Planting Liberally

One of the lower-profile sub-plots within the stimulus package debate was about the use of open standards in the smart grid.  The package sets aside $4.5 billion for the smart grid.  Although that's only a fraction of the total investment needed to build the smart grid - perhaps as little as 5 or 10% - it's still a big chunk of change, and the strings attached to that money by Congress will make a big difference in the evolution of the new grid.  So it's no surprise that smart meter builders tried to weigh in on open standards earlier this month.  An early version of the House bill required that utilities must use an Internet-based open protocol (meaning IP, almost certainly); a later version required "Internet-based or other open protocols and standards if available and appropriate."  A group of electricity meter providers sent the Senate a letter complaining about the IP-only language, saying that it would interfere with existing projects.  As far as I can tell, the final language is actually a bit weaker than the flexible "IP or something else" provision (from page 30 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act):

OPEN PROTOCOLS AND STANDARDS.—The Secretary shall require as a condition of receiving funding under this subsection that demonstration projects utilize open protocols and standards (including Internet-based protocols and standards) if available and appropriate.

Earlier this week, Secretary Chu said that he wants to start deploying smart grid standards, although his actual language left plenty of wiggle room on the question of IP versus other open standards.

Meanwhile, out in the field, the battle is already joined.  San Diego Gas and Electric announced earlier this month that it will start installing 2.3 million smart meters in its customers homes.  In a country with about 7 million smart meters in operation, that's a pretty hefty deployment.  The meters will be Itron OpenWay meters, built on the ZigBee standard (which is an alternative to IP); the rollout is expected in March of this year.  At around the same time, Google announced its PowerMeter project and eMeter announced a major new deal which will allow some Houston-area customers to better monitor their electricity consumption.

We are not far, I hope, from the point when smart grid technology becomes widely available - meaning not just that there are a lot of meters installed in a lot of homes, but also that the entry costs for small-scale entrepreneurs to build applications on top of the grid will be getting lower and lower.  As far as I can tell, there are no open source software projects for extracting data from smart meters, but smart meter start-up Tendril announced a new API for its products (which are, it appears, ZigBee-based) earlier this month.  Unfortunately, the API is currently only available to Tendril partners.  But I suspect that smart grid applications will open up significantly in the next year; I imagine that it won't be long before we see Facebook and iPhone applications for monitoring and calibrating residential electric consumption.

This is great news for the environment and the green economy, of course.  I also think it's great news for the progressive economy, because it means more opportunities for liberal entrepreneurs to profit from environmental protection, and more opportunities to cycle those profits through the progressive economy.

As the recession deepened over the last few months, one thing I've worried about (among plenty of other things) is the toll that it would take on the progressive movement.  It's no secret that the movement runs on a shoe-string; a single hacker attack is enough to take out a pretty significant chunk of the infrastructure running the progressive blogosphere.  It seems inevitable that a wallet-emptying recession will slowly drain the spending ability of progressives, and thereby drag down our nascent institutions.

The key weakness within the progressive movement's business plan (forgetting, for a moment, that the progressive movement isn't a single, cohesive organization, and that many organizations within the movement don't have anything like a business plan in any case), is that a large part of our revenue relies on donations.  In a recession, voluntary donations are the easiest things to cut from a household budget.  A further weakness is the massive amount of money that leaves the progressive ecosystem.  In five years, ActBlue has raised $88 million; some of that has gone to necessary expenses in progressive campaigns and is money well-spent, although no doubt a significant part of that money ends up in the pockets of anti-progressive political consultants.  And some of that money does return to the progressive ecosystem, in the form of advertisements in progressive blogs, for example.  But on the whole, the progressive blogosphere leaks donations like a sieve, meaning that even the flush years don't leave us with a lot left over for recessions.

Fortunately, I believe it is possible to address these weaknesses, and to help keep the lights on during the recession.  Conceptually, it's fairly simple: diversify our business plan beyond donations, and design mechanisms to keep recycle more money back through the progressive ecosystem.  The particulars are a bit more tricky, but below I'll outline a few possibilities for implementing these high-level solutions.  Other ideas are certainly welcome; feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Organized affiliate codes for progressive products

Many progressive blogs, and some organizations, already make money from affiliate marketing programs; probably the most well-known program along these lines is the Amazon Associates program.  Affiliate marketing programs like these generally fail to raise a lot of money for any one organization, because they don't generate a lot of sales.  At the same time, the money from sales usually touches only one, or sometimes two, progressive entities along the way - the author of a progressive book, and sometimes, a progressive publisher like Chelsea Green or Ig Publishing.  The retailer (Amazon, typically) is not usually a progressive organization.

If you think of a progressive book sale in terms of a series of monetary exchanges resulting in a customer getting a book, with each exchange yielding profit for the vendor, then the typical progressive affiliate book sale only yields a small bonus to the progressive blogger, and a fraction of royalty sales to the progressive author.  The profits paid to the retailer, the publisher, and the shipping company are all, usually, lost to the progressive ecosystem.  (There are, of course, exceptions: the sale of a Chelsea Green book through Powell's, with delivery handled by UPS or the Postal Service, supports progressive organizations and unionized organizations at almost every step of the way.)

There's a lot of value being left on the table here, and there are many lost opportunities to sell progressive products and support progressive companies.  There are a wide variety of products made by progressive organizations: progressive books, CDs, magazine subscriptions, and movies; Credo mobile service and Working Assets credit cards; and a virtually limitless number of green products.  Heck, you can even create a neighborhood group to buy solar panels in bulk.

There is, I think, ample opportunity for progressive organizations, particularly bloggers and local organizations, to focus a bit more deeply on affiliate sales of these kinds of products.  Some of these products are potentially high-margin, and some of them (like solar panels and energy-efficient light bulbs) could even be net profitable for their consumers.  All of them would help keep more money in the progressive ecosystem, as they would channel more money towards progressive companies.  The reason this opportunity is largely unexploited, I think, is that it's a pain in the neck for companies to maintain affiliate programs, and that it's a pain in the neck for bloggers and local organizations to maintain a dozen different affiliate program memberships.

A well-organized general-purpose affiliate program for progressive products and services could overcome this hurdle.  Such an affiliate program would need to herd cats, to some degree, among progressive companies, and convince them to fit their affiliate programs into a standard one-size-fits-all shape, or to begin to offer affiliate programs in the first place.  It would also face the hurdle of Amazon's entrenched position.  And, it would need to offer a flexible API and embeddable widget architecture, to allow progressive organizations of all shapes and sizes to use the program.

But the benefits of such a program could be significant.  It could boost demand for progressive companies; provide much-needed revenue for bloggers and local organizations; and, in some cases, help progressive consumers save money by becoming more energy efficient.

Green businesses embedded in progressive organizations

Among other things, the stimulus bill included about $5 billion for weatherization efforts for "modest-income homes", according to the summary produced by Nancy Pelosi's office.  That's a massive increase over the previous year's allocation of about $272 million; because the money has to be spent in 18 months, actually spending the money may be a bit of a challenge.  There may not be enough existing weatherization capacity, meaning that there are opportunities to create new weatherization companies.

As Leah Edwards has written, non-profit ownership is one way to bootstrap a small business; there may be some cases in which owning and operating a small business is a logical step for a progressive non-profit.  Weatherization consulting and implementation is one industry where those opportunities are not just available and lucrative, but a good fit for a mission-driven organization.

In particular, I'm thinking of progressive churches, many of which are already active in environmental action and social justice, and have a deep well of talent to draw upon from their membership.  While operating a business is a pretty hefty endeavor, a lot of churches already run small-scale social service agencies - part-time soup kitchens, homeless shelters, etc. - out of their premises.  Why not extend that social justice work while making a profit, too?  On top of the fact that operating a weatherization business could be a meaningful act of bearing witness to core convictions on respect for the natural world and alleviating suffering, such an endeavor could help boost membership (by extending the church's voice into the community) and donations (by keeping church members employed).

Weatherization operations won't be a good fit for many progressive churches, and will certainly not be a good fit for smaller progressive organizations or blogs.  But it's only one kind of opportunity.  The greening of the economy in general, and the signing of the stimulus bill in particular, means that there are now a lot of opportunities to save money through environmental action - and that translates into profitable opportunities for progressive organizations.

Microinvesting and microlending

The progressive movement has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it can raise huge amounts of money with small dollars.  For the most part, as I mentioned above, that money goes to Democratic candidates, and it doesn't return to the progressive ecosystem.  There's no reason that we have to organize our donations this way.  There are ample opportunities to give money to socially beneficial endeavors and in some cases, it's possible to get that money back - even with a good return on investment.

Microlending has become an increasingly popular strategy for alleviating poverty over the past 25 years or so.  Grameen Bank, one of the most well-known microlending banks in the world was founded in 1983, and since then, other organizations have joined the bandwagon.  The idea is to provide impoverished people with small loans which can be used to launch very small business endeavors, which can, in turn, build wealth that helps the entrepreneur rise out of poverty.

There are numerous ways to get involved with microlending online; Kiva is probably the most well-known.  Kiva's lending process is geared towards individuals, but the process could, in principle, be applied to small progressive groups and networks of progressive blog readers.  Earlier this month, Kiva released the Kiva API; while the API doesn't seem to make it possible to group together bundles of loans, Kiva's developer wiki encourages developers to create social applications around lending activity, so it's not hard to imagine that an application along these lines might emerge from their network.  While progressive group microlending would not really make progressives much richer, it would at least cycle money back to the progressive ecosystem, giving lenders a chance to recover their initial loans and thereby seal up some of the leaks within our donor network.

Related to microlending, but not nearly as mature, is the notion of microinvesting: gathering together large pools of individual investors in order to purchase equity in promising companies, preferably with an environmentally or socially responsible flavor.  That is the notion behind GreenFund, a project of the for-profit activism company Virgance.  Due to SEC regulations, it's not particularly easy to create a microinvesting project, but Virgance appears to have made some progress on the idea (although they're not releasing many details, won't commit to any launch date beyond "a while" on their website.)  If that fund does take shape, then it could become possible for progressive groups to organize micro-investing in green companies, and earn new revenues from dividends or equity sales.

What a progressive economy might look like

The ideas I've posted here are meant, for the most part, to prod progressive organizations to think a bit more creatively about their business plan, and to identify financing mechanisms that extend beyond donations.  The list I've posted here is no doubt incomplete, and I hope we get some additional creative thoughts in the comments.

More broadly, these ideas are also meant to encourage us to think of the progressive movement as an ecosystem that is fed by a healthy circulation of money.  A movement which is built on voluntary donations, from its core activists to its institutions and outward to favored politicians, is not sustainable.  A better model involves, as much as possible, a series of transactions that make progressives wealthier at every step of the way, while reinforcing progressive values.  A movement which boosts demand for progressive businesses like Credo Mobile, which provides jobs for members of progressive churches, and which gives progressive groups the opportunity to own equity in profitable and environmentally responsible companies will allow many more progressives to prosper together with their movement.

This week, Chris Bowers at OpenLeft has been encouraging readers to run their own media campaign. The idea is very simple: at a fairly low budget, anyone can set up a simple Google ad campaign, targeted geographically and by keyword. Bowers has been running two ads - one against McCain, the other against Palin - in his native Pennsylvania, and thinks he can reach a lot of voters on a fairly low budget.

The commenters at OpenLeft have been ecstatic about the idea, and I think it is exceptionally clever. In addition to the first order effects - exposing anti-McCain messages to a lot of voters in swing states - the campaign could also have an indirect sway over the campaign's own messaging strategy, by demonstrating in a quantifiable way the messages that work (and receive a lot of click-throughs) and those that don't. I suppose that's a long shot with this campaign, but it's nevertheless a possibility.

In any case, I'd be interested to see if someone could take this idea to the next level, and make the decentralized media campaign idea a bit more social. For example, would it be possible to set up a website which allows people to set up all of the parameters for a Google Ad campaign - the keywords, the geographic target, and the message/link which appears - and then to aggregate all of those campaigns on the website in some interesting way? There are a lot of different ways to do this - e.g. breaking down ad campaigns by state, tag-clouding the chosen keywords, and showing aggregate click-through and impression statistics. This kind of aggregation could be augmented with comments (suggesting refinments and tweaks to existing campaigns) as well as team fundraising pages, allowing site visitors to support one campaign or another monetarily. It's also possible to maximize and quantify the impact of a campaign like this by targeting all of these ads at an action-oriented microsite, which takes a user through the steps of signing up for Obama's email list, giving a small donation to the campaign, signing up for My.BarackObama.com, and so on.

This sounds, to me, like a good example of a simple business idea that could be modestly profitable, since after all the main point of this project is to sell Google ads. Technologically, this should be a relatively simple mashup of a community platform like Drupal with the Google Adwords software development toolkit. With relatively low costs, it should be possible to set the transaction costs - on top of the raw costs for the campaign itself - at a sufficient level to generate relatively decent profit margins. Besides the constant problem facing any social web platform - will anyone show up? - the only difficulty, as many OpenLeft commenters have already alluded to, is whether such an endeavor would run afoul of campaign finance rules, and whether or not Google Ad purchases would be considered campaign contributions. My guess is that this kind of project would have to be organized as a 527, or under the auspices of one.

If something like this doesn't take shape between now and Election Day, it's probably a worthwhile organization to develop, even so. Beyond the immediate need to go on the offense against McCain, as Chris points out, it's important to help develop and test messaging for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, in an environment that's not controlld by the campaigns themselves. More than that, with Google beginning to sell offline media ads in newspapers, radio and television, there's no reason to restrict an ad campaign to Google Adwords (although it's much more gratifying, as real-time metrics are available.) Any takers?

Disclosure: My company worked on a small technical/design project for Open Left last year.

Right on the heels of my discussion of infrastructure for progressive entrepreneurs comes the NetSquared Mashup Challenge, a $100,000 contest seeking innovative mashups for social change. NetSquared is a project of TechSoup, the non-profit technology folks.

The Challenge is now in its third year, and it has an interesting structure. Applicants are only required to write out their ideas, without doing too much to prove that the ideas are implementation-ready. Those ideas are then voted on by NetSquared members, and the top twenty teams get an all-expenses-paid trip to San Jose for the NetSquared project, as well as a shot at a slice of $100,000 and collaborations with web experts capable of putting the ideas into practice. This fairly low barrier of entry has results - already there are about a dozen applicants. One project that caught my eye was the Social Actions project, which promises to "free peer-to-peer social change campaigns from the social action platforms on which they were created", apparently by allowing social network organizers to readily find out about other campaigns across the social network-o-sphere.

For more on NetSquared, check out the project's YouTube video:

I am thinking about submitting an application to the contest, although I haven't fully decided what to work on. One idea I have kicking around is a project to mashup corporate securities filings with state and federal labor relations records, in order to help labor organizers identify new opportunities for unionization. But that's just a thought, I haven't really worked on it.

At any rate, if you're in the mood to shoot for a slice of $100,000, feel free to use the comments to trade ideas and thoughts about mashups for good. It'll be great to see what kinds of ideas we can come up with!

Last night at Drinking Liberally, I spoke a bit with a friend about liberal entrepreneurship and this site, and I got to thinking a bit more about what's really needed to support progressive entrepreneurs on a grand scale (or even a not-so-grand scale.)  I'm thinking about things like progressive venture capitalists, willing to lend out a lot of money to seed a progressive for-profit venture, and also willing to forego liquidation whenever a hotter opportunity comes along; or progressive angels, willing to lend out comparatively less money for not-for-profit ventures.  Alongside this sort of standing institutional support, I think we could also use some flashy contests - things like Blogpac's progressive entrepreneur contest last summer, and other kinds of business plan competitions.

I'm also thinking about social infrastructure - perhaps something like a marriage between StartupWeekend, BarCamp, and networking groups.  I'd really like to see a network of meetups for progressive entrepreneurs to discuss what they're working on, network, incubate ideas, get support and useful tips, etc.  In fact, I have half a mind to start something just like that on meetup.com.

There's more to think about here, and I think we have a lot to learn from the world of social enterprise.  For the most part these are just half-baked ideas now, but I'd love to see some of this support system come into place eventually.

This is a bit of a quick hit, and perhaps a bit dated as well, but I think it's too fascinating to pass up. About a month ago Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) wrote a post exploring media revenue models, which is to say, revenue models for businesses which produce a lot of content, and hope to somehow make some money off the whole enterprise. The post touched off a bit of a mad dash by commenters and other bloggers to name as many revenue models as possible.

There are a few revenue models which come to mind immediately - subscriptions and advertisements, mainly. But there are also some fairly obscure models which are nonetheless potentially very lucrative. Those models include selling access to an API, having the audience create something of value and monetizing it, live events, customized content feeds, and consulting, which essentially amounts to using your blog as a big advertisement for your business.

Naturally, all of this has got me thinking of my posts from last summer about sustainable blogging, in particular with regards to cost per action advertising on the blogosphere and blog profitability. After all, a blog is a classic case of a media outlet which gives away a lot of content and needs a good monetization strategy.

As the primaries wind down - and I hope they do, within a month or so - it occurs to me that we'll be seeing a massive outpouring of activist energy, as one campaign or another's supporters will, temporarily at least, gradually release themselves from the intensity of campaigning. If those activists remain committed to seeing a Democrat win this year, and I imagine they will, then the natural next step will be to do something activist-oriented but not campaign-oriented, and blogging fits that description to a T. I think that it's possible to turn some of that activity into new, sustainable blogging, under a few key criteria. In particular:

• The new bloggers identify and pursue niches that are not particularly well-trod.
• The new bloggers pursue revenue models outside of (but not necessarily to the exclusion of) advertising, like consulting, API access, etc.
• The new bloggers post consistently, participate in discussions ongoing within their niche, and follow news sources particular to their niche - in other words, the new bloggers follow the generally-accepted rules for being a good blogger.

It occurs to me that none of this will happen spontaneously, or in any event, not much of this will happen spontaneously, and we might be on the cusp of losing a great opportunity to create a new wave of self-sustained progressive bloggers.

I think what we'll need to address this opportunity is a kind of meta-blogging service, or a blog consultancy operation, which trains new bloggers on the tricks of the trade, and helps them capitalize on some of the interesting, lucrative, but not entirely obvious forms of blogging revenue, such as those highlighted in Chris Anderson's post. Such a consultancy could become profitable by taking a cut of revenues from each of its clients.

It's an interesting idea, though perhaps a bit far-fetched. Although I doubt something like this will take shape, I do hope someone is thinking about what to do with the giant wave of activist energy that is certain to be released from one of the presidential campaigns within a couple of months. More than that, I'm curious whether there are other progressive bloggers who have given much thought to their media model and have some wise words to share. What does a path to sustainability look like for a good progressive blogger?

Amy Gahran has a very interesting piece at Poynter Online about the importance of teaching journalism students to use content management systems (h/t joshb).  Her basic point is that Dreamweaver, which many schools teach their students, is utterly pointless in the modern journalistic office, since no one uses Dreamweaver to run a modern newspaper website anymore.  Moreover, she asserts, Dreamweaver teaches prospective journalists to think of their newspaper as an isolated island, while content management systems teach them to think of their newspaper as a hub of information, connected to a much broader web of interconnected information.

Those are both fair points, although I'm not sure I'm convinced that the latter is so crucial.  I imagine most journalism students understand the web by now, and have some idea that newspaper websites are frequently the hubs of interaction and discussion.  Then again, I could be wrong.

What I find most interesting, though, is Gahran's assertion that most journalism schools simply don't teach basic CMS skills.  That strikes me as odd, but entirely believable.  Moreover, it seems like a great opportunity for a liberal entrepreneur to make some money while reaching, and hopefully helping to shape, the minds of prospective or up-and-coming journalists.

Teaching users how to use a CMS is not very difficult.  It's a core practice of my company, in fact.  While we've only been doing it for about a year, we find that even our most technophobic clients generally "get it" pretty early on in the process.  I'd venture a guess that there are a lot of self-taught CMS users out there, judging from the size of the blogosphere.

So here's what I think a clever liberal entrepreneur could do to exploit this situation, and help push journalistic enterprises to the left.  Start up a one-day or two-day training course on popular content management systems, like Drupal or Wordpress, and target it at journalism students.  Then, use that opportunity to give journalism students a taste of the importance of democratic conversation in the world of journalism, and the ways that web-based technologies can help media outlets attract a good-sized audience without resorting to gossip-mongering.

Certainly, a one- or two-day course is not going to move mountains, and it won't change journalistic practice overnight.  On the other hand, providing a key set of professionals with valuable skills, and pointing out the ways that progressive journalistic practices can be supported by those skills, can be a money-making and, in some small way, profession-changing enterprise.

I just caught this story about MySpace's startup incubator in the New York Times (h/t Mashable). The incubator will go toe-to-toe with Facebook's fbFund, which funds companies creating Facebook applications.

I find all of this very exciting, since incubating progressive startups is exactly what I had hoped to do with my own company. (We're getting there, by the way, slowly but surely!) These startups are playing around, naturally, in very much the same waters that I imagine many liberal entrepreneurs like to get their feet wet - namely, new, online media. While it's unclear what kind of ventures MySpace's startup incubator will support, fbFund's focus on Facebook applications is clearly amenable to progressive causes. Facebook applications can be used to promote participation in liberal religions; to organize workers and labor activists to support unions; organize students on college or high school campuses; spread the use of progressive media; and on and on.

Naturally, I'm a little skittish about the fact that MySpace's startup incubator is ultimately owned by News Corp., the ultra-conservative parent of Fox News Channel.  Launching a progressive business under the wings of Rupert Murdoch is hardly a credible strategy for sustainable progressive movement growth.  Nevertheless, if the incubator doesn't take too much equity, it might be a good source of valuable revenue for progressive entrepreneurs.

In any case, I'm glad to see these kinds of organizations getting started.  Especially in light of the decline of Skyline Public Works, and particularly during an election year which is bound to produce a bumper crop of new ideas for building the progressive movement, we need to focus keenly on the problems facing progressive entrepreneurs.  Startup incubation is a valuable service for those entrepreneurs, and we should do what we can to make those services available for progressives.

Over the past couple of months, I've blogged quite a bit about the prospect of creating cable TV networks which feature progressive news and opinion.  These pieces range from an exploration of existing satellite progressive TV, to a proposed strategy for leveraging leased access into a progressive network, and thoughts about pushing MSNBC to the left in the near future.

There is another avenue slowly opening up for progressive TV: internet TV, which is taking baby steps toward broad adoption.  The past two years have seen an explosion in Internet TV technologies, from traditional-TV-on-your-PC Joost, to internet-video-made-easy Miro, to iTunes-to-TV solution AppleTV and video-on-demand-via-Tivo Amazon Unbox.  Of these technologies, I think we should be most interested in those which bring video from the public internet onto the living room TV sets.  This kind of technological innovation has the most potential to distribute progressive voices in a widespread way, since most people still like to watch video, especially video clips that are longer than 5-10 minutes, on their living room TV sets.

So it's exciting to see that AppleTV and Amazon Unbox (the latter of which garnered some well-deserved harsh criticism upon its initial launch in Sept. 2006) will soon be getting competition.  Netflix will be offering its video download service via set-top boxes later this year.  And StumbleUpon is latching onto the Wii to launch Stumble.TV for the Wii, which will give StumbleUpon users the chance to enjoy user-acclaimed video on their living room TVs.

At this point, the market for Internet television devices is still too cluttered with proprietary devices, awkward computer-to-TV interfaces, smarmy insider media deals, and similar cruft to make it ready for prime time.  But it's clear that the day that Internet TV is a widespread phenomenon, and has the maturity to take on cable TV as a mechanism for distributing niche content, might not be far off.  My belief is that widespread Internet TV will be a boon for the progressive movement, because it will enable us to more widely distribute our news and opinion, communicate with and grow our base, put an end to the ridiculous way politicians kow-tow to conservative print and TV news media, and more fairly compete with conservative news and opinion outlets.  If I'm right, then accelerating the Internet TV industry, and preparing for the day when Internet TV is widespread, should be important priorities for the progressive movement.  What can we do to meet those priorities?



The key to building a mature Internet television industry friendly to the progressive movement is an open, fast, cheap, and user-friendly pipe that goes directly from content producers to content consumers (and possibly in the reverse direction as well.)  In particular, that means building (or latching on to) a cheap set-top box that attaches easily to a living room TV, and works with a reasonably easy-to-use remote control.  It also means a set-top box that offers programming from an open network, and doesn't lock viewers into a closed network.

Perhaps the best model (and also, perhaps, a good partner) is Miro.  Distributed by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro which embraces open technology and democratic content.  (Indeed, it was formerly known as the Democracy Player.)  The software is open source, the platform is open, and the interface is slick and relatively easy-to-use.  The main trouble with the player is that it's limited to computer viewing.  What we need is a solution that brings the open technology spirit and user-friendly interface of Miro into a TV set-top box.  A good near-term solution would probably incorporate video game consoles, which are now complex enough to rival desktop computers for versatility, if not raw processing power.  A port of Miro to the Wii, PlayStation, and Xbox would bring us a long way towards an open-access, user-friendly Internet TV experience.  (I imagine that porting Miro's search interface, which assumes a keyboard, into the living room would be a fairly significant challenge.  It would also be the crux of the problem of making Long Tail content available in the living room.  But I'll leave that to the hardware entrepreneurs.)

Hardware is only half the problem, however.  If Internet TV ever gains enough market penetration to rival cable TV, we will still need to work on offering attractive, compelling content, and properly distributing that content.  There are some valiant efforts along those lines already, ranging from Democracy Now! to Free Speech TV, Link TV and The Real News.  While I do think we can get a lot of mileage out of simply marketing this kind of existing progressive TV programming to a wider audience, I think we will also need to develop more - much, much more.  After all, Internet TV is a Long Tail medium, and we will need a Long Tail of progressive content to match it.  In other words, we'll need progressive TV that matches a very broad array of diverse interests.  The progressive programming that's currently available is something akin to the limited content available at the dawn of the broadcast TV era - it's trying to be all things to all (progressive) people.  At the same time that we try to expand access to Internet TV, we are going to need to boost the amount and diversity of progressive TV programming.

Of course, the progressive movement has succeeded emphatically, at making a very diverse range of content available through one medium - the blogosphere.  The key to this success was the low barrier to entry in blogging, and the lack of daily updated progressive news and opinion in print media.  Our challenge is to extend that success into the sphere of video content, and in particular, into the arena of regularly updated video channels, through podcasting, vlogging, or other means.  There has been a bit of success along these lines, as evidenced by the mushrooming of green Internet TV, including Earth Focus (a production of Link TV), Green.TV, Tree Hugger TV, and others.

I'm hoping that barriers to progressive Internet TV will soon be lowered.  The fact that Democratic candidates readily adopted YouTube as a mechanism for distributing their message means that there's now a solid chunk of Democratic campaign staffers with significant know-how and experience in working with online video.  As the campaigns wind down over the next few months, some of these staffers will inevitable begin to look for work elsewhere.  Just as the demise of Howard Dean's campaign, and the dispersing of his Internet team, led to the creation of progressive web development shops like Blue State Digital, I'm hoping that the end of most of the Democratic presidential campaigns over the next two months will lead to a boom in progressive Internet TV stations.

The final challenge in making Internet TV work for the progressive movement is organic adoption.  We will have to ensure that once the hardware and content are readily available, consumers begin watching our content.  There are a number of ways to drive this kind of adoption.  First, by creating "progressive set-top boxes" which are pre-programmed with progressive TV channels.  Second, by spurring netroots activists to digg, stumble, and otherwise socially recommend progressive video using the social bookmarking venues available.  Third, by embedding progressive content within our blog posts.

Existing progressive Internet TV producers are already exploring these avenues for organic adoption.  The Real News, for example, has a volunteer "blog squad" whose goal is to evangelize Real News programming on blogs and social networks.  On the whole, unfortunately, I think we are not yet at the point where these efforts are very successful.  Outside of the three left-leaning shows on cable - Countdown, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report - there are very few progressive video clips which regularly get embedded and virally spread online.

However, I believe that our present moment is a perfect opportunity for liberal entrepreneurs to create an Internet TV infrastructure for the progressive movement.  On the consumer side, we have widespread demand for a la carte cable TV, and we will soon see deep dissatisfaction over the lack of original programming caused by the studios' greed in the writers strike.  We also have incredibly expensive cable TV (PDF), and with Stumble.TV, we now have a model for leveraging existing hardware into set-top boxes for Internet TV.  The technology for creating an easy-to-use, cheap set-top box for Internet TV, and the demand for it, are readily available; what we really need is an entrepreneur capable of packaging and marketing the technology properly, and doing so while under-pricing existing cable TV offers.

On the production side, we will soon be awash in progressive professionals exiting Democratic campaigns and capable of creating Internet TV channels, and their availability coincides with the writers' strike.  (Indeed, some writers are already looking into the possibility of creating startups which will produce professional online video.)  So there is a lot of loose talent available, and there's an opportunity to create compelling, progressive Internet TV that's free of corporate control.

I'm curious to see what will happen to Internet TV in 2008.  My guess is that the industry will mature considerably in 2008.  The only question is, how will the progressive movement use this potentially powerful tool to communicate its message?

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Yesterday I wrote about an important opportunity for making cable TV a bit more progressive - the possibility of replacing Tucker Carlson with a progressive on MSNBC. The comments on that post showed clearly that there are a lot of people thinking about how to make cable more progressive - ranging from a wide-ranging debate on who should represent progressives on cable TV, to a thoughtful post on how to schedule a progressive evening lineup, and more. I think this kind of energy is really valuable, and I hope that it's not wasted on MSNBC. While the channel does appear willing to experiment with progressive voices, it will never be a reliable progressive cable channel, and we shouldn't expect it to be. Instead, we should be planning to create our own progressive cable channel. Luckily, recent FCC rulings have just made that a little bit easier.

On Wednesday, the FCC slashed rates on leased cable access to 10 cents per subscriber per month. With leased access, independent programmers can pay to gain access to part of a cable carrier's lineup. Rates on leased access were about four times higher prior to Wednesday's decision.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've exchanged a few emails with Bob Fertik, President of Democrats.com, about the FCC's various efforts to regulate cable. We both agree that this decision opens a door for liberal entrepreneurs to begin laying the groundwork for a national progressive cable news channel. (And I should also give credit to a friend of Bob, who spoke to me about some of the broad outlines of a strategy for progressive cable, which I outline below.) The basic strategy is simple: line up prime time leased access on cable channels in a number of major media markets, and put progressive programming in that time. If that strategy can succeed with representation in many major markets, then we might be able to leverage it into a dedicated national channel. While the strategy is simple, it's certainly not easy. Over the flip, I'll have more on what we will need to pull together to get this idea to be successful, and opportunities for liberal entrepreneurs to make money while creating a national progressive cable network.

Costs and advertisers
As a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, let's consider a cable channel like the Ohio News Network, which clearly covers an important area from an electoral point of view.  The ONN has about 1.5 million subscribers, in markets that include Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.  Under the new FCC regulations, leasing 24 hours of access to the channel will now cost about $150,000 / month.  Leasing two hours of prime time will cost significantly less - obviously not 1/12th the cost, but perhaps 1/6th the cost of a full day's access; we'll call it $25,000 / month.  What that means is that a progressive cable news channel will have to earn at least $25,000 / month in advertising - and probably considerably more, to cover the costs of programming, equipment, facilities, personnel, and so on.

This is the first problem which liberal entrepreneurs hoping to create a progressive cable news channel have to solve: finding monthly advertising.  Fortunately, there's not a lot of competition.  There are only a handful of shows where an advertiser looking to reach a targeted progressive cable audience can go.  The existing progressive satellite TV channels (Link TV, Real News and Free Speech TV) are all non-profit and don't take advertising.  Progressive shows like Countdown are not particularly well-marketed to progressive audiences by their corporate parents, and I suspect that the marketing flubs are mirrored in a similar inability to attract advertisers who want to reach a progressive audience.  I believe that there is an opportunity to get considerable advertising from companies who are reaching a progressive audience.  What's more, as the 2008 election picks up steam, there will be more and more money available from Democratic candidates to advertise on progressive TV.  (Whether the candidates wise up and take advantage of the opportunity to reach a geographically and politically segmented audience is another matter.)

I think it'd be interesting to see a liberal entrepreneur create a cable television advertising representation company to sell prospective advertising spots on a progressive cable news channel.  Such a company would focus on market research, would identify the demographics of those likely to watch such a channel, would identify products and services which would likely be popular among those demographics, and would make a case to businesses that advertising on such a channel would be good for the bottom line.  Naturally, it would be difficult to sell advertising on a channel that doesn't yet exist, but if such a company could succeed in lining up potential advertisers, we could solve an important piece of the puzzle.

Programming and Marketing/Adoption
Lining up programming for progressive cable is a challenging but fun problem to solve.  Fortunately, there are already a few solutions on offer - in particular, the lineups for satellite networks Link TV, Real News, and Free Speech TV.  The comments on yesterday's blog post also brought to the surface a whole flurry of suggestions for potential progressive media figures who could become talk show hosts and cable pundits, and some pretty interesting thoughts about structuring the lineup to maximize audience flow.

Unfortunately, programming is only half of the problem.  The other half of the problem - and what appears to be the reason that Donahue floundered on MSNBC - is marketing the programming to a progressive audience, and/or organic adoption of the programming.  Back in 2003, Donahue didn't have executives willing to market his program to a targeted progressive audience; the progressive blogosphere was not yet strong enough to drive organic adoption; and YouTube was nowhere to be found.  He simply could not find an audience. (Update: An alert reader points me to an interview posted at Media Matters - conducted on Hannity and Colmes, of all places - which points out that Donahue's numbers were higher than anyone else's at MSNBC in early 2003. Execs just didn't like the fact that he was so liberal. Yet another reason why we shouldn't trust MSNBC to be a progressive standard-bearer, and should form our own network.)

Nowadays, the progressive blogosphere and other elements of the netroots, like DFA and Drinking Liberally, are plenty strong enough to drive organic adoption of a cable lineup.  Indeed, we are already doing just that for Countdown, the Daily Show, and the Colbert Report.  What I find a bit surprising is that we are not really doing the same for the three progressive satellite TV channels which are already up and running.  I'm not entirely sure why that is, although I have some guesses.  For example, it's possible that the channels aren't widely enough distributed (they each reach about 20-30 million households); or that their programming does not really relate to the kinds of topics we tend to talk about in the progressive blogosphere; or that they don't do enough to post their shows to YouTube.

This question is important, because if a progressive cable channel will succeed, it will require either a hefty marketing budget, or broad organic adoption of its programming through YouTube and blogosphere embeds.  Since a hefty marketing budget for progressive cable isn't likely to appear out of thin air, we'll have to build the audience for progressive cable through cost-effective blogosphere advertising and word-of-mouth embeds.

Yesterday's comments, incidentally, provided an interesting idea which could both generate new programming, and help drive organic adoption: a YouTube-driven, American Idol-style competition for talk show hosts.  (Full disclosure, this idea was provided by my Drinking Liberally co-host.)  I could easily see this idea turning into a fantastic website, focused on building a fan base for a variety of progressive media personalities, who would eventually become hosts, guests and pundits for a progressive cable channel.  It would be easy enough to monetize a site like that with advertising or ticket sales and other merchandise related to real-world appearances by those media figures.  (My guess is that some of the next generation of TV pundits will come from progressive comedians.)

Regardless of whether such an idea would actually fly, I believe it's important to tie together programming development with marketing/adoption concerns.  We now have a whole movement capable of driving organic adoption of progressive cable, and we should design programming and outreach efforts which take advantage of that.

Getting a foot in the door, and tying it all together
So far, I've focused on problems in progressive cable development with liberal entrepreneurs can directly address in a way which is sustainable and feasible without a significant investment of capital - things gathering prospective advertisers, building a prospective audience online, etc.  However, the success of all of this clearly hinges on the possibility of actually putting together blocks of leased access cable time in a variety of major metropolitan areas.  That means finding a string of existing cable channels for which we could actually lease prime time hours.  To return to my earlier example, while ONN might be an attractive network on which to lease access from an electoral point of view, the network isn't required to lease access.  Particularly for prime time, finding leased access availability is very difficult, because many cable channels already make lucrative use of that time.

The trick will almost certainly revolve around finding channels which are struggling, and cannot currently successfully compete with other channels in their market.  It will also probably require at least a few individuals with good connections in the world of cable TV, who will be able to guide an application for leased access to successful completion.

In this case, I think there is some room for progressive activists to join in the effort.  For example, crowdsourcing can help identify struggling cable channels throughout the country - identifiable as those channels which are already struggling to field successful and stable programs during prime-time, or even during off-hours.  To consider a more elaborate example, progressive activists can work together, perhaps using wikis or similar tools, to develop a sort of pro-forma business plan for a progressive cable channel in a single major media market; such a plan could be adapted and tweaked for a string of channels throughout the country, and could help facilitate successful leased access applications.  (h/t to Bob Fertik for this idea.)

At the end of the day, I believe that creating a national progressive cable channel will be a huge and complex undertaking, which will require overlapping efforts from a number of overlapping entrepreneurial ventures, as well as a stable of well-connected cable executives who can help facilitate the process of obtaining prime time leased access.  Nevertheless, the FCC's decision this week made the effort much more attainable, and we should make use of this golden opportunity.