Credit: thehutch

Is it me, or is it becoming harder and harder to come up with an original idea? I mean, the next time you think you have one, start Googling. Chances are, you’re going to find other ideas that are strikingly similar to your own. They might even have a Wikipedia page.

Maybe it’s because people have been coming up with ideas for millennia now. Maybe it’s because there are so many people in the world that the odds of being original are so slim. Or maybe it’s because we’re all so connected. The ideas that would’ve passed for new in the past are now too readily exposed for being unoriginal.

Now that we’re all so connected, maybe the idea of a brainstorm is completely out of touch with reality. Maybe we should thinking about a cloudstorm instead.

Think about it: even if you’re sitting down with a group of people to “brainstorm” ideas, so much of what’s brought to the table is going to come in from the cloud — from what they’ve found through social networking and from all the things they’re likely to Google throughout the brainstorm cloudstorm session.

The thing is that we’re all constantly sharing and consuming bite-size thoughts through Twitter and Facebook and maybe blogs. And while one of our own bite-size thoughts might only be just that to us, it might be so much more to someone else, triggering a series of subsequent thoughts and ideas.

The end result is that we often arrive at conclusions without even knowing how we got there. We recall seeing a Tweet and our minds then running off on a tangent of its own, but we might not remember where we saw it, who Tweeted it, or even what that Tweet was.

Almost everyone is good for a at least a few great ideas in their time. But now that everyone can (and does) share everything all the time, it’s like it’s all been said before (one way or another) and it’s all on record. So suddenly, hardly anyone seems good for a single original thought.

And I’m not just talking about tech ideas. Tech is always evolving, and there’s constant speculation on where it’s going to go next (like this little blog post).

I’m also talking about ideas in general. You know, those little drops of wisdom that will still matter even when someone pulls the plug. Those ideas about love, life, and our time on this tiny little blue rock. Those ideas about human experience.

Of course, all this begs the question: With so much being so accessible at all times, are ideas losing their currency? Is our mindshare is losing value? And are we worse off for it?

Credit: -Chad Johnson

You know how almost everyone is good for a at least a few great ideas in their time? Well, what’s the cloud going to do to that?

Now, people can share everything all the time. And it’s all on record.

So it becomes really hard to say anything that hasn’t been said before — never mind trying to say something original on a regular and consistent basis. Suddenly, hardly anyone is good for even a single original thought in their time.

When a brainstorm includes everyone and all topics all at once, it becomes a cloudstorm. We’re collectively pumping thoughts into the cloud, and they’re all be indexed and retweeted.

This really takes the idea of a collective unconscious to an entirely new level.

What I’m wondering is whether this is going to end the way we think about creativity, or is going to produce some smack-genius-s**t by raising the bar just within reach.

Last night was a special summer edition of Third Tuesday Montreal. There were three presentations, in the style of Pecha Kucha (20 slides, 20 second each, for a total of 6min 40sec) and I had the pleasure of opening for Julien Smith and Sylvain Grand’Maison.

The title of my presentation was Cloudvertising: Social Media and the Future of Online Advertising, and it explored how social media will shape the way that online ads and marketing campaigns will be targeted. It was a great evening, and I had a lot of fun seeing old friends, meeting new people, and talking about everything from social media to hemp farming.

In any case, here’s the Ustream recording of the my spot, with the Powerpoint presentation below.

Credit: Messiaen

The root problem facing newspapers (and other mainstream publishers) isn’t so much falling ad revenues. That’s just a symptom of a greater problem. The bigger problem facing mainstream publishers is that ad technology hasn’t caught up with content technology.

Right now, there are so many ways to publish and distribute content. But there really aren’t that many way to distribute and target advertising. The result is that the ad space that’s up for sale is worth a whole lot less than the content it appears alongside, and that means that publishers have to operate at a loss and advertisers have a demand for ad space that no one’s offering.

The upside to this, of course, is that there’s a considerable market opportunity for anyone who figures out how to fill this unmet demand (and, in turn, possibly save mainstream publishers). And that oppotunity isn’t that far out of reach because everything needed to fill that demand is readily available. There is so much user data floating around the social web that cloudvertising might just be a viable solution to help publishers help advertisers reach audiences that’ll actually convert.

Between the data that a portal can collect directly from their users and the data trail that those users leave all over the world wide web, everything that advertisers need to hyper-target consumers is already in the cloud. All that’s needed is a reliable way to aggregate and mine it so that users can be shown advertising they actually give a sh*t about.

Cloudvertising

Credit: becker&julie

“Mining the cloud” is part and parcel of what social news organizations (SNO) will do as they evolve. By integrating social media features into its content, both internally and through third party APIs (such as sharing features via Twitter and Facebook), an SNO can actually use users to target advertisers.

The idea behind cloudvertising is that publishers approach readers as users, and then collect data (1) directly from their activity on their site and (2) indirectly from their activity elsewhere on the social web. In a nutshell, publishers leverage third party APIs so that they can profile users/readers and make sure they show them offers that are relevant to them. Although it offers the advertiser less control to pick and choose their audience, it does offer them better targeting and refined results.

By leveraging third party, social media APIs, publishers can develop more comprehensive profiles of their users because they can more easily monitor their users’ activity on social networks. While some APIs will offer them direct access to user data, all APIs will help them (1) identify user profiles, (2) index the activity and content on those profiles, (3) read users’ cookies when they return, and (4) hyper-target offers according to users’ actual interests and recent behavior.

Mining the Cloud

An ad platform that could hyper-target according to both an internal user database and user-data aggregated via a third party APIs is something that could rival Google (or maybe even only be developed by them). So it’s unlikely to be developed by a content organization, so matter how social they are, or what kind of R&D ad lab they have.

What publishers can do, however, is start (1) replacing their ad-sales departments with a comprehensive, internal marketing agencies (like Vice Magazine has) that can (2) start mining user data, (3) diversify ad offerings accordingly, and then (4) collaborate with editorial to develop symbiotic content model.

Mining tends to be a dirty (and dangerous) business that doesn’t yield returns until considerable investment have been made. But it’s also the only way to access critical resources. So while ad technology companies might want to start thinking about cloudvertising so that they don’t end up in a plight similar to where publishers are now, publishers might consider doing what little small-scale mining that they can manage on their own.