practicehacker

A Face For Radio

Vintage TV show You Are There represented early television’s attempt to evoke a live event by recreating a historical one. Kind of like reporting or blogging. As a TV show however, it was the kind of yawner that could only have aired at a time when the medium was desperate for content and network executives reasoned that any show that had enjoyed success on the radio couldn’t miss on TV. So what’s that got to do with NextFest 2008? Let me explain.

Mr. Micro Meet Mr. Blog

When I got the invitation to hear Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson talk about his book Free! I planned to blog the experience as I had the ABA TechShow and other events over the past few years.

But when I arrived at NextFest something told me this was going to be different. Maybe it was the pervasive use of blue lights or the elegant feng shui of the exhibits; maybe I had an epiphany wedged in the front row of the audience between one lady holding a video-camera over my head and another balancing a pocket recorder between thumb and forefinger inches from my face. Whatever the reason, I knew that I had to take evasive action. My answer: iPhone + Twitterphone. You can see the results in this companion post or choose to follow me on Twitter.

So…What’s The Connection?

As Anderson noted in his presentation, The Future of Free (which is really just his spin on Joseph Schumpeter‘s theory of “creative destruction”), there are a number of forces that link new ideas and new media, from You Are There in the early days of television to Twitter on the Internet. They are:

• Fear of scarcity brings out radically different behaviors than hopes of abundance
• The latter inevitably leads to waste – the good kind that encourages trial-and-error
• Where the cost of failure is virtually zero, experimentation will flourish
• Where people are trying new things all the time, at least 1 good idea is bound to assert itself
• If the attempt is a bust, the cycle can quickly restart thanks to low barriers and costs

In the end, You Are There wasn’t so much a TV show as a radio program retrofitted for the new medium. It wasn’t until mass adoption of TV-sets and the ubiquity of free programming a decade later that broadcasters began understanding that they could afford to fail and not lose their audience. The experience lead TV in directions that its inventors could never have foreseen.

The Future of Free! Is The Future of the Internet

The Internet is our generation’s zero-cost distribution system; our TV. Twitter itself is a perfect example of how the Internet has lead to waste – the wrong and right kinds. So what if Twitter and its clones turn out to be spectacular failures? It doesn’t matter; the eco-system created by the Internet is still at work so long as thousands of failures lead to 1 good idea. After all, that’s what the future of free is all about.

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I’ve noticed a few interesting trends that seem to point to a future in which our experiences on the Web might be tailored to our personal preferences without our ever having to spell them out. Welcome to the practical application of the Attention Economy.

Revenge of the Attention Economy: If you’re not familiar with the ‘attention economy’ concept check out my post here. Seems that information used to be expensive and hard to come by, but with so much of it available instantly for little or nothing it’s our attention that’s selling at a premium nowadays.

Necessity is a Mother: Advertisers are already hard at work getting our attention; but the need to surmount the ‘noise’ in our daily lives in order to make their point is more important than ever. Enter attention protocol markup language (APML). By building APML into the fabric of websites visited by tens of millions every day like Yahoo, MSN, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, it will be easier than ever to measure, track, and predict their behavior. Voila – better ads, and maybe a more relevant browsing experience? Or a master manipulator’s dream?

I Want My MTV Back: Among professional critics on the ‘Net, the hot ticket is privacy and data ownership. In other words, assume that you leave a trail of virtual breadcrumbs behind you every time you get online; do you own that trail or can the information be used by your ISP, your software vendor, or others to shape your next browing experience (or sell you more of their product)? One blogger reviewed the actual policies of popular websites like Facebook, Yahoo, MSN, LinkedIn, and MySpace, and published his findings here. The results were not encouraging.

You knew someone was going to discuss it at some point: the creep. I’m not talking about Uncle Earnie … although he’s never been quite right … no, I mean the creep of non-lawyers (whether a non-lawyer professional, a business person, or a soccer mom) into what we used to call “legal work” (if that even means anything any more).  Whether we’re comparing an incorporation online or a store-bought will, lease, or promissory note, I can’t decide whether to love or hate these labor and money saving products of a DIY culture, the Internet, and an educated population. Case in point. In response to this post by Carolyn Elefant on the Law.com Blog Network I had a few things to say.  Feel free to disagree … if you can. Here we go

Prepackaged legal documents such as wills, deeds, and leases are the tip of the iceberg and you know it – more and more of the not-too-difficult but profitable tasks once performed by lawyers have been overtaken by cheaper, more readily available options.

I think this happened before … what was it called? Oh yes, the Industrial Revolution. Millions were out of work. It was a bad time to be in buggy whips, what with the horseless carriage on the rise.

Of course when a layman takes up the pen they are still bound to make costly mistakes, but that is the problem (if it really is a problem); for most people a ‘good enough’ job is, well, good enough. Why pay high incremental costs to take your output from ‘good’ to ‘great?’

Like it or not, this is the way of the future. All that remains is to determine who will benefit and who will suffer. Taking all bets …

I’m really excited about this post because it represents a scoop in more ways than one.

• First, PM Blog is breaking the news about DriveThruLegal.com (DTL)
• Second, DTL puts its mass customization model front and center

So, what do we mean by mass customization? We’re talking about the process of taking cookie-cutter elements and assembling them in real time to suit individual customers … uh, clients. And if that sounds familiar, it should: it’s what happens each time you order a burger (did you really think that they were making that fish sandwich just for you?). And just in case you missed the fast-food allusion in the name of the site, DTL even sports a menu of legal services and products that could have been printed at your local fast food emporium.

Is DTL the beginning of mass customization in legal services? Hardly. Fact is nearly every document, case, memo, opinion, and idea produced by a lawyer is an extension or modification of its predecessors or the articulation of a core set of principals applied to a particular situation. So what why refer to that age-old process as mass customization? As it becomes ever easier to store and retrieve information, then refer to and use that information in an entirely new way, we are finding more than ever that what worked yesterday can be made to work again today, and in ways we hadn’t thought of before. These same factors have given rise to so-called knowledge management, a practice that is being put into place in any number of ways in law firms of all sizes. [ed. note: it's worth noting that the term "knowledge management" was originally coined by vendors to sell $100,000 search engines to big-firm customers -- just ask West KM -- too bad those overpriced systems are being replaced by free or near-free alternatives these days].

On Friday I spoke with DTL’s founder Jerry Mowery who says he was inspired by his work with SCORE® — a service of the U.S. Small Business Administration — and spurred into action by a fortuitous episode of “The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch.” In classic entrepreneur fashion Mowery turned his instincts into action and produced DTL without so much as a web designer to help him. The result is the most non-legal legal website we’ve ever seen. Good on you Jerry. Good on you indeed.

DTL Founder Jerry Mowery
“Order your next non-compete agreement with our special sauce and a side of home-made cole-slaw!”
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