Yury Lifshits

As I was working on The Like Log Study (in-depth report on social engagement around online news) I come up with some simple 'social media check up' routine. So here we go :)

Baselines. According to my measurements in Like Log project, you should see around 5-20 likes and tweets per 1000 pageviews. If you have more than that, your content is very engaging. If you are below, it's either beacuse your sharing buttons are not visible enough or your content can be better. At the moment, various sources (The Aol Way, Yandex News Report) report that around 1% of traffic to news sites comes from social networks. However, serveral websites get order of magnitude more. The Like Log Study itself is getting 20% of visits from Twitter and Facebook. I recommend to aim for 10% goal of social-out-of-total traffic. 

The scale. Using The Like Log Study as a reference I can offer the following interpretations for the number of facebook likes. 1M likes is probably the best article of the year across the whole web. 200K likes is the one of the best stories of the month. It is also an achievable level for relatively niche sites, if they have breakout material and are doing great work at promotion. Gizmodo's iPhone4 leak got 245000 facebook reactions. 50K likes should be the target level for the best stories at any 'Tier II' website (Mashable, Vanity Fair, national non-English news portals). 10K likes is a pretty achievable level for a fantastic standalone page created by unkown people. 200 likes should be a routine result for almost any professional website (that cares about engagement). 20 likes and below is a sign of trouble. Either your direct/subscriber/search traffic is too low or your sharing buttons are unusable or your content is really non-engaging.  

Find most popular stories for a given site. Go to advanced search page at Topsy.com. Use your site name as a search query and restrict results to your domain. I'll get a list of URLs from your site that were tweeted during the last month. The total number of links is typically between 10 and 1000. Topsy allows you to see only first 100 results. To see them all you can use time restrictions in advanced search (check for every day or week separately). Topsy reports number of tweets for every results. These numbers can be 20%-30% below actual retweet numbers as Topsy can not always match all duplicates of your URL back to the original.

Measure retweets. Just go to http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://yoururl.com

Measure facebook likes, shares and comments. For any individual URL simply go to http://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://yoururl.com. It will show you the total Facebook count (likes+shares+facebook comments). For a complete breakdown of Facebook reactions, plus number of tweets and clicks on bitly-shortened version of your URL, go to http://bit.ly/http://yoursite.com and click on "Info Page+" link in the middle of the page. Note that in many cases number of bit.ly-tracked clicks is bigger than twitter referrals you see in your analytics. That's another indication that your actual social impact is bigger than your can measure. http://sharedcount.com is an alternative lookup service to check the number of facebook likes and retweets for any particular URL.

Find blog reactions. To find blog posts about your article, do a Google search with 'Latest' or 'Last 24 hours' option.

APIs. You can write your custom scripts by using one of available APIs for social metrics: Facebook REST API (detailed numbers), Facebook Graph API (total count only), TweetMeme (number of tweets), Bit.ly (number of bitly-tracked clicks), Topsy API (most tweeted URLs for given site), Backtype (tweet and like counts).

So, what are your numbers? Do you have other ways to measure social? Ping me at @yurylifshits or yury@yury.name.

I am pretty sure that this checklist can be helpful for social marketers, community managers and editors. If you know relevant people please send them a link or just tweet it. You can copy/paste the whole post to your site, just link back to original. Also feel free to translate it to your language.

I've recently completed one of the first large scale analysis of Facebook Like Log. Here are some ideas and problems for future work. I hope you will solve one of these problems :)

What is Like Log? Through some public APIs it is possible to discover most popular URLs for given topic or from a given site. It is also possible to retreive the number of Facebook likes or retweets for any webpage. I recommend to look at Facebook REST API (detailed numbers), Facebook Graph API (total count only), Bit.ly (number of bitly-tracked clicks), Topsy API (most tweeted URLs for given site) and Twitter count API. I use the term 'Like Log' as a name for the set of all social reactions to online content.

Measurements:

1. Rank websites by social lifespan of their content. Here is a possible metric for social lifespan of a website: Percentage of social engagement its content is receiving on the second week. In particular, I am interested whether online magazines have longer lifespan than online newspapers.     
2. Rank brands and newsmakers by social engagement around their coverage in media.
3. Compute engagement trends based on votes at Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, StackExchange, Quora and MetaFilter.
4. Study how engagement trends are changing in time.
5. Track social engagement around the same story covered in various media.
6. Rank keywords by their demand potential (high shareability, low coverage). Visualize most demanded topics.
7. Compute Twitter-based engagement trends. How do they differ from Facebook-based ones? What keywords are more tweetable? More Facebook-liked? 
8. Is it true that pageviews fade out much slower than social reactions?
9. Measure social reactions to other entities: Youtube videos, Slideshare decks, Amazon products, Etsy merchants, Kickstarter projects. Social reaction to online commerce are particularly important. Their owners are eager to optimize for social traffic.
10. Get access to referral data and compute ratio for likes and tweets vs. actual visits from social networks.
11. Use bit.ly API and tweet texts to determine keywords with highest clickability.
12. Extend social engagement analysis to other languages.
13. Do in-depth analysis of social reaction to a major event and its coverage. Analysis of most shared reactions to Japan Earthquake can reveal the best practices for reporting breaking news.

Models:

1. Collect a large dataset of social reactions for sites that show explicit pageview counts (BusinessInsider, Gawker Network, Forbes Blogs, Change.org, BleacherReport, BuzzFeed, LookAtMe.ru). Design an algorithm that estimate pageviews from social reactions. Test it on other websites with privately available pageview numbers. 
2. What content factors (content size, multimedia, ads, pagination, illustrations, call for action, question at the end) are correlating with social engagement?

Services:

1. In The Like Log Study I visualized websites as keyword tagclouds. A great step forward will be to make these tagclouds clickable. Every keyword should lead to best article (or top ten articles) about this term.
2. Build self-service tool that can compute engagement profile for any website in fully automated way.
3. There is a significant demand for social media optimization (SMO) consulting and community management. Something similar to what SEOMoz.com and SearchEngineLand do for search.   
4. Big media companies have 'business operations' positions. These people are responsible to track and grow performance numbers: pageviews, ad revenue, and time spent. Since social engagement is now a big part of overall media performance, they need new solutions. Specifically, operations folks need (1) social key performance metrics (KPI), and (2) social KPI dashboard, preferrable delivered in SaaS style. Given Facebook/Twitter count APIs these dashboard can be build with zero help from media companies. You can give them for free for a limited time, then start charging.

Please send this list to anyone relevant or just  tweet it!

I bet you have seen this awesome Word Lens demo. It is the strongest organic launch since the times of Chatroulette. What are the lessons for the rest of us?

• Everything is secondary to compelling usecase. Word Lens has strange company name (QuestVisual), no logo, crappy landing page, and no PR preparation. But it's darn cool! And that's what matters. 
• Prepare high quality images (product, founders, usecases) and demo video. Almost every media embedded Word Lens official video.
• Assembly innovation is really cool. Every piece of Word Lens was here, but nobody made a perfect combination before today. Academic researchers will never do another Word Lens, as they are overfocused on novelty and hate just-assemble-the-pieces work.
• Clever freemium business model. Word Lens is free, but you have to buy language packs. "erase words" and "reverse words" are free demo modes to prove that the app really works. Note, that you can even turn it into subscription model with dictionary updates.
• BlendBack is the heart of this invention. Word Lens goes like this: (1) detect and recognize characters, (2) translate, (3) produce text in similar colors and shape and blend it back to the picture. The last step is the most innovative and can be used beyond Word Lens. E.g. one can do "Bar Code replacer". Turn your phone on any barcode and see some picture there. Can be used as a cheap replacement for road signs and ads.
• No connection required. This is extremely important. 3G is unstable. WiFi is not everywhere. 4G has not really arrived yet. When you travel, your carrier can not cover you perfectly. I can see more and more essential apps that will not require connection. "Yelp in a box" anyone?
• Global appeal. This is not another geek's app. It is mom and pop's app. It is an app for every country and and every village. We need to spend more time outside Silicon Valley to find needs like this one.
• Science fiction inspiration. Part of the reason for press craziness is that Word Lens matched the science fiction story (Babel fish from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"). We love seeing SF concepts turning into reality. Let's reread old classic and implement all other concepts from there :)
• SuperHappyDevHouse and Hacker Dojo were essential for this success story. A lot of people there volunteered for Word Lens, were early testers, etc. Many top hackers knew about Work Lens before the launch, so it got a strong boost of upvotes and tweets right out of the doors.

What I would do next

• Obvious: add more language packs. Asian languages can be a bit of a challenge (recognition is harder).
• Brainstorm pricing. A lot of options are available: different price for the first month, bundle prices for several languages, one-time price discount (a la 23andme), subscription model, enterprise package.
• Put on hold all talks to investors and potential acquirers.
• Immediately start working on versions for other platforms (Android, Blackberry, Nokia, WinMo). Hire another person to do just that.
• Run a contest: iPhone for the best "Word Lens in the wild" video.

Good luck for Otavio and John! Can't wait for Android version and Russian language pack.

HackerNews discussion.

Along with health, environment, energy and transportation, education is a top area of innovation for the next two decades. The demand for education solutions is at all-time high. Investment in education is a priority for every country. The Web, streaming video, mobile devices, and social networks have the potential to significantly improve existing education systems. Today, many people are getting excited about LearnTech opportunities. This guide provides the high-level overview of the industry. We answer the following five questions: 

• What needs does education satisfy?
• Where do money come from?
• What technology ideas are at the play?
• What is changing in education?
• What are the most promising directions of innovation?

Learning needs

Let us review the main education benefits from the learner's perspective:

• Career guidance. Learners need to understand themselves, discover their best talents, get inspired and motivated, set career goals, receive feedback and emotional support along the way. 
• Literacy and academic fundamentals. Math, critical thinking, reading, writing, communication skills, learning skill, foreign languages, driving, computer and web literacy, health literacy, basic civic education.  
• Personal education. Character building, parenting, cooking, home and garden, cosmetics, style, time management, creativity, dancing, music, personal finance, fitness, yoga, happiness and well being.
• Edutainment (entertaining education). Learning can be an alternative entertainment option to TV shows, night clubs or movies. Many people enjoy learning out of curiosity and personal interests. Space exploration, brain science, science of sleep, history, geography, nature, and crafts are typical topics in this area.
• Employability. There is a growing gap between academic education and employability requirements. Learners need state-of-the-art skills and knowledge in order to be productive in their future jobs. This category also include product/tool education: Microsoft products, accounting software, hair products, Photoshop.
• Networking. Connections made in schools (classes, labs, sports teams, fraternities, dorms).
• Professional development. All industry-specific knowledge and skill that are needed to get from an entry-level job to being world-class specialist. 
• Business education. Industry-independent knowledge and skills: project management, team building, marketing, human resources, sales, accounting, entrepreneurship, corporate culture, and business development.
• Promoted education. Consumer education about new products. Education for social change: environment protection, green living, preventive healthcare, civil society, anti-corruption. Patriotic education. 
• Forced education. Safety and compliance training, corporate orientation, standardized tests, traffic schools. 

Governments and philanthropic organizations use the growth of human capital as the value metric for education systems. Human capital is the cumulative ability to produce economic value. In turn, industry often uses the concept of talent pipeline. Talent pipeline is an outlook for prospective candidates at all career stages: students, interns, entry-level employees, middle management, top management. Corporations are interested to grow the total qualified pool at every level.

Education customers

Learners and parents are paying for private schools, test preparation, colleges, employability training, personal education, and edutainment. In many cases, student loans are used to borrow money needed for education. Governments are supporting public school and universities, national tests, development of standards. Industry put money in supporting industry-relevant classes and research groups in universities, onboarding and professional development programs, as well as customer education. Philanthropy is focused on education for disadvantaged groups, innovative and unproven approaches to education, scholarships for talented students and school endowments. Learners, government, industry and philanthropy are four primary sources of money in LearnTech. These dollars enter the system and go to schools, universities, training programs, and book publishers. Education providers form a market of education tools and supplies. Education industry is largely sales-driven. Most purchases and contracts are big and take long time to close. As a result, LearnTech industry is moving rather slowly and, in many cases, education solutions are far from perfect end-user experience.

We introduced 10 education benefits and 5 sources of money. Now, you can use this 10×5 table to classify any LearnTech solution. Every cell in the table has its own competition and dictates its own rules for sales and product development.

Education technology market

Online degrees, schools and test prep. A number of startups are positioned as primary education providers. There are online high-schools (Keystone School), colleges (University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, The Open University, University of People), certification programs (Alison.com), enterprise training programs (GlobalEnglish.com), art schools (AudioVisualAcademy.com), and test preparation programs (TopTestPrep, GrockIt, Knewton, RevolutionPrep, TutorJam, BrightStorm). Another line of work is to allow brick and mortar institutions to teach online. iQAcademy helps high-schools to offer online classes, 2tor and Altius Education do that for universities, Arizona State University created an extensive online programs. Finally, there are innovative offline programs like YCombinator, Singularity University, and Tetuan Valley.

Learning management. Educational institutions need software to manage applications, grades (GradeMate), class ratings and reviews (Courserank, acquired by Chegg), schedules, tests, textbooks and student-teacher messaging. There is also need for content management (Sakai Project, Moodle). Another important area is analytics and reporting systems (SchoolNet.com). Learning management systems are now present in every market: schools, universities, corporate education and training centers. Notable examples include Blackboard, Koofers, ePals, MyEdu.com, edu20.org, LearnBoost, and GlobalScholar. Solutions for corporate learning include LearningZen, Learn.com + Taleo.com, eLearning Brothers, and Mindflash.

Content. There is a lot of innovation in production, distribution, licensing, monetization, search and recommendation of educational content. TED.com, Big Think, 99 Percent, Pop!Tech, GEL Conference and Charlie Rose Show are notable for video recordings of technology and business leaders. Academic Earth, Videlectures.net, and ResearchChannel.org do the same for science community. Salman Khan of KhanAcademy.org recorded over 1000 instructional videos covering almost all school curriculum. MIT OpenCourseWare and Stanfrod eCorner are leading examples of free online content from top universities. Tools for publishing (and charging for) online educational content include TeachersPayTeachers, Faculte.com, uDemy.com, Videolla.com, LearnOutLoud and LeapingBrain.com. Youtube.EDU and iTunes U are general purpose content distribution hubs. OERCommons.org is a search engine for open-licensed content. Sites like About.com, HubPages, Instructibles, AssociatedContent and eHow collect practical advice on everyday topics. Using technology ideas behind Wikipedia, everyone can create its own wiki (using platforms like PBWorks or Wikia.com). Wikified educational content can be found at Curriki.org and Wikiversity.org. Content libraries are created for career inspiration (dailyendeavor.com, TryEngineering.org), high schools (neok12.com, aventalearning.com), case studies (StudyNet), and lecture notes (GradeGuru). Flat World Knowledge publishes digital-free textbooks, while Chegg is a textbook rental service. InkLing is following "iTunes for iPad-optimized digital book" model and adds social features to it. Rosetta Stone publishes interactive language courses on DVDs.

Networks and marketplaces. There are a number of places to search for tutor and training listings: TeachStreet, BetterFly, TutorSource, School Of Everything, Skillshare, GuruVantage. TheoryAndPractice.ru is a very popular place for edutainment event announcements. CraftEdu.com is marketplace for paid/free online video and live training. Student Of Fortune is a marketplace for homework help. GulliverGo is a listing hub for educational travel. Noodle.org is your guide for choosing college. General purpose employment websites have sections for jobs for students and internship search. JobSpice.com helps students to create their online resume.

Live training and tutoring. General purpose tools like Justin.tv, Ustream, and LiveStream can be used for streaming lectures and conferences. Supercoolschool and EduFire.com provide specialized live teaching tools. Myngle.com (languages) and TutorVista (high-school help) are tutor-student networks for live education. Sugata Mitra introduced the concept of "Granny in the Cloud" - senior volunteers who encourage kids to study using skype video calls.

Collaborative learning. Services like UnClasses.org, OpenStudy.com and FinalsClub.org allow learners to form groups and study together. GrockIt provides chat between students, teachers and parents. Quora.com and StackExchange are modern question and answering platforms for professional topics. Mootup allows collaborative essay writing. There is a large number of education communities such as LiveMocha (language learning) and EduBlogs.com (teacher community).

Funding and payments. Sites like Enzi.org and GradeFund help students to get crowdfunded loans and to sell shares of their future salaries.

Hardware for education. One Laptop Per Child is a non-profit project to design a cheap laptop optimized for students in developing countries. Kno is a new tablet computer following "Kindle of textbooks" approach. Notable computerized classroom solutions include TimeToKnow and SOLE project.

Trends in education

Education industry is changing with astonishing speed. In order to succeed one need to plan for education landscape of tomorrow. Here are the main trends:

• Non-academic education. Although degree-driven education is on the rise as well, the growth in personal education, business education, corporate training, employability training, test preparation and edutainment is much stronger. There are also less established players in these areas.
• Self-learning. Much more learning is now self-motivated, happens on demand and is not driven by degree requirements. Learning is a lifetime activity. Learning skills, not knowledge determines professional success.
• New forms. Education units get shorter and more modular, "knowledge snacks" get popular. Online video, slides and text gain share from textbooks. Knowledge lifespan gets shorter.  
• Learning by doing. There is much bigger focus on practice now. Internships and a project portfolio (not a transcript!) determine employability. 
• Everyone is a teacher. We learn from best practices blogs, from Q&A sites, from professional experts at conferences. Peer support, group learning and corporate mentorship programs replace teacher feedback. Students teach students. Many CEOs give lectures at business schools.
• Industry involvement. At the moment industry is largely dissatisfied with education system. Graduates are not ready to be strong contributors from day one. Industry makes a lot of efforts to fix the problem: it sponsors industry-minded teachers, offers internship programs, influences curriculum, builds corporate universities.
• New business models. Education prices are out of control. There is high demand for quality low-cost and free education. The government spending is largely inefficient. Education philanthropy is in search of capital-efficient business models. Discovery of new business models of education is one of the largest challenges in the industry. 
• New credentials. Degree-driven education can be disrupted if alternative credentials will be accepted by job market. We start to see this happening when your code at GitHub and open source contributions, Behance profile, StackOverFlow and HackerNews reputations, Quora answers or TopCoder ranking are used in hiring.

Market opportunities

Educational content seems to be a natural target. Online video is still a virgin territory comparing to textbook business. Demand for new types of education (edutainment, personal education, business education) is not meeting enough supply, especially in developing countries. Another direction is translations and knowledge transfer from industry hubs (e.g. movie business in Hollywood) to the rest of the world.

Internships and student projects. As practice becomes the core of education, we need more contests, internships and hackathons to invlove student in real-world projects.

Career guidance. Students make suboptimal choices all the time. They get mac jobs instead of industry internships, overestimate the values of degrees, do not combine academic education with employability training, follow outdated curriculum and go to shrinking business sectors. These problems should be addressed by the right mix of mentorship,  talent discovery, professional orientation, role models, and recommendation systems.

Financial platform. Sales-driven nature of education market is a major roadblock of innovation. We need transparent, fast and efficient marketplaces for moving money from learners/government/industry/philanthropy/institutions to solution providers. E.g. Kickstarter model can be used to finance the development of new online courses.

HackerNews discussion.

Contact me at @yurylifshits or yury@yury.name.

Looking at my bookmark toolbar in Chrome I found 6 clusters of my web activities:

1. Time management and notes. I use PBWorks for all notes, todos and calender.
2. Communication. Email, facebook, twitter, and vkontakte.
3. Media. Livejournal, sports.ru, Hacker News, Quora. Occasionally, I read Twitter Times, TechMeme, Snob.ru, Mediagazer,  Inc Magazine, FastCompany, and live sports at LiveScoreHunter.com (it is a TV replacement for me). Without bookmarks, I also check TechCrunch, Charlie Rose, TED.com, and lookatme.ru.
4. My own projects and homepage.
5. Web services. Online banking, maps, dictionary, analytics and domain name checking.
6. Temporarily bookmarked articles (read later and delete bookmark after reading).

It's interesting to see the design of big destinations like Yahoo or Facebook through this prioritized list. They have good coverage for 2 (inbox), 3 (stream), 4 (profile), and 5 (my apps). However, 1 and 6 are not covered. So I wonder, is it a next step for Facebook/Yahoo/MSN/Google to implement native time management and read-later functionality? 

There is a new trend in the tech industry: making money on public goods. Until recently, public goods were viewed as an area of philanthropy. Now entrepreneurs, investors and corporate leaders see the business opportunity there. This essay gives a basic tour around the market of public goods. We cover the definition, core business models and future areas of growth. 

One can classify goods by the following two criteria: rivalry and excludability. A good is rival if its usage by one consumer reduces availability to others. In contrast, non-rival good can be used by every consumer in parallel. If a producer manages access for every user individually, the good is called excludable. Non-excludable goods are available for everyone interested. Thus, we get four groups of goods:

• Private good (rival and excludable): iPhone, Toyota Prius.
• Common-pool good (rival and non-excludable): Customer support, water in a river, conference rooms in an office building.
• Club good (non-rival and excludable): Cable television, Windows 7.
• Public good (non-rival and non-excludable): National defense, roads (excepting toll roads), GPS Satellites, Wikipedia.

In this essay we use the term public goods more broadly than in classic economics settings. Namely, we consider voluntarily non-excluded goods and nonrival-before-congestion goods to be public. Public goods are produced in a number of areas: city infrastructure, education, law enforcement, peace, safety/security, energy, environment, health, food safety, social security, employment, transportation, tourism, mass communications, and financial systems. In this essay we will have a look at the concept of public goods enterprise (PGE) - an organization that produces non-rival non-excludable goods at profit.

Comparing public goods to other concepts

Let us recall the definitions of several related concepts. Non-profit is an organization that does not distribute profit to its shareholders (all money are reinvested in operations and development). Charitable organization is a non-profit that serves some charitable purpose, in many cases helping those who can not help themselves. Charitable organizations are eligible for certain tax benefits. Social enterprise is entrepreneurial organization (i.e. typically for-profit) that is committed to make a certain change of philantropic nature.  Emergent venture is a subclass of social enterprise that is characterized by tech-based approach, focus on enrichment needs, business sustainability and small-to-medium scale.

How does this compare to public good enterprise? Well, PGE can be both for-profit and non-profit, as it only characterized by its product and not by the profit spending mode. PGE can produce both charitable goods (e.g. documentary about food safety) and luxury products (GPS sattelities). Public goods market is the overall ecosystem of supply and demand of non-rival non-excludable products. Non-profits, charities, social enterprises, emergent ventures as well as for-profit corporations can all be players in this market. We use the name public good enterprise (PGE) to describe any entrepreneurial entity on public goods market. The key common challenge for PGEs is to find means to produce freely available goods.

Public goods have several prejudices associated with them. The first one is that selling public goods to governments (and to foundations) is hard and corruption is typically involved. Of course, there is certain truth to that. However, some governments are genuinely looking for vendors of public goods. Some foundations make it simple to pitch them. We get better marketplaces to sell public goods. And corrupt governmental suppliers are still looking for subcontractors. At second, public goods are associated with charity and non-profit. It is not encouraged to make a fortune on saving African kids from AIDS. However, public goods is a much broader category than just survival needs of poor people. Think about city fireworks or a web-based fine payment system. One should think about a public good as a regular product with an indirect business model. Finally, sponsor-based business model does not reached mainstream status in technology sector. On the other hand, sponsorships and donations pay for fine arts, performing arts, museums, education, environment protection and event industry. Public goods need sponsors. So the tech industry will eventually embrace sponsor-driven products.

Business models

To produce public goods an enterprise needs to raise startup and R&D funding and then to find a sustainable source of operating revenue. There is a number of options for startup funding. To begin with, there are generic VC firms as well as VC firms with specific focus on public goods (Omidyar Network, Good Capital, Unreasonable Institute). Secondly, one can bootstrap from foundation/governmental grants. Then, there are special loan programs, like the one that was received by Tesla. Finally, public good enterprise can receive significant non-monetary investment in terms of volunteer help, media support, free facilities, technology and data donations.

Non-rivalry and non-excludability of public goods leads to so called "free rider problem". Everyone looks for others to fund the creation of public goods. As a result, public goods are underproduced. There are three primary ways to approach this problem and establish operating income for PGE:

• Pledge-based mechanisms. In this case, the producer of public goods sells directly to future users. A producer can set a threshold and ask for commitments. If the total amount of commitments exceeds the threshold, the production of public good is started. Kickstarter enables fundrising campaigns of this type.
  
• Pooled money. Another approach is to pool money from a community members to a single source. Then this proxy organization decides how to spend the pooled money for producing public goods. Governments, non-profit foundations, industry associations, chambers of commerce and home owner associations are typical examples of this approach.
• Complementary products. A producer of public goods can also fund its operations through selling additional products. For example, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is selling the rights to use its panda logo for commercial purposes (e.g. on credit cards) in order to rise funds for nature conservation programs. Selling name rights is another common scheme (e.g. Sloane Business School). Mozilla funds the development of Firefox browser by auctioning the default choice of search engine. Finally, public goods can follow freemium (PBWorks, gitHub) or ad-supported (Google Search) business models.

The opportunity

It is likely that demand for public goods will grow over the next few years. We see the increase in foundation money (e.g. "Giving Pledge" movement), developing countries become richer, corporations embrace the concept of corporate social responsibility, citizens of socialist and authoritarian countries (Sweden, North Korea) are giving their governments large shares of GDP to be spent in public interest. A for-profit enterprise has a lot of advantages in this market. It can invest in technology and people and attract large venture capital. Working on public goods means working on big problems: jobs, education, environment, health, transportation. 

There are two emerging clusters of web-based public goods. The first one is marketplaces. CharityNavigator connects donors and charities, Kiva connects lenders and entrepreneurs, Kickstarter connects artists and supporters, CatchAFire connects volunteers and charitable projects, Alter Eco connects farmers with fair trade buyers, Spot.Us is crowdfunding platform for investigative journalism. The second area is knowledge publishing. KhanAcademy and SupercoolSchool publish lessons, Ushahidi aggregates crisis reports, Wikipedia organizes encyclopedic knowledge, TED shares big ideas, OpenCongress makes law-making two-directional process and Ashoka profiles best social entrepreneurs. Other areas not far behind: mobile applications, e-government, payment and financial systems, social networks and communication systems.

Predictions for the market of public goods

• Better markets for public goods. The biggest barrier for producing public goods is the cost and complexity of sales to governments and foundations. Ideally, selling/buying public goods should be as easy as 1-click experience at Amazon. Existing procurement systems have a lot of room for improvement. We need specialized modern marketplaces for selling technology solutions to local governments, large public organizations (schools, hospitals), industry associations. DonorsChoose and Kickstarter are promising examples in this direction. We need a centralized market for corporate sponsorships. The public history of past spending would be very useful to identify sponsors of future products. Finally, a system to track demand ("wishlists") for public goods should be created.
  
• Sponsor networks. Like in advertising-supported media, the task of fundraising/selling to governments and the task of making public goods tend to be separated. Naturally, we will have sponsor networks, affiliate networks, large foundations and large governmental contractors who are good at collecting money. In turn, these entities will transfer most of the money to the layer of producers. While the first layer is under "be non profit" pressure and is subject to corruption, the second layer can focus on the actual creation of goods.
• Metrics and measurements. The easier it is to measure the public benefit, the easier it is to sell it. We need more metrics and quality control solutions in the areas of education, environment, and health.
• Improved venture funding. Some venture and seed funding is already available to public goods enterprises. Hopefully, we will see more such sources in the future.
• Increased spending for public goods. Another important direction is to allocate government/corporate/foundation budgets for funding creation public goods. In particular, we need more transparency and centralization around corporate social responsibility programs. Right now, raising corporate sponsorship requires a lot of legwork and personal connections. Another opportunity is to connect public goods spending to new tech clusters (Skolkovo, Chile, Boulder). Channeling technology demand to these places will bootstrap the ecosystem, attract talent and venture capital.
• Low cost public goods. Because selling to governments and foundations is hard, and because there is no liquid market for public goods, the prices are very high. Thus, an important direction for innovation is to deliver the most standard public goods at the lowest price possible (as Walmart and EasyJet do in case of private goods).  
• Connected community. One of the reasons why Silicon Valley is not contributing much to public goods is the long distance to Washington DC. Public goods industry will succeed if we connect tech cluster, government/foundation cluster and user cluster (education/environment/health needs). Silicon Valley entrepreneurs should travel to places were public goods are in highest demand. We need conferences, education programs, role models, best practices, directory of existing activities and players. It would be great to have a tradeshow where tech industry showcases available products to governments and foundations.
  
• Private goods companies to enter public goods sector. Private goods companies like Apple, HP and Sony accumulate enormous talent and technology assets. When they work on public goods (e.g. Apple iTunes U or Google PowerMeter) they consider it to be a philanthropy rather than business. As a result, these teams are underfunded and the projects are underdeveloped. Once we have a more efficient market for public goods, the contribution from these companies can reach the next level.

Takeaway lessons

1. Public goods is a great opportunity for the tech industry. As the market for private goods gets more competitive every day and large corporations seize the control over most profitable areas, it is time to shift technology ventures to the market of public goods. There are huge opportunities in the areas of healthcare, education technology, environment protection, governmental data, employment marketplaces, and financial systems.
2. The nature of public goods dictates the choice of business model. If your product belongs to the category of public goods then your revenue sources are direct sponsorships, governments, foundations and complimentary products. At the times, ad-supported business model was driving most of innovations in the web industry. Now it is time for sponsor-driven technology. Public goods are private goods. While a good is public with respect to end-users, it is still a private good for sponsors, foundations and governments. It is especially true for local public goods (knowledge translations, tourism marketing campaigns). Therefore, the regular business practices can be used. Customer development just becomes sponsor development.
3. The progress in public goods technology is tied to improvements of the marketplace. Once we will have a unified market for selling/buying public goods and widely accepted impact metrics, the speed of innovation increases dramatically.

Thanks to Preston McAfee, Michael Schwarz, Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, Ivan Davtchev for reading drafts of this. Contact me at @yurylifshits or yury@yury.name.

Three weeks ago I announced RemakeCamp, an unconference about the future of journalism and online media. At that moment I hardly new a single professional journalist. Now, I have 140 registrations and a solid lineup of speakers. You can join us in San Francisco on May 2. How did I make it? Here are the main lessons:

• Start with really good event description. Eventbrite is the best site for registration and tickets. Identify hot topics in the area. Promise the right combination of talks, panels and networking time. Give the fisrt few tickets for free. I actually put both free tickets and late bird tickets but was constantly adding more free tickets as they were selling out. Not announceing the exact venue at the beginning is just fine.
• Find super-connectors in your area and ask them in person to invite their friends. That really helps a lot.
• Collocate your unconference with a more traditional event in your industry.
• Go to local meetups in your industry and ask attendees if they will be interested to come/speak. Try to accept almost everyone for, say, a 5 minute talk.
• Post to relevant mailing lists or ask maintainers for a forward. Submit your event to relevant event calendars (surprizingly, this last one didn't work for me)
• Accept skype-in talks. There are relevant people who have no chance for a local conference on the topic. They will be glad to participate froma distance.
• Ask registered participants (by personal email) for speaker suggestions and introductions.
• Send a mass-mail event update asking participants for retweeting and inviting their Facebook friends.
• When you've got several strong speakers and a solid number of registrations, you can send cold emails and twitter replies (cold twitter invites work really well!). At that point you can also approach superstars offering to give a keynote.

In conclusion, there is no magic, no silver bullet, just send a few hundred emails and you are there. I feel that there is a room for a good unconference in almost every industry.  See you at RemakeCamp this Sunday :)

Plan

I want to build a new engine for online media: The core functionality ("Publisher OS") and a suite of publisher apps. I have several principles in mind:

• Focus on knowledge/professional media. Websites of professional societies and journals are still pretty much in Web 1.0. There are professional blogs here and there, but no real "web 3.0" experience.
• Advanced expert contributed content. The role of core staff should be curation and controlling the "top issues", while the best practices and in-depth coverage should come from real "doers" and decision makers in the field.
• Focus on productivity. Make it possible to run a big website and produce a lot of high quality content with as little editorial effort as possible. Outsource to freelance, algorithms and community everything that can be possibly outsourced.
• Agility and cutting edge technology. Being able to add/remove website features within hours and days. Test a lot of ideas and then double the effort on what works. Be the early adopter of new cool ideas in the online media industry.
• Build publishing apps around the network effect, i.e. when it is beneficial to have just one universal service (as in case of AP, Craigslist, or Facebook Connect).

At first, I was thinking to work as a part of some established destination. This turns out to be hard, as these teams are typically short-term focused and their engines are hard to extend. Then I considered a "cloud app" approach: to build a publisher plugin and look for early adopters. This way requires to find great customers who are willing to suffer through growing pains of your immature tool. This works primarily for "must have" features like comment engines. That's why I turned to the third approach: to start a new destination and build an engine with an app suite in parallel with growing the audience.

As a test case I choose to build the site for online media professionals. In the future it can help me hire most talented editors and also be the sales channel for my publisher app suite. And I am passionate about the topic. So I took a week off and launched mediaremake.com.

Main lesson: Three levels of features

I learned that making different features valuable require different level of your current success:

• At a new destination you should focus on: directory, ranked lists, summary articles, topic pages, guides, link blogging, coolhunting, editorial reviews, video channel, and a newsletter.
• At a destination with dedicated user base you can add news tips and leaks, votes on stories and topics of interest, comments, link submissions, personalized reader interface, wiki, user profiles, questions and answers, user created articles. If you are the primary destination for some users for the topic, you can do republishing too.
• At an authoritive destination you can finally work on expert op-eds and guest posts, columnists, interviews, online panels, branded events, awards, marketplaces and a job board. 

Therefore, before you can play with community-dependent services, you have to build the audience. An in order to build it, you have to create content.

Next steps

My next step is to figure out efficient/cheap way to create valuable content for online media professionals. Some initial ideas include topic pages, top content lists (videos, slides, texts), guides, 101 pages, ranked lists, coolhunting (finding and sharing things that are truly great), or set up an "ontology of profession" - a tree of areas and subareas of interest with relevant links along each node.

I also plan to work on community building. I am organizing Remake Brunch (April 18, San Francisco) and Remake Camp (May 2, SF). Check out the details here.

Finally, you can follow my progress at @mediaremake.

Journalists beleive that their professional experience and eduction help them create the content of better quality. Bloggers think that media is democratized now and everyday people can create good content. But I feel that we will face the new wave soon: monkey journalism. By this I mean the content created in a very mechanical fashion. The content that an average 14 years old from developing countries can create. Here is the way:

1. Create lists "10 most stupid videos on Youtube", "10 phrases that killed politician careers", "How 10 tallest buildings were built". It's basically a web/photo/video search + basic filtering.
2. Do post-production. E.g. "What top media are saying about "Alice in Wonderland". Read ten reviews, extract what meaningful, compile, ready! Quoting is a fair use, I guess.
3. Translate! There was a tennis game Williams-Sharapova? Go to Russian sports forums, collect most funniest comments, then create an article "What Russian fans are saying about the game".

Monkey journalism is not a joke. In fact, many leading Russian media are going this way. Sports.ru, the leading sports website is largely produced through live comments and blogs of its readers. LookAtMe.ru, the most influential "hipster" media in the country is full of stories written by high-school girls. The most popular blog in the country ibigdan.livejournal.com follows is build on monkey journalism as well.

I think that monkey journalism is great. Readers need it! Too much content is produced and too little curation is applied over. Third world countries do not produce much of premium content and have much less developed media industry. So monkey journalism is the way to go.

If you want to embrace monkey journalism, write a hundred headlines, request the stories on Amazon Mechanical Turk, add some design and you can launch a pretty decent online magazine in a few days.

Photo (cc-by) http://www.flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2284440858/

In academia, professors sometimes are a given a year off, when they can travel, work at a different university or write a book. Don Knuth started TeX during his sabbatical. Another common scenario is when a group of employees is leaving some corporation, starts a new company and then sell it back to their former employer. Aardwark/Google is a recent example of that.

I suggest that corporation should give their brightest people a "startup sabbatical" with the following rules:

• Employee (or a team of employees) takes unpaid time off for 2-12 months.
• They start working on a new project with a legal status "personal project". No corporate resources are used.
• After sabbatical is over, they can return to home corporation. If the resulting project is successful, IP, code and other assets are transfered to the company. Standard legal clearnace processes are applied.
• Depending on success of sabbatical startup, its participants can receive a compensation for their unpaid effort (e.g. in a form of serious year-end bonus).

Why startup sabbatical is good:

• It's damn hard to innovate within aging corporate monsters. Processes everywhere. Legal and security restrictions. All contacts with press have to go through corporate PR. Proprietary infrastructure that is worse than open market solutions. Sabbatical startup allows to take legal risks that the mother corporation can not handle. Great assets that big companies have (user base, brand, bizness development) is only useful at the later stages.
• Unlike classical startup, the team can focus on the product, saving time from incorporating and raising funds. Also being on upaid leave allows to keep visa and health insuarance.
• Sabbatical startup has insider information about what needed to be done and how it fits the company plans. 
• Sabbatical startup is the measure to keep best people in the company. Otherwise they will just leave.

Starting tomorrow I am testing this approach at a smaller scale. I took a week off, so next 9 days I will work on a personal project that hopefuly will get a startup sabbatical status. It is called mediaRemake and it is a community hub for professionals in media industry. Editors, reporters, webmasters of online media and so on. You can follow my progress here: @mediaRemake

Yesterday it was Ada Lovelace Day. It is time when we blog about women in technology. Here is my contribution, four interviews with women I highly respect. Thanks Wendy, Jamie, Elizabeth and Kristen!

Jamie Lockwood
Open source and web tech enthusiast, Hack U "Mom", journalist, passionate about inspiring innovation in universities

Tell us about your path to technology/science career?
Coming from a communications background, mine was a circuitous path that began in the wide wonderful world of marketing and public relations, spending the first six years of my career at a small PR firm, a large media corporation (now called Clear Channel) and finally sports marketing & Events Company. A life transition brought me to the bay area in 2000 and I was instantly enamored with the strange and alluring world of technology where seemingly anything was possible! I joined an exciting graphics chip company called NVIDIA where I worked on the University Relations and Programs team. The role was perfect- I loved connecting faculty and students to industry experts and insights, career opportunities, seed funding and access to real world technology projects and education. I stayed there for five wonderful years until I was recruited by Yahoo! to manage the technology university programs team where I have been ever since. I now work in the Yahoo! Labs organization where I develop and run academic programs for the science and engineering teams.
When have you decided to go this way? What influenced you to do so?
I think I answered some of this in the question above but I think for me it wasn’t so much about a clear decision “to go this way” as it was a series of serendipitous events that led me to a place where I felt I could apply my talent, passion, experience and education to an arena that seemed to fit me perfectly. There weren’t any strong external influences for me- I sort of let my gut and my experiences (or my “vision” if you will) do the decision making- you know that feeling when things just align and even when you are working hard it doesn’t feel like it because you are doing something you love and solving interesting problems- that is what it was for me. I had some great managers and mentors along the way but I would honestly say that the students and engineers I work with inspire me most and are definitely responsible for me continuing to love this path
What were the hard-learned lessons, the things you wish you knew in advance?
I wish I would have had more confidence in myself when I first started working with the engineering community. There have been times where I let my fear of being a beginner in certain spaces prevent me from speaking my opinions or asking questions. We all have gifts that we bring to the table and you really have to believe in yourself and let those gifts shine even if they are very different that the other people in your group or company. That is what allows you to do great work, makes you uniquely you, creates new opportunities and leads you to the true path you are supposed to be on. Don’t ever let fear stand in your way.
What is your personal approach to balance career and personal/family life?
Hmmm-I haven’t entirely figured this one out yet to be honest but I will say that balance is very important and I am religious about spending time hiking, doing yoga and hanging out with my friends when I do carve out down time.
Will we have more women in technology and science in the future? Should we let it go naturally or campaign for attracting girls to tech careers?
Yes, I believe we will absolutely have more women in the future. There are several new industries emerging, especial in the internet space, that require an interdisciplinary approach to engineering and science. User experience and design and human computer interaction for example are a blend of computer science, psychology, social science and traditional art/design. It is has a softer side and I think that will really appeal to girls- we just need to create awareness about these types of opportunities so they don’t feel they will be stuck behind a computer coding away without the ability to be creative or interact with others.
What makes it hard to be a woman in technology? Why is there more men in this domain?
I think it is hard for women in technology because the field is dominated by men who may not always be in tune with the different fundamental needs women have to grow, connect, lead, inspire, interact and create, not to mention the fact that women are not given the same level of opportunity or respect by certain men, which is unfortunate.
What are the good internet resources, books, events, meetups for women in technology you can recommend? What is your attitude towards these special programs?
What is your attitude towards these special programs? I think the women in technology group is a fantastic support system and there are several letups around the bay area that just bring together interesting tech folks that don’t have gender bias but are terrific for connecting with innovative, like-minded people, male and female. I think these groups can be great as long as they maintain a productive, positive approach and don't focus on the negatives that only serve to separate groups further.

Kristen Berman
Product person

Tell us about your path to technology/science career? When have you decided to go this way? What influenced you to do so?
Started a small tech repair connection business in Madison Wisconsin. I have been attracted to the tech world for a few reasons...the energy and passion for new ideas and creative problem solving really lives and breathes in this area. And there's such the opportunity to change current paradigms with technology. Working at Intuit now, I get to apply this opportunity to small business problems.
What were the hard-learned lessons, the things you wish you knew in advance?
Not sure hard lessons come as a sole result of being a woman or being in technology. They are a product of growing and challenging yourself, regardless of gender or field. For me, it's always been about going 120% with everything and having difficulty giving any part up. As soon as I let go of having to do it full blast, stuff get's easier.
What are the great aspects for being a woman in technology? Do recommend more girls to go this way? Why and when is it good for them?
The technology field is pervasive. I think it's not just one area anymore, so it's not necessarily a choice to work in a field/industry within technology. Given that, yes. More girls should go into technology.
What makes it so hard to be a woman in technology?
The one thing needed is mentors...seeing the women leaders, hearing them and getting more of them
What men should do to make life easier for their female colleagues?
Men shouldn't do anything to make life easier for female colleagues. It's not about one gender in service of the other. It's about working without the gender as a consideration for effectiveness.

 Wendy Tung
pink haired UI designer
 

Tell us about your path to technology/science career?
My dad has had computers since I was very young and I used to love using Print Shop on them (before there was even a mouse!). Designing layouts was very fun. In high school, I made my own Geocities site and learned HTML that way. My senior year of high school, I was lucky enough to get a web design internship at a local web development shop, which gave me more experience and I decided I wanted to pursue that field in university. When I went to university, I wanted to study Computer Science AND Psychology, then found the perfect marriage of both majors called Cognitive Science. I had more web design/dev jobs during college, then stumbled upon a start-up in San Diego and have been into tech/start-ups since then.
When have you decided to go this way? What influenced you to do so?
As mentioned above, I think my adolescent years working with layouts and web really interested me in this. It was something that came naturally to me and I really loved it. I think my senior project in university really settled my decision because I worked on a big UI project for 3 months straight and didn't get bored. I knew I loved UI then.
What were the hard-learned lessons, the things you wish you knew in advance?
You will feel attached and loyal to your first few jobs, but quitting is not betrayal.
What is your personal approach to balance career and personal/family life?
I distance myself emotionally from my co-workers and my work. I enjoy the people and the work, but I am not emotionally attached anymore. This helps me go home and just enjoy myself and not stress or worry about work things.
Will we have more women in technology and science in the future? Should we let it go naturally or campaign for attracting girls to tech careers?
I think there will be more. We don't need campaigning, but we need more mentoring.
What makes it hard to be a woman in technology? Why is there more men in this domain?
It's just how men think. They are typically the analytical, problem-solving minds, so there are more men in tech. As society and culture changes, maybe our minds will evolve, as well. The hardest part about being a woman in tech is having the first question most people ask me be, "Are you in marketing?" That's annoying and always makes me feel like I need to prove myself.
What are the good internet resources, books, events, meetups for women in technology you can recommend? What is your attitude towards these special programs?
Society of Women Engineers holds a special place in my heart because I was involved in this all throughout college. Met some good women there and we are still friends to this day.

Elizabeth Anne Bodine-Baron
married grad student in EE

Tell us about your path to technology/science career?
I grew up with computers (my father is an EE, my mom had a master's in math and worked as a software engineer), so I figured I would always go into some sort of technology field. I was always good at science and math, but my love was for history and literature... in college I double-majored in liberal arts and EE. I've continued this blend of tech and the liberal arts in my research by focusing on social networks.
When have you decided to go this way? What influenced you to do so?
I decided early in my undergraduate career that I wanted to get my Ph.D. - I was good at school, and my professors encouraged me to apply. As part of my senior thesis (which was actually required by my liberal arts degree, not my EE bachelors), I decided to build a prototype network based on Intel iMotes that were carried by freshmen EE students, recording social interaction data. As part of the research going into this project, I became aware of the general field of social network analysis, and my interest was piqued. Here was a field that relied heavily on math (graph theory and probability, for the most part), but it still had a foot in the liberal arts - sociology. At Caltech, I began to explore the economic side of social networks through game theory, and the options seem almost limitless, both in terms of theoretical questions and applications in the real world.
What were the hard-learned lessons, the things you wish you knew in advance?
I wish I knew how hard graduate school was going to be. I was used to everything being easy, and to excelling in my classes by working hard, but not too much so. When I entered the world of Caltech, for the first time, I was not the smartest person in my class. I wasn't even near the top! I was woefully underprepared in math, and I wish someone had told me to take more pure math classes as soon as I announced I was planning to pursue a Ph.D. It would have been invaluable.
What is your personal approach to balance career and personal/family life?
My personal approach to balance my career and personal life is through my religion. I am an orthodox Jew, and with that comes certain responsibilities. I can't work Friday sundown- Saturday sundown, so I am forced to take a break from school and work for a day. It helps renew my energy every week. In addition, I try not to miss dinner with my husband more than one night a week. It's important to have that time to spend together, even if it means that some things for school take a little longer to do. Yoga also helps!
Will we have more women in technology and science in the future? Should we let it go naturally or campaign for attracting girls to tech careers?
I think we will have more women in technology and science in the future, but only if we push for it. Some sciences, like biology and medicine, have really excelled at bridging the gender divide, but the math-based ones like electrical engineering, physics, and of course pure math, have a long way to go. Campaigning for girls to have tech careers at a very early age is the only way I think that we'll ever get to complete equality. There are simply not enough role models for young women doing serious science and math.
What makes it hard to be a woman in technology? Why is there more men in this domain?
Balancing family life with a career, period. Take academics, for example. For most up and coming professors, tenure is the goal. However, the exact time that a young professor needs to be spending tons of time doing research and publishing is the same time that a young woman wants to be starting a family. Very few graduate programs and schools offer maternity leave for students, a few more for professors, but it's a death wish in terms of getting tenure. The few women that I know that are active, respected professors in EE (or CS) either don't have a family, or they work overtime and store up papers to release and publish while they're trying to have children. The system simply doesn't work for women; it's far easier for a man to start a family while still getting tenure. The same basic argument applies to any high-pressure career, whether it's tech or financial.
What are the good internet resources, books, events, meetups for women in technology you can recommend? What is your attitude towards these special programs?
I actually don't know of any. I was a member of SWE (Society of Women Engineers) in college, but my best role model and sounding board was my mother. SWE offers scholarships to young women engineers, which is definitely good, but the quality of the local chapter varies widely from campus to campus. For the most part, they're beneficial, but at the same time, I want to be accepted for my work, not necessarily given special treatment because of my gender. However, I think these programs will continue to be necessary until we have more equality in the pure maths and sciences.

March 24 - High Places - Rickshaw Stop - http://www.last.fm/event/1353174+High+Places+at+Rickshaw+Stop+on+24+March+201...

April 14 - The Whitest Boy Alive - Slim's - http://www.last.fm/event/1399410+The+Whitest+Boy+Alive+at+Slim%27s+on+14+Apri...

April 16 - Hot Chip + The xx - The Fox Theater - http://www.last.fm/event/1306255+Hot+Chip+at+The+Fox+Theater+on+16+April+2010...

April 22 - Yo La Tengo + Camera Obscura - The Fillmore - http://www.last.fm/event/1387442+Yo+La+Tengo?setlang=en

June 3 - Local Natives - Bottom of the Hill - http://www.last.fm/event/1421048+Local+Natives+at+Bottom+of+the+Hill+on+3+Jun...

Bonus: I signed up for half-marathon! April 11 - Half-marathon - USHalf 2 - http://ushalf.com/2/

Anyone interested to join? 626 354 3675 or yury@yury.name

 - What one entrepreneur tells another one when he is really impressed?
 - I want to have a company with you!