways of packaging.  What if arts organizations  started to behave in that kind  of way?  It might be kind of interesting.  And we're seeing this in the  kind of news business.  This is Obama's speech the other  night about Afghanistan.  I pulled this down, because--  This is actually off of  "Huffington Post."  And they did kind of interesting  things.  With Twitter, you can now do  lists.  So, you can watch it live on the  video there, but they also  identified who they thought were  the really good Afghanistan  analysts, and they ran a Twitter  feed.  They asked people.  They just followed what that  was.  So you could follow that. 

 You could follow all the  national reporters who were  Tweeting it.  And you could also find the  progressive democrats, and there  was another couple of categories  below.  So instead of waiting till  afterwards to see how people  were responding to it, you could  crowd source this to people who  actually might know something  about what it is they were  listening to.  And you got a very different way  of being able to watch this  speech.  You can also do it if you  empower your audience to work on  your behalf.  This is the "Guardian"  newspaper.  And last summer, there was a big  document dump of expense reports  from members of Parliament.  And the "Guardian" is actually  kind of a smallish newspaper.  They knew that if they were  going to write stories about  these, what, 450,000 documents,  in a conventional way, it would  take them till Christmas before  they could go through them all.  So, they put them all up online,  and they asked their readers to  pick any documents they wanted  and tell them what was on them. 

 This is interesting.  Oh, check this out.  You don't have to check that  out.  They actually made a game out of  it.  So it was really easy.  And the thing that motivated  people, is you know, you see  those people in the video  arcades, and they're there  bleary-eyed, but they want to  get their initials at the top  for the top score.  Well, look at this.  Top users by line item, Mr. GDW  there, has gone through 2,859  documents, just so he could be  at the top of the list.  So you can motivate people who  actually care about what it is  that you do, to accomplish a  whole lot of things that you  can't possibly do by yourself.  And you can become a better  organization, become a better  artist, become a better  journalist for it. 

 It was such a successful thing  that the "Guardian" opened up  what they call its API, in other  words, anything that's been  published in the "Guardian," in  its entire history, you can now  access and write programs that  can use the data in whatever  ways you decide to do it.  And people have written some  really interesting things.  So you can do statistical  things, like these kinds of  murders happened over here, or  this kind of thing happened over  there.  And the point is that the  "Guardian" isn't controlling  this, but they get to be the  beneficiary of people who use  them.  It's really kind of a powerful  idea.  This is another thing.  Let's see, I've gone too far.  This is a company called Spot  Us, and they're in the Bay area.  And what they do is, when a  reporter has an idea, or anybody  has an idea for a story, they go  and they pitch it.  They make a video that says I  want to do this story because. 

 And you pitch your story.  And then it goes up into the  community.  And part of your pitch is, I  need $5,000 to do this story.  And then the community comes in  and says, I pledge $15.  I pledge $25.  And once you reach the cost of  it, then you go off and do the  story.  There's an editor.  Part of the fee is for an editor  to edit the story.  Then they partner with news  organizations, and stories  appear.  So it's a kind of crowd sourcing  of stories, which is actually  kind of an interesting idea. 

 Their real home run was they  recently did a story about this  big floating garbage patch in  the Pacific.  It's like the size of Rhode  Island, or something.  And this was a Spot Us story,  where the reporter pitched it to  the community.  The community funded it.  And the "New York Times" ended  up running it.  They got a lot of attention for  it.  But that's a way of also sort of  offloading some of the  responsibility for editorial.  Because what is actually also  happening is that news  organizations are increasingly  becoming aware that they have a  partnership role to play with  their audience.  And so, not only do they want to  listen to their audience, but  they want to have better ways of  measuring what their audience is  interested in.  This is sort of one. 

 This is another thing.  This is from Facebook.  This is what they call their  happiness index.  What they've done is written an  algorithm so that they can run  all of the words on Facebook for  a particular day, and they can  find what the mood is.  So if there's a lot of happy  kinds of words, then the graph  goes up.  So you can see Easter, Happy  Easter.  Mother's Day, Happy Mother's  Day.  But you can see.  So, you can start to tell the  mood of your audience.  Companies like Google are doing  A/B testing, where they'll put  up two versions of something and  within minutes, have 10,000  people have looked at this one,  and 10,000 people have looked at  this other one, and which  responded more. 

 So they're constantly kind of  trying to tweak how it is that  people are going to respond.  So, this last sort of thing that  I want to talk about is an idea  I haven't really fully thought  through yet.  And a lot of what I've been  talking about this evening is  how information is being  disaggregated from its form.  In other words, it's not the  news organizations which are  responsible for creating all the  news.  It's not the reporters that are  responsible for creating all the  reporting that's going on.  We're separating what is, in  effect, the metadata, the kind  of meta stuff that goes under  the surface until there's some  sort of finished product, from  what the product actually is.  So, one of the great things that  has happened in the second  version of the Web was that it  became something that they call  the Semantic Web,  where we dissociate the form  of something from the content of  something.  So this is the classic,  hello world.  But if I put tags around it,  I can have a meta program  underneath, and it tells those  words to look like whatever I  want it to look like.  So it can be the font color. 

 It can also be the kind of font.  We've become more and more  sophisticated about doing it.  So we can add backgrounds.  We can, say, put these words in  these different colors, and put  it in front of a picture of the  world, right?  And I can move it around.  I can change the fonts.  I can change how everything  looks.  This was a huge revolution in  content management on the Web.  Because you could have a  database with all of the content  over here, and then we could  change what it looked like in  any way, really easy, without  changing what the content itself  was.  Let's go one step further than  that.  We're now at a point where  mobile communication is really  changing how we look at the  world. 

 So there's this program right  now called Layar.  And on your mobile phone, you  hold it up to a thing that  you're looking at.  In this case, this is Paris.  And he's looking at bikes there.  Superimposed, it makes a grid.  Now, in Paris, you can get  bikes, you can pick them up at  these stations, you ride them,  and then you drop them off at  other stations close to where  you're at.  The thing is, you've got to know  where the stations are, right?  So, you hold it up in front of  the bikes, it recognizes that  oh, those are bikes.  And then it tells you where all  of the other things are, because  it understands that the  information you're looking for,  probably, is where the bike  drop off spots are.  You can do this in a number of  ways.  Look at a restaurant. 

 This is a restaurant called the  Little Owl.  So, you point it at the  restaurant.  It gives you the menu, and then  it gives you reviews.  You can do this with products.  You can do this with everything.  Everything is being aware of  where you are, and the sense  that the information that's  important to you, the news  that's important to you at any  given moment changes.  So it has to be situationally  aware.  This is all metadata, which  lives somewhere, but which  contributes to our understanding  of the sort of physical world  out there.  Now, what would happen if you  were an arts organization and  you decided to separate your  content from the form of the  content?  What if you separated the stuff  about the context, the  everything, right, which  journalism has kind of been a  lot in charge of doing that, you  know, explain what this means.  Put it in context. 

 Show us the new stuff and how it  relates to the old stuff, all of  that stuff.  What if the arts organizations  started assuming some of those  roles.  This is the Indianapolis Museum.  They created a thing called  Dashboard.  What they did was they put up  every bit of information that  they could think of about the  museum, and just put it up on  the Web.  And so, you can tell, you know,  how many kilowatt hours per day.  This is yesterday, actually,  today maybe.  Yesterday, December 2, oh,  today, December 3.  You can tell even what the size  of their endowment is, as of  recently.  And they don't know how their  community is going to start to  use that information, but they  know that it's important that  they put it out there. 

 And anybody can see it.  It's to be totally transparent  as an organization.  Because if you are, then people  have a different relationship  with you.  And it also means that people  can track it over time.  So, pick any of those numbers  that you see up there.  Pick the endowment, for  instance, and look at it for a  second.  It flips over to the other side,  but you can see that six months  ago, it was substantially down.  So, over time, you start to have  a relationship with the  organization that is different  than if everything is  proprietary.  And if you think back to some of  those early examples, when you  release to your community,  empower your community to act on  your behalf, they can accomplish  some pretty amazing things.  So, what if the theater was  disaggregated from the people  who were working in that  theater, was disaggregated from  the audience in that theater?  And what if all of that was  treated as a kind of metadata,  where things went where they  needed to go, nothing was  proprietary and it was  interconnected somewhere?  Now, I think that somewhere in  there is a role for journalists,  because it certainly isn't going  to be in the way that it was,  where it's the broadcast model,  where I'm the expert, and I'm  going to tell you what it is,  and I don't really care what you  do with it. 

 It has to be more of a  conversation.  And that doesn't mean chaos.  Clay Shirky drew this cartoon  that kind of warns.  He's a proponent of the here  comes everybody kind of idea,  and the threat to institutions,  that crowds can often do  something more efficiently than  institutions can.  But even he is willing to say--  I shouldn't say even he.  He's willing to say that there  have to be some rules of the  road, and that the kind of  community that you build to  accomplish something has to be  very carefully incentivized and  created.  Otherwise, you really do get a  kind of dumbing down of things.  So, anyway, thank you very much.  And I guess on to the next  thing.  (applause)