antti.vilpponen.net

Finnish citizens have had to cope with a tremendeous amount of low quality journalism this past week. Our foreign minister, Mr. Ilkka Kanerva, had sent some text messages to a female dancer who then ran off to the yellow press to release them to public scrutiny. Even the (normally) highly respected Helsingin Sanomat fell in and wrote numerous articles on this matter (then again they are the unofficial horn of the Social Democratic Party - Kanerva is from the National Coalition Party).

The down side of all this is, in my opinion, that this kind of journalism is here to stay. Why? Because of the internet and the media companies’ inability to renew their old, unsustainable business models. Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat are usually competing head to head for the highest ranking website in terms of online visitors and visits on the weekly TNS Metrix ranking.

They are constantly losing ground in the offline world as people are reading news online. Once online, you have to be quick and react immediately to the latest events to be the site that people pass around through e-mail and IM. If you’re slow you’re gone. Well, no you’re not - if you decide to compete on something more sustainable where people actually spend time and enjoy the content. Have you had a look at the Finnish yellow press websites? Their front pages are long as hell - that’s because you need as much coverage on as many items to grasp the interest of a wide, very fragmented audience.

The problem of losing advertising money is not something only the Finnish press is battling with. US saw the biggest plunge in advertising revenue in 50 years. Media companies’ business models are heavily outdated and if they cannot renew their way of thinking and creating value for the customer - we will see many more scandals covered in the hope of a few more eyes grabbed for attention.

Photo by diver227, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

I had the pleasure of having lunch with the former supreme administrative court justice Lauri Tarasti last week. He is writing a suggestion on the governance of the Finnish copyright law to the government of Finland and he wanted to hear my opinions on the law based on my work during the renewal of the law in 2005.

What I found interesting about him was the casual manner in which he went about, but he could afford it due to the massive understanding of the governance of issues in the Finnish judicial system. We went about discussing the backgrounds of the law, as one needs to understand the law to some degree before you can suggest who should be in charge of it. I told him about Lessig’s work in the US and how this has affected my thinking of the law and the matter in total. To my surprise when we discussed about the lenght of the current copyright law, he already knew of the Mickey Mouse theory.

However, I must say that our work during the autumn of 2005 was not in vain. A group consisting of four ministers, MO Justice, MO Education, MO Communications, MO Trade and Industry, has been formed to broaden the base on which these important decisions are made. Before, in 2005 more precisely, the sole decision of the law was made by the minister of education, Tanja Karpela - which we can all remember was very one sided and poorly prepared. Therefore I could conclude that we did manage to get something done!

It was a very interesting lunch with Mr Tarasti and he promised me to send the results of his work in May once he gets them ready. I’ll try and post the results as soon as I can.

I wrote an article on social media to HETKY’s (Helsingin tietojenkäsittely-yhdistys) magazine. The article in itself is quite light and doesn’t dig that much into the possibilities, but shines light on some possibilities and ways how companies have used internet in creating competitive advantage. The image is available in real size scan over here.

I heard some very exciting news just a moment ago; Sony BMG drops DRM!

The fight that I was involved in as well through Olen Rikollinen? -campaign was not carried out in vain. All the largest record labels have finally dropped DRM (or have publicly announced to do so).

This just made my day.

That’s Hans Rosling going on about how we destroy our planet. He’s one of my new heroes :) The other two are definitely Kevin Rose and Evan Williams - two guys who have done incredible things online in terms of social web.

It’s 3.19 am, been awake for almost 24 hours, it’s time to get a few hours sleep and go conferencing again tomorrow. Like my friend said, or almost accused me of - I do actually do feel being here a bit like being in a candy store.

Sony has made a strategic move in it’s online music business and has decided to adopt Microsoft’s DRM as a technology for its online content. Sony had been trying push its proprietary ATRAC along with its own music player for PCs. Smart move, although I don’t support DRM that much. I guess Sony was trying to go the Apple way and create their “own” DRM that would create a technology lock on their customers - thus artificially enhance customer loyalty.

Apple has an incredible customer base, which is full of evangelists that promote Apple and support them in their products and decisions. Sony doesn’t have this. It’s quite obvious that even Apple was taking a gamble with their “own DRM”, but succeeded in it because they were the first to market with their iTunes music store (that actually took the customer point of view of shopping for music) as well as the sleek and cool iPods that were once again superior to products already on the market. Sony didn’t have any of this with their online strategy.

So why try to create a walled garden in very competitive market? Beats me. Sometimes these decisions are made so high up, based on figures and calculations by highly paid consultants that money is poured into the most stupidest of ideas.

(via Guardian Unlimited)

As I’m spending my evening in the office and trying to make deadlines, I found an interesting blog post. James Hong of HotOrNot, enlightened me to an entry on Facebook blog that will most certainly increase Facebook’s reach manyfold.

“Now, when you’re writing messages, you can send the message to people on Facebook, and to people not on Facebook. ”

Damn, of course! Why didn’t I think of this?

It’s the little things that you tinker with in every day life that will slowly change behaviour with online apps. Large changes are difficult to make, small are a lot more easier. Furthermore, creating virality in your service is perhaps one of the biggest challenges most web applications and sites currently face (unless it’s built into it, like in the case of LinkedIn). These sort of things nudge users a step closer to adoption and loyalty towards your service.

MyFootballClub is a British initiative to purchase a football club in a collaborative manner with money raised from the community members. May sound impossible, but currently they have gathered close to £1.4 million.

The logic is quite simple, you become a member for £35 and with that you purchase a “share” of the new club. All members are equal and can vote on players, transfers and so on. At the moment they are discussing with 4 possible clubs for a 51% takeover.

(via)

This is pretty phenomenal - Taloussanomat, one of the largest business papers adopts Creative Commons licensing in their articles. Hooray! They apparently began to license all their articles with CC: BY-NC-ND license.

I’ve been a strong supporter of Creative Commons ever since learned of Lessig and the movement. Later on I helped the US Freeculture movement by designing a logo for them. It seems that they still use it - I piled the three legos on our dinner table and snapped a photo of them, little did I know it they would be so famous :)

Anyhow, correct me if I’m wrong but this is the first time in Finland that a major news company adopts a Creative Commons licenses. A good day for Finland, a very good day.

Update: They still Copyright news from STT - ironically I found this out through an article discussing piracy/copyright criminals.

I let my Flickr pro account expire on purpose to see how the change would affect me. After the expiration I realised just how much I am into the service - although I don’t use it that much to be honest. Flickr has put its cashpoint (a term I coined for this) into an excellent spot to start cashing in on the user experience.

You can upload 100 MB a month, have the last 200 photos visible and a total of 3 sets to categorise your photos. This is just enough to get hooked onto the service, but not quite enough to feel satisfied what you get to do with the service. I have over a 1000 photos in Flickr (as far as I can remember, since I now only see 200 of them) and when you have that many photos you need good ways to sort them out - hence the sets. Three sets gets you nowehere - you need more, yet another reason to pay the $24,95 a year for the premium account.

Furthermore, Flickr has an excellent API that third party developers have taken full use of. There are hundreds of different applications that you can use to play around with your photos. For example, I have an Wordpress plugin that pulls my photos from the Flickr account to this blog. The plugin of course sorts out the photos and keeps them in a nifty order, just the way I want them.

I think I’ll have to dig in to my wallet and pay for another 2-year period of Flickr membership - it’s definitely worth it.

The lesson here?
Open up your services a bit, encourage developers to build applications into your platform and community and ultimately: give the users just enough so they get hooked (but there’s a lot more they get when they pay for the service). Another great example of opening up your service comes from Facebook - the all new F8, the Facebook platform. When Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old CEO of the company announced the platform - there was a lot of buzz created instantly.

No wonder, there are now 10 pages of applications available for the Facebook community. Also, small startups get extremely attractive market visibility for free. Facebook on the otherhand gets content and tools for their users to create more stickiness. Pretty much a win-win situation. iLike, a music network announced they instantly added 400 000 members to their databases, not bad a for a small startup. For the urgency of the matters, this letter gives some insight to the explosive growth.

Interesting times ahead for Facebook. Something that many web communities should take a note of, definitely.