In the early days of my internet experience, I worked for Howard Tullman at Tunes.com/Rollingstone.com and Stuart Carlin at Machinetools.com. Though the firms were very different (industries, customers, revenue models, products, etc.), the “3 Cs of the Internet” were present in each firm’s strategy - commerce, community, and content.

These last two elements have formed an especially tight relationship of their own in recent years and this new partnership has forever changed the publishing and media industries. From music and movies to newspapers and magazines, the combination of community and content have introduced a new production model - user-created content - that is taking greater and greater market share.

I was reminded of the power of this new model when I saw a piece in Advertising Age highlighting that the Huffington Post is more valuable than many old-line newspaper publishers in the U.S. From the article by Michael Learmouth:

As long-rumored, The Huffington Post took $25 million in new funding at a $100 million valuation. It’s a healthy sum given the company has aggregated a huge audience - 8.8 million people a month, accordng to Quantcast - primarily on links to content it does not produce (newspaper stories) or pay for (columns).

The funding means Arianna Huffington’s news blog is now considered more valuable by its backers than quite a few publicly traded newspaper companies, such as Lee Enterprises, owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and 52 other papers (market cap: $36 million), A.H. Belo, owner of the Dallas Morning News and the Providence Journal (market cap: $35 million), and Media General, owner of the Tampa Tribune and Richmond Times-Dispatch (market cap: $34.6 million).

It puts Huffington Post in the same league as McClatchy Corp., owner of the Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald and 28 other dailies (market cap: $150 million).

Of course, there are also huge publishing/media firms who are struggling horribly - including Time Warner, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune Company - and appear to be shrinking by the day. They too have no idea how to combine community and content and they cannot just jettison their industrial era infrastructures, and mindsets.

The article briefly mentions this new production model when it highlights Huffington’s links and unpaid columns. This of course is simple blogging and is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of new content models based on communities.

While Huffington started with Arianna’s huge rolodex and brand, there are big advantages and opportunities for entrepreneurs in the media space. The campus, of course, presents unique opportunities given its diversity, technical infrastructure, and media behaviors of its inhabitants. The most obvious and famous campus entrepreneur in this space is Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

The campus offers a great place to target specific “communities” and provide ways for them to spend time together and share content. From photos and videos to status updates and group membership, Facebook has allowed its community to share content in endless ways. It has also allowed advertisers and application providers to join in. Of course, Facebook, like many products, services, and activities, has moved way beyond the campus.

Entrepreneurs looking for opportunities in an economy full of bleak news and shrinking spending take note, the combination of community and content continues to present low barriers to entry, low capital requirements, and growing markets demanding innovative products and services.

Here’s Part 1 and Part II of my Take 5, CIUT 89.5FM Toronto interview, hosted by David Peterson. That’s David and me in the studio on the University of Toronto campus.

Here’s a clip from my appearance on CBC’s The Hour.

Click here for a clip of me on The Agenda (h/t: Matt).

David Sirota does a very nice job summarizing what launching a book feels like (via Matt Yglesias).

I received a copy of my new book …in the mail today from my publisher … Opening the package was half anti-climactic, and half frightening … in three weeks, it is going to be out there for the
world to read. That’s a little scary, because to date, almost nobody
has read it, so I really have no idea what to expect as a reaction … And this
says nothing of the fear of how the book will perform. That is the
great unknown that haunts every writer who wants to continue to try to
eke out a living as a writer - every project is based on your last
performance. How well your current work does in the marketplace often
dictates whether you will be given another opportunity to write in the
future (this is why it is so important to buy books from writers you
like, and buy magazines that you support - your purchase is a way to
make sure that those writers and publications continue to produce in
the future).

From my first book …
I’ve learned to get used to some of these feelings - but I’m told by
more seasoned writers that you never really get used to it…ever.
Writing - and media in general (especially progressive media) - is a
very tough business. It requires regular 16 hour days to scratch and
claw into the debate. This book represents 2 years of those 16 hour
days - so I guess it’s natural to feel a little nervous …

Personally, I find the instantaneous, uber-connected Internet world compounds this massively; plus the fact that growing numbers of us are simultaneously launching books and doing media and touring in multiple markets worldwide. I figure since writing is takes so much time and effort, it makes a great deal of sense to go out there and promote books. I actually find it somewhat enjoyable and relatively easy to talk to the media about my ideas - compared to writing, and aside from Colbert , that is. The two biggest issues I grapple with are:  when and how to respond to critics (do I respond to all of them, some of them, sequentially, as a group?) and how best to use this blog to promote conversation around my books without seeming - well -self-absorbed and heavy-handed.

Your thoughts?

Here’s an interview by Pittsburgh based reporter with Bill Steigerwald. I’m in good company, Steigerwald interviews David McCullough in the same issue and did one of the best interviews on record with Jane Jacobs.

Q: What’s the key message of your new book and who did you write it for?

A: I’m a working class kid. My father worked in a factory. He
told me, “Rich, study hard. You don’t want to work in a factory like
Dad. Get a good education, get a good job. That’s going to be the key
to your success in life.” My mother said, “Your Dad’s a really smart
guy. I love him to death … I could have married these more successful
guys who I went to high school with. But I picked him. Picking the
right spouse or life partner is key to your happiness.”

What my parents never told me, and what I’ve learned in 25
years of research, including all the years I spent in Pittsburgh at
Carnegie Mellon University, is that there are three legs of the
triangle — the job and career you take; the family and loved ones that
surround you; and where you live.

I wrote this book for young people graduating college, for
young families having children, for empty-nesters whose kids are
leaving the house, to say to them, “You owe it to yourself to think a
little bit harder and a little bit more systematically about the place
you choose to live — and make the best possible decision you can.”

Q: Why is where you choose to live more important today than it was 30 or 40 years ago?

A: My earlier work and my ongoing research forced me to confront
this fact, this irony: At the time when’d you believe that advances in
transportation and communications technology — the telephone, the
Internet, the personal computer, the wireless revolution — would
flatten the world and make it just as easy to telecommute to work or
basically live wherever you want and plug-and-play into the global
economy, we’re confronted by the fact that about 60 percent of all of
the world’s economic activity and more than 90 percent of the world’s
innovations occur in about 25 mega-regions — for example, the
Boston-Washington-New York corridor and the great corridor that goes
from Chicago to Pittsburgh. So we were confronted by the fact that
place remains an incredibly important economic unit.

What I said in the book is that there are two things going on
at the same time. On one hand, the world is becoming flatter, as Tom
Friedman of the New York Times suggests. More places can play. But the
way we are globalizing is through these “spiky” places. The world is
also becoming spiky and more clustered…. Certain urban locations are
more important. Just to make this simple: It’s not like China and India
are our competitors in the United States. Our competitors are really
Shanghai and Bangalore. So when we look at the world we have to look at
the cities or mega-regions that are competing, not just the countries.

Q: You say it’s easier than ever to exercise our geographic choice.
How do we make that choice — what are some of the things we should be
looking for at different times of our lives?

A: The book includes a chapter called “The Mobile and the
Rooted.” What I say is that we really have to confront this. For many
people, staying in the place they live and around loved ones and in the
community they grew up in is incredibly important. Many people choose
to stay. But what I say is that if we look at what we used to call
“upward mobility,” “socioeconomic mobility,” increasingly the ability
to achieve socioeconomic mobility turns on geographic mobility, because
economic opportunities are more specialized and more clustered …

Q: Is there a single most important caution you can offer to people who deliberatively choose where they are going to move?

A: . I think a lot of
people make these decisions intuitively. What this book tries to do is
say: “You can be a little bit smarter than your intuition. Your
intuition is giving you a lot of hunches that are right — go with it.
But just be a little bit more systematic. Pick a couple places to look
at. Go take a look at a location calculator like Bert Sperling’s
fantastic “Best Places” calculator. Get a list of 10 places. First of all, if your place isn’t
on there — whoa! But do a systematic comparison of three or five of them.

Nobody ever told me — a quote-unquote “expert” — that place
was important. And what we’ve come to find is that place is one of
these three big life decisions. If the book can push the role of place
up in this conversation about what is important to our lives, I think
it will have done its service. That’s the goal of the book — to simply
insert place into this ongoing conversation about what’s important –
not just as an economic category, not just as a sociological category,
but what’s important to real people’s lives.

Library Journal on Who’s Your City?:

Florida, Richard. Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life. Basic Bks: Perseus. Mar. 2008. c.304p. ISBN 978-0-465-00352-5. $26. ECON

If
you think that choosing a life partner or even finding the “ideal” job
are the two most important decisions you’ll ever make, Florida
(business & creativity, Rotman Sch. of Management, Univ. of
Toronto; The Rise of the Creative Class) would like to add
still a third consideration: choosing a place to live. He has done
extensive research on the significance of one’s location, marshaling
extensive data to support his thesis that “where we live affects every
aspect of our lives,” with the caveat that if this decision isn’t made
carefully, the consequences may adversely impact one’s life for years
to come. The book pulls together findings from vast amounts of research
to dissect the reasons why people opt to live where they do. Part of
the author’s focus is on various kinds of community types, such as
“Strollerville,” “Ethnic Enclave,” “Family Land” and others, weighing
the respective pros and cons of each. The last chapter offers a
ten-step framework, intended to “help people make better choices about
where to live.” Although the text is occasionally overloaded with
trendy demographic jargon, this thought-provoking and seminal work will
surely be studied, not only by scholars but more importantly by
consumers pondering a move. Following Florida’s advice should aid them
in that quest. Highly recommended for all libraries.—Richard Drezen, Washington Post/NYC Bureau

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the dizzy platinum blonde from “American Idol,� appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?� during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked:
“Budapest is the capital of what European country?� Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,� she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?� she
said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.�

From the New York Times review of Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Age of American Unreason.

What would Steven Johnson say?

Fast Company excerpts Who’s Your City?, here and here.

The pub date for the book is March 10th, but here is the first Q&A from U.S. News and World Report.

Choosing a Place to Live

Why it’s as important as picking a spouse.

A Q&A with Richard Florida

By Bret Schulte

The world is not flat, says Richard Florida, contrary to the bestselling book by New York Times writer Thomas Friedman. Florida, author of his own bestselling book, The Rise of the Creative Class,
and a professor of business and creativity at the University of
Toronto, argues that while Friedman is correct in saying that
technology has reshaped the world, it has not created a level playing
field. With newly accumulated data to back him up, Florida argues in
his upcoming book Who’s Your City? that the world is, in many
ways, spiky—with population, opportunity, innovation, and money
increasingly coalescing in metropolitan areas worldwide. That means
pursuing a career and staying close to family and friends are often at
odds. Deciding what makes you happy, he argues, must go hand in hand
with deciding where you want to live. Recently, Florida spoke with U.S. News. Excerpts:

What makes Friedman wrong?

I had this intuitive sense that the world wasn’t flat. I kind of knew
that globalization was pulled between these two forces: one that
spreads out, like factories, and the other, this compelling fact that
50 percent of people live in urban places. We found that distribution
of economic activity is even more concentrated than distribution of
population. Then we got data from the U.S. Patent Office that showed
where inventors are located, and then we combined that with data from
the world. We looked at distributions of innovations; they are even
more concentrated. So, in a sense, as you go up the ladder, the world
got more and more concentrated. Then this idea came to me that the
world is not flat. It’s spiky. That’s not to say that Tom Friedman is
wrong. I think he gets about half the equation right. A lot of things
in the world’s economy can be decentralized, but my hunch is those are
not the central thing to the world economy. The most important
dimensions of the world’s economy continue to concentrate.

If we can fly anywhere, call anywhere, videoconference anywhere, why is place so important?

Innovative people cluster together. When we do that we increase each
other’s productivity. A group of researchers at the Santa Fe Institute
call it an “urban metabolism.” As our cities grow they get faster and
faster, better and better, more and more innovative. Some don’t, and
they die. That’s why economic activity spikes, because of these
conglomerations of energy and talent. Jack White left Detroit where he
created the sound of the White Stripes to be part of the music
conglomeration of Nashville.

What does this mean for the economy?

The spikes of economic activity are spreading out. It’s not China we’re
competing with, it’s Shanghai. It’s not India we’re competing with,
it’s Bangalore. These countries are even spikier than the U.S. and
Europe.

In the book, you worry about the places that aren’t spiking.

The spikes are growing so high they’re leaving the valleys behind. We
don’t have a North-South conflict. It’s the world’s peaks versus the
world’s valleys, and that frankly bothers me.

You go so far as to call the spiky world “tricky and even treacherous.”

Right. We can see it in this election. It’s really giving rise to class
conflict. We are starting to see a backlash against cities, and a
backlash against people who live in them. Urban conglomerations are the
single most important thing to our competitiveness, yet people won’t
talk about it. And the second thing that worries me is we’re unable to
talk about those being left behind. We’re stuck in a stalemate. I would
like to see everyone live better.

So, how does all this relate to happiness?

The point of the book is to help people make better decisions. You have
to understand that economic activity isn’t spread out. So there’s a
trade-off we have to make between furthering our career and finding a
lifestyle that fits us. Being economically mobile can mean you
sacrifice all the rootedness in family relations.

How do we make the best decision?

We said calculators and quizzes only take you so far. So we said we’re
going to give you a 10-point list on how to place yourself. We say you
have to go talk to the people who live in a place, and you have to go
visit. If you don’t you’re bound to be disappointed. Correcting the
wrong place decision is on the border of correcting a wrong
relationship decision or employment decision. So you have to be careful
about it.

What factors matter most?

You have to say, “My career means this much to me; my lifestyle means
this much to me. I’m married with kids; I have to find schools. I’m
young and single, and I need to find partners.” You have to balance all
that. The book tries to give you a sense of how to do that.

Do people realize their happiness is closely linked to place?

Absolutely not. People don’t even think about it. But when you ask them
you begin to discover their place is a critical contributor to their
happiness. Generally speaking, place tends to the positive side of the
happiness ledger. That was surprising to us. When we asked people about
the source of stress in their life, place came in last. If you find a
place that fits you, it gives you more energy. People have always been
attracted to aesthetics. The other thing is infrastructure. Maybe you
like to go outside, or ride your bike. Those things are critically
important. What people are saying is they are not going to be fulfilled
in a place that just has a good pipe system. They want to live in a
place that gives them excitement and energy.

The Telegraph Journal reports:

Montreal-based marketing professor Francois Colbert … said he considers Florida’s work “junk,” among other less polite terms …  “This is bull—-,” said Colbert, who holds the Carmelle and Rémi Marcoux Chair in Arts Management at HEC Montreal. “The creative city doesn’t exist. Toronto will always be more creative than any city in Canada because it’s a big city.”

Temper, temper. Now, where exactly to start.  Maybe with the last bit.  My work actually says pretty clearly that all other things equal size is a significant advantage. Big city-regions can provide a greater range of options across the board - work, life-style, neighborhoods, diversity and what not.  But it also shows pretty clearly that mid-sized places like Austin or smaller ones like Madison or Boise or even Ann Arbor can do pretty well.  Our study of Montreal, with Kevin Stolarick and Lou Musante actually found it to be pretty much - well ….’er ….. “creative.”  And the terrific work of Dave McGranahan and Tim Wojan shows that a sizable fraction of smaller exurban and rural counties also have developed creative economies.

I offer a modest proposal. Academics need to be held to a higher standard of criticism. Criticism is a central element of the scientific method, which progresses through discovery, vetting, criticism, evidence and additional discovery and revision. To be effective, however, academic critics must do more than shoot from the hip - and yell and scream and stomp their feet  - because they don’t seem to like something or perhaps it doesn’t conform to their world-view. Academic criticism must be based on facts, empirical evidence, logic, and rational thought.

Is that really too much to ask?