Kevin Kelly – Gigaom http://gigaom.com The industry leader in emerging technology research Sat, 27 May 2017 12:00:40 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Kevin Kelly’s cool tools for self publishing Cool Tools http://gigaom.com/2013/10/31/kevin-kellys-cool-tools-for-self-publishing-cool-tools/ Thu, 31 Oct 2013 15:41:51 +0000 http://research.gigaom.com/?p=203371 cool tools book

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools

I guess it’s not surprising that Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired and now the magazine’s Senior Maverick, would be using state-of-the-art business practices and tools. He recently decided to self publish the next issue of Cool Tools, comprising 1,500 curated reviews of all kinds of tools in an 472 page book:

Cool Tools is a highly curated selection of the best tools available for individuals and small groups. Tools include hand tools, maps, how-to books, vehicles, software, specialized devices, gizmos, websites — and anything useful. Tools are selected and presented in the book if they are the best of kind, the cheapest, or the only thing available that will do the job.

Kelly details the path to self publishing in a recent post, and the part I found most interesting had to do with his use of Elance and Dropbox:

I used some cool tools to keep the costs low. Much of the work was outsourced to the freelancers of the world on Elance. About a million freelancers enrolled in Elance around the world will bid on a job. I had several jobs I outsourced to Elance (although many, if not most, of the freelancers work in the US). The layout design of the 472 pages was specified with the request to bid the job on a per-page cost. Out of the 30 or so Elance designers who bid, we picked 8 to do test pages, and then selected 6 to get the work. Their bids were not the lowest. They were in the middle range, but had good ratings from previous work. The 6 designers worked in parallel. The ones whose work we liked best we gave more pages to. The amount we paid was low for San Francisco area, but most important was the speed. We could design the entire mammoth book in only 4 weeks. We hired proofers on Elance as well, and again we hired them in parallel. We took bids on a per-page basis, winnowed the best candidates down with a few test pages, and then got them going all at once, giving more pages to those who did the best work. We proofread the entire book in several days. We also used Elance to find graphic artists who could remove the backgrounds from product shots; one worker hailed from Turkey. Elance has a very intelligent and easy-to-use interface, which aids in protecting buyer and seller, managing bids, and keeping track of work submitted. I consider it one of the chief tools in self-publishing.

A near-perfect case study in small, socially scaled fast-and-loose production, leveraging the Elance placeform (marketplace + platformplaceform) as the foundation of finding participants in the project.

The other indispensable tool we used was Dropbox. This allows folks to work remotely on files anywhere in the world, while also backing them up to the cloud. The book was prepared in InDesign, the layout program from Adobe. It’s been around for more than a decade, and it keeps getting better, integrating nicely with Dropbox. We kept our InDesign files, plus thousands of pictures, and other large files in our respective Dropboxes, and never needed to move them the whole time. (We upgraded everyone’s account to the pro unlimited storage version.) This made working remotely and collaboratively and rapidly easy and smooth. I don’t believe we could have done a book this large and complex over the net without something like Dropbox.

This supports the Distributed Core model that I believe is the heart of creative work in the new form factor of work (see Social third-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook and The future of work: new paths to productivity). Dropbox and other file sync-and-share applications, like Hightail, Box, and Intralinks, are filling the gap of a distributed virtual file system. And, as Kelly stated, we just couldn’t do our work anymore without a distributed core for working socially.

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Kevin Kelly & the power of ideas http://gigaom.com/2013/10/27/kevin-kelly-the-power-of-ideas/ http://gigaom.com/2013/10/27/kevin-kelly-the-power-of-ideas/#comments Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:43:26 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=709363 “Success does amazing things to people,” said Shel Kapham, the first employee of Amazon, (s AMZN) in a conversation with Brad Stone, a BusinessWeek writer and author of the new book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos & the Age of Amazon. Shel was reflecting on Bezos, but it could be said of many more people who have changed after tasting that rare fruit: success.

But it is the truly great ones who don’t change with success, regardless of fame and fortune. And one of those rare ones is Kevin Kelly, an author who is a true blue chronicler of technology’s today and painter of technology’s tomorrow.

wired_1.01

Wired magazine issue #1

In his past life, Kelly was editor & publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, was the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and helped create The Well. His books were a major influence on the writers and directors of The Matrix. Kelly has been on my bucket list of people to meet before my CPU burns out.

Ten years ago, when I read this piece in Wired magazine, I was taught a vital lesson — technology and innovation means different things to different people in different parts of the world. So you can only imagine my excitement when I learned that he was also in attendance at the same social gathering where Kapham (who worked at the Whole Earth Catalog) was being interviewed by BusinessWeek’s Stone.

And when I went and shook his hand, I quietly muttered to myself — Achievement Unlocked! His theory of 1,000 true fans has been a guiding principle of our company. And not a month goes by when his blog doesn’t teach me something new, forcing me to change my preconceptions. Do I sound like a gushing tween who just met Justin Bieber? Damn straight, I do indeed feel that way!

Kelly is a great role model for any and every technology writer. His relevance doesn’t come from his past or the publication(s) he writes for, or how many Twitter followers he has. Instead, his relevance (as always) comes from the very foundation of our world — ideas. Later in the evening, long after the interviews were over, the selfies had been taken and gushing had stopped, I fell into a conversation with Kelly about a looming feeling of cynicism — especially as the valley transforms from a focus on things to people.

In 1994, technology was what writers used to obsess about in Silicon Valley. In 2004 it was about business (and business models) and in 2014, it seems to be all about the people and the spectacle of technology. Kelly, who has been part of many inflections and has been a spectator of many booms (and equally numerous busts), had rather simple but effective advice — learn from history by reading about the past and use it to get some context about the present. In other words, try and understand the time frame and then focus on the long view.

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Technologies take a long time to make their view through society and having a lasting impact. Today, thanks to our planet’s interconnectedness, new technical innovations (and ideas) spread much faster, but their impact still takes time. Focusing on the long view is the easiest way to ignore the short-term events and the cynicism that comes as a by-product of short-term thinking.

He went on to offer some more advice. You have to look at the world in terms of opportunity, he said (I am paraphrasing), because opportunity and optimism are part of the same fabric. Around the world, he said, millions of people every year leave their rural homes and march into an urban life. They leave behind family and simple life in search of one thing — opportunity and hope for a better tomorrow. That optimism is the antidote to any cynicism we might feel in the world.

Kelly pointed out that it is easy to dismiss a startup, but we shouldn’t. Each startup is an idea that is worth exploring, and thus an opportunity. Like every newborn child is full of promise, the new startups too are reason for optimism, he pointed out. Not every kid grows up to be an Albert Einstein or Zadie Smith — the same is true with startups. Some become Facebook, Twitter, Intel and Apple. Others live a faceless existence.

And before I took off for the evening, Kelly said that taking long walks with one’s thoughts is a good way to slow down and a way to take the long view. Maybe that would be good for my waistline too. Still, I am glad to say that the reality of Kevin Kelly matched the expectations of my mind. Success has just made him more amazing.

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7 Stories to read this weekend http://gigaom.com/2013/01/05/7-stories-to-read-this-weekend-50/ http://gigaom.com/2013/01/05/7-stories-to-read-this-weekend-50/#comments Sat, 05 Jan 2013 08:00:47 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=598788 Happy 2013 everyone. I am starting off a new year with the promise that I will try and share interesting stories to read every weekend. This week, I am starting with some fun stuff — pickpockets and resolutions.

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Why Louis CK and Amanda Palmer are the future of content http://gigaom.com/2012/06/28/why-louis-ck-and-amanda-palmer-are-the-future-of-content/ http://gigaom.com/2012/06/28/why-louis-ck-and-amanda-palmer-are-the-future-of-content/#comments Thu, 28 Jun 2012 16:37:28 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=537686

Comedian Louis CK raised some eyebrows earlier this year when he sold downloads of a live show through his website and pulled in more than $1 million in about a week, despite the fact that fans could easily download the content for free. Now, he has done it again: instead of a traditional tour, he decided to sell tickets through his website, and sold $4.5-million worth in under 48 hours. Content creators of all kinds — authors, musicians and others — would do well to learn from his example, and that of others like Amanda Palmer, who recently financed a new album and tour through Kickstarter. The main lesson? Building a community is more important than ever.

Louis CK (whose real name is Louis Szekely) was far from being an unknown when he launched his download experiment in December: he had a show on Comedy Central the FX network that was fairly successful, and had appeared on late-night talk shows — but he was far from being a top-tier name. But one thing CK did have was a community of fans, and he tapped into that when he offered a self-financed show to them as both a live-stream and a download. And he deliberately didn’t encrypt the show with digital-rights management locks or barriers, because he said he wanted to make it as frictionless as possible for fans.

As I pointed out at the time, media companies of all kinds could learn a lot from that approach — including the lack of DRM controls and the power of the community that CK was able to draw on. Tens of thousands of fans paid $5 for that show even though they could have easily downloaded it for nothing. His latest move, in which he offered single-price tickets for a 39-city tour through his website, built on that community and created a sold-out $4.5-million tour in less than 48 hours. That’s an incredibly powerful example of going direct to your fans.

Can giving content away result in more money?

This kind of model isn’t necessarily restricted to individuals either, as Union Square Ventures partner Andrew Weissman points out in a blog post about the TED conference entitled “What If We Give It Away.” As he notes, the conference has spent the past couple of years giving its content away for nothing — via videos on its website and elsewhere, and also through the branding of free TED spinoffs called TEDx conferences in cities around the world. As Weissman notes:

[B]y giving away what one would generally think of as a company’s (a media entity) greatest assets – its content, brand and business processes – the business has grown enormously in just a few short years.

On the individual front, musician Amanda Palmer is another great example of this approach: she quit her record label in 2010 and decided recently to fund a new album and tour directly by allowing her fans to donate through Kickstarter. Her original goal was $100,000 — but she blew through that figure in a matter of hours after the launch, and by the end of the campaign had raised ten times that amount or almost $1.2 million. In return for the funds, fans get a variety of rewards, including a signed art book, an invitation to special dinners and parties for fans in a number of cities, and so on.

One thing that’s important to note about both of these examples is that CK and Palmer didn’t just pull in a huge amount of money and walk off to do whatever they wanted with it: both of them have spent a lot of time detailing what exactly will happen to the funds, with Palmer in particular posting an itemized breakdown of her expenses for the album and the tour so that her fan community realizes what is involved. Louis CK, meanwhile, gave a substantial portion of the money he made from his downloadable show to charity, and wrote about that.

Building on those “1,000 true fans”

Authors can also benefit from this kind of community, and there are any number of examples: self-published young-adult fiction writer Amanda Hocking made more than $2 million without an agent or a traditional publisher by distributing her e-books through Amazon’s Kindle platform, and author John Green managed to get his new e-book to the number one spot on the best-seller list before the book was even completed — because his community of fans was already connected to him on multiple levels, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

This kind of community engagement has always been important: the band The Grateful Dead was legendary for allowing fans to tape its live shows and share that content, and other artists such as Jonathan Coulton have also made a living while still giving away much of their content for free (Coulton is also a thoughtful commenter on the issues around copyright infringement). Radiohead and Girl Talk have both used the “pay what you want” model for album downloads, which show — just as Louis CK has — that fans will pay even when they can get the content for nothing.

What has happened is that the web and social media — along with crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo — have added more horsepower to the concept that Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly described as “1,000 True Fans.” In that model, trying to become the next global superstar through traditional media is replaced by connecting with a loyal fan base and then engaging with them, whether it’s to fund a tour or an album or a book (marketer and author Seth Godin is funding his new book through Kickstarter).

Can anyone make use of this new model? Obviously it helps to have already established a brand, as Louis CK and Amanda Palmer have (or Seth Godin and TED). And there may be no easy parallel to the concert tour when it comes to some kinds of content — but the power of connecting directly to your fans, however small that group might be, can’t be underestimated. And whether its record labels or publishing houses or media companies, former intermediaries and gatekeepers of all kinds are going to have to try a lot harder to prove that they are adding some value to that process in order to survive.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Giuseppe Bognanni

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12 new kinds of media & the rise of “supercuts” http://gigaom.com/2011/11/07/12-new-kinds-of-media-the-rise-of-supercuts/ http://gigaom.com/2011/11/07/12-new-kinds-of-media-the-rise-of-supercuts/#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:59:52 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=434292

Wired founding editor and author Kevin Kelly notes that these are 12 new types of media forms that have become part of our collective consciousness — including what he calls supercuts, which represent “a video montage cut and sequenced from existing movies and TV and commercials” and “creates a rapid-fire medley of shots representing a theme of some sort.”

Supercuts as a meme is the brainchild of Andy Baio, one of my favorite digital anthropologists. Baio — who helped create Kickstarter and Upcoming, and now works for Expert Labs — has been famous for his curated blog Waxy Links. He has now started Supercuts.org and is curating some of the best video mashups out there. Ironically, I have been linking to these kinds of videos from my personal blog, but never had a way to describe them — but now I do.

Kelly’s list needs one more addition though — “Instagrams.” I think the idea of broadcasting stylized, curated moments of our lives are part of the “broadcast yourself” movement we all seem to be part of, and what I’ve called the “alive web.”

Here’s Kelly’s list:

  • The 18 minute PowerPoint presentation (a la TED)
  • LOL Cats
  • 100-Plus-Hour Serial Dramas (Lost, the Wire, Sopranos)
  • 1-page Blog Post
  • Fan-Fic Novels
  • Remixed Movie Trailers
  • 40-Hour Video Game
  • Bad Lipsyncs
  • 3 Minute Funny Clips (You Tube)
  • 140-Character Tweets
  • A Book of Tweets
  • Video Supercuts

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Ed Kohler

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