It took a while, but our website is now on its own. Big thanks go to the Berkman Klein Center for hosting us on its blog server since 2006. Also for continuing to host our mailing list and our wiki. And to all the friends who helped, including those at WordPress and Pressable, who made the transition smooth and complete. Links to every post and page we’ve published at blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/ (our old location) now travel down the same directory paths at projectvrm.org/. There will be no 404s. This is a rare thing for any site that moves from one host to another.

Clearly, this is not the one-year project we imagined in the first place. It may not be a one-generation project. But we will get from the state on the left above to the one on the right. And thanks to Gapingvoid‘s Hugh MacLeod for drawing that illustration in the first place, way back in 2005.

Want to place a bet on where VRM will finally take off? Try India.

Because India is home to the Beckn protocol: one that enables peer-to-peer e-commerce at scale without the big platforms taking a large cut of the pie just for matchmaking. The possibilities are endless and extreme—especially for customers and small businesses.

Beckn is open source (here on Github),  moving into deployment, and expected to grow toward ubiquity on the same slope as Aadhaar, the government ID now held by 1.35 billion people.

To put this into perspective, India has more people than all of Europe (even when you throw in Russia and Turkey), and more than twice the population of North America. Only China has more people, but India is ready to overtake it in just four years.

We will discuss all this and more with Sujith Nair this coming Monday, 20 February, from 2-3:30 PM Eastern Time.  He is the CEO & Co-founder of FIDE.org, the nonprofit behind the Beckn protocol, and may have the clearest vision in the world toward an e-commerce future that isn’t contained inside big tech’s walled gardens: ones in which every business and every customer can operate with both independence and minimized friction.

This will kick off the Workshop’s next Beyond the Web salon series . Stay tuned for more in the coming months, but be sure to catch this one. It could hardly matter more for what our project has worked toward since 2006.

It’s both in-person and online, and free. But you need to register. Do that here.

This is from a December 2009 newsletter called Suitwatch, which I wrote for Linux Journal, and was 404’d long ago. (But I kept the original.) I’m re-posting it here because I think syndication may be the most potent power any of us have in the Internet age—and because the really simple kind, RSS, has been with us since before I wrote this piece. (I also think RSS has VRM implications as well, but I’ll leave those for another post.) My only edits here were to remove arcana and anachronisms that are pointless today. This graphic illustrates how entrenched and widespread RSS already is:

Until recently, the verb “syndication” was something big publishers and agencies did. As a kid, I recognized “© King Features Syndicate” was the one unfunny thing about Blondie or Dennis the Menace. All it meant to me was that some kind of Business was going on here.

Now millions of individual writers syndicate their own work, usually through RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Publishers and other large organizations do too. This article is syndicated. So are updates to product manuals, changes to development wikis, updates on SourceForge, and searches of keywords. You name it: if there’s something that updates frequently on the Web, there’s a better chance every minute that the new stuff is syndicated if it isn’t already.

Far as I know, not many sources are making money with it. Lots, however, are making money because of it. The syndicated world may not look like an economy yet. But trust me, it is.

At this early stage in its long future history, syndication is primarily a feature of blogging, which is primarily the product of too many people to count. Blogging is not about large-scale things. It’s about human beings who have no scale other than themselves. Only you can be good at being you, and nobody else is the same as you. Syndication does more to expand individual human potential than anything since the invention of type. Or perhaps ever. The syndicated world economy is the one that grows around unleashed personal powers of expression, productivity, creation, distribution, instruction, influence, leadership, whatever.

In a loose sense, syndication is one side of the conversation. Think about conversation in the best sense of the word: as the way people teach and learn from each other, the way topics start and move along. Syndication makes that happen in huge ways.

The notion that “markets are conversation”, popularized by The Cluetrain Manifesto, was borrowed from this case I used to make for a form of marketing that was far more natural and powerful than the formal kind:

1. Markets are conversation, and
2. Conversation is fire. Therefore,
3. Marketing is arson.

If you want to set fires, start conversations that tend to keep going. Nothing does the latter better than syndication.

There are three reasons why we still don’t hear as much about syndication as we should (and will). First, it’s still new. Second, it didn’t come from The Big Guys. (It came from Dave Winer, father of RSS — Really Simple Syndication.) Third, it points toward a value system not grounded only in exchange — one especially suited for the Net, a deeply ironic worldwide environment where everybody is zero distance apart.

But let’s park the value system until later and talk about next week. That’s when I’ll be in San Francisco for Syndicate. It’s the second in a series of conferences by that name. The first was in New York last Spring.

Since I’m the conference chair (disclosure: it’s a paying gig), and since I’ll be giving both the introductory talk and the closing keynote, Syndication is on the front burner of my mind’s stove.

There are others subjects there as well, some of which will be visited in sessions at the show. RSS, for starters. And tagging—a practice so new it’s not even close to having standards of the sort we find at OASIS, the IETF, and the W3C. Instead, it has emerging standards, like the ones we find at microformats.org.

Like syndication, tagging is a long-tail activity. Something individuals do. Along with blogging and syndication, it helps outline a new branch of the Net we’re starting to call the Live Web — as opposed to the Static Web with “sites” that are “built” and tend not to change.

The World Live Web is the title of my December Linux For Suits column in Linux Journal. In it, I note that the directoryless nature of everything on the Web falls in the Unix file path east of the domain name. Every path to a document (or whatever) is a piece of straw in the static Web’s haystack. Google and Yahoo help us find needles in that haystack, but their amazing success at search also tends to confirm the haystack nature of the Static Web itself.

The Live Web is no less webby than the Static Web. They’re both parts of the same big thing. But the Live Web is new and very different. It cannot be understood in Static Web terms.

In that piece, I also observed that blogs, as continuing projects by human authors, leave chronological trails. These give the Live Web something of a structure: a chronological one that goes /year/month/day/date/post, even if that’s not the way each post’s URL is composed. There is an implicit organizational structure here, and it’s chronological.

Tagging, by which individuals can assign categorical tags of their own to everything from links to bookmarks to photos, has given the Live Web an ad hoc categorical structure as well.

So that’s what we’re starting to see emerge here: chronology and category. Rudimentary, sure, but real. And significant.

But not organized. New practices, and new ideas, are coming along too fast.

What matters, above all, is user-in-charge: a form of personal agency in the connected world. That’s a concept so key to everything else that’s happening on the Web, even on the Static one, that we may need a new word for it.

Or an old one, like independence, liberty, sovereignty, or autonomy. That’s my inner Libertarian, choosing those. If your sensibilities run a bit more to the social side, you may prefer words like actualization or fulfillment. Point is, the Big Boys aren’t in charge anymore. You are. I am. We are.

There’s an economy that will grow around us. I think free software and open-source practices (see various books and essays by Richard M. Stallman and Eric S. Raymond) put tracks in the snow that point in the direction we’re heading, but the phenomenon is bigger than that.

It’s also bigger than Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and IBM and Sun and Red Hat and Apple and the rest of the companies people (especially the media) look to for Leadership. For all the good those companies do in the world, the power shift is underway and is as certain as tomorrow’s dawn. The Big Boys will need to take advantage of it. We’ll need them to, as well.

This power shift is what I’d like to put in front of people’s attention when they come to Syndicate next week, or when they follow the proceedings in blogs and other reports.

Now more than ever, power is personal. Companies large and small will succeed by taking advantage of that fact. And by watching developments that aren’t just coming from The Usual Suspects. Including the Usual Economic Theories.

For example, not everything in an economy is about exchange, or the value chain, or about trade-offs of this for that. Many values come out of effort and care made without expectation of return. Consider your love for your parents, spouses, children, friends, and good work. Consider what you give and still get to keep. Consider debts erased by forgiveness. Consider how knowledge grows without its loss by anyone else.

Sayo Ajiboye, the Nigerian minister who so blew my mind in conversations we had on a plane nearly five years ago (Google them up if you like), taught me that markets are relationships, and not just conversations. Relationships, he said, are not just about exchange. They cannot be reduced to transactions. If you try, you demean the relationships themselves.

Also, in spite of the economic framings of our talk about morality and justice (owing favors, paying for crimes, just desserts), there is a deeper moral system that cannot be understood in terms of exchange. In fact, when you bring up exchange, you miss the whole thing. (Many great teachers have tried in futility to make this point, and I’m probably not doing any better.) Whatever it is, its results are positive. Growth in one place is not matched by shrinking in another. Value in both systems is created. But in the latter one, the purpose is not always, or exclusively, exchange, or profit. At least not from the activity itself. There are because effects at work. And we’re only beginning to understand them, much less practice them in new ways.

Toward that end, some questions…

Where did the Static Web, much less the Live Web, come from? What is it for? What are we doing with it? Whatever the answers, nothing was exchanged for them. (No, not even the record industry, the losses of which owe to their own unwillingness to take advantage of new opportunities opened by the Net.)

Nor was anything exchanged for Linux, which has grown enormously.

As Greg Kroah-Hartman said recently on the Linux-Elitists list,

Remember, Linux is a species, and we aren’t fighting anyone here, we are merely evolving around everyone else, until they aren’t left standing because the whole ecosystem changed without them realizing it.

Yes, we have living ends.

We need a lexicon for the different ways buyers and sellers express their intentions to each other. Or, one might say, advertise.

On the demand side (⊂) we have what in ProjectVRM we’ve called intentcasting and (earlier) personal RFP. Scott Adams calls it broadcast shopping and John Hagel and David Siegel both (in books by that title) call it pull.

On the sell side (⊃) I can list at least six kinds of advertising alone that desperately need distinctive labels. To pull them apart, these are:

1. Brand advertising. This kind is aimed at populations. All of it is contextual, meaning placed in media, TV or radio programs, or publications, that appeal broadly or narrowly to a categorized audience. None of it is tracking-based, and none of it is personal. Little of it wants a direct response. It simply means to impress. This is also the form of advertising that burned every brand you can name into your brain. In fact the word brand itself was borrowed from the cattle industry by Procter & Gamble in the 1930s, when it also funded the golden age of radio. Today it is also what sponsors all of sports broadcasting and pays most sports stars their massive salaries.
2. Search advertising. This is what shows up with search results. There are two very different kinds here:
   1. Context-based. Not based on tracking. This is what DuckDuckGo does.
   2. Context+tracking based. This is what Google and Bing do.
3. Tracking-based advertising. I’ve called this adtech. Cory Doctorow calls it ad-tech. Others call it ad tech. Some euphemize it as behavioral, relevant, interest-based, or personalized. Shoshana Zuboff says all of them are based on surveillance, which they are. So many critics speak of it as surveillance-based advertising.
4. Advertising that’s both contextual and personal—but only in the sense that a highly characterized individual falls within a group, or a collection of overlapping groups, chosen by the advertiser. These are Facebook’s Core, Custom and Look-Alike audiences. Talk to Facebook and they’ll tell you these ads are not meant to be personal, though you should not be surprised to see ads for shoes when you have made clear to Facebook’s trackers (on the site, the apps, and wherever the company’s tentacles reach) that you might be in the market for shoes. Still, since Facebook characterizes every face in its audience in almost countless ways, it’s easy to call this form of advertising tracking-based.
5. Interactive advertising. Vaguely defined by Wikipedia here,  and sometimes called conversational advertising,  the purpose is to get an interactive response from people. The expression is not much used today, even though the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is the leading trade association in the tracking-based advertising field and its primary proponent.
6. Native advertising, also called sponsored content, is advertising made to look like ordinary editorial material.

The list is actually much longer. But the distinction that matters is between advertising that is tracking-based and the advertising that is not. As I put it in Brands need to fire adtech,

Let’s be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising. It’s adtech that spies on people and violates their privacy. It’s adtech that’s full of fraud and a vector for malware. It’s adtech that incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism. It’s adtech that gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling in eyeballs.

Real advertising doesn’t do any of those things, because it’s not personal. It is aimed at populations selected by the media they choose to watch, listen to or read. To reach those people with real ads, you buy space or time on those media. You sponsor those media because those media also have brand value.

With real advertising, you have brands supporting brands.

Brands can’t sponsor media through adtech because adtech isn’t built for that. On the contrary, adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media.

Adtech is magic in this literal sense: it’s all about misdirection. You think you’re getting one thing while you’re really getting another. It’s why brands think they’re placing ads in media, while the systems they hire chase eyeballs. Since adtech systems are automated and biased toward finding the cheapest ways to hit sought-after eyeballs with ads, some ads show up on unsavory sites. And, let’s face it, even good eyeballs go to bad places.

This is why the media, the UK government, the brands, and even Google are all shocked. They all think adtech is advertising. Which makes sense: it looks like advertising and gets called advertising. But it is profoundly different in almost every other respect. I explain those differences in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff:

…advertising today is also digital. That fact makes advertising much more data-driven, tracking-based and personal. Nearly all the buzz and science in advertising today flies around the data-driven, tracking-based stuff generally called adtech. This form of digital advertising has turned into a massive industry, driven by an assumption that the best advertising is also the most targeted, the most real-time, the most data-driven, the most personal — and that old-fashioned brand advertising is hopelessly retro.

In terms of actual value to the marketplace, however, the old-fashioned stuff is wheat and the new-fashioned stuff is chaff. In fact, the chaff was only grafted on recently.

See, adtech did not spring from the loins of Madison Avenue. Instead its direct ancestor is what’s called direct response marketing. Before that, it was called direct mail, or junk mail. In metrics, methods and manners, it is little different from its closest relative, spam.

Direct response marketing has always wanted to get personal, has always been data-driven, has never attracted the creative talent for which Madison Avenue has been rightly famous. Look up best ads of all time and you’ll find nothing but wheat. No direct response or adtech postings, mailings or ad placements on phones or websites.

Yes, brand advertising has always been data-driven too, but the data that mattered was how many people were exposed to an ad, not how many clicked on one — or whether you, personally, did anything.

And yes, a lot of brand advertising is annoying. But at least we know it pays for the TV programs we watch and the publications we read. Wheat-producing advertisers are called “sponsors” for a reason.

So how did direct response marketing get to be called advertising ? By looking the same. Online it’s hard to tell the difference between a wheat ad and a chaff one.

Remember the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” (Or the remake by the same name?) Same thing here. Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.

This whole problem wouldn’t exist if the alien replica wasn’t chasing spied-on eyeballs, and if advertisers still sponsored desirable media the old-fashioned way.

Bonus link.

I wrote that in 2017. The GDPR became enforceable in 2018 and the CCPA in 2020.  Today more laws and regulations are being instituted to fight tracking-based advertising, yet the whole advertising industry remains drunk on digital, deeply corrupt and delusional, and growing like a Stage IV cancer.

We live digital lives now, and most of the advertising we see and hear is on or through glowing digital rectangles. Most of those are personal as well. So, naturally, most advertising on those media is personal—or wishes it was. Regulations that require “consent” for the tracking that personalization requires do not make the practice less hostile to personal privacy. They just make the whole mess easier to rationalize.

So I’m trying to do two things here.

One is to make clearer the distinctions between real advertising and direct marketing.

The other is to suggest that better signaling from demand to supply, starting with intentcasting, may serve as chemo for the cancer that adtech has become. It will do that by simply making clear to sellers what buyers actually want and don’t want.

Imagine a world in which there are only mainframes, and all individuals have are mainframe terminals. Then imagine that personal rights (e.g. to privacy) are violated in many ways by the mainframes and their operators. Then imagine that these violations have attracted regulations meant to protect the rights of mainframe terminal users—and that those regulations have made things worse for users, because the violations haven’t stopped, and users now have to hurdle “consent” notices, usually by clicking “accept” to the mainframe’s continued privacy violations.