Hmm... just thought of something kind of obvious.
I came across Andrew McAfee's idea of imposed vs emergent structure on his blog last summer; it totally made sense: once upon a time, Yahoo! tried to organize the web hierarchically, under categories selected by professional taxonomists (imposed/less efficient). Nowadays, we've got tag clouds on Flickr and del.icio.us, which reflect the aggregated wisdom of the crowd (emergent/more efficient).
Somehow I've always thought of emergence in the context of specifically-defined communities whose participants are explicitly aware of their membership (employees of the same company, users of the same Web 2.0 service, etc) . But James Governor's long-ago post on attestation made me realize that emergence could take place across any buyer groups that a market researcher might focus on: electronics consumers, enterprise CIOs, whatever.
The idea i have in mind looks to the future of declarative metadata collection and aggregation. Much like Larry Lessig’s election week concept “emblogment” - it's an informal endorsement through a tag associated with a user that talks to that users’ preferences. It is not a poll by phone methodology (but how scientific are they anyway?)... Users will offer public “attestation” - [take the pledge!] - this is who i am! this is what my system is. that is my configuration. these “emblogment” tags–distributed as Javascript say, could then be aggregated–and hey presto, Technorati or some other blog aggregator starts competing with IDC.
James got the idea from his friend Len, who suggested that in the future we'll all maintain personal profiles featuring our product/brand/political preferences. (BTW, Vincent Rais thinks he once came across a now-defunct dating network that consisted of such profiles.) Attestations could transform market research from estimation (ie data collection through imposed methodologies and assumptions) to measurement (aggregation of emergent data).
I can't believe that post was written more than 2 years ago. MySpace had fewer than 10 million accounts back then. YouTube didn't yet exist. Google's share price was <$200. Given all that's happened in our Everything 2.0 world, I'm disappointed that participatory attestation hasn't become more prevalent. Some signs of progress I see are...
1. Stowe Bowd's suggestion that vendors could put up "beacons" (or standardized tags) for encouraging emblogment. (Have yet to see this picked up by any vendor)
2. Doc Searls' idea that VRM helps CRM. (VRM = vendor relationship management.) Instead of waiting to receive vendors' marketing messages, Doc says buyers should assert their preferences. As an example, he mentions a prototype system for movie reviews where users own and control their ratings. The user-ownership makes the data more valuable because it's not locked into any vendor's silo. Doesn't that sound kind of similar to Len's and James' idea?
3. TrendIQ's "Internet opinion" analysis, which measures the amount of available text on the web for any brand/product/issue you choose. This is not the same as intentional emblogment though. TrendIQ says their sentiment measurements mirrors real world purchasing and voting behavior, but how do they distinguish between real attestations and machine-generated text on splogs, parked domains, etc? As with Technorati, some amount of spam is bound to slip through the cracks. (Of course, as James pointed out, any kind of attestation system would be vulnerable to abuse as well - and it's not as if phone surveys and focus groups have perfect accuracy anyway.)
The question is, will participatory attestation have its day, or will the "tyranny of statistics" takes over? (My friend Patrick isn't too excited about my idea of predictive ecommerce, whereby Quantcast/MIT's reality miners/other math modeling geniuses can tell you what "someone like you" is supposed to prefer.) In either case, it's about time for emergent market research - don't you think?
I did point you to my declarative living/tag gardening ideas didn't i?
Posted by: James Governor | January 26, 2007 at 05:54 AM
You didn't - but now I'll have to look them up :)
Posted by: Isabel Wang | January 26, 2007 at 07:41 AM