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It's pointed out in the recently released book The Curse of the Mogul that financial information giants like Bloomberg, LP and Reuters (now part of Thomson Reuters) gained their signature market advantages by creating unique efficiencies in otherwise inefficient markets. Reuters created unique advantages at first by using carrier pigeons to send stock exchange updates across a gap in a telegraph line between Aachen, Germany and Brussels in Belgium and, eventually, by developing systems for the global electronic trading of currencies. Bloomberg's key advantage came from providing analysis and trading tools for bonds and other fixed income securities rarely traded on major exchanges. In both instances the rivals of these companies were fixed largely on the already-cultivated markets for stocks, which were glamorous targets but not particularly profitable for information providers. One by one the major rivals of Bloomberg and Reuters in financial information services fell to the wayside, failing to build sustainable businesses out of commoditized information.

 As the buzz surrounding the Twitter real-time Web message service grows, those who nay-say the potential of social media to generate profits are yet again wagging about Twitter's lack of a revenue-generating business model. Yet like Paul Julius Reuter laboring in pigeon coops between major stock exchanges, sometimes the genius in generating profits from content are not found in the places where the action is already thick. Like Google before it, which was the target of loud doubts about its ability to generate revenues before it began to sell context-sensitive text ads in its search results, Twitter has been busy creating strong market advantages for unique content where others simply didn't bother to look. As the news industry concentrates on trying to resurrect the glamorous business of distributing highly polished news, Twitter has been busy turning the millions of people worldwide in its online community into a huge equivalent of Reuter's pigeon coop, ready to fly on a moment's notice with breaking news from virtually any starting point to any destination for the cloud computing equivalent of chicken feed. All that was lacking was the price tag.

Now the price tags are beginning to appear, and they're provoking in how much they are in fact very familiar ones. First up: real-time feed licensing. With pending deals to license Twitter content in search results on Google and on Microsoft's Bing, Twitter is following in the steps of more than a century of real-time information providers to provide unique content new and valuable contexts via tickers. Like the communities of currency and bond traders on Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, Twitter has enough functionality to create a volume of participants in their system that will make their content an authoritative source, if but by sheer bulk, and leaves much of the development of value-add applications to others. Hook people to Twitter data and its community can be like gold to those who can extract value from real-time sources. Now that wasn't too hard to figure out, was it?

Of course, like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, Twitter has to manage a balancing act that will provide enough unique functionality and high-quality service to keep other flocks of pigeons from muscling in on its community-generated content territory. With Google Wave growing rapidly in its pre-release preview, one can see some fluttering of wings on the horizon already. But even if services such as Wave manage to gain significant momentum, Twitter's predominant position as a real-time broadcast messaging service has already established a significant barrier to entry that will not be scaled easily by others - in large part because those who could have moved on this market segment were focused on well-worn technology scenes or trying to defend old intellectual property turf in aging markets. There were opportunities for Twitter to stumble as a first mover in real-time messaging, and opportunities to stumble will remain, but for now there's only one game in town for licensing this unique community content.

Best yet for Twitter, this is only the beginning of monetization opportunities. A few well-proven models from the world of financial real-time information services could be applied easily to Twitter:

• Quality of service. While there are general throttles on how many updates can be pushed into or out of Twitter, there's a good opportunity to enable that throttle to open up wider for those who are willing to pay the price. Many are the services that have been generated for the data-thirsty in the financial industry based on "how much of the firehose do you want how quickly" pricing. As the ability of Twitter content to move markets gains power, these will become truly premium opportunities - even when it means only a fraction of a second's advantage.
• Segmentation. Twitter for marketing, anyone? Or how about just the tweets or lists of the most influential twitterers? Bundling specific types of Twitter content can accelerate the ability of Twitter to service specific market segments very efficiently.
• Archives. When Twitter service gets up to its capacity levels these days, oftentimes you're limited in how far back you can look into the history of tweets. Financial information companies have made good money selling access to archives as a premium product. There's no reason to think that Twitter couldn't do likewise - at several levels of service.
• Advertising and Executing on Bids and Offers. While consumer advertising has been the focus of much of the monetization buzz around Twitter, traditional ads may not be best suited for the personal realm of real-time messaging. It's worth noting that companies like Dell Computer Corporation had early success in generating millions in easy cash via Twitter by tweeting breaking offers on its products and services. What if people could respond via Twitter to such offers and execute a transaction - with Twitter taking a piece of the action? Similarly, what if people could post prices that they'd be willing to pay for specific products and services - and get them matched? Services like Amazon and Priceline might be fairly vulnerable to such a capability - or benefit from an alliance with Twitter.

Along with these opportunities, though, also come the traditional exposures that come with marketing real-time information in the financial services industry. The pressure on Twitter to be an absolutely reliable service 24/7/365 will only mount over time, especially as more individuals and institutions tie their livelihoods to its content. There will be the temptation to diversify into lines of service that take Twitter away from its unique market advantages - a temptation that its current management has avoided carefully, but it will be there for its future executives. And over time there will be niche real-time services that answer the needs of specific markets more effectively. But for now these are distant clouds on the horizon. For more than a decade financial information providers crowed about how they were building a "Bloomberg-killer" service, trying to beat them at their own game. For now it appears that Twitter has defined the real-time Web broadcast messaging game very neatly, with few immediate threats. Its potential competitors had best think about different kinds of pigeons to which they can tie their hopes fairly quickly; the easy money on online real-time is about to be made by the first ones who saw the opportunity.

A tsunami, an enormous tidal wave created by major undersea earthquakes, can be a devastating phenomenon for people, places and things in its path, often changing lives and landscapes permanently. A tsunami can be difficult to detect, though, as its enormous force lays hidden beneath the ocean's surface until it approaches the shallow waters near land. Within moments a placid, established scene can change into one of total destruction and disarray.

So it seems to be with the preview of Google Wave , a new social media publishing technology that was opened recently to people who had signed up for the early adopters program back in May. As I wrote in ContentBlogger back then, I saw Wave having the potential to be a highly scalable and transforming technology that could grow extremely rapidly on the decades of development that have gone into cloud computing technologies. No small wonder, then, that I was compelled to sign up for the early adopters program on the day of the initial public demo of Wave. Four months later, my invitation to be one of the first 100,000 people to participate in the initial Wave preview program arrived in my email inbox. Along with that honor came the opportunity to send invitations to eight other people to join the Wave preview program, which I gave out on a first-come, first-served basis to a message that I broadcast on Twitter.

Within hours, it seemed as if Wave invites were becoming more valuable than winning lottery tickets, a frenzy accelerated by Google's waiting to add the "nominated' invitees for several days. After a week of typical initial performance problems and users grappling with "How do I make a Wave?" questions, Wave emerged as a platform with features and content adequate enough to invite in nominees who were eagerly waiting to start playing. In little more than a week, a technology went from being a gleam in the eyes of Google developers to becoming a major new social media platform being pounded on by nearly a million people with childlike abandon - with millions more clamoring to play as soon as possible. The content started streaming through the public and private channels of Wave at Twitter-like speeds. People of all nations, languages, interests, including lawyers, scientists, sports enthusiasts, gamers, technologists and just plain curious people began to play with Wave's features and collaborate on content.

Yet Wave is still just an early-stage technology that is struggling to find its footing. There is enormous interest and much goodwill from developers looking for a new publishing platform to exploit, but this is not a ready-to-launch platform just yet. Some features, such as the ability to access content that can be viewed by anyone on Wave, are still difficult to grasp at first, while other basic features, such as moving content into organizing folders and activating editing functions, are still rather balky at times. Still other features have yet to be implemented yet. Nevertheless, given little more than a blank interface and a few short videos, hundreds of thousands of people have grasped the basics of how to build, share, edit and enhance waves and are building new audiences rapidly in fascinating new ways.

From what I've seen so far in Wave I think that my assumptions about the potential impact of Wave are likely to become true over time - and, perhaps, a relatively short period of time. We tend to forget that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have grown up incrementally over several years, exploding into rapid exponential growth only recently. While it may be at least a year or two before Wave's full impact begins to become apparent, having such a diverse and global community in a matter of days creating content and exercising features cannot help but to accelerate Wave's path in that time frame. Here are a few of the key areas in which Wave is likely to deliver tsunami-like force in the months and years ahead:

• A breakthrough in collaborative communication. Wave is an interesting mix of email-like private and group communications blended with instant messaging-like features, collaborative editing similar on concept to wikis and commenting similar to forums and blog comments. Wave's strength is not that it does what any one of these types of social media tools does better so much as it does something that is a unique blend of all of these tools. For example, a person started a wave with me that was at first just an email-like exchange of complete ideas. Soon we were editing our messages at the same time, watching what one another was typing on the screen together, as in an overlapping conversation. When we had exhausted the topic, with his consent I published the wave as a public wave and inserted a poll, which in turn is attracting a whole new range of comments and content. This is a far more dynamic approach to content and idea development than one finds typically in most collaborative platforms. In Wave, any wave could be a messaging thread, a collaborative content development effort, an embedded application, a string of comments or all of these. This un-fussy way to approach collaboration on any level, be it personal, group, enterprise or public, is likely to lead to a breakthrough in collaborative content development that other social media technologies have not been able to provide in full. What email, forums and wikis have promised, Wave delivers.
  
• Better ways to integrate content. One of the more interesting features of Wave is its ability to embed both Web content and applications into waves. This is an "old hat" concept for some social media platforms, but the fluidity with which people can do this in the conversational format of waves and the ability of people to generate content collaboratively within and around these content objects provides a remarkably flexible space in which to experience and share content. Instead of having to do embedding in a branded portal, where there's lots of "noise" from largely superfluous information and services, Wave enables content integration rapidly on whatever blank slate suits a particular purpose. While specialty portals and applications will continue to thrive, Wave is an environment in which so much information can be delivered in a very focused manner that it will absorb far more of our energies and attention than email and Web sites have absorbed. It's not the most powerful application in terms of detailed functionality, but that in and of itself makes it an ideal, neutral container for any number of kinds of applications to thrive in a collaborative space.
  
• New ways to collaborate across language barriers. One of the most impressive things that I have seen in Wave so far is how it has become an international phenomenon rapidly. Looking at the public Wave messages, people from all over the world have adopted this new technology and are working hard to put it to good use. The real-time translation services that are available in Google Wave are therefore likely to be put to good use quite rapidly, especially with its ability to see people typing in real-time. People with different languages will be able to "hear" one another "speaking" through these translation services in a collaborative environment that will help to accelerate personal and professional relationships rapidly. While it's still an early-stage capability, these real-time translation services offer the promise of helping people to communicate globally who otherwise would be isolated by their language skills. Real-time translation is still a very new technology, but I do believe that it will turn out to be one of the most critical components that will enable Wave to become a new kind of conversational content platform, stimulating relationships and markets worldwide. As voice services become a part of the Wave environment, expect that impact to grow even more quickly.
  

Any one of these factors individually may not sound to be particularly impressive. However, when you begin to look at the outlines of a world in which finished content is sent from one place to another, an environment like Wave that invites people into collaborative content spaces with many different levels for everything from quick messages to full-blown publication development is very likely to change many of the fundamentals of the geography of human communications. Content will become far less about "what I gave to you" and far more about "what we shared with one another" in a common space. As I mention in Chapter 7 of Content Nation, social media's strength has always been focused on creating value in "third places," venues in which we come out of our own spaces to share ideas and experiences with one another. Think of Google Wave as having the potential to be the world's largest "third place" machine, generating community, context and collaboration on the fly on any scale on a durable basis for any audience, be it private or public. As in the early stages of a tsunami, the full impact of Wave is still far away from being realized on the beaches of public consciousness. But when this wave breaks in the next few years, it has the potential to sweep away many of our basic assumptions about what we are able to do with one another via communications services.

When I wrote Chapter 10 of Content Nation, I felt that I was taking a bit of a chance to spell out the potential future impact of social media 50, 100, 1000 and 10000 years into the future. As Chapter 10 outlines, I see a future in which social media becomes integrated into our very beings, and, eventually, changes not only the DNA of human society but our own physical DNA as well. That's a pretty far-fetched vision, no doubt. Or is it? The more that I look at what people are calling today Augmented Reality technologies and at technologies that are merging computing and organic materials, perhaps I will need to adjust my timelines somewhat. It appears to me that we will be moving towards fundamental changes to human society and our essential humanness perhaps far more quickly than one may imagine.

In the short term, we have Augmented Reality (AR) technologies and services as a hint of what may yet come to pass with social media.  AR is, in essence, the ability to overlay views of what we see and experience in a given place with additional information and communications that enrich our understanding of that place. Augmented Reality is a sophisticated concept, with some interesting applications already out there to demonstrate its capabilities. The ability to get information related to sights in services such as Google Maps' Street View images, for example, is a simple illustration of AR's potential. Add GPS-enabled mobile phones into that mix, and you can hold up a phone and see an image of the street where you are standing overlayed with that map information. The combination of street-level views, GPS, mobile phones with cameras and useful content is now being exploited by companies such as Layar, which attempt to embed information, ads and images to the scenes that people are seeing right before them by linking a phone's camera to their own enriched map.

AR can offer a rich in-the-moment content environment that can be tailored to a person's specific interests easily, enabling marketing communications on an immediate and personal scale. It can also enable social media to enter the picture, creating awareness of people who are in or nearby who may want to communicate in the moment. AR may also offer a combination of marketing and social media experiences, such as seeing reviews, comments and photos that people in our personal network have created about a specific place or product that is nearby. Be it a stroll down a local street or a stroll down the market aisles in a nearby store, such a confluence of commercial opportunities, social media and proximity will be an enormously powerful marketing environment.

How far can this confluence go? Well, there are some stunning advances in technologies recently that challenge us to think about the "when" of where this is all taking us. Three key developments to bear in mind: DNA computing, programmed organisms and computer-assisted vision. On the DNA computing front, DNA molecules have been organized to be able to solve logical problems, simple ones at first, such as winning at a game of tic-tac-toe, but nevertheless problems of the sort that silicon-based computers have solved in their early development. DNA computing is years away from being practical, but there are other early-stage efforts that may promise earlier results. For example, early plasmobots, simple genetically modified slime mold cells, have been programmed to perform sophisticated mathematical calculations and even to calculate the most efficient paths to find its meals. Electronic computers were not much more sophisticated than this in their computation abilities some fifty years ago. So the future envisioned in Chapter 10 in Content Nation in which organic resources are used to support computations is perhaps in a reasonable time scale.

The really exciting twist that's come to light recently which may bridge us towards that future is in the field of assisted vision for blind people. Small video cameras mounted in lightweight goggles worn by blind peopel can now transmit signals to a computer chip embedded in their eyes' retinas that transmit light signals to the brain. While today these systems can do little more than transmit vague patterns of light into the brain, the precedent for hooking up computer electronics associated with brain and eye functions has been established. Marry these capabilities with Augmented Reality capabilities, and you then have a world in which what we see in the literal sense becomes an augmented field of vision in which additional content can appear in our mind's eye to supplement the scene. Add in social media tools to this type of technology and we wind up with trusted relationships that are a part of our mental landscape whenever we want them.

In truth, much of what we are seeing in today's Augmented Reality efforts are not so different than what such advanced technologies could accomplish, but the types of relationships that we are likely to foster through AR tools are likely to get more personal and less commercial over time. We will certainly have commercial relationships, but they will be more likely to resemble the types of relationships that people had before the industrial-scaled era of publishing. We will be less concerned about shouting to the masses when we realize that the messages that we're putting out are literally ringing in someone's mind. So while the landscapes of corporate logos put out by services such as Layar may represent what many marketers will be doing with AR tools in the short term, in the longer term the person-to-person conversations seen already in social media are more likely examples of the types of exchanges that are likely to be occurring as the technologies develop.

The need for the outward manifestations of brands through signage and other traditional marketing tools become less important as AR tools allow marketers to post highly tailored branding through highly personalized views of a given landscape. In time, perhaps, as AR becomes a standard marketing tool, we may see a time when outdoor advertising and signs begin to disappear altogether. In the process of making such a transition, it's likely that these types of tools will dwindle even in the virtual world as the true source of strong brands - trusted relationships over time - becomes more apparent as the focus of marketing efforts. When we turn off our AR appliances, then we will see the world as it truly is, not as marketers would like us to see it. Yet, at the same time, their messages will be available to us constantly as we choose them to be.

I do think that many of the most exciting marketing plays over the next few years will revolve around Augmented Reality plays, especially in retail outlets - get a tailored view of aisles in your phone, complete with social media commentary - but also due to the continuing dangers of using today's information appliances behind the wheel of cars. "Heads-up" AR content that doesn't distract people from their driving duties (too much) will become the next "must-have" luxury after today's smart phones. Also key in this mix will be translation services which enable people with different languages to communicate in AR landscapes. We see hints of this already in the real-time translation capabilities of Google Wave, but that's likely to be the foothills of a major effort to bridge language gaps in search of broader markets. Imagine a Bluetooth-enabled phone that "listens" to someone speaking to you in a foreign language and translates it for you on the fly, even as you share it your conversation with others in your social media channels. Increasingly this type of service is achievable, and is likely to attract major investments.

At the end of the day AR is just an extension of the current communications environment for Content Nation, but it has the exciting potential to accelerate many of the social, political, business and marketing changes that are discussed in the book. And as the book suggests, social media is, after all, a tool that brings us at least as close to our roots thousands of years ago before the rise of centralized publishing as it bring us closer to a distant future. Already we see the world quite differently through the lens of social media publishing tools; it's exciting to think just how rapidly the Content Nation vision may unfold with these advanced technologies converging on the potential for transforming the world as we have known it. Keep your eyes open for the changes - or, then again, perhaps with AR tools that won't be necessary.

Cabueñes 2009 is an annual event sponsored by the regional government of Asturias, Spain that helps young people in their own country and countries around the world interested in applying Web technologies to key challenges in their nations. Originally an event focused largely on representatives from Latin America and other Spanish-speaking countries around the world, Cabueñes is taking on a broader international focus at this year's event. More than 700 representatives from many nations around the world have gathered to hear speakers, learn skills in workshops and, of course, to have a good time. I had the pleasure to travel to Gijón, Spain to speak to this budding group of Content Nation enthusiasts about, what else, Content Nation. In the process of doing so, I discovered a group of young people who are enthusiastic about social media, but also weighing the challenges of making it work in places where old traditions and powerful forces are likely to slow its acceptance.

The good news is that Cabueñes 2009 in particular, and the Asturias area in general, provides a great venue to help get ideas flowing for using social media in nations around the world. Asturias is a region in many ways set apart from Spain, with a lush and comfortable climate remarkably similar to that of San Francisco, California and a commitment to technology advancement that makes it a potential Silicon Valley-like bridge between the nations of Europe and developing nations. You may never mistake the Jardines de Begoña in Gijón for San Francisco's Union Square, but neither would you feel that out of place there, either, with its smart cafes and an abundance of free wireless services. While folks out along Highway 101 in Silicon Valley are having fun at events like Burning Man developing creative ideas for the trendy Web sites, there is a world that is filled with people who need better communications tools desperately in order to improve their lives. Why not Gijón as a hub for such social media development, a place that has excellent infrastructure, sophistication but less of a self-satisfied view of the world than the usual Silicon Valley haunts?

It was with this backdrop that I delivered my talk on Content Nation to the attendees at Cabueñes 2009, a talk that was well received - so great to hear a room filled with people from around the world shouting "We are Content Nation!"  - but there were also many pointed questions after the talk. The general themes of the questions revolved around issues of online safety, culture clashes and the place of commerce in helping social media to succeed in developing nations. In particular there seemed to be some concern about groups of people who may not feel safe in social media because of people who attack others in one way or another, as well as with government censorship. Having to deal with bullies and annoying people is a common problem in social media, of course, but one that I noted was largely under the control of the services that provide access to social media. Most people don't like to be treated that way, and will move on to other services that protect them from abuse more effectively. There may be some need for governments to get involved when people do things in social media that are crimes, but the ability to express one's self openly in social media does come with the need for reasonable self-enforcement.

On the government side of regulation, I think that the concerns voiced at Cabueñes 2009 fit in with concerns that were also expressed about how business fits in to the picture of implementing social media in developing areas of the world. In many nations, governments may view social media as a threat to central authorities, leading to attempts by those governments to filter social media or to limit its use. Yet it is because of this very reason that I think that the young people of the world should consider very carefully how enabling more efficient commerce in their nations at a very local level can help to foster the development of Content Nation.

The average villager in India, Peru, Cambodia or Indonesia or probably even Spain is not going to be an "OMG" texting fanatic, nor do they have to be. Social media starts with highly scalable and affordable technologies, some of which may be scaled in different ways for different people. This is why I think that the Google Noticeboard concept, a communication system that can scale nicely to villages with very limited literacy or technology access, is a good example of services that go light on technology but heavy on content generation. It's the content that will change the world, even as much as the technology makes it happen, and the most important content will be that which changes everyday lives in the most humble of communities. In the next few years, as very powerful and increasingly inexpensive mobile devices become more widespread, it will be easier for those villages to step up the technology curve to broader services, but first the everyday people whose lives need to be changed via social media must learn how to be publishers in the social media sense of the term.

In the process of using social media for everyday purposes, their ability to succeed materially will improve. This in and of itself should be motivation for any government to consider how to use social media in their nation. If social media can improve the economic outlook for their nations more rapidly than other media technologies, then why wouldn't they invest in them? Well, perhaps some leaders would prefer to have their people be poor, but I do think that most will choose to deploy highly affordable social media technologies in order to succeed. Whatever political or cultural questions may fall out of that decision will work themselves out over time, to be sure, but when the economic questions lead the way then it's likely that the other questions will resolve themselves appropriately.

A good part of the Cabueñes program provided sessions on how to deploy publishing technologies that can help people to succeed with online publishing, with a particular focus on affordable technologies such as open-source software and open standards used across the Web. These are good stepping stones for any publishers trying to improve their publishing infrastructure cost-effectively, though I would also argue that cloud computing infrastructure reduces the need to rely upon detailed Web development to build successful social media services. Cabueñes can focus also in its sessions on how to foster a culture of citizen publishing effectively in cultures around the world, so that people can have good guidance as to how to participate in social media effectively. The more that the rules of publishing are understood by everyday people, the more effective that citizen publishers from all nations will succeed in changing our work, our lives and our future.

The potential for social media to bring together people of different cultures into a more common Content Nation social fabric was highlighted by an event in the early evening of the first day of the conference. Participants in the conference put on wireless headphones in the plaza of the Universidad Laboral de Gijón and played roles in a performance based on guidance from a voice coming through the headphones.  As in this event, we all play shifting roles in social media, discovering ourselves and one another in the process. We need not think always about our traditional roles as people in our own local societies, nor do we have to abandon those roles; we need only explore how social media can enhance both old and new roles in our societies.

This melding of old and local traditions and new global ways of thinking about people in communities communicating with one another was underscored in a unique way one evening at midnight on the beach in Gijón, when some people attending Cabueñes who were from the nearby region of Galicia hosted an ancient Galician ceremony known as La Queimada. Queimada is a drink prepared in a large clay pot from a Galician liquor mixed with water, sugar, lemon rind and whole coffee beans. This concoction is lit with a match and is stirred gently for about a half hour as it burns down into a hot beverage. When the queimada is about ready, a bagpipe player begins a traditional Celtic song from Galicia and the "bruxos" - the sorcerers - chant an incantation to send evil spirits to their fiery death in the queimada.

As I was watching the queimada burning down into its essence, all of a sudden someone came up to me, pointed to the fire and said vigorously, "See, this, this is Content Nation!" I had to think about what he was saying for a moment, but then it seemed to be quite clear that he was right. There we were, people from all around the world, with different traditions, many of us knowing nothing about Galicia, queimada or anything else about one anothers' lives. And yet we were all willing to let go of our individual outlooks for a time to share as one community the beauty and joy of an experience in a very unique context, even as we were taking our photos and videos of it to share with our experience with others around the world in new contexts.

 The fire and the bagpipes and the incantations were bringing all of these people from far and wide together in much the same way that the band of hunters in the final scene of Chapter 10 in Content Nation share a unique moment ten thousand years from now with their friends around the world. Social media enables us to be proud of all of our unique heritages, individually and collectively, even as those heritages take on new audiences through our local and global citizen publishing. No offense to the good people who produce Burning Man, but the fire of queimada on the beach of Gijón is the real creative fire of social media, everyday people reclaiming their heritage as the true guardians of Prometheus' fire, being unafraid to be both traditional and cutting-edge, both uniquely local and powerfully global.

My thanks again to the sponsors of Cabueñes 2009 for inviting me to speak at their event and to the local press and television outlets who provided such generous coverage of my visit. The world is indeed a nation of publishers, and it was an honor and a privilege to have some small amount of influence over the next generation of influential publishers using social media.

It was a real pleasure and a privilege to deliver the opening keynote address to the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers in Oxford today at their annual International Conference, an event that drew hundreds of publishers and industry experts to a beautiful venue just beyond the storied university town. While society publishers may evoke images in some people's minds of a rather musty crowd, I was pleased to see dozens of Twitter messages related to the conference in just its opening hours and in general a very enthusiastic reception for my presentation on Content Nation. This didn't come as a surprise to me in many ways, as scholarly publishers are, in a sense, the original peer-to-peer publishers. Peer reviewed academic journals may bear little resemblance in many ways to today's social media, but it's no coincidence that the Wikipedia online reference service uses methods to enforce the integrity of their content that originated in many ways with peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

Unlike journals, though, Wikipedia grew up from about 100,000 contributed articles to a crowd-sourced 3 million-plus articles based on an oftentimes wild and wooly history of contributions. Using a system in which anyone in the world could edit most articles on Wikipedia, Wikipedia's early growth was fueled by people who were excited at the prospect of being able to shape authoritative content on a wide variety of topics that could be seen by the world immediately. Of course, just as it was easy to publish content on Wikipedia it was also very easy people to un-publish it, leading to moderation by volunteer "Wikipedian" editors, who would try to make sense of how accurate and ethical its contributions were. Wikipedians are far from perfect, but they've been perfectly willing to do their best to build better and more respected content in Wikipedia through their moderation efforts.

As Wikipedia matures, however, its managers are experiencing more pressure to have its content controlled more tightly. Recently Wikimedia announced a trial of a Wikipedia feature for its English language version called Flagged Revisions, which would enable Wikipedia editors to stage edits contributed to a page in a way that would prevent them from overwriting automatically older versions of a page. Instead, these revisions would be reviewed first by a Wikipedian. This feature has been available on Wikipedia since last year and has been used actively in its German edition, where legal issues required its use. Now the Flagged Revisions feature is to be used on a trial basis in the English language version for profiles of living people. Given recent U.S. court decisions on slander cases that favor public figures over social media contributors, Wikipedia's concerns as a thinly funded non-profit entity are well-founded.

Unfortunately, though, a firestorm of articles published by major news outlets is treating this fairly minor adjustment to Wikipedia's policies as a major shift away from openness in its management of contributions. Some, such as the self-styled "anti-Christ of Silicon Valley" Andrew Keen, claim that Wikipedia had lacked editorial controls prior to this announcement and that they are only now accepting the need to filter content in an effort to "grow up." Clearly these articles are interested in spin more than fact, as Wikipedia has had editorial oversight since its inception. If there is a problem with a revision in Wikipedia it is corrected by Wikipedians rapidly in many instances and subject oftentimes to intense debate amongst contributors before a version of a page is finalized.

The vulnerability in this system is that inaccurate or harmful content could be exposed for any length of time before it is corrected. There are many examples of where blatant errors have gone untended in Wikipedia, alongside examples of where Wikipedian editorial bias seems to ignore standards for content in some instances that are applied overzealously in other instances. There is a system for Wikipedia editing, to be sure, but it's far from perfect.

Flagged Revisions is a necessary recognition by Wikipedia that how people manage their private lives is not always a matter subject to the discretion of editors. Nations have laws, and those laws - and the threats that they impose on a publishing organization - need to be taken into account. As I point out in Content Nation, social media is about the law of the campfire, not the law of the jungle; good content gets created in social media when there is a trustworthy system that filters out abuse based on principles and not personalities. The Flagged Revisions feature is simply a recognition that Wikipedia's volunteer peer review system that publishes changes before it can be reviewed is not meeting many of the expectations of a reading public that turns to it increasingly as a trustworthy source of information.

Some of the shortcomings of the Wikipedia peer review system are in the human side of the system, but there are also major technology limitations in the Wikimedia platform used to develop Wikipedia content that act as constraints on editorial quality also. From a technology standpoint Wikimedia is a platform that has lagged behind evolving platforms for blogging and other social media functions significantly, with an error-prone and downright user-hostile editing interface that has changed little in its basic functionality for years. This has effectively lowered the bar of expectations for wiki technologies in general, leaving many efforts to foster community-developed media content with an ineffective model for product development.

The real question shouldn't be why Wikipedia is now introducing The Flagged Revisions feature now, but rather why it wasn't a part of the platform since its inception. I chose the Near-Time platform used to develop the Content Nation book in part because it had the ability to expose content first to registered members before it was exposed to the public. There is a point in social media where the efforts of a collaborative community can be turned from social media into mainstream media - that is, into a standardized product that can meet specific expectations as a packaged product and have the potential for commercial licensing. It's not necessary or even desirable for all social media to be turned into mainstream media, but having a system to make that possible can make the social media services that produce it more commercially viable.

In other words, if Wikipedia has been treated as a mainstream source by a trusting audience and compares its quality and standards to mainstream sources, then to some degree it's obliged to play by the terms of the mainstream media game, regardless of its non-profit status. In general I think that it would be useful for Wikipedia to develop a truly commercial complement to its current non-profit, community-driven content. This content could be managed and licensed more effectively in a way that could provide the revenue streams to ensure the survival of a robust and enthusiastic community-driven version of Wikipedia content. It would also provide a legal structure that would make it clear to the courts what content should be considered social media that is subject to the constant challenge required in societies supporting free speech and what should be considered more traditional media that meets a different set of legal expectations.

Most importantly, such a division need not necessarily mean separate Web sites or systems. There are different phases in any publishing process, and there can be a wide variety of phases for Wikipedia content that reflect the process of content moving from a community social media resource to a marketed product. There would be great challenges in implementing such a system, to be sure; sorting out licensing issues amongst contributors for commercial versions of Wikipedia would be one of the more challenging tasks. Ultimately, though, Wikipedia needs to come up with a system to manage commercial-grade expectations of its service if it is to succeed in the long run as an open and freely edited social media reference service. These should be treated as complementary and not conflicting goals, goals that should, in the long run, strengthen Wikipedia's ability to provide a robust and well-regulated social media community that enables anyone on the world to contribute to the world's knowledge at a moment's notice.

It's unfortunate that media hype and misunderstanding has distorted the real opportunities for Wikipedia to succeed by providing more effective editorial support for its platform, but there is still ample opportunity for Wikipedia to move in more positive directions to manage both its commercial opportunities and its heritage as the world's largest citizen-managed source of knowledge. People who contributed to the development of Content Nation online don't feel bad about its existence as a commercially marketed book; I would think that if Content Nation can manage these issues, certainly Wikipedia can manage the enormous upside for the world if it can become a more self-supporting entity for producing quality social media.