Ok. Some big changes happened over the last 3 months and I have failed update this blog. Here goes;

I took a break from working at the World Bank to move to Rome, Italy and manage the web for the World Food Programme. I have been in Rome since early July and enjoying every bit of it.

I am proud of what I have worked on at the Bank:

• Launched the buzzmonitor, an open source aggregator that has been downloaded close to 4,000 times.
• Helped the Bank's experts and economist embrace blogging
• Did a cool mashup
• Got the first World Bank API going (they launched it last week, yay!)
• Invited some luminaries to speak to Bank management about what's going on today on the web
• Worked with great folks like Pierre, Irakli, Goga, Jeff, Nicole, Zeina and many others.

 

All in all it was a great experience. The World Bank is a fascinating, incredibly complex place with lots and lots of brilliant folks. It's a bit of a bureaucracy too, of course, but I am positive that social media will continue to have a strong impact on the organization.

Out with the old...I am now at the World Food Programme, the world's largest humanitarian agency. Boy is it different from the Bank. We are in constant emergency mode. From Myanmar to Georgia to Haiti to North Korea...WFP staff is all over the world delivering food to the poorest of the poor. This presents a whole new set of challenges and opportunities on how we can use the web and I hope to share some of what I have in mind on this blog.

Onwards,

PG

I read Billy Bragg's NYT piece on why artists who promoted their music on Bebo should be rewarded because it helped build the site. Beebo recently sold to AOL for $850 million and Bragg argues that the bands deserve a cut.

Mike Arrington rips into him :

Why is it the Brits have all the crazy-stupid ideas about how to screw up the music industry even more than it is already?

and

I think the main reason Bragg wrote this article is jealousy over the massive success of someone he once met - Bebo cofounder Michael Birtch.[...]. Bragg had absolutely nothing to do with Bebos’ $850 million payday. And everything else he wrote in that article is dead wrong, too.

I believe Mike is wrong and that Bragg is right but both use obsolete arguments. 

Both focus on the royalties, radios, labels, artists etc.. while this has nothing to do with the music industry. It has to do with brands, attention, traffic, social graph, whatever you want to call it.

This from Youtube's FAQ:

After you click the "Enable Monetization" button on your video, YouTube will begin showing ads when your videos are viewed. As a partner, you will earn a share of this revenue.

Videos yes, streaming songs or music videos no?

The web is going towards a model where every piece of information that has value can be "monetized" in an equitable manner. This applies to the music industry too. In the case of Bebo, bands have music, pics, fans that translates into traffic that translates into ad impressions. It's this value that justifies an $850 price tag for Bebo. Bands should be paid something correlated to their popularity.

Mike argues that "recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist". Yes, the song, as a product you own is dead. Online, the brand is the product.

These communities  / b(r)ands are organizing themselves and by using data portability, open id, web standards etc..could, overtime, gain considerable economic weight, forcing online middlemen (social networks, search engines, media sharing sites) to rethink the way things are done, and auction their value to the highest giver.

Nick Carr gets it

This has been in the back of my head for a while so here it is, as a 2008 prediction:

• In 08, the start page theme will become a hot advertising spot. Google just launched a theme directory and an API and it is a matter of time until a savvy brand develops a theme with a catchy, funny, provocative story line. Think Burger King or Virgin etc....

It makes a ton of sense to grow this even more. This page has an insane amount of info on the user so it can be targeted / personalized to death, has his/hers attention probably more than any other web page and allows for the development of a story line that unfolds during the whole day...All this makes for a very stong emotional connection between the brand and the user. I am going to look at this API now..

On the job, I spend time listening and trying to understand how social media works. This means that i look closely at what is being said about my employer, the World Bank, on the Buzzmonitor.

There was a story on digg yesterday that has gained a fair amount of attention because it has a misleading headline. It claims that 90% of the World Bank aid money is consumed by corruption while pointing to an article about a case of corruption on a project in India. Nowhere does the article say that 90% of the money we lend is for corruption, the guy who submitted the story totally made that up, as digg bait.

And it worked:

• Top story for the past 24 hours in the business section
• over 900 diggs
• 83 comments and 5 posts.

The interesting thing is that the exact same story was submitted two days before with less catchy headline and it collected a royal 2 diggs. Reading the comments, i'd venture that maybe 5% actually understand what the issues are while others use the same old clichés and cristicism of the Bank.

What does that tell us? that the wikipedia page that says that digg allows "sensationalism and misinformation to thrive" is probably right.  And that, as a commenter on the story says:

"I figure occasionally, Diggers might want to get outraged by facts, not exaggerations."

Yes, that'd be nice cause you know, social media is about the conversation right? ;)

In any case, for those of you who actually might be interested in the real issue, how the Bank fights corruption in its operations, a friend of mine here once told me that fighting poverty in corrupt environments is akin to emptying a pool with a colander. The Bank is fully aware that corruption exists and is taking more steps than many others in investigating, stopping and preventing corruption in its projects. It has actually debarred dozens of firms (see who and why), and is investing in training and preventive programs to make sure our collander is bigger and with fewer holes. Finally, if you ever are involved in a bank project and witness or even suspect corruption, you should report it using  our fraud and corruption hotline.

[update: i submitted the story on digg]

Now that everyone is joining the Data Portability initiative (including linked-in, flickr), Wired questions how committed to portability these companies truly are given the past claims of openness without actual follow through.

This is different from Microsoft pretending to support Linux. This is something that directly affects end-users and, in my view, within 5 years, a critical mass of them will be saavy enough to ask for it, to expect it.

So I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Ultimately, I will chose to primarily do most of my online business thru Google or Linked-in not because the switching costs are too high, but because they are the best for me. Rational and efficient. Let's hope those guys are sincere and most importantly that we start seeing some concrete applications soon.

 

It looks like it. Google, Facebook and Plaxo just joined the data portability working group. I was wondering whether google was serious when Eric Schmidt hinted at it a while ago. I blogged then:

[....]Google is commited to data interoperability (as in: Google lets you take your data to go to a competitor - see this Eric Schmidt interview, scroll way down) [...]Watch this space.

If this is indeed real and user data is truly portable, then it will give you control over it and will become your data. This means opening the door to a slew of services and applications aimed at helping you manage it, share it, and, why not, monetize it....

happy new year!

A new look for personomies! Yeah, for the new year. <snark>I have done such a great job at blogging that I deserved a new design </snark>...

Drupal and my buddy Pierre Lord made it happen. Thanks.

It will be hard not to blog with such a great looking site. Or so I hope.

One of Google's VP of engineering just announced in a detailed note that they are basically taking on wikipedia, mahalo, about, squidoo and many others with one very simple and clever concept: the knol.

A knol is EGM (expert generated media - i made up the acronym;)).

It is a very simple idea: an expert writes a page on a topic (a la squidoo / about), the page is submitted to the community for peer reviews and comments (a la wikipedia). The wisdom of the searching crowd decides then which pages are best. (a la mahalo). And the kicker: google splits ad revenues on the page with the author.

Simply brilliant.

At a time where the wikipedia community is fizzling, where attention is increasingly hard to get, Google, with its mighty market share, offers experts instant traffic and recognition, and, substantial revenue. No more anonymous editing and writing for wikipedia. The knol has your name, your photo and more in big bold letters! Talk about incentives. I also wonder how the knol will fit in the portfolio of online presence tools we have today. Will quickly become another item on the lengthy "social media todo list" or can it actually be the start of vertical networks tied to profile and other lifestreams from the experts? Time will tell.

Hats off to Google on this one for entering this space.

Oh, and Jimmy Wales should have taken my advice of slapping some ads on wikipedia when i gave it to him 2 years ago: by now, he could have started sharing revenue with top contributors.

I'll keep an eye on the knols, for sure.

While at Defrag, I had the chance to sit down for an interview with Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! and talk about the buzzmonitor. Watch the video here (it contains a screencast about half way through).

I am happy to report that I will be attending the Defrag conference. The speakers are great, the topics are really relevant to what I do and it does not look like a large, boring, one-way conference. It's a fairly small  - about 250 people I'm told - and open sessions and discussion spaces abound. I look forward to being there, chat about the Buzzmonitor and have a good time.  If you are going, let me know.