Denise Caruso

The release is a rare look inside the process of one of the most prolific and tenacious interactive media artists working today. While Willis is well known as a mega-hit songwriter and composer, she is also a painter, a sculptor, a videographer, a party impresario, a builder of motorized objets d’art and furniture and an avid collector and aficionado of ’50s atomic and “soul” collectibles — all of which make their way into her work.

So if the funky, homemade aesthetic of “Editing Is Cool” looks familiar to you, it probably is. In 2007, Bubbles & Cheesecake’s first video, “It’s a Woman Thang,” got more than 900,000 YouTube views.

The real visionaries of almost any cultural revolution rarely get the credit they deserve. They are usually so far ahead of their time that by the time the wave hits, they’ve gotten bored or frustrated and moved on. Willis is one of the rare few who has persisted in bringing her vision to fruition, even though she frequently abandoned her songwriting career to do so.

I met Willis in 1992 when she spoke at one of the very first Digital World conferences, which themselves were instrumental in gestating the yet-unborn interactive media industry. She floored a rather staid crowd of industry executives with a passionate entreaty to support the new generation of artists who would be using digital tools to create the next generation of media. Interviewed later by the Hollywood Reporter, she said:

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to redefine entertainment. Interactive media is a unique opportunity for artists like me who do a lot of different things and have had mainstream success but whose product is still considered “different” to take the ball and run with it. I think that Hollywood is running after very obvious technological uses of CD-ROM, CD-I and interactive movies. Traditional pop culture mediums are out of touch with the masses, now finally it can be self-empowering for the ultimate user as it is for the artist. The right combination of fresh ideas and brilliant technology is the ultimate revenge. This is a new world. Power to the people and I want to lead the revolution.

By then, she had already been working for two years, with her longtime partner and collaborator Prudence Fenton and funding from Intel, on willisville, a combination of story-driven virtual world (with Willis’ trademark outsider-art aesthetic) and social network, long before the latter concept existed.

Willisville was built for fluid, persistent connections to and from television programming, shopping, e-mail, creativity tools and more. But in the five solid years they shopped the project — to some of the biggest media moguls on the Internet today, I might add — the reaction was always the same.

“Everyone was really excited to see it,” Willis said. “Then their eyes would cross as soon as we’d start talking about it, and they’d start talking about ‘Web-isodes.”‘

But, thankfully, that painful period is over now. With so much technology available to produce virtually every kind of media, Willis is in control of her art and her destiny in a way she has always wanted to be.

“‘Editing Is Cool’ was perfect conceptually, because I got to get my philosophy about process in there,” she said. “I used to always be creating for someone else and that was great, but writing music and seeing someone else’s visuals attached to it is totally disjointed for me. What I’m doing now, in whatever medium — linear, non-linear, virtual, physical — I can execute on all those different planes. And that’s what I always wanted to do.”

The next project for Willis is the result of a “fantasy trip” to her hometown, Detroit, when “The Color Purple” (she was one of three composers) opened there. “I went to my high school, Mumford High, for the first time in 43 years,” she said. “I thought I was going to give a 10-minute speech, and they surprised me with Allis Willis Day.”

The marching band, the chorus, the glee club — all had prepared tributes for her. “They asked me if I would write a song for them and I said no,” said Willis. “I said, I want to write a song with you. So now I’m doing music, video, artwork and promotion online, with 500 black kids from my alma mater, because I’m obsessed with mass collaboration. It’s everything I wanted to do in willisville, come full circle.”

Fogg is director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, an independent research center that explores a discipline he invented, called “captology.” Captology stands for Computers As Persuasive Technology, and it looks at how certain technologies intentionally persuade us to do their bidding.

Fogg’s research examines how product designers can methodically use persuasive techniques in everything from ATMs to shareware.

One example of persuasive technology is the “nag screen” that’s built into shareware programs to persuade slacker users to pay up. Another is the computerized Baby Think It Over doll, which tells you when your “baby” needs to be fed, and changed, and bathed, and played with — clearly designed as a propaganda tool in the fight against teen pregnancy.

If you visit a video arcade or a casino, you’re surrounded by captology. The ringing, squawking, flashing screens that pitch such a fit as you walk by actually have a name. They’re called “attract mode,” and their sole purpose is to make you stop and drop the first of many quarters into their slots.

And remember the Tamagotchi “digital pets” from the 1990s? Talk about persuasive — I still shudder to recall the U.S. News and World Report story that I read at the height of the Tamagotchi craze: One father of a couple of fanatics had to return a puppy to the pet store because his daughters preferred to “feed” their Tamagotchis.

As more of the world hooks up with the Internet, the social network phenomenon provides some of the most powerful present-day examples of technological persuasion. According to Fogg’s research, for example, Facebook is the most persuasive interactive technology on the planet.

“Facebook has changed more people’s behavior, more dramatically and faster, than anything that has come before it,” he said. With millions of people “ritualistically” involved with their Facebook accounts every day, he and his students are now trying to deconstruct precisely how it does its voodoo so well — from its subtle, yet incessant siren song of inviting and finding friends, to the triggers that keep you coming back, as many people do, several times a day.

The pinnacle of persuasion in the “trigger” category, according to Fogg, is the individual status updates that Facebook users type in at random times. Those who don’t change very often get a subtle interface cue from Facebook saying, “What are you doing right now?”

At the moment, for example, mine says, “Denise wants an iPod touch. It’s a vague, formless desire, unsupported by good reviews. But she wants it nonetheless.” I read my friends’ updates at least once a day, and often change mine every day as well.

“Status updates are amazing,” Fogg said. “They are pellets that keep popping out for the pigeons — tremendously effective at keeping you coming back.”

The lab’s first foray into understanding “the psychology of Facebook,” as Fogg puts it, was from the inside: he and a colleague taught a course in designing Facebook applications.

“The first class was crazy,” he said. “It was like watching a field of poppies grow — in six weeks, the students’ applications collectively got 16 million installations. Then it was 25 million. We stopped keeping track.”

But as anyone knows who has added or removed a gazillion Facebook apps for various reasons, persuasion is not a permanent process.

“Some of the most viral apps from our class had a clear life cycle,” said Fogg. “Once the novelty wore off, they weren’t so fun anymore. So students would create another app. Learning to transfer users from a dying app to a rising app became a skill. We want to learn more about this, so we’re starting to look at the psychology of persuasive designs and what metrics you can use to measure it. I want to be able to teach how to use psychology to make good decisions about what you want to persuade people to do, measure what’s working, and be able to iterate quickly based on how they respond.”

Fogg said he recently had lunch with an exec from Rock You, the largest ad network on Facebook. “He took three calls from the office, just during lunch, about the metrics that day,” said Fogg. “He told me that they change their ads on a daily basis” based on how people respond in real time.

Any kind of persuasive technique can be used for good or for evil, and no matter what others may do with it, Fogg is trying to use his captological powers for good. Last year, he started teaching a course he calls Peace Innovation. The core idea is to try to “invent peace” through persuasive technology.

“What we’re doing is identifying antecedents to peace — like empathy and tolerance — that most people would agree need to be present in a peaceful society, then we’re designing measurable persuasive techniques to achieve them,” said Fogg. “It’s a new way of looking at the problem.”

One class project, for example, imitated the Free Rice site, a game where, for each word the player gets right, Free Rice donates 20 grains of rice through the U.N. World Food Program.

“Our surveys of users before and after showed that people’s empathy and tolerance levels changed measurably,” he said. “People who answered four questions in the game felt different from people who didn’t answer the questions.” They were surprised to find that the changes were still true a week later.

“We’re still at the very beginning of this, so we don’t have hard data yet,” said Fogg. “It’s a challenge to learn how to measure changes in empathy and tolerance. So we challenged each student to create one simple measurement tool by the end of class. That’s a pretty good step to future work.”

For someone who hasn’t owned a TV in eight years, I sure watch a lot of it. Who knew that DSL, an Aeron chair and a laptop hookup to a nice big flat-panel display would be so much more enjoyable than the couch? Clamp on a nice old set of Bose noise-cancelers, and — immersive nirvana. I don’t care if they’re big. They’re nice and smooshy, and I love that kussssh they make when I flip on the switch, and … wait, where was I?

Sorry. Watching TV online. Right, then.

The reason I got rid of my television in the first place is that I hate television advertising. I hate all advertising, frankly, but everything about ads on TV drives me around the bend. The increased volume, the escalating frequency as the story climax nears, the mostly inane content — it all makes me nutty. I stuck to books and magazines instead, for I don’t know how many years, until somebody gave me Season 1 of “Buffy.” That’s when I realized the drive under my right wrist was no longer for CDs. It was for DVDs, and I could actually watch TV for hours at a stretch with no advertising whatsoever. For better or worse, it’s been a TV festival here at Carusolandia ever since.

I’ve since (obviously) expanded my horizons to include streaming TV sites, and I concur with the wisdom of the crowd that Hulu has the best quality video and user experience of any of them.

Better yet, aside from the random stuttering problem that I just know they are going to fix very soon, only about 5 percent of Hulu’s ads are obnoxious. In any case, they’re so short — often as short as 15 seconds — that you hardly have time to turn off the headphones before they’re over.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve become a member of the club, but I hear a lot of really engaged conversation nowadays about online TV and movies. Everybody is finding good new programs to watch online that they tell their friends about. Everybody is badgering networks and production companies to get their shows online. Pretty much everyone I know watches something online. It’s hard to hear a discouraging word on the subject, from viewers at least.

So while some financial analysts may have been shocked, shocked! to hear it, I certainly didn’t find it surprising that Disney’s third-quarter earnings this year were actually helped by its online video assets. Look around, guys. People like it. They really like it.

But they may not like it for long. The financiers are all very worried about the fact that there just isn’t enough advertising revenue to support these online shows. The trouble, according to Michael Learmonth of Silicon Alley Insider, is that advertisers can’t stuff in as many ads online as they can on regular TV. If someone doesn’t break the code on how to wring more advertising dollars out of online television, Learmonth said, online video will get kicked to the curb by the end of 2009.

Typical. Apply traditional media business model to online medium, wait a year or two, then kill the market (or watch it asphyxiate) for not meeting your irrational expectations. Do we really have to do this again? What’s the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Yes, that’s it.

I know money has to be made, and I also know that I am not the typical customer here, being on the far end of the Hate-O-Meter when it comes to advertising. But perhaps it’s time for the industry to change its business model to reflect reality. Does it ever occur, for example, that people may be watching online not only for convenience, but also because there aren’t as many obnoxious ads?

Work with us, people.

According to Dave McCarthy, an online market executive, the issues raised by online video affect many stakeholders: content producers, technology providers, media agencies, creative agencies and advertisers. “The fact that so many stakeholders are involved has resulted in us reaching something of an impasse, with nobody really leading the charge, and the model is struggling to build momentum as a result,” he wrote.

But it might help if more people in the industry considered consumers to be stakeholders, too. Noting that “There’s precious little valid research out there to prove what really works both from a consumer ‘engage/enrage’ perspective and from the delivery of hard and fast results,” McCarthy adds,

We need to develop creative that fits with consumers’ current online mindset, rather than rely on our TV-tarnished perceptions of what works when it comes to ads. … The rules of engagement for web and TV are poles apart, a case that is highlighted by the way people consume content across the two platforms. … Many in the industry are getting too tied up with format: get the creative right and the format becomes far less important.

Amen, brother Dave. But I think that “getting the creative right” goes beyond the content and format of the ads themselves. For a group that’s as obsessed with the “new new thing” as the advertising industry, it might try applying more of its prodigious creativity to finding a new business model for supporting online media that puts consumers first. We have an awful lot of choices these days, and we don’t like getting kicked to the curb.

By harmonic convergence, also on Monday, EFF released an open-source, “test your ISP” software tool that will let you check your own Net connection for ongoing Comcastian interference.

Called Switzerland, EFF says it’s:

designed to detect the modification or injection of packets of data traveling over IP networks, including those introduced by anti-P2P tools from Sandvine (widely believed to be used by Comcast to interfere with BitTorrent uploads) and AudibleMagic, advertising injection systems like FairEagle, censorship systems like the Great Firewall of China, and other systems that we don’t know about yet.

The tool performs three critical functions. One, it spots data transmissions that have been forged or modified between clients. Two, it tells you if your connection is being messed with. And three, it gives you copies of the modified packets as evidence. Sweet.

But if you aren’t a sophisticated network user, you’ll probably want to wait a little while, or have one of your network-geek friends run it for you. This is an alpha release, command line tool, with all the attendant caveats that you have to understand in order to not get yourself into trouble that you can’t get yourself out of.

Public Knowledge, one of the FCC complainants, has a comprehensive resource page on the complaint. Its founder, Gigi Sohn, wrote a terrific post on the victory — “Comcast Decision Scratches a 20-Year Itch” — for PK’s policy blog. (Full disclosure: I am a member of PK’s advisory board.)

First, I’m sure many of you know these stats, but they are so bad and have such dreadful ramifications for a healthy Internet that they bear repeating. A 2008 survey of 18- to 55-year-old U.S. consumers, published by Gemalto, a digital security company, showed that 74 percent are afraid of identity theft as a result of online transactions. Fear of getting their online bank account hijacked was next, at 44 percent — understandably so, since nearly half of them had already fended off such a theft.

Second, the Gemalto survey also noted a positive reaction to the idea of a personal, portable security device. More than a third of the people surveyed were interested in owning some kind of USB or smart-card key, or a mobile handset device that traveled with them and contained means to ensure a secure environment for their online payments and other accounts.

Third, a panel of identity and security experts at last year’s Digital ID World came to the same conclusion — that some kind of user-centric identity technology that allowed people to keep their personal data closer at hand would become universal across the Web, not just for financial transactions but for social ones as well.

And finally, despite the fact that Second Life‘s 15 minutes of pop culture sizzle may already have come and gone, the estimated 30 million-plus highly complexified avatars still thriving in massively multiplayer online (MMO) role-playing games like Second Life and Entropia Universe may hold the key to restoring our control over our digital identities.

In a virtual world like Second Life, the ability to conduct transactions both anonymously and with credibility is part of the system’s DNA. “Drivers” (as users are called) get to decide how, and how much, their avatars present themselves to the world. Other inhabitants may not know the “true” identity of an avatar, but they know it very well by reputation. Reshaping the Internet so users could operate in the same protected way, rather than relinquishing control over their personal data as they do now, would mean a fundamental reshaping of how business is conducted online.

Today, businesses hold all the cards. Both the rule of code and the rule of law allows them to demand information from us, and if we want what they’re giving — whether it’s a pair of shoes or a Facebook account — we have to give it, period. No negotiation. No way to make them prove they are worthy of our trust. If they get sloppy and let someone steal our stuff, we’re the ones who have to clean up the mess.

There are several open software projects that are working to change these rules — to take this personal data out of the hands of businesses and allow people to conduct themselves more anonymously online, just like they can in the real world.

And according to some of the Digital ID World experts, avatars are one of the more intriguing software constructs that could “carry” this identity information.

Once you can get past the fantastical “Barbie and Ken on X” appearance of most avatars, and think of them instead as data constructs that can move around and conduct social and business transactions on behalf of their drivers, the idea makes a lot of sense.

With an estimated 30 million subscriptions to multiplayer online environments, each one represented by an avatar, virtual worlds are a tremendous proving ground for the potential of user-centric identity systems. Even at their relatively crude stage today, the technology on which they are based already allows them to interact and transact anonymously — with varying degrees of intimacy and in relative security — with millions of other avatars, including those who are hellbent on causing them some kind of digital harm.

On the Digital ID World panel, Kaliya Hamlin, a user-centric identity evangelist who runs the Identity Woman blog, said it’s only a matter of time until avatars get or demand other digital rights, including the legal right to exist in the virtual, rather than the physical, world.

This perspective is shared by many denizens of virtual worlds. Last week, I received a copy of Mark Meadows’ book, “I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life” (New Riders, 2008). An old friend and colleague of mine from the dot-bomb days, Meadows is a veteran virtual-reality programmer who spent several years immersed in Second Life and other digital worlds. He claims the avatar is “the most overlooked and undervalued asset on the Internet.”

His argument focuses mostly on how the businesses that descended upon Second Life in its hype phase forgot they were selling products to avatars. “A Jean-Paul Gaultier shirt isn’t so interesting when you’re used to wearing a jet pack,” as he put it. Businesses that do not make money in virtual worlds fail, according to Meadows, because they are ignoring the fact that drivers are not their avatars — nor do they want to be.

But those of us without avatars are dealing with the mirror image of the problem: Forced to reveal the data that represents our true selves, we are forced to be our avatars. We don’t want to be, and we shouldn’t have to, either.

Avatar technology has a long way to go before it can be truly useful as an identity system, but based on the trajectory of technology adoption — from enthusiast to professional to mass adoption — it is probably on the right course.

While avatars are now clearly at the enthusiast stage, identity professionals and others are exploring how to build a less intrusive network that would allow us to drive our own identities more safely around the Internet, shopping and reading and chatting and playing with each other without leaving us so vulnerable to identity or data theft. Given the sorry state of personal security and social trust online, I hope they figure it out fast.