CLIENT:

WHAT CONSUMES MEPROJECT TITLE:

INSPIRATION ENGINEDATE:

NOVEMBER, 2011

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OUR MISSION IS TO BUILD THE DEFINITIVE INSPIRATION ENGINE FOR THE CREATIVE

COMMUNITY.

YOU DIDN’T JUST PULL THAT OUT OF YOUR ASS DID YOU?

WHAT IS AN INSPIRATION ENGINE?

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An inspiration engine puts beauty and brilliance in form and functionality that aid work, not just distraction.

An inspiration engine is full of content, but delivered in a way that is highly relevant, useful, addictive, and actionable.

An inspiration engine doesn’t just support reading, it supports doing. It helps to unleash more creativity upon the world.

It isn’t your typical blog, or even content aggregator, it’s something more – something functional.

What follows is a high-level, foolishly ambitious plan to build the creative community’s most insanely loved site on the web.

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CONTENT

FUNCTIONALITY

AN INSPIRATION ENGINE IS ULTIMATELY AN INNOVATIVE PACKAGING OF THE TWO.

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CONTENT STRATEGY

STOCKS AND FLOWS

A FLOOD OF BEAUTY, INSPIRATION, AND NOVELTY

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What is Flow Content?

Flow content represents your typical daily stream of novel content on sites like Buzzfeed or PSFK, often aggregated from other sources. Flow content will be the bulk of day-to-day content on the site published by a handful of editors, ranging from topics far and wide.

Challenges inherent in Flow Content:

• The social currency of this content is usually short-lived (mostly determined by novelty among peers) and the lifespan on most sites ends once it’s fallen off the homepage

• Sites that compete on flow content typically need to publish early and often, our challenge is to be as fast or faster than other aggregator sites and to publish often on a broad range of creative topics

• We don’t want to simply amass this content and let it languish in our archives, we have to find ways to make it useful to readers far beyond its publish date

RETAIL

ENTERTAINMENT

AUTOMOTIVE

FASHION

FOOD

LUXURY

JOURNALISM

TECHNOLOGY

WORK

BUSINESS

WEB

MUSIC

HACKING

ART

LITERATURE

ARCHITECTURE

WEB CULTURE

PRODUCTIVITY

COMPLEXITY

PLANNING

STATISTICS

FOUND IMAGES

DATA

DESIGN

AND MORE

MEDIA

FANDOM

GAMES

STRATEGY

CREATING AN ADDICTIVE READING EXPERIENCE

Publishing Flow Content

• First, we need to find a handful of editors that will publish to the site multiple times a day, and we need to use Percolate’s analysis of feed sources to measure whether our initial editors have enough topical variety to avoid homogenous sharing

• Percolate will help our editors in making sharing more frictionless

• We need a way to stop duplicate content from being posted

• We need to preserve that content’s original categories/tags so we can minimize the work we have to do to identify content

• We need a design to handle that incoming content and best show off video/image content

• We need to track how shared the original content is to value it for our readers

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PERCOLATE

WORDPRESS

SOCIAL FEEDSAND BLOG RSS

USED BY EACH EDITOR

WHATCONSUMESMECOMMUNITY

SOCIAL

SHARING

DATA

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• First and foremost, BuzzFeed publishes a huge amount of fresh content each day, this is a must if we’re to be successful

• They’ve created a category system voted on by the community, in a vernacular that’s driven by reaction, not content category (e.g. LOL, cute, win, etc.), we should explore categories like this for our flow content (awe, service, wha?)

• The content is presented with social context, how popular it is, how it is being spread, there’s lots of social proof to why you should pay attention

• Content is an opportunity for performance, and Buzzfeed asks for reactions, responses, and contributions that are community rated

• The design balances easy scanning and yet entices the user to click on stories

BuzzFeed Does Flow Better Than Most

LONGER FORM BRILLIANCE WORTH BOOKMARKING FOR LATER

Stock Content

Stock content represents long-reads or deep dives on specific questions or topics. There is usually some topicality, but the value in the article goes far beyond its reflection on current events. Our job is to court writers (like HuffPo) that will occasionally provide valuable stock content, writers that represent a wide spectrum of opinions and industries.

Challenges inherent to Stock content:

• In a site dominated by Flow content, Stock can be easily overlooked, our design must break Stock content out of the time-based deluge of Flow

• We need to provide a valuable incentive to Stock content writers to put their content on our platform instead of their own (a larger audience is a good start)

• The design of Stock content article pages must entice the reader to dive deep and break out of the short-attention span we may have rewarded with Flow content

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ICONOCLAST WITH A FOLLOWING

SEEKING WRITERS THAT ARE A(N):

ENTERTAINER AND EDUCATOR

LONG FORM THINKER THAN CAN ENTICE EVEN THE MOST SHORT FORM READER

RABBIT HOLE DIVER AND TOUR GUIDE

PULPIT PREACHER AND COMMUNITY ORGANIZER

CREATING LONG-TERM VALUE, BOOKMARKS, SHARING, AND RE-VISITS

Publishing Stock Content

• Our Stock writers need their bios/photos on the site and our first writers need to be of the caliber to attract other writers

• Our article pages must be the most legible and engaging experience on the web

• We need to drive the use of comments to foster a true dialog with our writers, to make their content even more valuable

• We need to work with our writers to identify innovative editorial ideas (e.g. tap two writers to do an open debate on a controversial topic, give them each a day to craft their responses, make it last a week and let people vote on arguments - call it “Head to Head”)

• We could give Stock writers access to our editors to pitch ideas and get immediate feedback

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AWorkingLibrary.comOne of the Most Readable Sites on the Web

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AtRoundtable.comCreating New Models of Conversation

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FUNCTIONALITY STRATEGY

CREATING UTILITY AND ADDICTION

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WE NEED INNOVATIVE

FUNCTIONALITY THAT WILL

ELEVATE THE SITE BEYOND A

BLOG OR CONTENT PORTAL.

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FUNCTIONALITY THAT PUTS OUR WEALTH OF CONTENT TO

WORK, CREATING VALUE BEYOND DISTRACTION.

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INTRODUCING:

THE INSPIRATION BOARD

QUICKLY ASSEMBLING AND SHARING INSPIRATION

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The Inspiration Board

• Purpose: to make our content archive actionable and our site more valuable

• Desired Outcome: The next innovative product idea facilitated by our tool, inspired by our content, and made by people in our community

• Use Case: a user is working on a project developing mobile tools for health care patients, she opens our tool, searches “mobile health care” and is given a stream of content we think is related to those terms (she sorts the content by popularity and social filters), based on the content she drags into her workspace we can suggest even more accurate content. She then visually clusters content based on her needs, adding content we may be missing by giving a URL (we then add it to our content archive), and she adds notes to pieces of content. She then invites her co-workers in to her workspace and they begin asynchronously ideating based on the content in front of them and are able to vote and comment on each other’s ideas

COMPFIGHT

MEETS

MINDMEISTER

MEETS

GOOGLE MODERATOR

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IN ADDITION TO UTILITY, WE SHOULD EXPERIMENT WITH SMALL MECHANISMS THAT

REFLECT AND REWARD PARTICIPATION.

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WE HATE THE G WORD. BUT. IF AN ACTION CAN

MAKE THE USER EXPERIENCE BETTER AND OUR SITE MORE VALUABLE TO THE USER, WE SHOULD MAKE THAT ACTION ADDICTIVE AND REWARDING.

TO IDENTIFY AND REWARD OUR MOST ACTIVE VISITORS

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Making Reading Addictive

• Behaviors the site should track and reward for readers: reading pieces of content, commenting, rating other comments, sharing content in social media, we should tick up points in the corner of the site and nudge users to register to claim the points they’ve already accrued

• Feedback: give the user better content, show users what topics they read most, how liked their comments are, and a leaderboard of readers and commenters per topic

• Rewards: the ability to send in links to the editors, visibility on the site, specialist recognition (content or comments), the ability to be invited to be a community manager, editor, or a stock content author

• Future Vision: create community blogs that users have to earn a right to use that editors can scan and decide what to elevate to homepage/category level placement

TO IDENTIFY AND REWARD OUR MOST ACTIVE EDITORS & WRITERS

Making Publishing Addictive

• Behaviors the site should track for Editors/Writers: amount of content published per time period, number of saves of that content, number of shares, number of comments, overall score of comments per article

• Feedback: all of the above, show which categories are being under nourished by fresh content (nudge the editor to hunt down/share more of it), chart frequency of content with frequency of visits, track comment frequency on stock content with frequency of visits(nudge writers to stay more active)

• Rewards: identify favorite editors/writers per content category, elevate editors to writers based on community popularity

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WARNING FOR THE FUTURE: POINTS ARE ALL

FUN AND GAMES UNTIL THEY CREATE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES AND DISTRACT US FROM OUR ORIGINAL MISSION.

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A QUICK NOD TO BUSINESS STRATEGY

REINFORCING THE NETWORK

THOU SHALT NOT HARM THE USER’S EXPERIENCE

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Ways to Pay for the Site Without Serving Ads

• Kickstart each phase of the site

• Charge for the Inspiration Board once it’s a viable platform, limit free access to 1-2 boards or introduce premium features, charge for the tablet experience as it’s likely to be the most effective and engaging use

• Package the Stock content semi-annually and sell as eBook

• Job board

• Host paid meet-ups, workshops, or full bore conferences centered around unleashing creativity

• Make our revenue needs transparent and create donation goals to keep the site ad-free or invite readers to suggest monetization strategies

BEING GOOD WEB CITIZENS AND NOT SPARKLY WEB VAMPIRES

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We Must Respect and Reward The Sites That Keep Us Fed

• Above all, we have an obligation to the sites that supply our Flow content to not reproduce their content in its entirety and to send our readers their way for the full story

• We should also have the ability to block content from a specific source if that site owner requests it

• We should create a list of the top sites we link to and make that visible and transparent, we should also think of ways to promote those site owners (on-site interviews, bios), we could even show which sites are climbing the charts

• We should never be satisfied with how we reward our favorite sites, we can always do more or be more creative in how we show our appreciation

IN THE WILD, OBSCENE EVENT WE TURN A PROFIT

Building a Shared Destiny

• We believe that participation should be rewarded in kind, with that in mind, we’d like to investigate a Worker’s Co-Op business model, where everyone earns a say and a stake in the future of the business

• We need to consider levels of participation, the effort required, the value created, and the stake and say that warrants

• We need to reward the development partners willing to take a gamble on our vision as well, and find a relationship model that keeps them around and interested to evolve the site based on use

• We need to explore liability under this model, especially where copyright and intellectual property are concerned (success on the web usually comes with lawsuits)

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TO REALIZE THIS CRAZY DREAM OF OURS

High Level Steps Forward

• Recruit initial Editorial team and court Stock Writers

• Work with Percolate to build a test environment to evaluate content, design, and ease of use

• Find development partner(s) to scope/plan/phase/attack initial site and Inspiration Board product

• Investigate worker’s co-op model and explore compensation rates

• Raise any necessary capital to get teams moving, lean heavily on early supporters to pass the collection plate

• Focus on site mechanics, feedback mechanisms, and build processes/teams to iterate and adapt quickly to what users actually do

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THANK YOU– BUD CADDELL –