Will Technology Kill the Newspaper ?

The JAM magazine (31,000 copies) sometime back ran a story on IIPM (Indian Institute of Planning and Management), questioning some of its claims. The story appeared on the magazine's website and that should have been the end of the story. On August 5, Gaurav Sabnis, an IBM employee and an avid blogger linked to the JAM story and questioned the credentials of IIPM and its leading light, Arindam Chaudhury. On October 4, IIPM 

responded with a legal notice to Sabnis, which he promptly posted on his blog, and this was followed up with a call to IBM threatening to burn the IBM notebooks they purchase in front of their Delhi office if the post was not withdrawn. 

Gaurav reacted by resigning from IBM and posting all this again on his blog. By now, blogs the world over were linking to his blog, giving commentary of their own and even “investigating” IIPM further. 

By the end of the day, mainstream media was playing catch up catch up. And this in a country where Internet penetration still has a long way to go.Welcome to the bold new world where individuals and not organizations not only set the agenda, but also act and report on it much faster and in a way that traditional organizations never can. Welcome to the world of community-content creation.

The traditional model of content creation has been one of collaboration. Take the

example of PCQuest itself. 

One of the reviewers in the team writes an article that is checked by a senior in the team. The

article then moves to the copy desk where it is checked for language and readability,

before it moves to the design department. From there, it traverses back for proofreading and checking before finally

going to the printing department from where it is sent to the press. This is a chain of collaborative activities that takes up some cycle time, from the creation of the content, to the time it reaches you. Also, the number of items that we can create is limited by our team size. 

This is the traditional collaborative approach to content creation that is followed by everyone from newspapers to TV to filmmakers and every other content creator, be it for a full publication, or a marketing brochure.

Community-content creation is exactly the opposite of this model. Instead of a team, it relies on the individual. Instead of collaboration, it depends on propagation, and instead of an assured cycle time, its key differentiator is the spontaneous nature of the propagation (over the Internet). While collaborative content creation is limited by the size of the available team, and its skill sets, community content relies on the availability of thousands of individuals, spread across time zones and over inaccessible geographies, with a range of talent and capabilities that an organized team can never match.

Because of its very nature, community content displays all the characteristics of a mob at work. More often than not, it is disruptive of the established order. Lacking in an established leadership and hierarchy, its effectiveness on a given issue is difficult to predict, but once the 'community' or the 'mob', depending on the way you want to see it, gets galvanized, seemingly no force on earth can match or stop its impact. So, of the millions of community initiatives, only a few reach mass proportions, and the ones that do reach mass movement proportions do so rather quickly.

Community content initiatives use the basic tenets of the Internet-instantaneous, cheap, and minimal controls-to work their wonders.

Just DO it MoBlog On a moblog one can post content to the Internet from a cellphone and this needs only the device to have MMS facility activated. Choose from among many websites that support moblogs for free and create one of your own. Consider what site caters to with regards to posts limit per day, image size limit, RSS support and other special features. Other than posting on Blogs, such message (with photographs or video) can even be circulated via MMS. A person with a cellphone with a camera can take even high-resolution  photographs These photos can be posted on moblogs via  e-mail, with both pictures and text  The blog then contains the latest images and news, faster than TV or news can get it out. This creates serious competition for traditional media

While, so far we have talked of Blogs, they are not the only form of community content. They are one of the latest. We would define community

content initiatives as any that enables an individual to post his or her opinion without moderation, online, and allows others to link to it. Currently there are atleast five major

community content platforms (see adjacent box).

Of these, online forums are one of the oldest, having their origins in the bulletin board systems (BBS) of the pre-Internet days. Given their

origins, they are the most moderated of all community-content initiatives. Online forums (such as http://forums. pcquest.com) let people post their opinions about a topic and string together opinions posted under the same thread. 



Since forums are established by someone else, there is some amount of moderation
of the content posted.

Impact PCQuest Forums As a technology magazine, PCQuest has maintained an online community interface for a long time now. It started off way before the Internet revolution happened, with PCQ Online, a single telephone line BBS. The PCQuest Forums, at http://forums.pcquest.com, had a quite beginning on Christmas day of 2003, the immediate objective being to get reader inputs for PCQLinux 2004. It started off with a custom created piece of software, with just threading support. We soon replaced it with the current phpBB run site. Also, the objective of the forum was expanded to include three things. Firstly, we moved our existing email based support activities (for PCQlinux and for other topics) to the forum. We started using the forum for getting reader feedback on our articles and finally, we use the forum for getting article ideas! At the time of this writing, we are just touching 24,000 posts. How do we keep running it? What are the issues involved in soliciting community participation? What goes on behind the scenes? There is no rigid hierarchy or set of rules at the forum. Any body can post anything, as long as it is remotely linked to technology (General interest posts like Sania Mirza's current ATP ranking also gets added once in a while, though no one has yet posted on Ganguly's captaincy!). Direct personal attacks and abusive language is frowned upon and removed by moderators. Incidentally, the moderators include even a person from outside the PCQuest organization.  Have we had trouble? Yes of course! How can you have a system that takes public input without having any trouble at all. But it is mostly easily managed. First things first, moderators are not Gods. Over moderation can kill any interesting debate. So, someone has to keep an eye on overzealous moderators. That is the job of the Editor. Any comment on the magazine-good, bad and the ugly is welcome and is never edited out. That is part of the policy. That is why the forum exists. If users tend to abuse the system, in terms of language or content, then polite warnings often do the trick. So far, we have banned only one user from the forum (the software has facilities to ban by name, by incoming IP address and so on). More often than not, corrective action is over private email from the moderators to the offenders, than through public warnings. Recently we have had one instance where things went a bit too far in a slanging war between two members at the forum. An ultimatum to both was publicly given when all other efforts failed. Did it succeed? Well the fighting stopped, but one of them is still sulking! One facility we do not provide at the forum, that users have asked for, is private messaging (the ability to send a private message to another member). We feel that that is not required for meeting the objectives of the forum. We also keep experimenting with new things. We are trying to build up a repository of the history of PCQuest.  Ocassionally we post an article or two before it gets printed. Those experiments go on. Beyond our own forum, we constantly search for discussions and comments about the magazine and about the articles in it. We come across them, allover the world. Mostly, these are of two types-availability (of the lack of it) of copies and comments about specific articles.  Wherever be such comments, anyone in the team coming across a comment is expected to take action to resolve the issue or to escalate it.

Wiki is where individuals from across the globe collaborate to create, edit and update content on a page. The traditional method of creating the page, laying it out and subsequently updating it on the server is given the go by. You edit or add to content posted by someone else on the same page as it was originally posted. Wiki's are traditionally used to collate knowledge, as in

www.wikipedia.org. 

Blogs are weblogs, and originaly were online diaries maintained by individuals. Soon they evolved into online commentary, and what has made them a raging success is ease with which you can create a blog on a site such as blogspot. com and the ability to hyperlink to other blogs and sites easily. Blogs have given rise to Moblogs (blogs updated over the mobile phone), Plogs (picture blogs) Vlogs (Video blogs) and Splogs (spam blogs). For more on these, refer to the

jargon strip in this story.

Impact The middle finger that wasn't there In the news for all wrong reasons was the middle finger that Indira Nooyi, CFO and President of PepsiCo, apparently gave the US. The bloggers got it wrong. But both Pepsi and Nooyi had to apologize nevertheless. The issue revolved around a speech that Ms Nooyi made to the graduating class of the Columbia Business School where she said, “...I remember being told that the five fingers can be thought of as the five major continents. The index finger is Europe... while the middle finger is the US...the middle finger anchors every function that the hand performs and is the key to all of the fingers working together efficiently and effectively.” Word of mouth reports of the middle finger in the speech led to the outburst by rightwing bloggers who called it shameful, condescending and patronizing to stab the back of US that made her rich and famous. Soon, it was all over the Net and the TV. By day, newspapers here in India were also running their versions of the story. End result? A public apology by Nooyi and Pepsi after saturated coverage across the world.

Social networks are more like online clubs. They allow people to come together and find each other and form groups based on commonality of interests. There are social networking sites that cater to almost every need, from

business networking to friendship to dating and marriage. 

Organizations have realized the potential of Blogs to bring their customers and audience closer and share an interaction with them on a one-to-one basis. Employees are increasingly encouraged to maintain blogs or participate on third-party Blogs

Podcasts are audio (and now video) files (of commentary or thoughts, not music) made available online. The word has its origin in ipod + broadcast, with the practice originally being to create and download these files to an iPod. They are not as amenable to hyperlinking as with text. 

Just DO it RSS for your site RSS or Really Simple Syndication has completely revolutionised the way we treat information. If the Internet is the un-ending repository of information, then RSS is the ultimate delivery channel. Creating RSS is so easy that you could do it with notepad! You would however need to be a bit geeky. If you don't want to be type in XML RSS tags, there are websites that create the code for you. These can then be updated to reflect the latest happenings. Online tools allow you to create RSS code by simply filling in a form that describes your content Once that is done, the generated code is to be copied and saved as '.RSS' file Upload the RSS file to your Web site and add a link to it on your Web pages with a single line of HTML as shown in the screenshot above. This automatically reveals the file to RSS-readers.

There are more technologies that disrupt the traditional model of Content distribution. The most prominent of these

is the RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS enables the user to have a synopsis of the content in a page, to help

decide whether to visit the page or not. This strikes at the very root of page view count based online business models and also of most online advertising models.

Just DO it Wiki for Enterprise Your enterprise, small or large can use Wiki to collaboratively share knowledge. And leveraging its dynamic editability, you can maintain quality and consistency of that information. Setting one up is easy. If you can do with one hosted on the Internet, there are dedicated Wiki-hosts that can be used by individuals or enterprises alike. Go to Wikispaces.org, fill in the form and click Join. Use the link in the confirmation e-mail to finish setup You can setup licensing for your Wikispace. This adds a footer to each page with links to pre-created texts of each of license you select You can add your own pages, with formatting, links, and images, creating a regular HTML page, using a simple online editor Each page can host its own mini discussion among members or the general public according to your settings. You will be notified of messages on e-mail When a person edits a wiki page, both the previous and new versions are saved separately.A visitor can view all the versions by clicking the 'History' link at the top of that page. If you want a wiki on your intranet, you can use software like Twiki, Wikimedia or MediaWiki

In this story we will see how organizations and individuals can use these disruptive technologies to their benefit.

Managing negatives



The huge mass of individuals who can develop content online, the randomness of their involvement and the fact that they could be nearer to the point of action than any media house can afford to be, means that there is no way traditional media can compete with community content. 

Consider the Gulf War. The US military spent billions of dollars embedding journalists within their ranks. News organizations like CNN and BBC spent many more. And what happened? They were all upstaged by Salam Pax, a lone blogger, resident of Baghdad, whose “inside story” of what life during times of war was infinitely more compelling than what any embedded journalist could dish out. 

While this story is largely media centric, it is not just the media that faces challenges from the new tide of community-generated content. Every organization, every politician, every editor, none of their deeds are spared from the microscopic scrutiny of community content. And it doesn't take too much to get going. A cyber café, a dial-up Internet connection, and passable English are all that is required to take on the might of well established organizations and triumph them. 

But that's not all that today's blogger has coming to his aid. Cheap and abundant technology is there to aid him too. Satellite phones may be costly, but cellphones are dirt-cheap. And they can do passable pictures and video. You can update your blog direct from the cellphone and send pictures from the cellphone direct to services like Flickr. Add to this a cause, real or imagined and you have a very potent combination indeed. That leads us to two questions: the first being, how do organizations guard against 'negative comments' and second how do organizations utilize the same technologies for their benefit? Let us take the first question first. What should an

organization do, when faced with negative onslaught from community content? To answer this, we need to take a more

understandable analogy. How do you fight a mob?

The answer is very simple. You cut your losses and retreat. The first step in any PR activity -and taking on community content is still largely in the realms of PR-is to contain the issue. Instead of sending out lawsuits, which only tend to 



aggravate the situation, a saner approach would be engage the content creators in an effort to put the situation to rest.


That said, if indeed the blogger/forum/Wiki is at fault, your first attempt should be to get them to understand the situation and acknowledge and rectify it. Legal solutions if at all, should be the last option. Do remember that both the law and case law in this area are in the very nascent stages.

Another point that needs to be highlighted here is that typically, Indian organizations tend to ignore happenings on the Web. With Internet access growing by leaps and bounds, Indian organizations can no longer afford to do so. They need to proactively keep searching to find out how their names and their brands are being referred to on the net. Have you ever tried a Google search with your brand names or the organization names? If you have not, do it. You will be surprised at the results.

Making the most of it 



Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun Microsystems maintains a frequently update blog. So do many of Sun's employees. So do Google employees, and Microsoft employees, and Boeing employees and ...

World over, organizations getting into the community content bandwagon, with varied objectives.

Should your organization also encourage community content participation by your employees? The answer is an obvious and unconditional yes. But while many are getting

into the community content process for the obvious PR benefits, there are many real life benefits that the organization can reap, both at the Intranet and Internet levels. Let us start with that much-maligned term -Knowledge management. Knowledge, being unstructured, and internal to a person, poses great hurdles in being managed. And KM solutions are mostly structured formats! 

On the other hand, community-content solutions are largely unstructured in the way they capture content. A Wiki may be the best answer yet to the problems of knowledge management.

Think of an organization with a geographically spread out workforce. How do you keep them updated about the latest product developments or market information? Are they getting lost with the plethora of information they have to wade through on your intranet? Consider RSS enabling your intranet as a possible solution? That way, they can get the headings of newly added content pushed to their browser, and only go to the specific pages that interest them.

Want to give your employees a pep-talk? Or want to update them on the latest initiatives of the organization? Are you considering traveling to every location to talk to them? Will all of them be there? Will they have to cancel sales calls to be there? Have you

considered a podcast instead?

Want to discuss the latest market moves of the competition? Are you doing it over

e-mail, often loosing the thread even before you started? Have you tried thrashing it out on a forum on the Intranet (or one on the Internet, that requires login) instead?

Are you an organization that has to deal a lot with photographs? Have you considered a system like Flickr? Have you tried out Gallery?

One could go on with ideas of how to use community-content technologies at the work place for constructive benefits. Like disruptive technologies, the potential benefits of community content and associated technologies is often missed out even as we scamper to highlight the potential pitfalls.

Should the CEO write a blog? This is one interesting question that has often been raised. In the brick and mortar world, the parallel question would be-Should the CEO talk to customers? In all successful companies, the management, and not just the CEO, remains in constant touch with the outside world. When the medium switches over from a conference room to the 



Internet, the tools not the rules change. And in today's Internet-enabled economy, the tools are forums, blogs and podcasts. Help your CEO choose one that he is comfortable with.

Taming the tide



Since it is free public platform where one can put upfront one's thoughts and perceptions open for mass-viewing and commenting, noted incidents have occurred where this rather disruptive media has made visible craters into the PR of individuals and organizations alike.The free-form nature of community content can be a benefit, but the lack of control over content causes some companies to wonder whether these tools might prove detrimental to business. In case of enterprise blogs for instance, many struggle with the issue of how much autonomy to allow employees when they

blog.

There is a fear amongst the public-relations professionals that too-candid blogs may

result in branding meltdowns. For example, Microsoft bloggers generally refuse to

respond directly to press requests asking for comment on their own blog posts, instead passing such requests along to Microsoft's PR agency.

But before all this comes the question of quality and authenticity. How authentic is the content put up by some unknown person? What is the quality of the research behind the opinion expressed? There is anecdotal evidence to prove either side of the argument. For every high quality article in wikipedia, there are others that are nowhere up to the mark. These are questions that remain unanswered by and large. For every Salam Pax, there are blogs that swing to the other extreme. 



It is important to stress accountability and regular review of postings when Wiki are used to share important
information, such as security data. It is expected that enterprise wikis will soon become more like blogs. And this would make it all the more necessary that enterprise have better control over them. So enterprise Wiki should carry permission- based features that allow greater control over posted content through edit and add options. On the other hand, even as newspapers and other media continue to retain their influence.

While the propagative channel (community content creation and its dissemination) brings news a lot faster, it has its own set of limitations too. It can make and it can break, leaving no room for anyone to mend the sabotage afterwards. The poster could later escape the havoc that he may have created by just posting an errata or saying that what he had posted earlier were his own views.

By Binesh Kutty, Krishna Kumar, Rinku Tyagi, Sujay V Sarma and Varun Dubey