distributing content with bodega

In my last blog entry I wrote about how to publish content with Bodega. This is separate from distributing that same content, and the reason for that has its roots in some rather straightforward economics which I won't go into here for fear of boring everyone to death. Perhaps on a later day if people are interested, but today we're going to look at the process of distributing content.

Audiences

The easiest way to grasp how Bodega goes about things is to think in terms of audiences. Creators and publishers of digital works are on the lookout for an audience, people who want what they are making. The currently dominant method for finding an audience is similar to horse ranching, old school style.

Picture if you will: The plains are full of horses that travel in smaller or larger herds. These horses roam where they want and do what they want in their own happy, wild way. They are of no use to the rancher in this format, however, so he sends out a group of cowboys to round up these wild horses, put them in small fenced enclosures and then tame them through a method referred to as "breaking". The rancher then carefully tends his ever growing herd of broken horses within the bounds of his ranch, claiming that these horses are now his. Would-be horse owners (including other ranchers) can buy his horses or go catch and break their own wild specimens. How wonderful and romantic.

Today most distribution is based on the concept of a captive audience, which is a slightly kinder sounding phrase for describing the process of rounding up people's attention, forcing them into corrals (or as they are sometimes called "walled gardens") and then guarding the amount of attention they've managed to capture. This audience is then sold to creative types (or the people who represent them) as a way to get their stuff to people. Maybe even make a buck or two in the process if you're lucky.

If it sounds like a tough business, it is. It also has a very strange side-effect that I believe is generally unintentional: it makes it increasingly difficult for small audiences and self-representing creators to find what they are looking for. The Big Rancheros are just trying to make their business successful, what happens to the minnows is not much their concern.

Bodega tries to reimagine how the distribution process might work by adding a neutral party into the midst of all that machinery. Instead of the distributor also owning the catalog, the catalog in Bodega is managed by the warehouse team ... but the warehouse does not engage an audience. The stores, which pull content from the warehouse, do that.

Distribution in Bodega is done in an open market (though we've only scratched surface of possibilities there, to be honest) and each distributor ends up aggregating their audience with all the other audiences from the perspective of a content creator or publisher. This makes it as realistic for small audiences as big audiences to be serviced and for independent creators, even those focused on very tightly constrained themes, to find audience as well.

Distribution is a part of the life-cycle, not another life-form

We don't much believe in dualities of convenience, and this is reflected in Bodega. When you become a participant with a Bodega warheouse, you create partnerships. It might be a partnership of just you, or it might be a partnership of you and your 10,000 best friends. The Warehouse doesn't manage this: you do. A partner may publish content into the warehouse, and that same partner may also distribute content from the warehouse.

This is common sense, really: if you write books and make them available in eBook format, you may wish to make them available for download and purchase on your website. In doing so, you are a distributor, albeit distributing your own goods. At the same time on the other side of the virtual world, another Bodega partner group with a completely different audience to yours may also be distributing your eBooks. You get the fee (if any) you put on your goods, but you no longer must build intentional relationships with others for distribution to their audience.

Distribution is therefore an equal part of the life-cycle of created goods, rather than a means of control.

Designing a store

Stores in Bodega are collections of tags. As a store owner, the first question you need to answer is: What kind of content do I want to make available here? Next: How do I want that content arranged? 

For the Plasma Active Add Ons store we decided we wanted to start with the following content:

• books from Project Gutenberg
• wallpapers
• applications
• desktop widgets

So those became our top level categories, or in Bodega store-speak, "channels". Under the books channel, we created sub-channels for books organized by author, by title and by topic. Under those, the books are grouped alphabetically. (There are well over 40k of them, so such grouping is necessary). Those last channels were defined using tags, just like assets are described. So one of the channels has the following tags associated with it:

• author: project gutenberg
• type: book
• descriptive: author last name starts with 'A'

Bodega then does its magic and automatically organizes all the assets that match those tags into that channel. Yes, this means you can arrange things however you wish, have assets appear in more than one place, etc. It also means you set up your store definition and content put into the warehouse automagically shows up in your store structure. You can, of course, have as many stores as you want; virtual real estate is surprisingly cheap.

Since you control the store presentation, you can define things like content ratings to be carry or geographic focus. The warehouse stays out of those decisions as it's a final presentation question for the store owning partner.

I can haz curation?

The curious may ask "what prevents someone from just tagging their stuff as a Project Gutenberg book?" the answer is deliciously simple: that specific tag is owned by the Project Gutenberg parter. As a result, only the get to use it to describe assets. So you can't just tag your stuff with someone else's identifying tags. Other tags, like "author last name starts with 'A'" or the content rating tags are shared (not owned) so everyone can use them.

The truly curious may then say: "So, can I own a tag that only I can put on other people's assets, and then use that for curating content?" Answer: yes. This feature is not neatly exposed in the management application yet (it will be soon), but each and every partner which engages in distribution gets a "Signed off by" tag created for them which they can use for this process.

So while people may be throwing content into the warehouse, if you really care enough to do so you can go through and do curation. Using tags. Because everything must use tags. ;)

Business models

Partners who publish things to the warehouse set a base price for those assets. Distributors define a rate to add onto that base price. That mark-up goes to the store owner as profit as an incentive (and a thank-you) for bringing that content to their audience.

It's just like the Big Rancheros, only without the fences holding the horses in so they can be broken and then treated like cattle. Run free!

Location, location, location

So where can you set up a store? That's entirely up to you. Store structures are shown to people using a Bodega client, such as the Plasma Active Add Ons store. Since the Bodega warehouse is its own independent entity, it does not actually itself render the user interface of the stores. It just provides the API for clients, or "storefronts", to do so.

This means that you can put a Bodega storefront in the middle of your cool video game in a way that blends seamlessly. You can use it to deliver add-ons to your desktop or mobile application. You can put your storefront in a webapp on a consumer device like a network router, a PVR or a weather station kit (to pick three strange things). You can use it to show a store on your website. You decide where the store goes.

We have created a C++ library and a QML based application that makes that easy for people using Qt in their products as we do. A stand-aloneweb client is in the works, and we're happy to work with anyone who'd like to render a storefront in the language, toolkit or medium of their choice.

We did it this way because as the partner with an audience, you know how to best reach your audience, and one-client-does-not-fit-all. You don't even have to let on that it's Bodega in the background. It's a level of customization that puts to shame most other stores' claims to being "brandable".

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publishing content with bodega

The other day I wrote about Bodega, an open market for digital content. It was impossible to get everything into one blog entry, however, as Bodega engages with people in three different ways: as consumers, as creators and as distributors. In that previous entry, I focused on what Bodega is to you when you are interacting with it as a consumer. Today we'll be exploring Bodega from the perspective of a content creator.

Warehouses and Stores

As a creator, Bodega strives to empower you. Most of the digital content systems that currently exist have you give your content to a publisher then controls where it can be delivered on your behalf. Unfortunately, this usually means that when you upload something to a specific online store, that becomes the only place people can get it from. 

This is actually a fairly odd result if we compare it to how things works in the atom-based economy. Out in the physical world, people make things and they tend to pass it through a wholesaler to distributes it to multiple retailers. Rarely is the creator tied into any sort of exclusivity with the wholesaler, and retailers tend to have choices in their wholesale partner. Today's online content systems work a lot more like Walmart: warehouser, retailer and often looking for exclusivity. Walmart's model is good for Walmart, but often not so much for others.

With Bodega, there are no exclusivities, no accidental platform lock-in. You put your content in a digital warehouse where it sits with all the other things people have added to it. The warehouse is run by the server and its job is to orchestrate between creators and distributors. When you add content to the warehouse, a process we refer to as publishing, it becomes available for stores to display. The warehouse itself, however, is not the store itself.

What this means in practice is that you can publish your content in one place and multiple stores may choose to carry it. (Or not .. it is up to the store owner, but more on that in the next blog entry.) You may even choose to open a store for your own content. Consider the following scenarios:

Let's imagine a fellow named Joe. Joe writes technical books covering software he knows quite well. He'd like to publish his work, but his choices are limited. He can put it on RainForest, the giant bookseller website, and let them take a large portion of the profit. This doesn't seem very fair because most of the people who want Joe's books know about them because Joe promotes his work into the relevant communities. RainForest is just a transaction provider at this point, but making money as if they were a retailer. So instead Joe puts his books into a Bodega warehouse and then opens a Bodega store on his website. Without having to handle transactions, downloads or anything like that, Joe is now selling his books and keeping nearly the entire sales price. That itself may be good enough, but then the real magic happens: Make·Play·Live's store which can be accessed on Plasma Active devices, includes Joe's books. Joe may have no idea what Make·Play·Live or Plasma Active is, but his books have found another outlet. Joe may decide to co-promote some books from his fellow authors, and selects some of them to show up in his store on his website as well; Joe makes a small commission on those sales as well .. but more on that in the next blog entry.

Now let's meet Alice, who is a software developer targeting Linux. She'd like to put her software in an "App Store" but sees that there is one option but it only services one distribution and doesn't seem to turn much volume. She bemoans the fact that even though her software runs on all sorts of distributions, there's no way to get it there without somehow getting her application in each distribution's package management system, and even then it really is not the same user experience as an App Store provides. So Alice decides to put her applications into the Bodega warehouse, and since any distribution can have a store that uses that warehouse her app is no longer stranded in a "one distro" solution. Multiple Linux distributions can provide access to an entire App Store, and by bringing together these dozens and dozens of smaller markets, Alice can start to see distribution reach that makes sense.

Oh, and those distros also have Joe's books .. because they're awesome too. This is the next step in the evolution of online content distribution mechanics, and it is driven by the simple idea that the store should not also be warehouse.

You choose the type, you describe your content

When you publish content into the warehouse, you have a lot of control over what happens at that point. This starts with the type of content you are uploading. So if you are publishing an application you might see this:

It knows to ask you for the platforms it supports, category (e.g. 'Education' or 'Communication'), a content rating (Everyone, Adult, etc) as well as screenshots and icons. Great! But what if you are publishing a book?

Aha! Now it has fields for front and back covers, and skips the platform thing. The magic here is that this can be done for any kind of content. You can add your own tag of type "assetType" and then use that for your content. The warehouse managers can then promote your type even further by defining the tagging and image rules. (In future, I'd like to have even this step able to be done by content partners.)

Bodega has no internal bias as to what kind of content it hosts. So if you want to publish Battle for Wesnoth add-ons to a Bodega warehouse, you can.

Beyond these basics of type and essential tagging rules, you can then go about tagging your content with all relevant tags. There are mimetype tags, language tags, descriptive tags, genre tags, author tags ... these tags help stores know how to organize things into nice arrangements and people can search by these tags, so it is quite important to be accurate and comprehensive. When you add a tag that does not exist, it is automatically created for you. You can add, edit and remove tags at any time.

More on this process can be found in the Manager app documentation.

Setting your price

Pricing is obviously part of describing your content, but I wanted to cover it separately since it often is the source of some confusion, so I'll try to be extra clear.

You don't have to put prices on your items. You are welcome to make your things available at no cost.

If you do set a price, that's what you get. Store and warehouse spiffs are added to that. They do not come out of the price you set. You are defining how much you want. The final price includes the store markup, and typically that means you end up with 70-80% of the final sale price.

You can sell things which are licensed under Free culture terms. Just because your software is GPL'd or your wallpaper is CC BY-SA does not mean you can't put a price on it. People buy bottled water all the time. Why? Convenience. Bodega is a convenience for people, and on top of that .. a lot of people also get the idea that just because something is "libre" does not mean you didn't put effort into it and so it should be "gratis".

Otherwise, there isn't much to say about pricing.

Partners

An interesting feature of Bodega is the concept of "partners". While you use your normal everyday Bodega account to log into the manager application, to start publishing content you have to create or join a partner. Partners allow multiple people to work together on content, both for publishing and for stores.

You don't have to ask for permission to create a partner: it's as simple as going to the Partners tab and hitting "New Partner". To get going with publishing and distribution (more on that in the next blog entry), you hit the "Request" link; this is there to ensure that the terms of service are understood and accepted and so that people don't use Bodega as a personal backup solution. ;) Typically requests are approved by the warehouse the same day.

With a Partner set up, you can assign different roles to different people within the partnership. These roles include:

• Partner Manager: Partner information, members and role assignment
  
• Store Manager: Creating and managing stores
  
• Content Creator: Creating and managing assets
  
• Validator: Content approval and curation
  
• Account Manager: Managing the financial aspects of the partner (e.g. bank accounts)

You can be a member of more than one partner, and there is no limit to the number of people in a partnership. If you're a one-person "partner", then you get all these roles to yourself (automatically, in fact). For cooperations, however, this role splitting can be very handy.

Following the action

The manager application also provides access to a variety of statistics so you can follow the success of your assets: how many downloads, how many purchases, how much earned. Using the nice built-in graphs you can compare multiple assets and control the time frame you are looking at.

Each asset you upload also gets a tag in the discussions forum and it becomes available for rating by other Bodega participants. We'll be adding to these tools over time as we feel this full communication cycle is really important to both creators and consumers alike.

Ok, but how does this all come together?

So far we've looked at the benefits for people using Bodega to get content and people adding content to the Bodega warehouse. How does this all come together? The missing piece of the puzzle is the storefront. The next blog entry will cover how all of this comes together to allow content to be integrated into websites, on mobile devices, in desktop applications, into games and .. well .. whatever else you might imagine. See you then!

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bodega: it's all about the participants

When describing what Bodega is to people for the first time, I usually start with the following phrase: "It is an open market for digital content." We usually then spend the next good while unpacking the meaning in those eight small words. In this blog entry, I'm going to focus on what that phrase means from the perspective of those experiencing it from the consumer side.

Freeing ourselves from old notions

When people hear the word "market" they tend to think of "money". When they hear "consumer" they also tend to think of "money" and related things like "marketing", "advertising", "sales". Those words are definitely all related, but by themselves they are incomplete.

According to Wikipedia, a market is "one of the many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange." This is precisely how we use the term "market" in relation to Bodega. It is a digital place people can come together to engage in exchange. Whether that includes money or not is really up to those involved.

One of our (not-so-)hidden agendas with Bodega is to reclaim concepts that ought to be integral to that special, and I'd say sacred, set of interactions that occur when people coming together to share and trade. It is not just about money and salesmanship, it's also about the interaction and the human flexibility.

A focus on people

As we examine what Bodega offers, you may notice a recurring theme: a focus on people as humans rather than agents of consumption or value production. When you create an account with a Bodega warehouse (I'll get into what a 'warehouse' is exactly in the next blog entry), you are creating a participant account. 

As a big believer in the idea that the words we use support the thoughts we think, we made sure to avoid terms such as "user", "customer" or "consumer" in the source code that drives Bodega. So the database does not have a listing of "users", for instance; your account appears in a table called "people". The idea of people as humans is deeply embedded in our thinking and the creative process behind Bodega.

In fact, when you create an account with Bodega you can use that to immediately log in to the management application (more about that in the next blog entry as well) and quickly get on your way adding content to the system. There are no walls between participating as a consumer and participating as a producer. That is why we refer to all who use the system as participants.

Privacy and other important rights

Bodega is entirely Free software. The client-side C++ library is licensed under the LGPL, everything else is released under the GPL. That means you never have to wonder what we're doing, nor are you ever held hostage to a central group. You can install Bodega yourself and host your own world of stuff. In fact, we hope that happens. We see a huge potential for hosted Bodega for schools, government agencies and even companies.

Having things Free software licensed is important, but it is not everything. Make·Play·Live, our free culture brand, is hosting a complete Bodega infrastructure open to use for all. Our privacy policy is simple: we don't share your information with anyone without your express approval. Your data is yours.

All data transmission is encrypted (we use https extensively), your passwords are securely hashed and if you register a payment method such as a credit card we don't even hold on to that on our servers: it is deposited with a certified and audited 3rd party (Stripe) whose business is the security and privacy of that data. We're also going to be bringing online direct payment microtransactions and other forms of privacy respecting payment.

Variety is the spice of life

Bodega is not an app store. It isn't a music store. It isn't a book store. It isn't a service activation system. It isn't a community sharing system. It is all of those things rolled into one.

You can browse and search (full text!) all kinds of content. You can even create your own kinds of content (more on that in the next blog entry). We could identify no reason why the place you find applications shouldn't also be the place you look for wallpapers or books or ..

This also means that it works just as well for, say, add-ons for a network router as it does for promoting books on a website as it does for finding and installing the newest games available. There are no platform requirements or assumptions built into the system. This is intentional as we saw so many Free software projects inventing and re-inventing ways to delivery application data, game levels, artwork and more. It just doesn't make any sense.

To us the idea of a Store(tm) seemed very outmoded and unnecessary. The only reason we could identify for there being an Android Store, an Apple App Store or an Ubuntu Store was control. Well, we value freedom and sharing more than we value our ability to control your every experience. That has allowed us to create a platform-neutral system that can still be shaped to a platform's precise needs. (More on that in the blog entry after the next one ..)

So instead of juggling a dozen different interfaces with a dozen different accounts and a dozen different ways of using an add-ons system ... Bodega opens the doors for a consistent experience. Ironically, perhaps, that is only possible because we acknowledge that variety is the spice of life.

Conversations

There are many ways to exchange value in Bodega. The most basic one is simply through use and appreciation. People who make their creative works available via a Bodega warehouse can follow usage and feedback given to them, which for many people is a huge part of the reason they engage in such exchanges.

People can track beyond simply counting the number of times their things have been downloaded or (if there is a price on the item) purchased, Bodega has a few tricks up its sleeve. One is ratings. Most people are familiar with the common, and utterly useless, 5 star rating system seen in most online stores. This xkcd comic sums it up perfectly:

Instead of a single meaningless "star review", each type of content in Bodega has a unique set of attributes which you can use to rate an item in the store. Applications, for instance, feature the following attributes:

Games have attributes related to game play, wallpapers related to artistic qualities, books about the writing style and storyline .. you get the idea. This lets you provide useful feedback to the publisher, and allows the person whose item it is to understand better how people are perceiving their work.

You also do not have to leave a comment to leave a rating, or leave a rating to make a comment. This is a baffling misfeature we noticed in many other content systems out there. Of course, discussion is important as it communicates things simple ratings never can. Being Free software people, our first thought was to look around and see what kind of good discussion software existed already. We'd rather re-use than re-invent, after all. What we found was Discourse. The Discourse team uses the phrase "Civilized Discourse Construction Kit" to describe their forum software, and it is a thoroughly modern affair .. not to mention quite beautiful.

When you create a Bodega account, you can also use that same login to visit the Discourse forums. Immediate feedback and glancing at recent postings can also be done right from within the client software without having to go to a web browser. (That final bit of integration is currently sitting in a branch awaiting final merging for the next update.)

These forums are not the usual limited "leave a message" style affairs; they support fully threaded conversations with all the features we expect these days: private messages, being able to tag individuals in your comments, notifications of follow-ups and more. This is not about simply giving people a way to leave a 140 word message, but about actually engaging with each other.

Eventually we will provide integration with defect tracking and feature requests as well, making it a full life-cycle system.

Making a living

Many people simply want to share the things they create for no further reason than to share. This is a wonderfully human thing, and it's something we do ourselves every day as we create Free software. We also acknowledge that people need to and want to make a living. So Bodega supports the notion of paying for content.

Where Bodega diverges from the pack a bit is that money is not the currency. Instead, there is an in-system accounting mechanism based on points. In the Bodega install we host, you can buy points with money. Those points can be used to purchase items in the store that have a price. (How those prices are set will be covered in the next two blog entries.)

Used in other contexts, however, points might be handed out to students enrolled in a school, used as an incentive program in a company or .. just not used at all.

We will also be bringing tipping, pay-what-you-want and subscription systems in future updates. I'm even toying with providing a built-in crowd-funding feature. Best of all, because it is Free software, you can participate in helping define the mechanisms of trade.

.. oh, and you can download things and stuff

Of course, all of this is there to make it possible for you to browse, search, explore and ultimately get stuff. What we've talked about so far might seem a tad complex, but it is all hidden beneath the surface. The actual user experience is remarkably calm, simple and straight-forward.

Our goal has been create something simple to use and enjoyable to experience, but with a lot of intention and meaning behind every aspect of the system. It is like an ocean: wonderful to float around on, immensely deep.

Even when it comes to the "download things and stuff" bit there is this signature of care and thought. Downloading software, for instance, integrates with the system's package management. On Linux systems, we use PackageKit to meld with the operating system. You can even have software installed from a package repository .. without even knowing what a package repository is, if you must.

Other kinds of packages similar are handled by their 'native' systems: Plasma packages are installed with plasmapkg, eBooks go into your books folder, etc. If using the Plasma Active Add Ons app, it even integrates seamlessly with the semantic desktop system to transparently index the books, music and types of content you choose to access. All of this happens transparently and efficiently.

Updates are also handled in a similar fashion. When a new version of the content appears (be it an application, a book or whatever), you receive a notification in the notification area. Of course, if the application has been installed using the package manager from a repository, Bodega leaves it to the integrated software updater that comes with the operating system to handle it. Perfect harmony.

I'm sure you have questions

If you have questions, comments, ideas or other feedback, please leave them in the comments section below. I'll be hosting a Google+ Hangout at the end of this week where I will be gathering up your feedback and questions and answering them live, though you will be able to catch it later at your convenience on Youtube.

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freedom and content distribution

Tomorrow I will be creating stable branches in the bodega-server, bodega-client and bodega-webapp-manager repositories. This branch, to be named v0.1, will mark the first stable release of the content distribution system we've developed alongside Plasma Active.

Tomorrow will also see the first in a week-long series of daily blog entries about Bodega. These entries will detail what Bodega can do for you, exploring various use cases including that of someone:

• browsing, searching for and downloading content
• publishing content for download and/or sale
• creating a store front and including that in an application, website, device or other product

Each entry will be split into a high-level tour of functionality that focuses on benefits, followed by a more technical look under the hood of that feature set.

Below are some screenshots of various pieces of the system as they stand right now to whet your appetite. If you wish to dive in a little further before tomorrow, you can visit the Bodega web service API docs and take a look at the draft documentation I've been working on for the management interface.

A Plasma Active client

Content management dashboard

Integrated forums

Live API docs

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