Another day away from law blogging.
Recently I’ve been thinking on the differences between art, craft, and expression.

Art takes thought.
What is art without thought? Don’t know, but kids are great at it.  Maybe joy, or play.

Remember play?
Play is the work of childhood.  So is art the work of life?
Perhaps on our best days.

Craft embodies art. But art is more than craft.

Art is how you use craft to bravely move an audience.

So, to review:
Must have craft. | Must apply it with intent. | Must have audience. | Audience must move.

Like romance, no?

Who Will Update My Facebook Status When I Die?
If you follow this blog’s Twitter feed you may have already seen me saying goodbye to people I’ve enjoyed in person and online.  MIT’s Bill Mitchell and Chuck Howes, formerly of the Christian Science Publishing Society, both good men, recently passed away.  In the case of Chuck, I often reached out to discuss “crazy-stage” publishing ideas on LinkedIn and Facebook.

When my mom died, I got her address book.  Every friend’s birthday, the names of their spouse and kids, even when they graduated was written there.  It was a record of her memory and some of her values.

I don’t keep an address book, not even really in Outlook.  Most of that lives in social media.  If I wanted to find Chuck, I’d zap him a note through LinkedIn, and regardless of where he was working, or riding his bike, the message would get through.

So this raises a question: How do we pass on those contacts and values to our survivors?  A recent  SXSW panel asked the practical question “Who Will Check My Email When I Die?”  The social media equivalent may be “Who Will Update My Status When I Die?”

Your Digital Legacy
My lawyer friends and I have always wondered about digital inheritance, and if businesses would rise up to provide escrow services for endowing our digital selves.  Who will be your digital executor?

Continued

An oil release from BP imperils the seas, careless financial firms put economies and governments at risk, and a mine in West Virgina (run by a company with a despicable safety record) explodes.

Cereal companies lie about their products’ ability to bolster immunity during an epidemic, cars accelerate for no apparent reason, and pharma companies market birth-control drugs to improve mood and complexion.

The need for corporate liability — not to mention the hypocrisy of “caps” — has never been clearer.

Businesses want the courts all to themselves
Corporations want tort reform to keep people from suing them. And, hypocritically, they want to be free to sue you.

Continued

Later this month, Seth Godin will make Boston one of the first cities on his acoustic tour. No slides, no notes; just ideas and discussion with marketers.

I recently came across this Godin collection of single slides by 70 experts from various disciplines to share their views of the future in a single page. It’s provocative Sunday reading.  Download it as a PDF here.

Take a look, and if you like, please post a comment to share what you think.

The elderly population in the US is ready to zoom to 20%.
According to the US government, the number of people over 65 in 2030 is projected to be twice as large as in 2000, growing from 35 million to 71.5 million and representing nearly 20 percent of the total US population.

They Are Buying Technology
Did you know that 11% of households run by people over 65 have gaming units?  Yes, they bowl on Wii – unlike kids today, seniors know how to bowl. NPR’s On the Media did a great segment on accessibility design in gaming, which mentions the needs of seniors.

Back in 1997 seniors were the fastest-growing demographic on the Internet.  Just as our kids are comfortable with technology, so now are our elders.  They have resources, shop online, and participate in social networks (here are 50 social networks for seniors.)  And, they are a growing segment.

So, are you designing your marketing experience for seniors?

Continued

Too many people make the “I’m not good at life” face.

But in games, people apply themselves to overcome obstacles and often create alternative better selves.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and she has a goal to increase game play to 21 billion hours per week — and to make better games.

There’s no unemployment in World of Warcraft. There is, in fact, more industry than in real life.  And good, clear incentives and feedback.  Young people who game normally will log 10,000 hours of games by age 21. That’s the same number of hours of school from 5th to 12th grade. That’s enough to be virtuoso gamers.

And here’s what the 1.5 billion gamers are virtuosos at, and why society (and your business) needs them:

!) Urgent Optimism: they want to act immediately, and believe they can win.
!!) Social Fabric: they connect and say in the game.
!!!) Blissful Productivity: they’re happier working hard and being engaged.
!!!!) Epic Meaning: they love to be part of the epic story.

Continued

In the cloud, nobody can tell if you’re a web page.

In talking with people about the post The Siteless Web and the End of Brand Website Rule: Web 3.0, I found myself suggesting that online visitors will encounter us through three types of experiences:

1. Sites we control: traditional, publishing-based information distribution.
2. Sites others control: content and social networks that put our message under others’ control.
3. Applications: either as interface, such as Tweetdeck, or as aggregation point, such as Salesforce.

Of course, sites others control are quite likely driven by applications.  Facebook is an application; so is Google search. But they typically appear to users as websites.

The move away from a page-based user-experience to an application metaphor has been slowly approaching for years. The “portal” was said to break that metaphor.  Same with the idea of the application put on online and sold as a service. This has been a slow shift.  Video, AJAX, and data-driven services all exceed the page metaphor. It’s been hanging by a thread for some time.

However, there is a huge change happening in how people access the web. The move from “screen” to “hand-held” is the continental divide that will shift development away from the page metaphor.

• 75% of Twitter access doesn’t come through its web page at all. It’s through API-integrated applications, which provide a richer, easier-to-use application-type experience, particularly via mobile devices.
• Consider the proliferation of mobile applications for iPhone and iPad – the internet will be increasingly used as a medium for people interacting with applications, not browsers and HTML pages.

The Web Has No Pages, Really.
Web pages are not pages at all. In some ways they are still inferior to their printer counterparts.  Turning a page is instant; loading a page is still far from that. Viewing a page is consistent with the designer’s execution, while web pages render in a variety of ways, based on programming and browser technology.

As we move from the screen to hand display, we will consume ever more information through applications.  They provide more consistent, space-concentrated, responsive user experiences.  Web and application design will completely overlap.

Will Corporate and Brand Websites Still Have a Place?
Continued

Online changes seem to happen quickly, but their beginnings are often apparent years in advance. And legal factors provide signals to business about the stability of these new systems.

This is an idea I hope we can start to discuss in all the places we talk about the future of the Web.

It is from one of this blog’s first posts, in 2007, Web 3.0 – Envisioning the Web’s Next Big Change.

Here’s the idea:

Web 3.0 will be characterized by integration of the web into application-driven experiences. If user-generated content is a mainstay of 2.0 – then machine integrated content is the base of Web 3.0.

The result will be a web experience that at first is highly distributed and less centered on home pages. This, I believe, will easily transition to applications experiences that don’t rely on the conventions of pages, sites, or even being online.

This systematic integration is already changing the web.

• Its technical drivers include the use of XML, ASP business models, open id/federated identity, rich media applications and open APIs. (Think of Facebook, Salesforce, and Twitter).
• Its legal driver is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (Web 2.0 is enabled through this provisions subsidy of legal immunity for republishers.)
  
• Its market drivers include the desire to organize and unify (mash-up) information from distributed sources such as social networks to create consolidated user experiences (think Salesforce and Hootsuite).

In many cases (Web 3.0) won’t appear to be the Web at all. Applications will consume and produce public web content — but the user experience will be increasingly mediated. The online experience will be increasingly an application experience.

In a Web 2.0 world, brands built their own sites, and customers said what brands stood on them and on social sites. In a Web 3.o world, the concept of specific sites evolves into offsite experiences and mash-ups that integrate content.

The Web 3.0 world is less about place (or domain) than voice and identity.

Section 230 Protection Is a Root of the Siteless Web
As this is both a legal and tech blog, I should point out that most of the “siteless web” today is hugely “subsidized” by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Our current connected network of application sites that aggregate or host ideas contributed by others would likely not exist without this legal structure.

Example 1: Brand Sites Don’t Frame Brands; Web Applications Like Search and Social Media Do.
Go type Modernista.com into Google. Click on the first result.

Modernista! doesn’t produce or promote a home website at all. It has created an interface to the web.

The firm’s customers make a considered purchase that is more influenced by what others say than how an agency describes itself on its brand sites.

The Modernista! site is an interface to a distributed set of links to other websites. Their “About Us” section is Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter. Their portfolio is on Delicious.  Their news section is what Google News and Google Blog Search say about them.

Their authority is not from the endorsement of these sites. It is from the ideas posted by those who use them. Modernista!’s credibility comes from the sites they don’t control — and ironically, those sites don’t control the content either.

The truth from outside the company can be rewarding and risky.

Did they just win an award, lose an account, post an idea? Customers know that truth and brand are in fact different things. Modernista! realized this early, and has managed to that new reality.

Example 2: Brands Migrate Off-Site to “Fish Where the Fish Are.”
Some businesses are choosing to skip building their own sites or to promote their off-site presences ahead of the brand website.

The kayak rental shop I went to on vacation decided to forego the work of building, maintaining, and promoting its own site.

Instead, it set up an easy-to-remember Meetup account and positioned itself where its demographic was already going.

In the past, brand sites have tried to build their own communities. Most failed. Brands aren’t naturally good at aggregating audiences, and most people are too busy to create multiple identities in what are essentially walled gardens run by beer companies, film distributors, or potential lawyers.

But what if brands were in social networks with their clients, and brought something of value to the party? It is easier to do this, and the market-reach results are greater.

Continued

The Internet is much more than a network of computers.

It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe are connecting to one another, thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity.

Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society. And this society is advancing dialogue, debate, and consensus through communication. Because democracy has always flourished where there is openness, acceptance, discussion, and participation.

And contact with others has always been the most effective antidote against hatred and conflict.

That’s why the Internet is a tool for peace. With it, anyone who uses it can sow the seeds of non-violence.

And that’s why the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to the Net.

Remember my 2010 prediction that brand holders should beware of clowns? I called it the Coulrophobia Epidemic of 2010.  

Logorama did it with trademarks, and won an Oscar.

Girl Talk did it with music, gaining top rankings from Rolling Stone, Blender and Time magazine.

And now Eric Faden uses the most copyrighted video anywhere, Disney® cartoons, both to explain and to demonstrate the reality of “fair use” in documentary film making. It takes the works of “the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms” and uses them to argue against longer copyrights and attacks on fair use.

To paraphrase Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “They are using their power of Free Speech, simply to demonstrate it exists.“

Be sure to read the opening copyright un-warning; this is provocation, parody and education from the very start.

McDonald’s® must be smarting from Logorama’s use of Ronald McDonald as a Pulp Fiction-like gunman. Now Disney has its cartoon catalog used to speak against it in a creative and highly defensible way.

Continued