Socially Speaking

The Waxxi ‘cast with Cory Doctorow is up for your listening pleasure. There were more questions coming in via IM/email this time than via phone, which is an interesting dynamic. Cory really delivers an incredible amount of knowledge, thought and sharing in answering one question, never mind dozens. Have a listen.

For those who prefer text, here is another (great) question from the chat, by Diggal:

(1) Why do you think Boing Boing is so popular, and (2) do think online blogs will take over print, TV and other traditional media?

So, Boing Boing I think owes its success to a few factors. One is, we have good taste. I think we pick out neat stuff. That’s cool. I think, though, that there are lots of people who have good taste, and one of the things that we do that goes beyond having good taste, is we are very, very, very explicit in our headlines and our summaries. You can tell from reading a Boing Boing headline exactly what the Boing Boing story is about. You can tell from reading the first sentence, everything that’s in the story. You can tell from reading the whole post, everything you need to know about the link.

And that’s, I think, an enormous advantage over other blogs, which often post things like, “Funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Can’t describe it, just go look.” When you’re looking at 10,000 undifferentiated headlines in your RSS reader, it’s really hard to pay attention to those things. They don’t alphabetize well, they don’t make any sense, as compared to these very, very explicit headlines.

There are other reasons of course. Clay Shirky famously described the power law distribution of blogs. His thesis is that the rich get richer when it comes to inbound links and to attention and traffic. Which is to say, the more links you have pointing at your blog, the more chances there are that any given person will find your blog; the greater the chances that any given person will find your blog, the greater the chances that someone will make a link to your blog; the greater the chances that someone will make a link to your blog, the greater the chances that someone will find your blog. So, in other words, we’ve been around a long time, and that makes us popular, too.

Will blogs take over traditional media? I think the future composts the past. You know, opera wasn’t’ taken over by radio. It might have been overtaken by radio, but it wasn’t taken over by radio. By the same token, I don’t think traditional media will disappear, but I think that the role that it plays will be greatly shifted.

There are certain kinds of stories that you might want to tell, and certain kinds of messages you might want to convey that are just better suited to being discussed and conveyed in a distributed fashion by individual bloggers and small groups of bloggers who have this distributed conversation linked together by services like Technorati, Google Blog Search, trackbacks, and comments that just aren’t as well suited to being distributed and promulgated by big, monolithic broadcast media.

During our interactive podcast with Cory Doctorow, the first question asked of him was one we think he felt very comfortable answering. As for the conversation, we’ll be posting transcripts here, and of course the audio will be up on Waxxi shortly.

Question, (via email) from Karen in Chicago:

Will DRM die, and if it does, what will be the conduit?

Cory’s profoundly simple answer, was this:

I think, ultimately the force that will drive DRM out of the marketplace — is the marketplace. There is no market for DRM. There is no customer who woke up this morning wishing that three was a way that she could do less with her music.

Here’s his answer, in its entirety:

“Well, I think DRM is definitely reeling. I was just preparing some stuff for the class I teach tomorrow, and I was going through Siva Vaidhyanathan’s wonderful book, The Anarchist in the Library, and he reminded me of something I’d totally forgotten about.

There was a guy in Germany who bought this CD in 2003 or 2004, and it wouldn’t play on his computer because it had DRM on it. He wrote EMI a letter saying ‘I bought this CD and it won’t work!’ EMI sent him back this incredibly awful note saying, ‘Look, thief! You better get used to it, because within months every single CD sold in the entire world will have DRM on it, and there’s no going back now.’

Now, the interesting thing about this is that EMI has just announced that they’re planning to a make a huge portion of catalogue available without any DRM at all, just as mp3s. Not just taking DRM off their CDs but actually just selling mp3s on the Internet. So that’s pretty amazing.

And, I think ultimately the force that will drive DRM out of the marketplace – is the marketplace. There is no market for DRM. There is no customer who woke up this morning wishing that there a way that she could do less with her music. So, to the extent that these companies have shareholders, and these shareholders have got their eyes on the ball, they aren’t very happy about the fact that these companies aren’t making music available in the form that consumers want to buy it in.

Companies that are making music available in better forms are selling more, and ultimately all of these companies have to compete with the free market – the infringing market. iTunes has shown that people will buy stuff even if you can get it for free.

So, you can compete with free, but it seems pretty implausible to think that you can compete with free by making something that sucks. It’s really hard to compete with anything if you start with a product that sucks.”

The audio really brings Cory’s words to life, along with his passion and intense intellectualism. Next up: Boing Boing, Steve Jobs, Google Book Search, and more.

We’d like to thank everyone that attended Monday’s interactive podcast with Cory Doctorow, including of course, Mr. Doctorow himself. Some joined by IM, some by phone, and many – both. As expected, it was a fascinating, reeling conversation. Someone once said of Cory, quite accurately, that he was the ultimate interviewee. Fire off a question and what you get back is clear, concise, and brilliant mindshare; an explosion of thought, passion and analysis.

We discussed topics from Disney to DRM, the world of science fiction to the world of the copyfight, Google Book Search, Wikipedia, his upbringing, and (much) more. We’ll post some of the conversation here, and of course the podcast will be available on Waxxi, shortly.

Interestingly, during the recording we experience a slight technical glitch. Suffice to say, it felt more like twelve or so podcasts worth of technical difficulties all rolled into 10 minutes’ time. But what happened in the end is actually the fun part of the story. A participant named Rich (calling from the UK) swiftly took over the conversation, asked Cory questions, and took some from the crowd – like he had done it 1,000 times before. The crowd went wild! They loved it. And, after listening to this great banter for a bit, I came back in when the timing was just right, and continued on. Now that’s participatory.

We’ve always said at Waxxi, the Floor is Yours. We believe the interviewer should take a back seat, and the people should drive the conversation.

Our gratitude again goes out to Cory, as well as a few others:

* the dedicated, hard working, fun loving Waxxi team, which includes our partners-in-design, Inflatble3

* the participants, who included bloggers, students, entrepreneurs, executives, journalists and a fantastic on-the-fly-moderator, Rich (you’re hired!)