There are those moments when you first encounter a new technology that you just know it’s going to be transformative. It just feels perfect. Some examples for me were the first time I ran a BASIC program on my TRS-80, the first time I signed into CompuServe, that fateful day in college when my friend told me he “saw this place on the computer, you go to an address and you can see it”, that first time I held the iPhone and recently upon peeling back that case to reveal the iPad 2. These speak to something within us and instantly make a connection. There’s something magical about these technologies.

Of course most technologies either never get there, and if they do, they usually take much longer to spark that moment. Perhaps it’s that we change along with the technology, and only months later do we realize its implications. Twitter was that sort of technology for me, I (somewhat famously around Arc90) spent a fair amount of time talking crap about it before it completely changed how I communicate with the world.

I’d Like to Introduce You To…

I was lucky enough to encounter one of those moments at this year’s SXSW: a super-slick hardware, software and network integrated solution that reimagines a core concept that drives our economy. The most impressive aspect of the technology, as is often the case, wasn’t the technology itself, but the social implications born from its invention. So where was I introduced to this technology? At the Convention Center? A new app launch? At the Trade Show? No, a much more interesting place – over a beer at The Ginger Man.

Home of the real conference & trade show

My late night routine was to hang out at The Ginger Man and talk to people, some old friends and plenty of new ones. On this night, Chris Fahey introduced me to Nick Disabato and the subject moved to Nick’s Kickstarter-funded, self-published book on interaction design, Cadence & Slang. Nick had a copy in hand, and I took a look through it. It was beautiful. I’d have bought it on its beauty alone, but Chris highly recommended it and I have a soft spot for self-published books, so I mentioned that I planned to buy a few copies for Arc90 when I returned to the office. To which Nick replied, “hand me your credit card, please.” I complied, he then swiped it into a small white device attached to his iPhone, I then signed his iPhone screen and got an email instantly confirming the purchase.

Another Form of Communication

If you haven’t yet heard of Square, you will. As far as technologies go, it’s stunning. The entire experience around purchasing has been considered, which is far more expansive than just swiping a card. As Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square inventor, has said:

“Payment is another form of communication,” he says, “but it’s never been treated as such. It’s never been designed. It’s never felt magical. About 90 percent of Americans carry cards, but almost nobody can accept them. We want to balance that out and just make payments feel amazing.” Dorsey talks about how Square must be “pixel-perfect,” and staffers tell stories about him agonizing over the exact location and thickness of a line on e-mailed receipts.

Another form of communication is exactly what struck me when I first encountered Square at the bar. Sure, the technology is interesting and the experience is thoughtful. That will take them quite far. But the social interaction that it gave birth to is what is really fascinating. Purchasing a book from its creator over a beer, no publisher in tweed coat or distribution middleman anywhere to be seen.

We’re in an age where people are getting back to creating things – from metalworks shops in Brooklyn to home-based businesses creating product sold through Etsy to Kickstarter-funded publishing efforts. What Wired, somewhat annoyingly, calls “The DIY Revolution”. But for the DIY Revolution to really take-off, creators must be able to sell their wares. And if the last 20 years have taught us anything, selling on credit is a powerful force. Now the little guys are on equal footing with the big guys, at least when it comes to collecting payment.

In the 00s, everyone became a publisher, perhaps in the teens, we’ll all become merchants.

I used to have a debate about Wal-Mart with friends and coworkers all the time. I suspect you did too. It went something like this:

Them: “Wal-Mart is evil. They’re ruining small towns and commerce in this country. Their approach leads to a race to the bottom.”

Me: “Don’t blame Wal-Mart, they are merely the agent. If you’re upset about what Wal-Mart is doing to communities, your real issue should be with the people that shop at Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart is just a proxy for your anger… And btw, Wal-Mart is not only not evil for single mothers of 6 kids – they’re a savior – cheap goods may not be necessary for you, but for some, they’re essential.”

For a long time I wondered why I was the only person that took that point of view. And today, many people still think Wal-Mart is evil. To me, it’s more nuanced than that. Of late I’ve had a realization though, this same conversation is playing out again with Demand Media. And with KFC. But let’s start first with KFC.

Satan's den? Or a mirror to our humanity?

Of course you know by now that KFC just launched the Double Down chicken sandwich. And guess what I’ve heard at least 10 times in the last week? “KFC is disgusting for exploiting people…” or “KFC is bad”. Shades of Wal-Mart is evil. But digging a little deeper, the Double Down sandwich is merely a product of market research and market testing:

During the product’s test market phase last year, high consumer interest and demand drove people to travel for miles to sample the Colonel’s tasty new creation.

We’d like to think of KFC executives being evil and exploitative, but that’s giving them too much credit. They aren’t brilliant enough to have invented the Double Down on their own, they’re merely reflecting our desires. Much like Wal-Mart does. When the public slides in the other direction, you find McDonald’s marketing their salads and orange slices instead of kids’ meals fries.

Currently, we’ve swung the other way, away from salads and orange slices, right towards a chicken sandwich where the bun is the chicken. Which brings me to my new theory, or at least a supposition:

People are uncomfortable with purely demand-driven businesses, because they expose what it is that people actually want… unfiltered. Which is often scary.

People demanded this mess

Which finally brings us to the aptly named Demand Media. You hear a lot of talk these days about how Demand is bad, and you might even encounter a Demand is evil comment. I was surprised how much of the talk at SXSW this year was around Demand and content farming, including a very balanced talk by Dan Gillmor: Are Content Farms Good or Evil? Yes. They are the most visible example among a set of businesses looking to exploit Google’s search results and farm out the creation of under-served content. A common criticism is that their end-product content is often unedited and often of suspect quality. But if there’s a void for step-by-step instructions on how to throw a good bachelor party in Vegas, you can be sure that Demand will sniff that out and create a post about it (note the first Google search result, from e-how, a Demand vehicle).

Demand burst into the public’s consciousness last year with Wired’s phenomenal article on their business practices, which, whether you like them or not, are brilliant:

The process is automatic, random, and endless, a Stirling engine fueled by the world’s unceasing desire to know how to grow avocado trees from pits or how to throw an Atlanta Braves-themed birthday party. It is a database of human needs, and if you haven’t stumbled on a Demand video or article yet, you soon will. By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Demand is already one of the largest suppliers of content to YouTube, where its 170,000 videos make up more than twice the content of CBS, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, Universal Music Group, CollegeHumor, and Soulja Boy combined. Demand also posts its material to its network of 45 B-list sites — ranging from eHow and Livestrong.com to the little-known doggy-photo site TheDailyPuppy.com — that manage to pull in more traffic than ESPN, NBC Universal, and Time Warner’s online properties (excluding AOL) put together. To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.

Much like Wal-Mart did in the 90s and 00s, and KFC is doing with their Double Down, Demand is giving us exactly what we want.

So instead of blaming Demand, those of us in the content creation, Web, publishing and communications industries need to ask ourselves – where is the demand for what we’re offering? Demand is making money while local papers are going out of business, could it possibly be that people value Demand’s content over the Sun Times’? If that’s the reality, you can complain and call Demand “bad”, or you can try to figure out what it is your former readers actually want to read.

Epilogue: If this depresses you, and you worry about the future of humanity, remember that the Wal-Mart revolution ushered in the slow food-Michael Pollan-Whole Foods counter-revolution. And Demand and AOL’s Seed will likely usher in a thoughtful, long-form, insightful content revolution.

A Long Time Ago

People gravitate to simple narratives and explanations – they’re easier to, well, explain. Discussion of the future of publishing often centers around the fact that publishers are big, ancient and dumb and won’t be relevant in the neat digital future. Traditional print publishers insist on such archaic things as editing, printing and payment. Simple explanations, however, miss the grainy textures of reality.

Another frequent tale is the common wisdom that people won’t pay for news. For a long time people have been conflating all types of information under this single banner of “news”. The Web then came and printing became silly and news became free. “News”, though, is too broad a term – and while plenty of information has become commoditized from the lack of a barrier to entry for distribution – all information cannot be painted with such a broad brush. Today you can just as easily learn that there’s a pending tsunami heading towards Hawaii from a blogging meteorologist as from CNN. We used to wait for the NY Times to describe a battle in the Pacific Theatre that happened weeks ago, and now it’s possible to learn about an event before your average NY Times reporter. Classic commoditization. The newspaper, though, used to bundle up so much more than just a statement of fact and occurrence – editorialism, composition, classified ads, word jumbles, Family Circus, thoughtful investigative journalism and so much more. News, even in the newspaper, was commoditized years ago – it was riding along with higher-value content. On the Web, that packaging has been peeled back and the valuable content has been scattered – no longer in the [evil] clutches of the publisher. So while people may not pay for news, they will certainly pay for word jumbles, curation, opinion, nice photos, infographics, insight and maybe even the comics. And here’s the dirty little secret, they’ll have to pay for those things, as they are expensive to create.

Publishers are evil. And old.

But look at how long that preceding paragraph is – how much easier is it to say that ‘people won’t pay for news online‘? It’s hard to communicate nuance, so most people don’t try.

In A Galaxy Far, Far Away

What of the future of the long-form narrative – the story? In the clean well-understood future without “publishers” authors will type fiction novels into Word on their laptops and post them to their Websites – no middleman required! Democratization of information; information wants to be free; Here Comes Everybody; we’re all publishers now. Nirvana.

One problem, though… we just threw the baby out with the bath water! This concept [the end of the publisher] has always bothered me, I’ve always suspected that publishers had learned a lot since Gutenberg, and probably some things that weren’t just about printing, binding and physical distribution. Things like editing, composition, working with authors, story-telling and building anticipation – aren’t those capabilities still important?

A New Hope

With this as a backdrop, I anxiously awaited Jeffery Zeldman‘s SXSW panel on the future of publishing – New Publishing and Web Content. There’s much to say about this panel, it was excellent, but I encountered something so compelling and so relevant to what I’ve been thinking about lately that finding it was alone worth the price of the conference. This is The Amanda Project which challenges this neat story we’ve all crafted about the future of publishing in unexpected ways.

Lisa Holton, Founder and CEO of Fourth Story Media, was on the panel, along with Erin Kissane, former Happy Cog’er and current Web strategy and community lead for the Project. Lisa helped run a traditional publisher, and did well bringing real books to market (you might have heard of them: Harry Potter & 39 Clues). Lisa then founded Fourth Story Media, with a mission articulated well on the company’s About page:

We develop compelling intellectual property and distribute it across traditional and nontraditional channels including books, collaborative web fiction, and social media. Our stories are enriched, refreshed, and socially shared by our online readers, while the readers who encounter our stories in print can further immerse themselves in the cross-media narrative by joining their fellow readers online to discuss, expand, and celebrate the stories we tell.

At the heart of our company is an expanding circle of experienced writers, artists, developers, and producers who are equally comfortable with traditional and brand-new forms of storytelling. We also work with major publishing and media companies, ensuring the strongest possible marketing and distribution for our content.

Above all, we believe that great stories can survive—and thrive—by finding their readers where they are: in bookstores, on websites, on cell phones, and in new media forms that are only just beginning to develop.

Wow, that’s refreshing: carrying the story across media, editing, supporting audience engagement, professional writers and editors (!), and a focus on distribution. This brings us to Fourth Story’s The Amanda Project:

The first manifestation of the story was a print book, targeted to teenage girls. The Amanda Project site extends the story and allows young girls to join the community and contribute directly to the story through their writing. On the site, members can create a character, write stories featuring their characters along with characters from the main story, those created by others in the community or their friends. On a weekly basis, the editorial staff for The Project writes a prompt, which triggers a wave of writing among the community. Girls can upload pictures they’ve drawn, clues they’ve “found” or start a discussion. The Project’s authors and editors then will pull compelling community-created characters and plot lines into the print editions.

When I first heard this described I immediately thought about Star Wars – people love the characters from Star Wars and extend them outside of the official intergalactic regulatory commission. They write, draw, dress-up as and discuss their favorite characters. Some franchises fear this loss of control and work against it – but how much smarter is it to embrace this fervor? Sure there’s a loss of control, but creators suffer this loss of control as soon as their book hits the shelf or their movie hits the big screen. The Amanda Project embraces this loss of control and allows the story to evolve within the community.

People love their favorite characters

The Amanda Project also challenges our story about the future of publishing in more direct ways. While they’ve innovated and turned the audience on its head, they also have an editorial staff (“who are equally comfortable with traditional and brand-new forms of storytelling”) and a varied distribution model (“we believe that great stories can survive—and thrive—by finding their readers where they are: in bookstores, on websites, on cell phones, and in new media forms that are only just beginning to develop.”). Distribution is messy and always evolving, and there’s room for print, I suspect, well into the future. Even for the next generation.

Happily Ever After

As a father of a soon-to-be teen girl, I’m excited that this innovation is targeted at her. Keeping young girls interested in reading and writing during their transformative years is a public service. In the early years of my kids’ schooling, I’ve been surprised by how much their teachers stress story-telling. Before they could spell they were asked to tell a story using pictures and and attempt at words. Hilarity often ensued. Story-telling is crucial to learning and effective communication.

Beyond my personal feelings about what they’re doing at The Amanda Project, people should take notice of their publishing model. Engaged audiences are profitable ones. Which brings us back to our narrative around the future of publishing – if traditional print publishers can take the value that they’ve spent many decades cultivating and apply them to new distribution models, there’s room for them as protagonists of our story. The successful story-tellers of the future will be individuals and organizations that understand the need to balance the old (editorialism, curation, anticipation, composition) with the new (new distribution models, audience engagement, no barriers to entry).

Publisher as Protagonist