Catch me at Social Animals, Tomorrow

by Alex Halliday

Looking forward to speaking at Social Animals tomorrow. They’ll be exploring how social networking is evolving to create transactable value out of our common human desires.

It's sold out, but if you already have a ticket, then i will see you there! 

Social Animals: Wednesday September 14, 2011 at The Book Club, Shoreditch

The Digital License Fee Debate

by Alex Halliday

Last night I attended a debate at Google's swanky new central london office (complete with inflatable reception area), to discuss the idea of monetizing content and creating viable 'content' businesses. The argument made early on was that advertising alone would not be enough to sustain a viable content business and therefore a 'Digital License Fee' was proposed. This would require all broadband customers in the UK to pay a small monthly fee on top of their broadband subscription which would then be divided amongst the their favorite publications, similar to the way that Flattr works today. 

First of all, as the chair last night Benjamin Cohen (disclosure: friend of mine) has proved with PinkNews, it is perfectly possible to create a viable content business that is profitable and produces high quality content. It is much harder, to take a traditional content business such as a newspaper, and transition it into the sort of lean, distributed and efficient content creator which can be profitable (hence The Guardian's staggering 100k/day loss). The challenge for these institutions is to recognize that the model has now completely changed and shift the way they work to remain competitive. One of the reasons HuffPo has been so successful is that it effectively gets a large portion of it's content for free. By driving the cost of content production so low, they became not just profitable but hugely successful which lead to their blockbuster acquisition by AOL.

Secondly, why not divert a small portion of the existing UK License Fee to this scheme? As we are consuming so much more of our content online and from far more sources than before, surely it makes sense that our license fee distribution reflects that? I would be happy for 10% or 20% of my annual license fee to go to the top 10 blogs i read rather than subsidise BBC Radio 6. I suspect that the government backed Big Innovation Center, the organizer of last nights do, would not want to rock the boat with such a suggestion. 

Finally, the distribution and monetization of content is becoming more of an art form than ever. Companies are experimenting with complex hybrid business models like paywalls, subscriptions, freemium and doing more to optimize and widely distribute their content than ever. Ben, our chair last night, said that it's easier than ever to start writing a blog to get your content out there which is true. But there is another layer of skill required on top of this to ensure that content then goes out there and is monetized. I think that we at SocialGO should consider how we can help train and educate people to be better at creating and distributing content as the first step in creating an audience for their message. If platforms like SocialGO, Wordpress etc don't help our users effectively, their share of voice will be tiny even though their content may be far more interesting than another keyword stuffed article from about.com. 
PS. Since most publishers make a portion of their money from Google Adsense, I'm surprised that nobody last night mentioned how Google could greatly help smaller publishers by upping the revenue share %age of their scheme. However considering Google where our gracious hosts, it would have perhaps been considered mildly rude…. this is England after all.  

Spinning lady illusion...

by Alex Halliday



I was reminded of this great optical illusion the other day when it popped up on YouTube. You will see her spinning one way first and then if you look at her shadow she can magically change direction. Depending on which side of your brain is most active you will see her moving one way or another. can't get here to change direction? take a look at this. 

Rebuilding my site on SocialGO Version 2

by Alex Halliday

I have spent the last hour adding some content to my new website which you are hopefully reading this on now. One of the unique things about Version 2, is that it works as well for building a simple website like this as it does for creating full blown communities. As the web become more social, we see the lines between dedicated online communities and traditional websites blurring and have built our new platform to reflect this shift. 

On this site i have setup multiple blogs which i can add posts to. These are the Blog, Press Appearances and Photography. I then have a normal static content page with About Me. When adding new Text, Photo or Video blogs to my site i can choose whether to post them to Twitter or Facebook so that my wider social graph can see this content and come to my site. Really simple, quick and social.

With Version 2, you can choose the level of visitor engagement you would like. For this site I have opted to allow users to comment on my posts but not become full members. People can come along, write a comment and authenticate with Facebook but they can't create profiles or engage any further than that. This is the right level of "social" for my site today. In the future i could choose to open up areas of the site to other users, and even solicit blogs, add live chat and more but as this is only my personal website i have chosen to keep it simple. 

Whilst SocialGO 2 has loads of fantastic social features like Activity streams, Forums and Groups, not every website in the world wants bucketloads of functionality day one. We want people to iteratively expand the social functionality of their site at a pace that's right for them. 

This week will be a big week for SocialGO Version 2. Hopefully we will be getting quite a few more people on board and will begin to roll out more features and improvements.... Let the games begin.

If you always do what you've always done, you always get what you've always got!