That extra interview!

Taking note: the wisdom of invisible crowds

Becky Carroll interviews Jack Jia, founder and CEO of Baynote Inc, in person on May 16, 2007.

Jack is a founder and CEO of Baynote, Inc. For eight years, he was SVP & CTO of Interwoven Inc. with executive responsibilities in engineering, products, marketing, strategy and vision. Prior to Interwoven, he was a founder and CEO of V-max America. Jack led operating systems and applications development at SGI, Sun Microsystems, Stratus and NASA for over a decade. He is a frequent speaker at major conferences and has appeared on television programs in several countries. He is a contributing author in "XML Handbook, the 4th Edition," "Online! The Book," "Content Management Bible," and writes regularly about key technology issues and trends. He is a board advisor for Santa Clara University, and the president of HYSTA, a premier non-profit organization for promoting entrepreneurship.

Becky talked with Jack about crowdsourcing information on websites. Customers are often reluctant to give feedback on the usefulness of website information, thus creating a challenge for web teams. Customers are even less likely to “rank” or “tag” useful items. This interview tackles this subject as well as using the “wisdom of invisible crowds^TM” to grasp the long tail.

Becky Carroll: What do you think is new about crowdsourcing and where do you see it going?

Jack Jia: I think crowdsourcing, up to this point, you can define it as the first generation of Web 2.0, as being very explicit crowdsourcing, which is really forums, blogs, and people coming to write things. That has been very useful in connecting a lot of people in the world together. At least from our end goal, the biggest missing piece is what we call "the invisible crowd." These are the people behind the website, the ones who don’t have time to write blogs, who don’t have time to write comments.

Q: The lurkers?

A: Yes, the lurkers. I like that phrase! They are 80-90% of the population on the web. They know a lot, and if we can have them participate, with or without their permission, that would be the biggest thing for the future. I think a lot of the leading thinkers are starting to talk about this; even people such as Tim O’Reilly are starting to talk about it. It’s not about blogs, it’s not about forums, and although he didn’t use the term “invisible crowd,” he did say it is about everyone who is using your site.

Q: How do you get these people to start to be part of the conversation and participate?

A: That is the hardest part. If you study psychology, humans are self-motivated. There has to be something in it for us. What that is becomes very critical. Unless you can line up their incentive with your site’s incentive, whatever outcome you are expecting is not going to be very ideal. There are several ways to do it. One is to make them part of the game. There are sites that use the wisdom of crowds to predict anything from stock prices to sports games. The crowds actually participate with monetary incentives. They can win if they predict correctly. There are tons of examples where a non-incentivized web prediction site does OK, maybe not so well. If you put money behind it for these people, however, you can predict elections, economic growth, stock prices, everything. The crowds seem to really, really know.

Q: But you say this is more the case when there is money behind it. Why is that?

A: Money is one way to incentivize people. This is not always the case, but some of these prediction sites are using experimental ways of testing out how well incentives really work. Most people won’t participate in those kinds of game-like sites. For the real business world website, there are other incentives you can find. For an e-commerce and marketing sites, when a person comes to your site, they have a clear goal. If someone comes to your site, and says they are shopping for a refrigerator, the incentive for them is to find the best refrigerator and buy it. You can watch their behavior and figure out where they are having success and failure on the site, without having them actually answer questions (they don’t have time to answer questions).

Q: It is more of an irritant to have to answer questions.

A: That’s right. There are well-known studies by psychologists that show when people know they are being watched, they behave differently. They will say things they wouldn’t really do because there is no consequence for them to say it. They want to look good, they want to pretend. They try to guess what other people might do, which is not always correct, so you have this extreme survey bias. Survey bias can be so severe that if you take this as your feedback result, it can sometimes give you worse feedback than if you didn’t have any at all. Really understanding the true intent of the community and sourcing them through their action, then bringing that wisdom back to the site can truly to help an online effort to succeed.

Q: If we take say, a wiki, why do you think some people are willing to participate in this for free rather than getting paid?

A: Wikis are examples of where there are enough people in the world who have enough time or alternative incentives for them to spend time writing something. There are people who have time and would like to write, there are people who want to correct something written by someone else! Negative emotions can sometimes be more powerful than positive, so if someone is dissatisfied, they will do something about it. There are also enough altruistic people out there who just want a better world, and that is incentive enough for them. In the isolated individual business site, you simply don’t have enough of those people to give you the wiki effect.

Q: The people who are more likely to respond to a site are those who maybe have extra time on their hands or who are very opinionated?

A: Yes, I think it does. It works beautifully, even in the wiki context where the incentive is somewhat fuzzy. In a wiki, you know the writing of each article may not be fully correct, but you have to read enough different sources on the web so you can create the wisdom of crowds effect. If I read ten wiki articles, and ten people are saying something I can trust in the aggregate of those ten articles.

Q: Tell me about the wisdom of "invisible crowds" and how that is different.

A: The wisdom of invisible crowds speaks to the notion that there are people behind every website. You have already built this community; they are just invisible to each other. It doesn’t matter if your site has hundreds of people who come to read it every day or every month or if there are millions. That is a big, big group of people.

Today, they are doing something which is very unhuman. They are visiting the site, exploring it on their own, and they don’t see a single soul, don’t see any other human traces. Whatever they do, whether successful or unsuccessful, the moment they leave that site that information or knowledge is gone. Human society would not be here if we had to work that way in the rest of our lives. We have to learn from our past mistakes and successes and pass that knowledge on from generation to generation. We can do that with the invisible crowd who possesses the knowledge about that particular business site. If you can tap into that, then you can effectively crowdsource everybody. That is your customer, typically. It is the most valuable asset you have: your customers, prospects, or employees if it is an intranet site.

Q: Tell me more about how that works, how you can take the wisdom of the "invisible crowd" and use it.

A: Basically, for any website, there are a large amount of people on the site. Just recognizing there are a large number of people doesn’t really help much. You have to watch their behaviors from their mouse actions and navigations and searches they do; this gives you a clear sense of whether they are happy or not happy. You just have to know where to look. To create the wisdom of crowds effect, you have to find like-minded peer groups. Individually, they can all be random. At any given moment, we look it could be random. We can try to measure the time spent on a given page and say, hey more time is good, but it could be they have just gone to get a cup of coffee. Is that good or bad? We don’t know. But, through the wisdom of crowds, with like-minded peers having similar interests, the signal of something good for that group of people will emerge (called emergent behavior by the psychologists). That is a powerful thing.

You can find these unique like-minded peer groups; all sites have their communities, their sub-communities, their sub-sub-communities. There are literally thousands of self-segments within a site, and they all have people behind them. Some of the segments have a small number of people (five, seven, ten people); the smallest segment we get wisdom from is seven. The largest crowds can be thousands of people. They start to create these like-minded peer recommendations. Effectively, they start to recommend the long-tail products and site content, which is Chris Anderson’s theory and that’s how you make your business more profitable and how you differentiate it from your competitors. You can actually have products and content that people love, instead of products or content they are “just OK” with.

Q: You’ve been doing this project for awhile now. I’d like to find out what surprised you most about digging into the wisdom of invisible crowds.

A: The crowds really, really know! I have been trained to trust the “experts,” and I am changing even the way we practice our own business. Peer learning becomes actually far more important for anything we do, whether it is marketing, sales, engineering, or operations. We do a lot of peer learning. We found that through our customer site as well. We actually purposefully picked a few sites we knew fairly well initially. We were “the experts” for this company as former employees. We knew some of the domains very, very well. The crowds completely surprised us. Not only in finding the best content, but also in finding the diamond in the rough. They were somehow able to surface the diamond. And they ranked the diamonds in their value quality, the most pure diamond on the top, the next with a little yellow in it further down the list, etc. I can’t even do that using experts and committees to help direct the “best content.” Once I see it, I can certainly see that it makes perfect sense, but I never would have dreamed of being able to get it done. It was ranked well on all dimensions of information, not just on one dimension. You can put a lot of money in and get one thing right, hopefully, through a lot of interaction with your customers. In this case, you can just do it. You don’t even need a focus group or any of that, because my entire community is the focus group. There is no sample error, either. That is truly the surprise.

They also connect things, to a certain extent, that we would not have guessed they would have known. They connect words that have normally a very distant connection. For example, on the Interwoven site, people do a search and type in “web content management.” The result would show the product TeamSite. How would they know the web content management is TeamSite? They actually created a new set of vocabulary words. Some people will misspell the product name, “Team Site,” with a space in the middle. There are several products with that problem, for example, OpenDeploy is often typed in as “Open Deploy.” The crowd just connects the dots. “Oh, Open Deploy is OpenDeploy.”

Q: They don’t really care about the branding, do they?

A: Right. It’s kind of just understanding the local slang and watching how new vocabularies emerge. It’s like watching how people talk around water coolers, making notes and saying, “Oh, that’s what they mean!” Experts have certain notions of how we define certain products, how we label it, certain jargon, but the community may or may not know that or respect that. Turn that around and reflect what the community is saying, and it will basically increase the conversion rate for any online businesses.

Q: Give me the 30-second view, the high-level view of how Baynote does that.

A: Baynote does that by watching every single visitor’s behavior on a site or a set of sites. You put five lines of html tag into your site template page; we call it the Observer, that’s our sensor, our eyes and ears on a particular site. Drop that into a template page header or footer and then basically, every single page has a watchdog to silently watch every single movement of a person. We don’t know that person’s name, we don’t know their private information, and we don’t care about their private information. All we know is this person has found a certain set of content for certain reasons and in context. We compare it with other people who have similar fingerprints, as we call it, or similar signatures. We group them into like-minded peer groups, also called visitor clubs. Based on that, we project content back, in real-time, for the site’s search and navigation. We will make recommendations, such as people who liked this content also read these content pages. Or, next step, if you liked this, what would you do next? People who bought this have also considered these products or these accessories. People who read this (support) article found these other articles useful in solving their problem.

Q: By watching the crowd, by watching where they are going and the path they are taking to get there, both backwards and forwards, you can figure out, for someone who has similar behaviors…

A: Effectively, people are voting it or tagging it through their actions, which is really far more accurate than trusting in what they are saying. Another metaphor we use quite a lot is thinking about your website as a mountain. Before anyone steps foot on the mountain, it looks pretty even everywhere, there are no trails yet, no signs anywhere. When communities start climbing the mountain, by traversing the site, and people start to discover where the peak is, where to find the watering hole, where to find the treasure…

Q: An easier way up?

A: Yes, short cuts. You may tell them to “go here,” but the community finds the short cuts. They will reinforce it, the trail starts to emerge, and then we will put up the road signs based on the community (here for the watering hole, here for the peak), and the trail emerges by itself.

Read More about Baynote and the wisdom of invisible crowds

The Baynote Blog
Social Search: Can Baynote Hit A Chord With B2B Marketers?, Forrester's Marketing Blog.
Why understanding your right brain will help you succeed., by Jack Jia.

(Edited by David Cohn)

How IndyMedia paved the way for the future of crowdsourced journalism

Jay Rosen interviews Christopher Anderson of the New York City Indypendent

Christopher Anderson fits the category of participant-observer. He's worked as an organizer, reporter, and editor for the New York City Independent Media Center and the New York City Indypendent since 2001. He is currently completing his PhD at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he studies journalistic authority, media history, and new media technologies. His dissertation will be on citizen journalism in an era of technological change, and it will include the story of IndyMedia. In an earlier life, Anderson was a regional director with ACORN Housing Corporation, a non-profit community organizing group working to assist low-income first time home buyers.

Anderson says it was the original act of crowdsourcing, "in a way."

Jay Rosen: How did you come to be such a close student of IndyMedia?

Christopher Anderson: Well, I was actually involved with Indymedia in New York before I went back to grad school. In fact, you could say that my involvement with Indymedia (and I still help them out a bit) helped send me back to school, rather than the other way around. I started helping out with the IMC shortly after the September 11 attacks in NYC. I thought that it sorta looked like the world was going to hell and figured I'd better do something fast.

Q: And what did you discover when you got involved?

A: Well, it was sort of amazing. By and large I found that it was made up of a group of people who had incredibly strong (and by conventional American standards, very left-wing) political views, but who managed to combine this with what I thought was a really old-fashioned and non-polemical understanding of journalism. And they combined those two things with a pretty radical view of how the Internet was changing the media and the role of citizens in reporting. When you combine those things, I thought ... well, this is something worth keeping tabs on.

Q: This "radical view" of theirs: what did it say about the Net and citizens and reporting?

A: Indymedia started in 1999 at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle-- going on eight years ago. Eight years isn't a a long time, but its about 1,000 years in Internet time. Most corporate news sites were just figuring out the World Wide Web at the time, and there weren't very many websties that made it easy for "regular folks" without html skills to just "post" their opinions up on the web for everyone to see. Amazon.com's book reviews were one of the first things like that I remember.

Q: That was pre-blogging software....

A: Absolutely, pre-blogging software. It feels like forever ago, you know? So in any case, group of media activists who had been involved in a few "anti-globalization" protests in the years before 1999 had figured out that the traditional media organizations weren't going to cover the upcoming WTO protests in a way they thought would do justice to the concerns of the organizing. A lot of these media activists were also involved in the "open source software movement," and I think they decided, well, lets set up a website where anybody who was actually AT the WTO protests and who saw stuff, or took pictures or video, can post it in public (easily, without knowing code) for everybody to see.

And thats what people did. Thousands of posts about the WTO protests, and the sum total of coverage ran rings around what the mainstream media had been trying to do. It was the original "crowdsourcing" in a way. And from a real live "crowd" -- in the most political, almost mob-like sense of the word.

Q: This was "active", the codebase that allowed anyone to upload media to an IMC website, yes? So there would not have been that code base if it has not been for the freesoftware movement?

A: Yeah, active. I think it's a fair bet to say that there wouldn't have been that codebase without the free software folks. They had a totally different mindset when it came to looking at the web than a lot of other people did at the time-- a vision based on collaboration and sharing. Plus, techies has to do the darn work, too.

Q: I never knew about that connection. You say "crowd" in the sense of a mob because these were people interested in street protests, and in taking power from the powerful?

A: Sort of, yes. The original IMC folks, and the people who made up the crowd they were "collaborating" with, were a committed group of political activists who believed (and still do) in the power of mass political action and non-violent civil disobedience to change power structures. They certainly didn't believe in objectivity in the way traditional journalists -- or even the Wikipedians do. So in some ways this is different than many of the Web 2.0 projects that are popular today, which I think are a little further away from a direct attachment to political protest.

Q: It seems that there's another forward-looking element here-- besides the blogging-before-blogging software and the "anyone can upload media" philosophy. They had an intuition that if hundreds of people are covering an event because they care about it and how it gets portrayed, this is potentially a force to rival the professional press, and that as an alternative "news net," the distributed model could put the authorities under surveillance perhaps even more effectively than the traditional news media. Plausible?

A: I think that sums it up really well. There's a later, more advanced version of this idea here-. "The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad," about the RNC protests in 2004.

Q: Is it just technology that's more advanced or is it also the social architecture or human organization?

A: Its both. The technology is part of it, but the bigger part is that 1) By 2004, notions of how to network a crowd, both for protest and for media coverage of that protest, were much more common knowledge-- more people were doing them, and 2) By 2004 there were a group of people in Indymedia and elsewhere who had been doing this for 5 years and who could really draw on their lessons from the past. I think the independent media RNC coverage of 2004 marked a high point when it comes to Indymedia's power to do this sort of coverage.

Q: There's something I don't understand about the IndyMedia "coverage plan" when they had people who converged on the scene of protest: how was this coordinated? How did people know what to do, where to go? Where did the coordination take place... from the Indy Media "center?" Or at the margin? On the web? Was it decentralized? Or did everyone just know?

I ask because one of the things that strikes me about doing this kind of journalism is that you need some way to solve the problem of mounting coordination costs as you get more people involved as contributors-- a "moment" that I believe is found in every successful open source project, and of course, in the failures too.

A: During most convergences at protests there is a convergence "center"-- an actual physical space, or a newsroom, where people can come, edit video, upload audio, use public computer terminals, etc. But in other ways, that actual physical space is peripheral. The main thing peope need is a cell phone to call in "breaking news" to whoever is monitoring the IMC website, and they need to know about the site itself. I think part of the answer goes back to your question before about having a shared common purpose and vision. In the case of protest coverage, people have a shared logistical map about what exactly to do, where the action is, and who to call and tell them about it.

Here's a story: During the RNC, there was an urban legend (that was probably true) that the NYPD was sitting at an internet cafe on the last day of the protests, reading the NYC IMC website to figure out what to do next, because it had the best intelligence of anyone in the city. There's a complicated moral there, which I'll leave to you to figure out.

Q: You mention "common knowledge." This, I think, is a hidden factor in the success of open source, crowdsourced and networked projects. Without participants who have common knowledge and some common convictions, it is difficult to succeed, even if you have the technology, the opportunity, the intent. Does your study of IMC confirm this? Or would you put it another way?

A: I used to think that it would be impossible for a group of people who didn't have strong, commong political beliefs to really pull off an "open source" journalism project. Where would their energy, their motivation come from? This is all "work," after all, even if it's also "fun." Wikipedia has shown that, well, maybe you could find enough people in the world who shared a passion for "objective knowledge" that they' be passionate about creating "objectivity." I think now, projects like your own "Assignment Zero" and other open source journalism projects are testing another hypothesis--

Q: And that is...?

A: Are there enough people in the world who care about journalism (not political journalism, or journalism motivated by politics) to create something more ... god, I hate the word "objective," but something less ... partisan? Just because they care about good journalism?

Q: Yes. Or because they care that a particular story get properly told.

A: Yeah. Its a wager, I think, and one that I really hope pans out. But politics are a passion of the bloodstream, and the gut. These other things are a little more ... abstract maybe? I think you have a harder task, Jay! But one thats just as important, and maybe revolutionary.

Q: A "shattering" event for me (in the good sense, shattering my complacency about change in media) was when I learned how Chris Allbritton, a former AP and New York Daily News reporter, became what Wired called "the Web's first independent war correspondent." As I wrote in CJR:

He did it by asking readers of his blog to send him to Iraq at their expense. Allbritton raised $14,500 from 342 donors on a simple promise: that he would send back from the war original and honest reporting, free of commercial pressures, pack thinking, and patriotic hype. He needed a plane ticket to Turkey (where he snuck over the border and found the war), a laptop, a Global Positioning Satellite unit, a rented satellite phone, a digital camera, and enough cash to move around, keep fed, and buy his way out of trouble. While some reporters were embedded with the American military, Allbritton sent himself on assignment, never even asking permission to be in the country. The Internet did the rest. On March 27, his reporting drew 23,000 users to his site (www.back-to-iraq.com), thus proving, not that anyone in the public can perhaps be a journalist, but that anyone who is a journalist can have a mini-public on the Net.

This was real journalism, foreign correspondence, without the media at all. Chris felt he was writing "for" the miniature public he has at his blog, but he was also aware of covering the war for a broader, international public. I was struck by the interaction between these two-- the more close-knit community he was writing for, and the political public he was also trying to reach. So here's my question: the IndyMedia people thought they were producing news for their community, or for the public?

A: Now that's a good question ...

Q: But we need answers, Chris!

A: I think the Indymedia people care less about reaching that broader international public than Chris Albritton did. A lot of it comes from the difference--and yes, there still is one--between the mindset of a ex/current and soon-to-be "professional" reporter like Chris and someone who is basically a protester with a video camera. But also, and maybe more importantly, there's a difference in politics here. Much of Indymedia operates from a mindset that is, basically, anarchist-- a desire to communicate with those who share ones "affinities," as it were, and to hell with the rest of them.

Now, that said there are some Indymedia projects, like the Indypendent that are different. The Indy is the newspaper of the NYC IMC. The folks who work on the Indy are much more similar in mindset, in this regard, to Chris Albritton. They want to take their reporting, which is still grounded in the world of Indymedia and the politics of that world, and still communicate to a larger audience.

Q: You're right: the hell with the rest of them is not a journalistic idea or conceit. But "the whole world's watching..." is.

A: Yeah.

Q: Maybe that's the difference between an anarchist and a hippie!

A: Thats partly why I think the Indypendent-- that project I mentioned above-- is so neat. Maybe thats a whole other interview. But the Indypendent is basically a bi-weekly newspaper that takes the crowdsourcing idea, combines it with the notion that we train new journalists, sends them out to report, draws on the web, and blogs, and everything else, writes articles in a way to make them understandable and accessible and then-- in the most insane notion of all-- prints them on real paper and distributes them off line!

Q: So in the evolution we are trying to understand here, the Indypendent expanded its ambition? What caused that to happen?

A: I think what caused the ambition to expand was that the Indypendent was started by folks who had done "real" journalism in the past (mostly in print), who were hip to the fact that journalism was changing, but who also believed in journalism strongly. Also, when you spend the money to print something up, thats going to raise your ambitions a little bit.

So, what the Indypendent wanted to do was to draw on the core Indymedia mission-- that ordinary folks can be journalists, especially if they learn how, and also simply raise the bar-- doing real reporting, communicating with the public, etc.

Q: You said earlier that when you first encountered IndyMedia people you found they had '"a really old-fashioned and non-polemical understanding of journalism." What did you mean by that and who were you referring to?

A: I was referring a lot to the folks with New York Indymedia. The NYC people have always been a little further from the street protests crowd and closer to the "we want to do journalism" crowd. And by "old fashioned" I guess I mean that they believed in going out on to the street, watching things happen, doing interviews, coming up with complicated story ideas. And even not covering protests at all! Covering things like NYC Municipal Wireless hearings, and non-sexy stuff like that.

Q: Isn't Daily Kos kind of the inheritor of, or successor organization to, IndyMedia, as well? On a much bigger, broader scale? How do you compare the two communities?

A: They're similar in a lot of ways. They're both ulitmately concerned with journalism in the service of politics-- with political victories (they define politics really differently, but thats a whole other story). In some ways I might say that Talking Points Memo is also a successor as well, in a different way. I sort of wish Kos and crew had gone down the path of doing actual "citizens journalism" a little more than they ended up doing.

Q: Susan G in her interview with us said that the investigative journalism potential in crowdsourcing was mostly in going through documents with lots of eyes. Do you agree with that?

A: Well, thats part of it. I think there's more, though. I would like to see crowdsourcing reach deep down into the bowels of local city governments-- and I don't just mean NYC, I mean Anytown, USA. And part of that can be going through documents, but part of it can be showing up at town council hearings and blogging about it, and creating a political community, a political crowd, through that blog. I grew up in the suburbs. They need good investigative journalism there as much as anywhere else. More probably. There's a lot of corruption in those places, and the mainstream press is dropping the ball.

Also, I'd like to see investigative crowdsourcing be a little less shy in directly attaching itself to political movements. Show up at an ACORN meeting (an urban community organizing group) and see what they're doing, and build an invesitgative program off that, drawing on the wisdom of ACORN members.

Q: What do you think the next phase of journalistic crowdsourcing will look like?

A: I think there's some real potential here during the next election, especially on the polling place, voter fraud and voter intimidation fronts. I know there was a little of this in 2006, and even 2004, but it hasn't been organized yet, and I think it's ripe. Especially given the way that voter registration has been so tied into the US Attorney Scandal. I think journalistic crowdsourcing is going to break a huge voting chicanery case in 2008.

Q: What do you think motivates the IndyMedia's contributors today?

A: I think that the era of big street mobilizations is behind us, and what was once known as the "anti-globalization movement" has basically died in the United States. Much of the political center of gravity these days is in electoral politics, and in pushing the Democrats to the left (and Republicans to the right). Thats pretty far from the Indymedia political center of gravity. So what I think motivates contributors these days is: The belief that everyone can be a journalist, and the need to help people get to that point, and, second, a sense that, well, if we're not going to overthrow corporate capitalism tomorrow, we can at least tackle local injustices, and, third, the sense that journalism-- again, in that old-fashioned sense-- is in trouble. And we need more of it. We have a lot of information, and not much news, and even less journalism.

Q: Do you believe that, let us say under certain conditions, there is wisdom in crowds? Could this give us a wiser journalism?

A: I do, without a doubt. Even some of the most traditional notions of journalism, the ones dearest to the core of what journalism is, can be improved by many eyes rather than few.

Q: Linus' Law according to Eric Raymond states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." which is certainly the most famous sentence in open source culture. Exit question: do you regard these as inspirational words for people who care about good journalism?

A. Yes, I do. I'd add a line, though: a good editor never hurts, either!

Q: You do because...?

A: Well, because wisdom may not come from crowds, but knowledge and information do -- more knowledge than anyone could ever get by themselves. Add a good editor to the mix, and you might just get wisdom, too.

The inner workings of Shutterstock

Nancy Feraldi interviews Jon Oringer, founder & president of Shutterstock via telephone on May 22, 2007

"Shutterstock is the largest subscription-based stock photo agency in the world. Our outstanding collection of premium, royalty-free images grows every day, with photographs, illustrations, and vectors you won't find any where else." (Shutterstock, 2007). This is what subscribers see: "It's as easy as: choose your plan, pay one low fee ($199 for one month), download what you need when you need it." Jon Oringer is Founder & President of this growing business claiming, "1,874,626 royalty-free stock photos, 30,458 new stock photos added this week, and 60,380 photographers." In four short years, Jon has tapped into citizen photography from all over the world. When I asked if he was a photographer, he replied, "Oh yes, but never a professional, and never very good. I found there were much better photographers out there. I was just taking pictures all over the world and needed a library for my photographs." Jon went to Stonybrook as an undergraduate, and to Columbia for a Masters Degree in computer science.

Nancy Feraldi: Where are you located?

Jon Oringer: New York City

Q: What motivated you to start your project?

A: I started Shutterstock in 2003, as a library for my own 30,000 photos. I would be in Tokyo sending photos in to some microstock site, and I met a lot of other photographers. I became an entrepreneur in a business that uses stock photographs for brochures, art on the box, etc. I realized there were a lot of photographers out there better than me who needed outlets. Why not open up Shutterbox to the incredibly diverse talent in the world?

Q: How long were you thinking about the idea?

A: I put up the Web site and database in about six months time. Web 2.0 tools were just beginning then. In 2004, I opened up the site to the world, and it just took off and spread like wildfire. A huge group of people had been previously ignored and it was just a confluence of the technology, the times, and networking around the world. I received thousands of photographs every week. Shutterstock now has 60,000 members who are all amateur photographers. Now, anyone from anywhere can submit photos and support their hobby. We have 30 employees, including ten reviewers, and members are making money.

Q: Did you bring to the table existing relationships with media outlets?

A: No, not really. Although I was a customer of some outlets that became customers of Shutterstock, once I opened up subscription services to buyers on the site, it took off. Marketing was no problem.

Q: Were you already familiar with the "crowdsourcing" phrase?

A: Well, when we began, the Web 2.0 tools were new and no, not really.

Q: What kind of volume are you dealing with?

A: We accepted 25,000 photographs this week. We usually accept about 40% of photos submitted, so you can see how many are submitted.

Q: What commission do photographers make?

A: Our photographers are paid $.25 every time a buyer/subscriber downloads one of their photos. They are paid by the download. They are making money. The buyers subscribe to Shutterstock access for stock photos.

Q: What is the difference between you and competition?

A: The big difference is that we do not pay commissions to photographers. We pay by the download. And, the really big difference is that our buyers subscribe to our categorized photo-stock service.

Q: What is your marketing strategy?

A: We are in lots of design magazines; look at any design magazine, and we are there. We do have a section for editorial unreleased news photos, and we have been in popular magazines. I cannot really say which ones. I don't really have to do a lot of marketing because we are a subscription service.

Q: What motivates contributors?

A: Money. Well, it is a way to monetize their hobby. Members can finance equipment and expenses and make a little extra money on the side. Photography used to be for the wealthy; it was a luxury before the explosion of digital technology. Now, anyone, anywhere, can take photos and publish them.

Q: Can you think of any big milestones?

A: Well, we are about to hit 2,000,000 photographs.

Q: What do you think the major social impact of citizen journalism is? Specific to photo journalism and advertising, how do you see this playing out, and what kind of impact does it have on our culture?

A: Well, ten years ago there were about 2,000 stock photo sources. Now, there are sources all around the world in one hundred countries. The content is incredibly diverse. Now, we have content that never would have been seen before, never has been seen before.

Q: How much impact does this have on mainstream media sources?

A: Well, you do not need a press pass anymore to take photographs and be published. Where do the best editorial photographs come from? They come from people with a camera that is just out there when something happens. They can catch the shot very quickly. More and more people around the world are doing this. Press passes are no longer a way into a career anymore. It is much more competitive. The technology is in everyone's hands.

Q: Is fraud an issue with Shutterstock?

A: We have 60,000 watch dogs. They catch this very, very quickly. This person would never be allowed to contribute again. It is important to all the members that the site doesn't get tainted.

Q: Can you think of what might have been the most important shots?

A: This would be impossible. We have ten reviewers, and I look at thousands of photos every week. Take a look at the newest submissions to get an idea of what is important. Look at the editorial section. I am proud of this section. The most important shots might not necessarily be the most popular shots.

Q: What do you think next phase of crowdsourcing will look like?

A: Video. It will be video. We have 677 new clips this week, and the sales are going up.

Q: What are your next steps?

A: I want to bill footage out to larger companies and continue a large membership and subscriber base. We will be making a big editorial announcement soon. This is something new. Look for it on June 1st, about sourcing editorials.

Q: What do you see as the wisdom in crowds?

A: No doubt, it is the content that never would have been seen otherwise. It is a powerful force.

Q: What surprised you most about your project?

A: How quickly this took off. The incredible viral force created by crowds, how individuals motivate each other, and what they can produce, how the project spiraled from our logs and networking.

Q: I intend to become a member and submit some of my 30,000 photographs. I have a huge notebook full of floppy disk files and a huge library on my laptop.

A: Oh, please do. Give it a try. See what happens. You might be surprised.

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http://www.shutterstock.com/

http://www.surfsecret.com/

http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2003/march/59822-4.html

A sports team managed by the fans

Johannes Kuhn interviews William Brooks from MyFootBallClub

This is an interview with William Brooks. He is 36 years old, a passionate Fulham fan and started MyFootballClub. The project is about finding 50,000 people interested in running a soccer club - crowdsourced style. For detailed information you can look at Springwise and this article in The Times. You can also look at Digg for a discussion about what it is for and what chances the concept may have. William Brooks worked as a writer for a football fanzine and currently as an advertising copywriter.

Note: We will refer to "soccer" as "football" in the interview, as this is the common word in Europe.

Johannes Kuhn: How did you come up with the idea for myfootballclub.co.uk?

William Brooks: It’s been crystallizing in my mind over a few years. I support Fulham FC, and there were times when the club did not have much money. When I was a kid, I saw the fans and thought, what if 4,000 or 5,000 of these people each put in £1000 - we would have £5m and could save the club. MyFootballClub uses this theory, but on a more affordable scale.

Q: Can you say something about your personal background?

A: I started a football fanzine, and I then wrote for BBC Match of the Day magazine for 5 years. I now work as a writer in the advertising industry. Football has always been my passion, but now I’ve added what I’ve learned in marketing. Myfootball.co.uk is the result.

Q: How is the project going right now?

A: Right now (May 21st) we have 25,500 people registered. 75 percent of these from the UK, and many from Germany, Scandinavia, Argentinia, Canada, USA and Spain. It has been live since the end of April, so we are very happy with progress. Fans are also discussing it on the net – the majority are really excited, others don’t think it’s possible.

Q: As far as not using fans as a source of money, but also as deciders: Why do you think this will work?

A: This is something else I observed in my time going to football matches. When the home crowd has been demanding a change for three or four months, eventually the coach will agree. Often it will turn out to be the correct decision. I think people running professional football underestimate the knowledge of football fans. The "wisdom of crowds" theory suggests that many informed people can reach correct decisions, sometimes better than an individual can. The irony is, if the fans decide who plays and who is bought, the coach can blame failure on the fans!

Q: Is this a way of criticizing what is happening with the English football right now – investors and oligarchs rushing in to use it to make money or as their private playground?

A: No, I think there are many good club owners who care about their fans. It is not a backlash on the way football is going, but an interesting alternative and an attempt to see what fan power can really achieve.

Q: Why do you think now is the time?

A: I think the Internet provides the perfect environment for this, a place for fans to pool their knowledge, passion and finance. But we know when you try something new, you cannot ask for too much money. £35 is less than an average premiership ticket, or a computer game. £7.50 from each member will go into the building, maintaining and enhancing the website. With 50,000 people online, this will be a huge site – we hope the most interactive and reactive football site ever. We expect to hire eight people to work on Myfootballclub.co.uk full time.

Q: You have around 1.4 million to buy a club, but the vote on the page favors clubs like Leeds, which have a lot of debts, or Liverpool, which are unaffordable. How will that process work out?

A: The law firm who will buy the club on behalf of the members have explained that there is no precise science to how much a football club costs. It depends on numerous factors, like whether the club owns its ground, whether they are profitable etc. We wanted people to vote which club to buy so that they can participate from the start. Once 50,000 have registered, we will run down the list from top to bottom and see which club is possible to buy. My guess right now is we will buy a club in the equivalent of the 5th or 6th division.

Q: When do you think will the purchase be finished?

A