Inventing the Information Valet

I spent a few days in Columbia, Missouri this past week, in the company of 50 or so people gathered by Bill Densmore at the spanking-new Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Bill is there on a Reynolds Fellowship, with the mission of inventing something he calls the Information Valet (which I call InfoValet for short). Our collective purpose at this gathering was to help him "blueprint" InfoValet.

Bill has been chewing my ear about this and other projects for years, but I must say that before getting to Columbia, I could not have explained the InfoValet concept to anyone (despite my perhaps intelligent-sounding post about it some time ago). As it turned out, neither could most of the other attendees at the conference. We came from a variety of backgrounds. Only five conferees currently work for newspaper-publishing companies, and a few others did so in the past. The rest were drawn from technology, law, new media, consulting, academics and electronic commerce. Which is to say, it was the right mix to brainstorm solutions to the ambitious challenge Bill was posing.

InfoValet is perhaps best described and understoood by looking at it from the point of view of each of its stakeholder components. Once operational, it will be a networked set of content providers, content consumers/web users, and commercial content providers/advertisers, linked by means of tools and technology managed by the fourth component, the Information Valet system itself. Like the proverbial elephant being manually examined by a group of blind men, here's how it might variously appear, fully realized, to these stakeholders:

Content consumers/web users:

• Would register their personal data via InfoValet and would, in a secure system, retain complete control over who could access that information.
  
• By doing this, they would also gain the convenience and security of not having to enter a raft of data over and over each time they register at another site to access information or make purchases. Their personal information would reside in only one place on the web.
  
• In return for allowing selective access to their personal data, they would gain two important benefits: (1) access to information more tailored to their demographics, needs and interests, and (2) a system of rewards in the form of cash or points based on their web usage and exposure to advertising content. These rewards would be greater if they are willing to share, selectively, a larger amount of personal information with advertisers for targeting purposes.
  

Content providers including newspaper web sites:

• Would act as portals through which content consumers initially sign up for InfoValet. As such they could gain a share of future transactions, including ad-viewing rewards, associated with individuals they have signed up--even when those users are elsewhere on the web.
• Would be able to sell and host advertising targeted more precisely at site visitors by means of InfoValet registrations

Commercial content providers/advertisers:

• Would benefit from more efficient, better targeted ways of advertising to InfoValet registered consumers, published through "trusted nodes"--local brands through which consumers have signed up for infoValet
  
• Could send new, more welcome forms of commercial content to InfoValet consumers

If that has you sufficiently confused, here's the conference's consensus "executive summary mission statement" description of InfoValet:

A permission-based ecosystem assuring privacy that allows you, in a trustworthy way, to share personal information so that content providers and partners can create a structure to provide you with content, applications and incentives tailored to you and your needs.

While a system like this will not necessarily save newspaper publishers (because, for one thing, it will take some time to gain traction), it has the potential to help save journalism by enabling online news publishing at a different scale. While the New York Times could be an InfoValet network member, so can a blogger or micro-local news site, and each can benefit proportionately to their traffic and content value to advertisers and consumers.

If this description makes sense and whets your appetite, here's a set of links where you can learn more:

• Bill Densmore's Information Valet Project blog
• The December 3-5, 2008 InfoValet conference wiki. This includes a great deal of detail on the discussion, alternatives considered, the consensus project outline, and next steps toward an actionable business plan
  
• The Information Card Foundation site--this system, presented at the conference by its executive director, Charles Andres, is seen as forming the secure customer registration and data protection system for InfoValet.
• Blog post on the conference, and further thoughts, by Chuck Peters, CEO of Gazette Communications, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
• Liveblog of the conference set up by Chuck.

Stay tuned, when Bill has more to talk about, I'll be talking about it.

InfoValet, at your service

Continuing from yesterday's introduction to Bill Densmore...

Bill is now at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, as one of their Reynolds Fellows, developing his Information Valet Project. For the full scoop on his project, follow his blog on the subject, and see the original proposal, (which is linked from his July 17 post, no separate URL available). The InfoValet (my shorthand) is described as follows:

A service network of “information valets” will replace the old physical product-oriented music, publishing and entertainment industries, replacing many CDs, newspapers, DVDs, perhaps even books. These valets will compete across geographic and topical spheres with search, advice, community, research, linking, hosting, data storage and other services. They will compete to be best at meeting the consumer’s diverse information needs within communities defined by individual users. Information resources will not typically be owned by the valet. Rather, the valet will be compensated for finding, shaping and referring them to the consumer, much as a retailer aggregates and merchandises for wholesalers.

What I'm interested in is the "finding, shaping and referring" part, which would seem to have implications for the news business. I'm still not sure if what Bill is trying to develop is simply an information commerce network, or an information commerce network that has some aspects of the Intelligent Interface Agents I referenced on Sept. 24, long envisioned but still unrealized "knowbots" that can take the drudgery out of surfing the Net.

Michal Migurski of Stamen, commenting on that post of mine, says, in effect: "Forget it, just use RSS feeds that reflect various largely human-edited aggregators; this is not going to be done by software agents." But I'm not convinced, and I hope Bill will build the idea into InfoValet -- after all, if your valet can't figure out your needs, what good is it? And indeed, Bill's proposal continues with this vision of the news organization of the future:

The next news organization is not principally a newspaper — centralized daily printing is going to become a niche product for the wealthy and depends on non-renewable resources and expensive manufacturing. Rather, it is a 24/7, platform-agnostic nerve center that finds, organizes, shares and makes sense of information from a vast array of paid, volunteer, independent and partisan sources — and then serves it how you want it, when you want it.

It will be a service organization — like a law or accounting firm — and it will be paid accordingly. At first, it will be extremely difficult to convince people to pay for such a service. But as the years go by, it will be seen as an absolutely indispensable way to get through the day. People will become as reliant on their "Newshare" as on their car, doctor, parent or colleague. Larger cities will have multiple "new shares" offering competing information valet services.

They will compete largely on technical grounds — which sorts best, who finds the real gems, and who provides premium information at the right price bundle? Advertising will be part of all this, but it will be an option—if you are willing to receive advertising, the cost of your "Newshare" will be less.

The competition for mass-audience advertising on the web is such that it seems hard to imagine sustainable rates will ever support the amount of original reporting the United States has enjoyed for the last 50 years. Audiences are now atomizing and the only future for advertising is in presenting targeted messages to individual users. This means the entity that earns the right to receive value for advertising is going to be the one which does the best job of understanding and then servicing the needs of an individual user — including privacy. In the informationservice economy, you[r] information valet will be paid for arranging your attention when you look at an ad, and that payment will be a credit to an account, will offset your purchase of premium
information. This represents an ebb and flow of attention and info-currency, depending upon whether it is information someone wants you to have or information you want.

I'll buy the idea that with certain obvious safeguards against manipulating the system, consumers might share in the advertising revenue targeted at them. But I disagree with the idea that consumers will get over their enormous resistance to paying for online news content, and be willing to pay in some fashion as they once did for print. If the InfoValet system materializes, and I use it to shop online for music, video, games, software, anything downloadable—then the service itself needs to be free. And news, since it's already 99 percent free online, should remain on the free side of the package.