typo(s), tendency and text

My recent gowalla activity

People around me have been getting into using GPS devices for games for a while with geoaching. But I never tried it, and haven't gotten a gps-enabled device before last summer with my android phone. Even then I tried foursquare a little bit, but not really. I didn't really get the hang of it.

Recently I have used gowalla a bit more, and try to get some fun or useful things out of it. So far I have only checked in at a few points, and not really used it. I wonder if most people use foursquare, because I can only find few contacts that I already know in Gowalla. A lot of people are making a lot of buzz around it. Basically the same people who talked about twitter a long time before I got to understand its uses. And today I love using microblogging.

Gowalla and foursquare use the gps-coordinates of your cell phone to find places nearby where you could be. You can also add new places. That way, you can "check in" at the cafe, classroom, workplace, museum, hotel etc. where you are. Your contacts will be able to see this. If you connected your account with twitter or facebook, everybody will get the message, too.

A whole different approach to locationbased services is Layar, a location-based video-browser for your surroundings. I have only tried this a little bit, because it is quite hard on the battery resources of my phone. And this really is a lot of fun. You can see where you are going, and where in your proximity someone tweeted something recently. This, again, is not so widely used in Norway, but in other countries people have created services for this Augmented Reality Browsing. Like aids to find a new appartment, for example.

If you want to learn more about new geolocation services, NRK beta has a good writeup on projects presented at the conference SXSW earlier this year. I refrain from writing about facebooks location services here (because, whoops, no longer an account there). But twitter allows geolocation for tweets now as well.

Google Latitude is an interesting service, which for me, only ever worked during a congress in Berlin where a some of my Google contacts where around at the same time. The only use case for me there is to find people and to see where they are without asking them. Otherwise I mostly have Latitude turned off. I don't want or need to send out data about where I am at any moment.

All my experiences considering I am still where Vegard, fellow student and blogger, is. It is fun to use, but its still very lonely. There aren't that many people using this, so checking in at ferries or class rooms or at my work place, is just a little bit pointless right now. Which is why I often forget to do that. What I would really like to try is geocaching and location-based games. That sounds like fun.

Ever since the content production and distribution industry has figured out that copies of text, music, film and pictures are not that easily to compartmentalize and contain as on analogue media, strategies have been discussed of how either digital copies can be compartmentalized and contained as well, or how payment can be organized in a different way.

Micropayments have been discussed since the late 1990's, but have not yet really become a real factor contributing to revenue for online content. There have been different payment solutions implemeted, and some have become widely used. But bloggers, podcasters or smaller news magazines had no real alternative to advertisement besides their content.

June 2010: Enter flattr.com. Founded to give people the opportunity to give for content on the internet made by others, and get back for their self-made content. The company is based in Malmö, Sweden. I was very excited to try it out, since the service was building on a different kind of interaction opposed to selling. You would literally give people credit for what they were doing, and if you got peoples positive attention with your own content, they could "flattr" you back. On the websites you can find all "things" that you can flattr, and websites can use the flattr API to connect their content production to flattr automatically. Flattr takes 10 percent of the amount of money that you load on to your account. Where social network platforms integrate flattr to let users get flattrd for ther submitted content, flattr and the platform provider share the 10 percent of the revenue.

What I saw during the first time of the public beta (it still is in public beta) were relatively marginalized online news media incorporating flattr into their websites. The lesser german newspapers "tageszeitung" (taz) and "jungle World" started using it. Being either opposed to a lot of ad content, but also not seen as a good environment for many campaigns by advertizers. The taz has made the observation that their flattr income got up to 1000-1500 Euros within the first months, and that the income spiked in july, and then went down a bit from there. They share their insights into the flattr revenue and how they can use to see what users flattr here. Tim Pritlove, a quite popular podcaster in the german tech blogger scene, works on projects like Mobile Macs, Chaos Radio Express and Not Safe for Work. In the medienradio podcast no. 32 he talks about his revenue which has been about the same amount, adding 1000 euros to his monthly income.

I myself have gained 1.09 Euro via 7 clicks on the flattr buttons on this blog in may. Since then I haven't blogged much, and have apparently not gained much attention or merit with flattr-aware users.

I think flattr is a very interesting project, since it is not yet clear how it will develop in the future. My guess is, that there will be some people who will gain a lot of popularity and good connections to their audience, and that the big heap of people will always be paying more than they gain. The difference between this content monetization model and the traditional copy-based model is, that this can be turned around impromptu, if bloggers or podcasts suddenly gain a lot of attention. Another positive point is that everybody is equal on the payment side. You can give money to projects, and give back to the community by that. And by giving content to the world, you gan get back by the community.

Something that might not be positive, is that "flattr" might be perceived as positive acknowledgement - as the "like"-button on facebook. Hard debates, criticism or confusing communication could get their flattr-button ignored. There it could be an incentive for content producers to streamline their way of expressing themselves.

I decided to make the social network profile of the organization I chose as a case, HackBergen, a flattr account. The reasons for that are that HackBergen both has to think about new ways of getting project funding, as well as being part of an international community about the projects that people want to work on. Where thingiverse implements flattr into its 3D object design-sharing community, and where other hackerspaces have flattr accounts, it might be good to give something back, as well as make it possible for people to show their appreciation for stuff people do at HackBergen.

More sources:

Podcast at medienradio (german)

Blog on a masters thesis on flattr (german)

Flattrs blog