SXSW notes: Commons Based Business Models

Speculation and hand-wringing about business models seem to go hand in hand these days.

Going on the premise that business models will “just emerge” isn’t sufficient motive for many start-ups, nor comfort to their potential investors. But neither is the solution simply always about scale (ie. traction plus “eyeballs”).

One interesting result of recent technology developments is the growing niche of commons-based initiatives, and SXSW Interactive scented a trend worth investigating in 2006 when they programmed a session on commons-based business models on Tuesday 14th March.

As teasers go, the programme blurb was quite enticing. ‘How will peer production models prove out in the content space? Learn how pioneering commons-based business models are creating what Business 2.0 calls the next multi-billion dollar industry.’ I was so there already

PANEL:
Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia
Joi Ito – VC & Entrepreneur
Theresa Malango – Magnatune
Ian Clarke – Freenet

Outlining the company ethos, Theresa Malango explained that Magnatune still have a small staff as they want to hold onto their values as the business grows. They also want to sustain their artists and their artists do get paid.

Ian Clarke explained that Freenet’s A-round investors were the same team that first funded Skype. The internet is now fast enough to support video at a rate that people are willing to watch, and Google Video and YouTube are also in the market. Freenet attach unobtrusive marketing to their pages, he explained. All their videos are raised under a Creative Commons licence that doesn’t permit alteration of the video (which won’t allow people want to strip out advertising) but all artists retain copyright.

Investors & the commons space – oxymoron or bandwagonesque?

Jimmy Wales joked that to build a site that’s number 20 in the world they had beat off VCs with a stick. More soberly, he explained that Wikipedia have investors that understand how to grow a business in a commons based culture, people who are sensitive to the situation.

Aren’t commons-based business models VC incompatible, someone asked, as there’s no lock-in that guarantees a VC payout at the end? Also you can get in for very little money – that’s okay for angel investors, but for VCs?

Joi Ito explained that he has stopped investing completely, prompting an audience member to speculate on whether there’s a Web 2.0 bandwagon, with microformats, etcetera, whereby now, people with ideas and no business models are getting funding? Having a Creative Commons licence is not a religion, Joi observed. It should be about choice.

Automatic for the (Web 2.0) people

Theresa Malango interjected that the whole deal is about making the overhead manageable. They have a lot of flexibility that can suit artists and managers. It’s not an either/or situation – you don’t have to give up one thing (CC licence) or the other (making money).

Queried about DRM, Clarke reckoned that it’s the opposite of what technology should be about – it disables people and content, rather than enabling them. Joi Ito added that there’s a nuance to add to that – certain types of channels have DRM built in and the artists has no choice – and the new GPL code cannot be used without DRM (?)

Clarke observed that you have to be pragmatic: you can hate the game while still playing it, and you can criticise the game while playing it. In Malango’s view, CC is becoming flexible enough that they can give flexibility within commercial models.

Transcending the DRM model & mindset

What about emerging payment models, eg micropayments, or are they advancing that this [Creative Commons commercial licences, I presume] is the only feasible model at this time? Wales replied that iTunes is a new model that works, dubbing it “digital annoyance management”. He buys, burns and rips because his MP3 player won’t play iPod or iTunes files. What you’re paying for with iTunes is the service, he stressed – always there, reliable, and the IRS aren’t going to come knocking on your door.

Clarke said that advertising has the nice quality that you can just do it and you don’t have to create DRM or rely on inbuilt flaws to guarantee revenue. It will end up like cable TV where you have direct payment models and advertising will cover the rest. It’s the easiest way, he figured.

Mining the Long Tail and cultural differences

The traditional operating systems (OS) model is to have the stuff downloadable for free and all the support, etc, is what you charge for, an audience member remarked. Malango replied that they dealt with all this head on because they only did downloads; then they realised that there was still a demand for CDs, so they introduced that, but now it’s dropping off with the pervasive uptake of downloads plus broadband.

Ito explained that he has been taking it to people who do anime. They are changing their model in order to sell ultra-deep content to the few thousand hardcore fans. It’s about the relationship, he stressed, as you can cut out the middlemen and give more (as per the Long Tail) to less people and charge more for it. Endorsements and events are another way to supplement revenue. This approach is taking off in China where the worst thing for a musician is not to be copied.

Creative Commons culture spreads

Creative Commons has intrinsic values but is also a means to an end, as the founders of Threadless (solicits and runs competitions for t-shirt designs) discovered. They have no CC inbuilt. The same goes for Kathy Sierra’s ‘Creating Passionate Users’.

How does Create Commons engender these communities? Joi stressed we need to differentiate CC from OS (operating system) licences. CC are trying to create metadata so that Google etc have a systematic way of searching the licences and so that they’re machine-readable, he continued. Lawrence Lessig is trying to get together clumps of other commons-based licences that are not CC. A lot of OS licences are very poorly framed legally.

Joi flagged the recent Adam Curry case, whereby someone used the licence without attribution. Curry took them to court and won. Many, many people are using Creative Commons with different goals, and CC allows that, they are trying to provide choice for everyone.

Remixing culture & content let loose

Malango explained that Magnatune use the non-commercial licence for the podcast service they have started. They also use the attribution licence to buy. While Wikipedia don’t use CC, Malango continued, Magnatune believe that the more people hear a track, the more likely they will be to come back and buy it. In turn, it encourages the remixing trend and they want to be part of it – it’s their lifeblood.

Jimmy Wales reflected that Wikipedia pre-dates the CC licence. They use a free documentation licence. There’s also the branding element to consider – if I’m thinking of working with Magnatune, the licence tells me a lot about them. It also gives further reason to participate, creating the “network externality effect”.

Clarke said all their videos are release under a “no derivatives” CC licence. The problem encountered in getting people to create short-form video content is that people tend to think of using others’ music. Why not do a test, Wales suggested, where you leave the advertising in? People probably won’t remove it as it’s at the end, he surmised, because it’s so unobtrusive. If they were remixing it they would strip out the ads, Clarke countered.

Patronage, peer investment & the Revver model…

Mike Linksvayer, who is the Creative Commons CTO, asked the panel what they saw to be the role of patronage in future commons-based business models.

Clarke replied that they developed the idea a couple of years ago to create a marketplace where people could invest in video production of others content, and if others invested later the earlier investors would make money (Google fair share was also namechecked in this context). But the idea wasn’t picked up, he said. Revver, was another concept in this vein.

Tantek Celick (CTO of Technorati) commented that there are tools in the content distribution chain that force DRM in. But the challenge is education rather than tools. Are there alternatives?

Format silos and the multi-channel approach

Joi responded that people should try to come up with and document alternatives. It’s different with software where many different types of content are stuck in a format, for example, if you’re a film-maker you have to use DVDs as one of the distribution channels because it makes sense (while using BitTorrent as well). Thus it becomes a tactical decision and it’s the choice of the artist if you need to hit people with your content next week.

But Tantek countered that DVDs can be made “Region Zero”, and you can make them without bad CSS (?).

Branding, trademarks and the community dilemma

Tara Hunt raised the notion of a commons-based education model, and a marketing model where all the communities participate. Chris Messina added that one of the things that shut down the ‘Spread CC’ and ‘Spread Firefox’ movements was the brand, as if it’s licensed under a trade mark that’s a lot harder to do. Most lawyers of course would argue that not controlling it deteriorates your ability to manage it. Is there a commons-based way to treat trademarks, he wondered.

Jimmy Wales responded that you want fans of Wikipedia to promote it; and then there’s bad people who would misuse the brand. Joi said, with his iCann hat explicitly on, even though we want everything to be distributed, trademarks are one way to find and distinguish communities. As the session wound-up, fittingly, final comment came from an audience member who reckoned we should get rid of top-level domains as they’re not good for anything.

[NB. This was a very fast-paced and high level discussion and I can’t stand by the complete accuracy of everything I noted down in its duration. But, a podcast of this session is available from this page:
http://2006.sxsw.com/coverage/podcasts/]

All SXSW Interactive 2006 panels:
http://2006.sxsw.com/interactive/programming/panels/

My other SXSW Interactive 2006 session write ups:

What’s In A Title?
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/03/15/whats-in-a-title-sxswi-notes/

Beyond Folksonomies – Knitting Tag Clouds For Grandma
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/sxsw-notes-beyond-folksonomies-knitting-tag-clouds-for-grandma/

Book Digitisation & The Revenge Of The Librarians
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/03/23/sxsw-notes-book-digitisation-and-the-revenge-of-the-librarians/

James Surowiecki on The Wisdom Of Crowds
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/04/07/sxsw-surowiecki-on-the-wisdom-of-crowds/

Running Your New Media Business
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/11/07/sxsw-notes-running-your-new-media-business/

The Perfect Pitch
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/11/09/sxsw-notes-the-perfect-pitch/

What People Are Really Doing On The Web
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/12/18/sxsw-notes-what-people-are-really-doing-on-the-web/

And there’s still time to check out and book for SXSW 2007!

New Directions In Mobile is Pandoras box unleashed

Where to start with New Directions In Mobile, the NMK event held on Tuesday 3rd October at 01ZeroOne in deepest Soho?

It was all in the mix – mobile TV, the mobile web, business models, user-generated content, statistical trends, and brands on mobile. Lordy. Just beam me down now, I’ll feed it all to you over my super-bionic network in a nano-second, and shazzam! Well maybe…

But really, you had to be there. For now, I’ll share a good few highlights.

Stats and factoids

Among the choice trends detailed by m:metrics’ Paul Goode, the news that ringtones are in decline has gained a lot of coverage this week. Paul Walsh of Segala added the caveat that people are downloading less but increasingly creating their own ringtones. In turn, if you think that mobile gaming (a booming sector) is for the boys, smell the coffee – it’s more balanced between genders and 70% of consumption takes place among over 24-year-olds.

Demographics, however, reveal mixed news for the handset manufacturers – Nokia have increased their handset share in 3G services in the UK among older users, while Sony Ericsson lead the younger market.

The UK is a test-bed for 3G services with 10% of the population owning a 3G phone. We lead Europe for mobile video downloads but France has the edge on mobile TV viewing.

Mobile TV disrupts…

Steve Flaherty of mobile innovation consultancy Ketai Culture cut to the chase, and boy did he whet the appetite of students of disruption. Move over YouTube, mobile is gonna upset your business (and creative) production and distribution model, and then some…

Phones themselves won’t be the only terminals for mobile TV – enter the PSP, the Video iPod, and antennas for laptops (via DMB in Britain; DV-BH in Europe). The likely uptake of mobile TV has always been a moot point, but Steve revealed that Vodafone has signed up over 1 million subscribers [Correction: Steve has contacted me to let me know it was rather that Vodafone had delivered a million TV sessions in the first 3 weeks] in the first three weeks of launching their Sky mobile TV service. Could the simplicity of the concept of “Sky on your mobile” plus reliability of the Sky brand be a factor I wonder….

Lookout – brand channels incoming!

While there are similarities to TV, Steve noted, it’s in the differences that the opportunities and challenges of mobile TV reside: limited or no EPG; short programme formats; streamed rather than broadcast (for now); non-TV brands making an impact; channels dedicated to single programmes. And the last two factors open a Pandora’s box…

They have the power to re-cast our relationship with TV, just as the web has; and massively extend the opportunity for non-TV brands (which reminded me of the hugely successful Hallmark channel – a card company scores as a TV company – who’d have predicted that?); yet the value of mobile video on demand is still being hamstrung by network operators’ business models and high data charges to the consumer. But for a glimpse of the converged, multiplatform future, reflect for a minute on this: the most popular TV channel on Orange is FHM TV.

If shareholder certainties are uppermost in your mind, you’re in for some sleepless nights folks, as the roles of broadcasters, mobile operators and aggregators are still to be defined, Steve stressed. But as the entire market enters a transitionary period, who can afford not to innovate?

Clock ticking for walled gardens

Alfie Dennen of Moblog UK underlined the imperative for network operators (not just start-ups and brands) to innovate. They’ve created a system that has built-in obsolescence, so they should have the foresight to experiment and adapt services and business models to secure their future existence. They’re waking up to the fact that they need to start behaving more like mobile ISPs.

Paul Walsh of Segala raised the interesting point that the end-result of stripping stuff out of websites to make them work and easy to navigate on mobile can often be perceived as damaging to brands ie. removing graphics, advertising, logos and other so-called funky stuff. While at the minute WAP is a far superior experience to the mobile [open] web, he added, the issue is that you have no freedom on WAP, it’s yet another walled garden.

Accessibility vs. snack-mode culture

He championed following the W3C accessibility guidelines, which override the need to create your website twice (once for web, and again for mobile), because a by-product of the W3C guidelines is that your site will work well on mobile too. Plus the web will detect what device the user is using and the device capability, and tailor delivery of the website to fit that phone [cool, but apparently it slows down the browsing experience]. But this seemed to side-step the issue of content suited to the mobile device and the user’s context.

A whole new vista was then opened to me by one of Paul’s remarks. While we are obsessed with content-on-the-go, mobile snacking and mobisodes, we seem to forget that the way most people in the world will access the internet is via mobile.

So while affluent Westerners wired with broadband at home might lap up tailored content on their handset, people in India and Africa might be happy to get the full episodes, the full essay, the whole motherlode of information on the web on their phone, as in the main they have no alternative. Don’t factor that in at you peril and don’t assume that you know what your users want!

Collaborate with your community

Listening to the users was at the very heart of Alfie’s perspective, and he opened with a superlative rant on the part of the consumer that Ewan has published here.

With MoblogUK they canvassed users right from the outset and let them submit in competition their own designs for re-skinning Moblog pages. While responses may have been limited to people with design skills (but 80 submitted designs was great feedback for a start-up barely off the blocks!), it was a fantastic way of garnering feedback and understanding of the market from the get-go.

It’s so easy for anyone to use a wiki or a forum to collect further feedback. But who else even thinks of asking the question, Alfie remarked.

Consumers know what’s good for them…

Uptake of disruptive services is steadily creeping upwards as better and more innovative alternatives are launched and developed. Shozu and Juvino were two that Alfie rated highly. Enabling the freeflow of content between your digital spaces was another feature Moblog embraced with send to “my Blogger”, “my Delicious”, “email this” and “Digg this” buttons recently added to the Moblog user toolset. Creative Commons licencing is also offered.

Richard Hurring from Marvellous noted that the permanent world of mobile presence is coming to brands and he explained why the mobile channel is so important for brands: it allows for impulse interaction and purchase as it’s anytime, any place and anywhere; it gives people and brands the power to interact; it drives control for users; and it’s an active (not passive) medium.

As the number of people with 3G phones is now equal to the number of households with broadband, more people will connect, Richard added, and he cited Peugeot (who have launched three cars with Marvellous) and Carling’s London barfinder (downloadable via WAP) as instances where thought-through mobile branding has really come to life.

Advertising forecasts and marketing response rates

A salient point from Beep Marketing’s Helen Keegan was that consumers, as ever, seem to be two steps ahead of businesses and brands when it comes to mobile. She cited research from Jupiter (released September 2006) that said mobile advertising spend will reach £2 billion pounds in the UK by 2010.

The more granular findings underlying that bold forecast highlighted the shift in consumer mindsets. Almost half of 16 to 25 year-olds said they were happy to accept adverts in return for free content, and 30% said they would be likely to respond to marketing messages (though the medium for the call to action – posters, TV ads, print, mobile itself – was not stated). A further 25% said they’d respond to mobile marketing specifically, and this was equally split between the sexes.

Bountiful options…

Helen went on to outline the opportunities and trends in ad-funded content, mobile advertising, sponsored SMS, selling your list (not-so-good), branded content, sponsored content, off-the-page promotion, subscription models, user-generated content and wholesale. Phew, so many options! It was a rich summary of the business landscape where you can make money now. But still, many brands’ mobile activities are poor, spam-like, or non-existent.

There were loads of other nuggets, case studies and interesting debates, but like I said, you had to be there. One Irish mobile marketing start-up even sent two delegates over from Dublin to attend. As Helen recently said, mobile isn’t going away any time soon. And the whole sector is ripe for transformation.

So next time there’s a mobile event anywhere of this calibre folks, get yourself along! Mobile Mondays are recommended and hopefully we’ll have a B&I soon that goes deeper into this area.

In the meantime, if disruption, content aggregation and new business models more generally float your boat, there’s still a few places left for Beers & Innovation 5 on 17th October.

[UPDATE: I've removed the apostrophe from Pandora's in the title as it makes the URL kinda crazy, so the URL has changed. As for the new punctuation, am expecting a call from Lynne Truss any minute... paranoia induced by journalism background etc. Use of etc induced by too much GapingVoid etc]

Yell leans on Yellowikis

This is a turn up for the books: traditional business listings service Yell has threatened legal action against UK start-up Yellowikis.

Their stated reason? “Misrepresentation”, “passing off” and, they suggested, using the name Yellowikis could “constitute an ‘instrument of fraud’.” [see the Wikinews story, 5th July 2006]

Which got me thinking – firstly, this is this slightly insulting to the majority of adults. I go to the Yellowikis homepage and I can’t see how anyone would think this was the wiki version of Yell. Granted, this is just conjecture and my opinion, and I believe previous similar cases have gone in favour of the plaintiffs. That’s how the law works. But still…

Panic stations?

Secondly, and more interestingly, this speaks volumes about the defensive responses emanating from (some) large media and business enterprises in the face of the internet’s rise to dominance. Lots of smart people work at Yell. But this action does not bespeak foresight or the greatest self-confidence.

This is an irrational response because Yell could yet reinvent itself as a totally digital and still more attractive enterprise to clients and consumers – its online directory is already hugely popular and well known.

Yell made $2.4bn in 2005. It has the resources and ability to forecast and strategise, to innovate on a larger and more commercial scale. Enterprises like Yellowikis occupy a different space to Yell in my opinion.

Search has transformed listings in the web space

As Yellowikis co-founder Paul Youlten notes: “Small and medium sized businesses are beginning to notice that their customers are ringing them up and saying ‘I found you on Google’ and not ‘I found you in the yellow pages’”.

Precisely. The problem – if you want to construe it as a problem – is more Google, search, and the internet in general, not Yellowikis. But as Yell knows full well, Google and the internet are not going to go away (plus you can’t sue the pesky internet). So you force Yellowikis to change their name – then what? What do you do about Craigslist, Adsense, Yahoo Directories..?

Brand sense?

Thirdly: what is this action going to do for the Yell brand? Nothing positive I’d wager. Yell may think they are protecting their brand, but at a time when mistrust of brands is a huge issue and more and more people are chattering away about poor service, ethical flaws and other brand inadequacies in blogs and other online communities, threatening a start-up that has yet to turn a profit seems…

Well, what do you think it seems like – does it look good and make you want to use Yell and recommend it to all your friends?

[Disclosure: Paul Youlten is a professional aquaintance of mine. Some of you may also have seen him speak alongsde Richard Sambrook at Beers & Innovation 2: User Generated Content on 30th March.]

Turn on, tune in, mash up

"Mash up" was a term coined to describe the footerings (yes – Scottish slang best desribes it!) of maverick music producers and DJs.

It described the scenario whereby often genre-antithetical tracks were melded together – frequently without one or more rights holder's permission – to create an entirely new end-result, but one that still clearly bore the traces of its formerly discreet antecedents.

In a way it was an evolution of the re-mixing trend founded in hip-hop and electro-funk and mainstreamed by other soul and electronic-based genres, and developed by the dance music scene's bootleggers.

So remixing became unremarkable, but when 'The Grey Album' grabbed music fans' imagination in 2003, folks twigged a corner had been turned. DJ Dangermouse blatantly wove together Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' White Album in a compelling but transparent fashion, and so a new genre was born. Scarcely a week now goes by when music mash ups aren't in the Top 50, in the UK or across the pond.

Greater than the sum of its parts

And so mash ups have now crossed over into the online sphere, with websites being designed or augmented with software applications that deliberately encourage this kind of activity.

It's still hard to extract clear business models from these amalgamations of websites, these hybrids. But even so, it's hard to dispute that the "mashability" of the likes of Google Maps has not served people well – never mind the recently less-in-favour but innovative-by-nature Google themselves. In short, done well, they have immense value.

An open playing-field?

In turn, a rising tide of start-ups are now racing to provide the APIs (application programmable interfaces) that allow them to mash up with the services of all the big superchannels (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc), and at SXSW Interactive last month, former walled-garden supremo AOL announced that all their applications are to be opened up for just this purpose.

Amazon are another big player and pioneer in this area, with their world-renowned Web Services division. Moreover, when Microsoft call their annual US conference Mix 06 and plan to sprout APIs all over the shop, you know it's not a fringe sport.

So we're pleased to announce that 'Web Services & Mash Ups' is the focus for the next Beers & Innovation held by NMK on Thursday 27th April. You can book your ticket now for £10. The last B&I sold out 2 weeks in advance, so don't hang about and I'll see you there.

SXSW Notes: Book Digitisation And The Revenge Of The Librarians

This session on Saturday 11^th March had me from hello, after a fascinating half-day conference on book digitisation I attended and reported on last month in London held by the ALPSP…

SXSW 2006 session page 

PANEL:

Liz Lawley – Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, a trained librarian who used to work at the Library of Congress and visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, Liz blogs at mamamusings, Corante's social software weblog Many-to-Many, and Misbehaving.net
Danielle Tiedt – Head of Microsoft’s Books Program and General Manager of MSN Search
Bob Stein – Institute for the Research of The Book, visiting Fellow USC Annenberg Center for Communication and founder Night Kitchen 
Daniel Clancy – Director, Google Book Search 

————— 

Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at de Montfort University (UK) jumped right in with a question about trans-literacy just as the session started. And a guy from Cyworld asked how does something written now fit into future writing – “the living book” – and changing texts (eg Wikipedia)? A delegate from New York Library asked as we digitised things, are we actually shrinking the realm of knowledge as people will be thinking that’s everything?

Liz Lawley first addressed privacy concerns, for instance the privacy surrendered by having to log-in through Google to look at books. An easy criticism of Google Book Search is that it only had options of where you could find the book online, but they now also include where you can borrow it from / ones in the public domain. 

Daniel Clancy recounted how he went to a talk recently where half the students hadn’t been in the library in the last 6 months. There is a vast amount of authoritative content available and Google want it to be available at anytime and everywhere. To this end, Google has their Book Search and their Library Program.

Mary Hodder spoke up from the floor, positing that Google are not being good community members if they are signing exclusive contacts with publishers, etc, because others should be able to crawl and re-scan that information… Tom Clancy responded that for the public domain, it’s limited, but Hodder queried in turn, can I crawl all Google’s public domain content and use that for other things? Can I build new knowledge on top of it and build communities? 

Danielle Tiedt said she got into book search for a lot of the same reasons as Google, for example to improve the answers in Microsoft Search. Only 5% of the world’s information is online today. Book digitisation is a very long-game process and is going to require a lot of people working together to make it happen. One of the reasons Microsoft joined the OCA, she continued, is because it is specifically focused around public domain work and they make it freely available to everyone. There are 3 copies of everything – one goes to the Internet Archive [run by Brewster Kahle – cheers Brewster, fragments of three former websites I’ve worked on that went bust or were retired are stored there!], one to the OCA, and one to a commercial company eg. Microsoft. 

At this point Bob Stein countered that it is scary that Mary Hodder has to act like a supplicant if everything is “going to be okay” Hodder commented that Kahle says “trust me” but if you put the info out there, the concept of having as many copies as possible forces you to make a business model around better services, based on better user interfaces, and trust that validates (eg make an API for all the content so others can remix, mash up and build upon it). 

Stein said he has a tremendous problem with any commercial organisation controlling the archive that is our culture, citing the instance of censorship in China. Ceding our culture in this way to large organisations is scary. We are giving up the role of the public librarian too easily, he stressed. 

Danielle Tiedt noted that Europe is taking a more public approach with governments supporting digitisation. There’s not enough money to make it happen without public involvement, she added. 

Daniel Clancy explained that 30 million books takes $1.5 billion to digitise – so how would Bob Stein et al have Google behave, and is Stein comfortable with the US government being the source of digitisation? 

Liz Lawley interjected that maybe we need to look at more decentralized options, wondering how much would they have costed Wikipedia in advance? 

An issue around the idea of the perfect book was raised from the audience – if pages online are collected from different editions, what edition [or what translation, I wonder] am I reading? What effect is this having on scholarship, he asked.

A delegate from iBiblio described the broadcasting and webcasting treaty currently being negotiated as “the Rome Convention” on steroids!” as it transfers the copying rights onto the web and broadcasting world. 

Responding to the point that there is not a lot of demand for digitisation, Danielle Tiedt, said there is in regards to search. People want authoritative, book-sourced / originated content and a lot of search queries aren’t being answered because there’s a lack of authoritative content in the search results. 

Bob Stein put forth the case that the books Google has digitized are reading us. But Daniel Clancy countered that you don’t have to login for public domain content, if you check 'fully accessible' in Google's 'advanced search'. 

Liz Lawley asserted that Google aren’t organizing anything, they’re just indexing it, and usability issues have to be addressed. For instance the best edition of Hamlet for a six-year-old and the best for a PhD scholar aren’t one and the same. Librarians however, do have expertise in searching and sourcing the correct texts.

Danielle Tiedt took up the point about indexing and organizing – how pages are ranked for search is a lot harder to do with the types of technology we have today and she reckoned we’re still going to need a lot of human intervention.