This blog entry is about the death of standardized compliance.

We’ve gone a long way from mass marketing and categorization to the individualization and long tail choices as defining digital traits, where each one of us is a micro universe of one.  To the institutions we interact with – from commercial suppliers, through brands and government based services, we, users, are largely still links in chains of commercial, organizational and governmental goal achievements processes. The non uniformity of the people that comprise the client base, audience, market share… may already seem obvious , but it still not taken as an axiomatic key stand point .

Seth Godin’s new book We are all weird is a tale of individuality, of celebrating the uniqueness of each one in every food chain. Weird, as not standardized, talks to generalizing providers and institutions, and praises individuality as a stand point for interactions with people with a cynical reference to normality, as an outdated lens for definitions and processes.

Yes, the future belongs to individuals, to a mindset that replaces standardization with the humanification of interactions. Once the user is put at the center, not as a usability and marketing communication cliché’ of form, but as a fundamental matter, the real human value of user centricity and citizen centricity comes to life. To each of us our individually significant actions and choices are our own tales of individuality that strengthen our meaningful and valuable choices and interactions.

Icentricity is a philosophical identity definition that exceeds the individual yet gives a personal print and control on who, what, where, when and why.  Taking an independent yet very personal prism, enables a framework of the unique individual ecosystem of one that interacts with everybody else.

When each one of us has so many personal expressions across so many platforms, we need to take the individual fingerprint that on one hand sets us apart as individuals but on the other hands defines us and our say as parts of collectives in these frameworks.

The Icentered lens is an individual grasp for interactions, a prism that helps separate the wheat from the chaff in the overload of seemingly not connected interactions. It is a framework for a larger process that gives a context for the place of the individual in relations with providers, peers, friends, organizations….. Godin’s book is yet another call to start and exercise this distinct personal mark that sets me apart from everyone else and makes categorizing, segmenting, profiling me…. Impossible.

With the ubiquitous connectedness that enables us to be distributed across many platforms, across many contexts and interactions, Icentricity provides a looking glass that sometimes takes a step back to oversee and sometime to focus on how I am in a particular set of interactions – social, professional, or information based and how I relate to other people in social circles and in service providing systems.

Personal, a start-up company, offers to empower each of us to manage our digital data, share at will and get compensated when companies capitalize on our data, Personal’s service is a personal data bank, that keeps your assets for you in a friendly and intuitive way, facilitates permission based sharing and may trade with them in your name.

It is an early example of user side personal data management services. This personal information vault may be seen as the equivalent of a bank vault combined with an account management and services platform. It is based on a simple assumption that personal data should be managed and shared user side, as a form of currency.

Why is it necessary? In a ubiquitous world where personal cloud services will become natural, always-on assumes accessibility to my personal digital materials. There are already file hosting cloud based services like Dropbox, that allow instant accessibility and intuitive sharing to all files saved through the service as they are  also instantly saved to all computers, phones, and the Dropbox website.

Personal takes this notion a step further to create intuitive topic/functionality based data gems, modular data  capsules that address specific information, topics and needs. This icon based personal digital filing system around personal data and functional information – such as insurance information, appliances’ specifications, pets’ regime, registrations….. over a 100 data gems filed under icon based digital files,  empower users’ intuitive access to functional data and information in a pin pointed manner, easily shared per need.

The value of these data gems starts with the user experience. Yes, we all have files and folders that we build according to our logic and personal tagging. Data gems facilitate organizing and managing users’ practical information and data by objectifying data units and wrapping them in a universal symbol capsule system. The user oriented conceptualization, functionality though an icon based  universal symbolic language, makes the experience simplified, flowing and personal.  The visual user friendly iconography frees users from individually reconstructing where the needed information resides, under what tags it was filed. This intuitive usability approach and detailed lego-like granularity, facilitates bridging digital divides by accommodating people that are not digitally intuitive to information handling, filing and sharing , and facilitates accessibility to that information if someone trusted needs to quickly find some functional data.

Icentered envisions a future of user controlled personal data management, that will replace the need to trust providers and rely on their privacy policies. This user side data management paradigm will empower Contextonomics –  a user side trading with personal contextual information, rewarding users as equal partners in the food chains for their data tracking and as means for  attention bartering.

The topic of users’ data ownership and  privacy control is controversial. I believe that once users side platforms and personal data management services like Personal will empower users to store, manage and share their personal data with other people,  advertisers and providers, user based contextonomics models will start to replace the traditional corporate based business models, an important stage towards a user centric digital economy.

Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare,  Google, cloud computing, mobile web.….. offer us an always on, accessible, knowledgeable social world, that keeps us connected physically and socially. This liquid web, as  Stowe Boyd calls it, is an immersive experience that makes us much more involved.

In the intersection between social graphs and interest graphs new relations between people and content are created.  He assumes that different consumer segments need different technological  support tools. In distinguishing between traditional, online and social consumers, users become stakeholders in the attention economy, as they draw their information not only from different content and social resources, but refine their relevant interactions through communication tools such as tweets, retweet, comments…    all create a very different user experience.

From an Icentered point of view, where I (the digital I of each user) strive for an adaptive web, tailored to personal choices and preferences – the human link of the single user still has a long way to go.

User centricity is about us, people. Yet it still takes a systemic view of the we interact with those tools and infrastructures, and how we become more immersed in this ubiquitous web.

Taking a different prism, an inside- out lens, the Icentered one, makes it more humanized. From that point of view It’s about us as people, not just users – centered or captive. To truly personify our web experiences, a deeper degree of individual personal signature should be called for.

Our personal data, real-time experience and interest based social graphs empower more humane social experiences, but the missing link is still personal context. Social humanification in smaller groups, such as the one offered by Flink12 that humanizes the social experience by creating social circles of no more than 12 people , is easier, because it reflects real life circles of interaction ad is initiated and moderated directly by users.

We need to control and manage more than just users’ privacy settings in various sites. We need to control in the same way Flink12 empowers us to connect at will people close to us around a specific subject, to connect our identity, data and sharing options from various sites around a topic that interests us in an inclusive holistic way that reflects us in our interactions around that topic.  This translates to contexting us, people, and not just a single thread of content. In such a Icentered reality, when I am in full possession of my personal information,  meshing all my interactions  around a specific topic within a specific interweb. Interwebs, as Venkatesh Rao explains,” is the perfect term for framing our experience of the Web today as an intricate mesh of play and storytelling that is enacted across many media and modes, an experience that is characterized primarily by its plurality A pattern of use with content, temporal and social dimensions, that evolves, lives for a while, and dies or morphs into something else.…”. For a short while, an individualized personalization hub is created. Since I own my representation, and am empowered to directly manage my privacy and trust regime, it completely sidesteps the exposure problem.

I, the individual user, am the glue that interconnects one inclusive context around many interwebs and allow an individual prismatic view of a thread/experience/ topic/action.

Once I, the individual user, create my personalized story, it is the context that makes it unique and  turns the overwhelming overpour of the liquid web into a humane selective experience .

From an Icentered point of view – my data, social network and my privacy and sharing preferences are mine to manage and use as I see fit. 2 new initiatives take this approach to different and opposing extremes.

Empire Avenue is a social media exchange platform game, where you buy and sell shares of people and of websites online through a stock market simulation. The game includes social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, YouTube, and the player’s own blog and RSS feeds.

Empire Avenue creates players’ portfolio in a virtual economy setting, like Monopoly on people, by driving their social media activity in the real world.  Players choose their own ticker symbol, the price of a player’s share depends on the ticker’s stock buying and selling, based  on  social networking activity. They can conduct share like activities such as multiple investors, invest in other players, gain dividends from the other shares in players they invest in, and can win Achievements for their actions, such as advertising and adding services such as Twitter.

The game intertwines real world and play world, because real life social activity of  play members , such as their social graph, RSS feeds and blogs, increases their game value which, in turn, is translated to dividends.

The game uses a virtual currency, Eaves, as a way to purchase shares in other players, that can either be people in your social network, or brands and companies that have social media accounts on Facebook – which turns it into a social marketing and mind share building tool for marketers.

Selling your Facebook friends and Twitter followers takes Empire Avenue to the most open social approach to a user’s own data, that by participating in the game, openly consents to trade with her social graph and be traded.

It can be viewed as a ranking system for social graphs, that builds evangelism, influencing and follower charts mechanisms that are the bread and butter of community dynamics. The data extracted from this social game draw profiles of influencers, leaders and initiators that can in turn become valuable in communities of interest.

User centricity takes an interesting open approach in Empire Avenue, as the thin line between reality and game is blurred in this game, once a player willingly becomes a part of a universal value index.

Can people’s stock like ranking have influence in their real life endeavors? Will players act socially online to increase their social worth and encourage others to invest in them? Will they be valued differently in the real world socially, in the job market? Is it good? Threatening? Exploitative? That’s very personal. However, just like in Second Life, the virtual world game, simulating and capitalizing on real world phenomena and rankings with virtual currency, to create a virtual world is very controversial. Only Empire Avenue blurs the borders even further and builds currency around real world people and their real data – it can serve from commercial interests and up to new circles of networking based on common denominators with people not originally in your social sphere, based on pointers and asset building of co-players.

Flink12 is the complete opposite. It’s a real life social network that brings back the authentic personalized touch to social networks by offering limited personalized networks of up to 12 friends in a circle, and empowers sharing of chats, photos and personally segregated blogs around topics and opinions. The approach of  up to 12 people in a social circle around a shared interest, with an option to have the same person in several Flinks around different prisms of sharing.  It takes a user centered control over the user’s social graph to a very private extreme, creating very small personal social spheres and making sure that those graphs are not indexed in the web in any search engine. Flink 12 is named after 12 cows that compose a flink.

It is a more relevance based networking way that brings intimacy back to private sharing of social online life. The small sharing in confined groups touches upon the fact that in the big social networks your list of friends does not really represent your human scale of personal relations. When you want to intimately share with a group of people around topics and experiences and don’t want to make it into public exposures – you can control the real sharing of personal information with just the people you want and actively control privacy and sharing considerations intuitively, easily.

Flink12 humanizes back the social online experience. In a social network era where one has hundreds of friends, personal touch is lost and we are all targeted by search engines and marketers, Flink12 brings back a personal touch of creating authentic first circle of really closed friends/family members/peers/co-workers around topics to shares humanifies back our social sphere to what it should have been – a really personal circle of communications.

By creating very private socializing maps that simulate more authentically our real- life personal socializing, as we don’t befriend 400 Facebook registered friends in a go and intuitively monitor what we share with whom.   It empowers intuitive sharing by natural social groups such as close family, close friends/co-workers and allows the online instant spontaneity while keeping privacy, user control and personal segregation preferences.

These two extreme new evolutions of social spheres online strengthens the 2 sides of what experiences should be like – ubiquitous infrastructures and accessibility, on top of which on top of which user controlled segmented interwebs offer varied
interaction option for each one personally - another step towards a truly user centric web.

Immersive Labs, a NY based  start up,  builds billboard technology that can target you, personally, and present relevant ads on bill boards.  Promising? Frightening? definitely intriguing.

A closer examination reveals that this is no scene from Minority Report and your iris data are not being read to target you with direct messages.

 In fact a combination of real time, location based, combined with age and gender reading from cameras in locations where the bill boards are placed, make it possible to change ads based on the age group and activity that takes place and segment age and gender based ads in real time.

This does not fall under the category of personally targeted ads as it lacks the personal context of each person that passes near the billboard. If a 30 years old woman passes by and a disposable diaper ad appears, it’s not because they know her identity, number of young children  and the fact that her credit card shows baby related shopping, but because she falls under age and gender based segmentation.

 So for the time being – fear not the retailer’s  big brother’s eye on you just yet – with ubiquitous connectivity, smart gadgets and an always on life style, the future of  personal targeting will some day  be in time and place defined real personalized ad placement on your personal mobile device once you enter a location, based on your very personal context, purchase history – the semantic web vision and internet of things that will eventually connect, combine data and screen each of us very very  personally.

A dooms day or real user centered scenario – depends on where you stand in the privacy/sharing debate.   Let’s hope that till this happens, privacy keeping and sharing mechanisms will  be as developed as the semantic context based  profiles that will allow such individually targeted ads.

Respecting people’s  data as currency and putting its management in the hands of consumers, is threatening tracking, behavioral targeting , marketing and advertising companies, who base their traditional food chains on tracking and purchasing users’ data for the online advertising industry.

Personal information enables pinpointing on personal context which in turn spells relevant, and translates to targeted offerings and ads. The interests of providers and consumers are not that contradictory. Whereas providers look at me, the consumer, and want ROI =return on their investment for targeting me with relevant offers, I am looking at ROA=return on attention, and may be open to what, in my context, interests me.

With the shifts in internet marketing, these  interests will have to evolve. We , consumers are changing and so should marketing discourse. We  are moving to pull based models , we own conversations and change loyalties by a simple click away.  Providers and advertisers are welcome to directly ask and get our cooperation and responses.

From an icentered point of view – reversing the paradigm is natural. My data, my context, are mine. I own it and I am the only one who can proactively manage my privacy and sharing. The economics of my context – contextonomics  is a currency, yet no one has the right, unsolicited,  to infiltrate my spheres, monitor my actions and patterns and hover around, manipulating my data.

A Wall street Journal article describes several start-up initiatives that start catering for user centered needs and empower active trading of personal data by users.

 There are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, companies like Myid , Intelliprotect , Abine, that block online tracking, together with privacy groups and federated identity initiatives, represent the user side privacy protection and give privacy management services to prevent companies from viewing  results of tracking data, without direct consumer consent.

On the other side, companies like Personal Inc, i-allow  pay people a commission on their consent to share their data with marketers and advertisers.

These companies are pioneering initiatives that cater directly for user centered data on her behalf.  That in itself is a significant move towards a real user centered marketing paradigm.

Treating data as currency does not end in placing individuals as partners in food chains created around them. Contextualization mechanisms are not ripe yet to allow for context based transactions that exceed observation of raw data.

Once user side contextualization will mature, it can evolve to serve as alternative currency, in the struggle over a user’s’ attention.

 In a long tail data based economy, attention bartering  can be translated to different food chains on digital content consumption platforms. E.g, select personalized commercial targeting for the same content item by incorporating a variety of aggregation and distribution channels with different value adding chains and financial reconciliation mechanisms.  It empowers new mechanism of exchange, new kinds of aggregators. A converged unified TVIP based, social media 2.0 environment allows for diversified food chains around the same content items. To name a few:

• A pay-per-view viewership of a sports match with additional prior matches of the player who scored highest or the winning team for different bundling with targeted ads and related commercial offerings for different price options.
• A choice of a pay per view movie, leading to additional movie offerings with the same actors/director, combined with all sorts of monitory or context + ad or merchandising bundling.
• Aggregators and providers will have banks of advertising, ads will be pulled and the advertiser rewarded for each ad sent in a pull model to a viewer.
• Users can allow companies use their profiles or data for market research, targeting and get rewarded directly as part of the food chain created around them by content offerings, digital coupons, merit points…..

The user centered approach, that puts individuals at the center with active control over their data and privacy and calls for a paradigm change in relations with providers, institutions and content creators, is beginning to mushroom through preliminary initiatives and writings.

The following is a partial list I have accumulated.

Initiatives around user centered proactive data management

• Project VRM – VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. It’s a reversed, pull based paradigm that presents the other side of CRM (customer relationship management) and provides customers with independence from closed siloed vendors’ golden cages.
• Personal.com – User side data sharing management initiative
• Personal data store  and Mydex personal data store – a personal data center about individuals for interactions with institutions through common data models to be shared and viewed permission based.
• The Mine! Project – The Mine! Project is about equipping people with tools and functionality that will help them to take charge of their data, arrange it according to their needs and preferences and share it on their own terms.
• The internet identity workgroup  is a practical idealism in working towards the shared vision of a decentralized, user-oriented identity layer for the Internet
• The personal data ecosystem supports businesses supporting user’s need to control, manage, and direct the way they want to share and allows for the emergence of new data markets and services
• NET EUCEN – network of European Stakeholders for enhancing user centricity in eGovernance

These initiatives, together with groups that work on identity management, will create a nucleus for a blueprint of systems that will truly put individuals at the center and will facilitate user centered control over individual data, privacy, choices and sharing.

Books

Pull: The power of the semantic web to transform your business – David Siegel

The power of pull: How smart moves, smartly made, can set big things in motions – John Hagel III and John Sealy Brown

A video: The data locker vision – by David Siegel.

 A video describing a future scenario of a  fantastic  user centered, personalized, contextualized reality  of daily life with  a personal data locker vision by David Siegel. This is what an icentered ecosystem will look like, when all platforms, technologies, contextualization tools and practices will mature, interoperate and personally align  around each individual.

User centricity is a universal approach that takes a holistic systemic view of  the place of the individual in it. As the web’s ubiquity becomes a given and an increasingly growing part of our interactions is web based, the issue of user centricity takes a more significant meaning. User centricity can no longer be seen as just a design principle, but the other way around, especially as user centricity and trust, an essential element in 21^st century web and business culture, go hand in hand.

User centered semantics comprise of multidisciplinary approaches – philosophical, social, economic principles and a fundamental set of values and concepts that assume:

• Open ended systems, interoperability protocols, design premises.
• User control over data, privacy, identity management…
• User controlled data portability
• Transparency
• Users own conversations, interactions, privacy and sharing
• Simple, intuitive usage design and inclusive user experiences for the weaker digital populations.

Once the user is truly at the center, user centricity requires balancing the interests of all parties involved, users, providers, institutions, architecture designers through a cooperative discourse that looks at all as equal partners and respects the rights and interests of all, through transparent mechanisms that enhance trust.

In web based systems, these values and premises can then be translated to define design principles of enabling and supporting technologies, platforms, architectures and business processes that empower user centered interoperability between users, providers, institutions, governance, communities and content creators.

User centricity in existing paradigms does not go hand in hand with top down siloed approaches that claim to be focused on the user, but confuse users with consumers from a corporate/institutional point of view. It is due to hegemony wars and business dominance of corporates and service providers, that do all they can to cultivate approaches that put constraints on customers’ disengagement, as they try to keep their customers captive for corporate profit building plans. It is in complete contradiction to the open, free and transparent spirit and culture of the web and of us, its users.

User centricity is not just about commercial offerings. It is about users’ control over their data, transparency mechanisms that are based on the principles of free choice, portability, simple and free disengagement…..

Whereas user centered takes a systemic view of user centered systems and scenarios, Icentered takes a prismatic view of the individual as the hard core nucleus of any user centered system. It represents the individual in the conceptualization of a user centered blueprint. How the world, interactions and relations should be seen through this lens, once the user is really at the center, with the reins of control in her hands.

The I in icentered focuses on the individuality of each user, as an Itom, the granular entity of the icentered world. An Itom is the smallest comprehensive unit that describes me, the individual user, as a whole, as a unique individual, through all my interactions, across all sites, platforms and media. Each and every one of us is an individual, unique, distinct, non divisible Itom.

Looking at the digital world through a prismatic view of each individual Itom , creates a new vantage point for web based relations. Once we look at it as a people’s web,  it’s an “I in the center” paradigm, where  each user becomes a distinct anchor,  an Itom. The systemic concepts and blueprints that will empower this vision of the web,  are at the heart of user centricity paradigms.

Managing an attention economy and filtering out the clutter through personal relevance in the overpour of information, becomes an urgency. In the attention economy our most scarce resource is time. It’s a two headed dilemma:  Am Iwasting my limited attention capacity on things I could do without? Am I missing, in all that noise, things I would have wanted to give attention to?

The answer to both questions is context, personal relevance as a key to web interactions.

Relevant to me.

In my context.

Relevance turns the overwhelming overpour of web interactions into a humanizing selective experience. It’s the difference between searchability and findability, an avalanche of information and a manageable portion where I have my attention focused on what is really of value to me and I where I can selectively communicate.

Relevance is predictive. Based on my past interactions, my next future needs can be attended to. Companies pay a lot to try and get closer to my relevance – so that their offerings surface above the general marketing noise and get my attention. They measure it in terms of ROI (return on investment) – how much will it cost them to reach me, the individual. But once they do, how relevant is their offering to me? Again, the closest they can get through paid targeting is to what I am looking for right now, in search, siloed sites that keep my profile and based on current interactions in social platforms.

As users we want to interact with information that answers a need we have.   For that relevance is key. To date there is no holistic context of me that can capture a full relevance scale and be federated by me. My context is fragmented, dispersed all across the web. From a users’ perspective personal relevance should be viewed from a holistic point of view. There is one me, interacting all over, and not site or service  I have interacted with.

Relevant to me  is what will grab my attention the most and will turn my attention into an ROA ( return on attention) for my personal measuring scale. Once my relevant context (my data) is established, my attention can be bartered, treated  as an alternative currency – the economics of context – Contextonomics.

Contextonomics is the economic model for attention bartering. It means exchanging consumption of digital goods or services with attention.

To achieve a high ROA I will be willing to view offerings, communications and targeted ads based on their relevance to me. To achieve an effective ROI companies will be willing to invest in context based food chains that get them there.

In the vision of the semantic web, adding my context as a factor in the targeting and matching process changes the results, a transformation from searchability to findability, based on individual context. I can ask the world and the world will answer – but will it answer me in my particular colors, language and frame of mind. Providers will have to negotiate with me, or my avatars, based on my context.

 New food chains can be built around that ROA-ROI equilibrium. The traditional foundation of transactions will be reversed. Rather than a vendor negotiating with a cloud of users, it will be anchored in a pull model, where the user negotiates with a cloud of vendors for  similar offerings and a variety of  paying methods, in hard currency or attention equivalents.

From the economic sense of relevance based transactions, a pull based user relevant food chain, it means that each transaction executed, can be monetized in full and paid directly or traded, fully or partially, for alternative service. Providers will have automated context based offerings and banks of advertising, ads will be pulled and the advertiser rewarded for each ad sent in a pull model to a viewer. One consumer, one movie to watch for 50% discount + 3 ads that may targeted to interests and lifestyle, or one movie to watch full price = same value, but not necessarily same interest.  Yet, choice, value and preferences are individual.

Scott Adams envisions Futureme, a future plans based personal network that sees my intended plans and wishes as currency.

 Right now, you can’t get there from here.

How much is my privacy worth?  my data? 

My data have a predictive value for providers and advertisers.

Once they know what I was interested in, they should know what to offer me next.

To me it spells relevance = attention enhancement

To them it spells personalization – matching offering with customer need= offering enhancement.

They are willing to pay to know my relevance scale. Of my past activities. So they can assess future potential.

Who owns the process?

To date, we, users, may own the conversation of what we want next, but providers own the data manipulation process.

Of our data!

We, users, fight for keeping our privacy. Our privacy has an economic value. What is it? How can it be quantified?

Today it is non tangible to us. We give parts of our privacy away for nothing, and most of the time, we don’t even know it. Other parts are captive in siloed sites of providers and although the data are ours, we can’t reach it, let alone use it elsewhere.

Our future interests also hold capital value. Sales potential.

Scott Adams describes a personal, future based social network, Futureme. He calls it a Facebook killer, and differentiates between them based on a time line – Facebook is about my past – Futureme – about my future. It will be  built around my future interests, where people I choose can become part of a specific social graph for a specific interaction. So can providers and advertisers.

That adds 2 dimensions to the value of my data. My personal data as displayed for a future intention that has value to providers and my social capital that has value, placing me as an anchor in a  social ecosystem built around my future interest.

I don’t know if secluded future based marketplaces are the answer, but that is definitely a clear example of how my context becomes a currency. That can be bartered with direct $ value, or with attention to targeted ads.. I call that  Contextonomics. 

You may argue with the spectrum of his call for open sharing, that’s very personal and should be calibrated by each and every one according to the event, social graph and elements involved.

This vision is of a user centered long tail, based on pull, rather than push. User controlled. Direct inclusion of the user in the food chain is in sync with the icentered mindset.

Buyer centered paradigms  will force providers to embrace an organizational shift, where putting the customer first becomes more than a marketing lip service and all the systems will have to be aligned to provide that shift to pull based marketing.

Once contextonomics allows a bartering system and user centered marketplaces are up, we, users, will then own the process, will be treated as a source of revenue and will get our rightful place in the food chain.

Turning our data into capital still requires a quantum leap.  If Dilbert sees it, eventually providers will too. Such grassroots of visions and ideas of user centered ecosystems seed the path that will eventually lead to the required paradigm shift.