Rethinking journalism

theme parties in the form of mystery parties that are packaged in multiple scenarios.

science toys and science kits including microscopes, crystal growing kits and earth science kits.

military.

gout control product since 1998.

wooden swing sets.

rolling backpacks , exercise DVDs, the old sled and also football cleats.

sterling silver chains from seven to 24 inches.

My readers are actually users

Clay Shirky — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:16:08 -0700

Continuing the pattern of readers adding value to books, not just consuming them, My Mind On Books has posted a webliography of Here Comes Everybody, pulling together links from the book with links of more general relevance.

"Webibliography" links for 'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky (part 1)

"Webibliography" links for Clay Shirky, 'Here Comes Everybody' (part 2)

Great Suw Charman-Anderson piece on pigheadedness

Clay Shirky — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:10:58 -0700

Suw has a great post on social software, failure, and success over at Strange Attractor.

She was riffing on something from the cognitive surplus talk -- "The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out" -- and she goes into why most businesses still don't understand failure modes in social software, and how important sheer pigheadedness on the part of the founders can be in driving the successes:

Every now and again I'll be talking to a client or a journalist or some random person at a conference, and they'll ask me if I think that social software is a fad. Invariably they'll have anecdotal evidence of some company, somewhere, who tried to start up blogs or a wiki inside their business, and it failed. That, they say, is proof that social software has nothing to offer business, and that if we give it a few more years it will just go away. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The problem with this interpretation is that these failures - which are common, but largely unexamined and unpublished because no one likes to admit they failed - are part and parcel of the process of negotiating how we can use these new tools in business. They are inevitable and, were they discussed in public, I'd even call them necessary as they would allow us to learn what does and doesn't work. Sadly, we don't often get a glimpse inside failed projects so we end up making the same mistakes over and over until someone, somewhere sees enough bits of the jigsaw to start putting them together.

Read the whole thing.

Jay Rosen on Citizen Journalism and Obama's "bitter" comment

Clay Shirky — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:24:43 -0700

Jay Rosen, a founder of OffTheBus, has written a great piece on how Obama's "bitter" comments got picked up by a citizen journalist, Mayhill Fowler, a 61 year old Obama donor who was at the West Coast fundraiser and heard those comments:

We're in uncharted territory here. Descriptor languages missing. People get mad when they don't know what to call things. Mad or daft. Like when Mike Allen of the Politico, listing 12 reasons 'bitter' is bad for Obama, couldn't even find the word "website" to describe the Huffington Post. It became "a liberally oriented organization that was Obama's outlet of choice when he wanted to release a personal statement distancing himself from some comments by the Rev. Wright." Sounds like some 527 group.

Citizen journalism isn't a hypothetical in this campaign. It's not a beach ball for newsroom curmudgeons, either. It's Mayhill Fowler, who had been in Pennsylvania with Obama, listening to the candidate talk about Pennsylvanians to supporters in San Francisco, and hearing something that didn't sound right to her.

Comments broken

Clay Shirky — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:17:02 -0700

Comments are broken. Thanks to everyone who's mailed in, I'm looking for the problem, will add to this entry when they're fixed. [Fixed! Sorry for the trouble.]

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Clay Shirky — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:48:53 -0700

(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.

Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now."

Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

Thank you very much.

Newspapers and the Net

Clay Shirky — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 04:11:58 -0700

Britannica Blog launched a series of posts today on Newspapers and the Net. The seed essay in this case is a passage from Nick Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google about how the economics of unbundling are threatening newspapers.

My response is first up. In it, I agree with Carr's assessment about the end of the economics that have supported newspapers, and then ask 'What's next?'

My answer to that question is encapsulated in the title: What Journalism Needs Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia .

We should stop worrying about the newspaper as a whole, and instead turn our attention to the important question: taking unbundling as a given, what bits merit saving? It isn't the physical fact of newsprint, or the expensive yet ineffective classified ads, or having a movie reviewer in every town.

What's worth saving, as a critical function, is investigative journalism. We need someone, many someones, to do long, deep, boring research, for stories that may not even pan out. Without that, government at all levels will simply slide back into the nepotism and corruption of the 19th century.

That is the challenge we need to take on, and as Carr notes, it's not one currently being met well on the Internet.

Link

Given enough eyeballs, all typos are shallow

Clay Shirky — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:48:00 -0700

One of the common patterns in Here Comes Everybody is lightweight collaboration, not "Let's lock ourselves in a room for 5 days to work together" but "Let's make it easy for an individual to make a meaningful contribution with little effort." This patterns shows up in Linux and Wikipedia, where most of the contributors have made only one addition or emendation.

And now it's come to the book. Alan Connor has put up a Flickr page documenting typos in the first edition:

Now I know where to start for the second edition. As Eric Raymond might say, "Given enough eyeballs, all typos are shallow." Thanks Alan!

Airline Passengers' Rights: Round II

Clay Shirky — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:43:30 -0700

In the book, and in presentations since, I've talked a lot about the Coalition for a Passenger's Bill of Rights, the group founded by Kate Hanni in early 2007 that lobbied for better treatment of passengers stuck on grounded airplanes. There have been several of these incidents in recent years, including the American Airlines diversions to Dallas in December of 2006 and the JetBlue JFK meltdown on Valentine's Day in 2007, and there is no question how the majority of the flying public feels about the issue.

What was remarkable about the Coalition's work last year is that they achieved a remarkable success in a legislative eyeblink, convincing the NY State legislature to pass a law creating passenger's rights in less than 8 months, with little staff or budget, and after a decade in which the airline industry simply fought off every previous attempt to create passenger's rights. And now the big test comes -- yesterday, the 2nd Circuit struck down the NY State law, saying that only the FAA can regulate passenger treatment. So now the issue goes to the US Congress, and maybe to the Supreme Court.

I've argued that the Coalition succeeded where early efforts at either lobbying or class action suits failed because the Coalition is ad hoc, amateur, and surprising. They didn't set up a big institution. They have a very specific and targeted goal. They attract people from across a political spectrum -- their members didn't need to agree about any other issue besides passenger's rights. And they appeared out of nowhere, getting the attention of legislators before the airline industry had time to frame a reaction.

However, the risk is that protest movements that rely on surprises simply get waited out by institutions. Once you get a tactic that works well, it can't be surprising anymore. (I speculated about this problem at Berkman about a month ago, and now here it is.)

So the test case here is: can a pressure group that doesn't have an institutional structure prevail in a situation where the airline lobby in the US Congress is well defended against citizen complaint? The next phase of the drama will be slower moving the first phase, but will ultimately matter more in what it tells us about protest culture in the current era.

KUOW on Friday afternoon: The Conversation

Clay Shirky — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:57:02 -0700

About to go on Ross Reynolds long-form radio interview, The Conversation, to talk about the book. The stream and podcast is here.

Penguin Blog: Tools and Transformations

Clay Shirky — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:20:36 -0700

Penguin, the publisher of Here Comes Everybody, has invited me to guest post this week on the Penguin blog, and I'm using the space to talk about how transitions in communications tools affect media.

First up, the comparison between the internet and the printing press:

It's worth noting that most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient. Readily available translations of scripture did destroy the Church as a pan-European institution. Most of the material produced by the new class of publishers was flyweight. Scribes did lose their social function. And so on, through a battery of transformations including public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment, and even literate women. (The book to read on these transitions is Elizabeth Eisenstein's two-volume work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.)
All of which brings me to the internet. It too democratizes both production and consumption of media. It too is producing a staggering volume of new material, some good but most flyweight. It too is upending the role of traditional gatekeepers and destroying the older economics of scarcity. And it too is leading to a cottage industry of hand-wringing: "Why can't we just get a little bit of internet, but keep most things the way they were?"

Read the whole thing here. There's also a podcast interview about the book.

DC book talk, Salon Interview, On the Media, and...Favoritest. Review. Evar.

Clay Shirky — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 13:45:05 -0800

I'm pleased to say "Here Comes Everybody" has been getting good coverage in the blogosphere. (Technorati, Google Blog Search, Summize. Not that I'm checking...)

My favorite review so far is from Radar, a magazine whose normal coverage tends towards the "Ashton Kutcher's Oscar Gown malfunction!" variety. (Actually, I made that up. Maybe Ashton Kutcher is a boy. I'm not really in the Radar demographic...)

The reviewer, Elizabeth McKenna, starts off saying "The mere mention of technology or sociology makes me want to run to The Hills and hide." But she goes on: "All it took was peppering social-networking theory with a little blogging, Facebook, and Paris Hilton context [...] Shirky makes convoluted theories such as Power Law Distribution and Nash Equilibrium accessible through colorful pop-culture references and real-life examples. He efficiently straddles two worlds and satisfies the needs of two seemingly opposite groups: the seasoned sociologist and the easily distracted." (Emphasis hers, btw, and a hat tip for finding literally the only bold-face name in the book and bold-facing it.)

More substantively, Jerry Brito wrote up my talk yesterday at the New America Foundation, and there are interviews up with Farhad Manjoo at Salon and Brooke Gladstone at On The Media. These kind of interviews are my favorite part of this phase, as I finally get to start mixing stories in the book with current events, which if of course the point of the book -- to provide a platform for talking about all this stuff.

Book Talk at Harvard's Berkman Center

Clay Shirky — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:01:40 -0800

Last week I gave a book talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and they've posted a video of the talk (40 mins).

Wikileaks and the Hard Problem of Changing Social Bargains

Clay Shirky — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:47:22 -0800

WikiLeaks.org, a website for anonymous individuals to report illegal or unethical behavior, was briefly and famously shut down by Judge Jeffrey White of San Francisco. Or rather, it was half-way shut down -- Judge White ordered that the WikiLeaks.org web address be de-activated, though the site itself remained intact. Judge White took this step because a former VP of Bank Julius Baer & Co., a Swiss bank with a branch in the Cayman Islands, leaked internal documents about the banks' practices in Cayman, documents the leaker claimed showed the banks' strategies for money laundering and tax evasion.

Judge White's action was a little like shutting down a newspaper, sports section and all, for a libelous article in the business section, and he eventually realized this, reversing his own ruling with the rueful observation that "Maybe that's just the reality of the world that we live in. When this genie gets out of the bottle, that's it."

Between the injunction and reversal, it was widely observed that the technical approach of revoking the Wikileaks domain name was ineffective, as the content could still be accessed through its IP address, as well as on other web sites and file sharing services. It's easy to mock Judge White for getting both the law and the technology so wrong, but underneath these seemingly simple issues, the WikiLeaks case exposes a much broader issue.

There is a tension between freedom of speech in general, and restriction of certain kinds of speech; how can society let people say what they like, while still restricting things like libel or publication of trade secrets? And although the law around these issues hasn't changed, the economics of media have been so transformed that the old legal bargains between freedom and restriction are breaking, and we have no easy way of replacing them.

The current way we have structured this bargain relies on the motivations of media professionals. Since media outlets are costly and complex to set up and run, every such outlet has a natural constituency, the professional publishers and editors and engineers who have a long-term commitment to the business. Because these professionals have a long-term commitment, it is possible to balance broad freedom of speech with specific classes restrictions, with laws that punish media professionals for publishing libelous material or trade secrets. The threat of these punishments motivate them to act as filters, not publishing such material in their newspapers or airing it on their stations. And because there are so few media outlets, society can rein in certain kinds of speech with very little little legal leverage.

Except none of those things are true anymore. Creating media is no longer costly or complex as an absolute case, it doesn't require trained professionals, and it doesn't require long-term commitment. Amateurs now have direct access, without going through a professional bottleneck.

Media, in its most elemental form, is the means of repeating a message thousands or millions of times, a capability that has become vanishingly cheap and held in common by amateurs and professionals. This mass amateurization is an end to the scarcity of media outlets. Now, if you have something to say in public, you don't need to ask anyone for help or permission. We can try to find you and punish you, but this will always be post hoc -- the self-interest of media professionals in keeping their jobs is no longer a way of preventing the amateurs from speaking out.

The motives of the Julius Baer VP were doubtless impure, but it didn't matter. He got the documents out anyway, and he could do it again tomorrow. Judge White could have gone a lot further in shutting down the WikiLeaks site, but even if he had, it is but one site of many, in but one country of many.

The question here is not whether we want to increase the ability of every employee able to violate trade secrets. Thats the situation we have today, and short of wholesale internet censorship it is the situation we will have from now on. The question is how (or whether) we can continue to carve out an exception to free speech for cases like Julius Baer without doing more harm than good. So many of our legal traditions around media assume scarcity, commercialization, and professionalization that our sudden lurch to a world of abundant, free, amateur media is going to threaten many existing social bargains, not just the the ones around trade secrets. Judge White's original injunction was a particularly bad solution, but that's no guarantee that there is a good solution to be easily had.

(Also published at HuffingtonPost.com)

My book. Let me Amazon show you it.

Clay Shirky — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:26:24 -0800

I'm delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of Here Comes Everybody today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere:

Cory Doctorow:

Clay's book makes sense of the way that groups are using the Internet. Really good sense. In a treatise that spans all manner of social activity from vigilantism to terrorism, from Flickr to Howard Dean, from blogs to newspapers, Clay unpicks what has made some "social" Internet media into something utterly transformative, while other attempts have fizzled or fallen to griefers and vandals. Clay picks perfect anecdotes to vividly illustrate his points, then shows the larger truth behind them.

Russell Davies:

Here Comes Everybody goes beyond wild-eyed webby boosterism and points out what seems to be different about web-based communities and organisation and why it's different; the good and the bad. With useful and interesting examples, good stories and sticky theories. Very good stuff.

Eric Nehrlich:

These newly possible activities are moving us towards the collapse of social structures created by technology limitations. Shirky compares this process to how the invention of the printing press impacted scribes. Suddenly, their expertise in reading and writing went from essential to meaningless. Shirky suggests that those associated with controlling the means to media production are headed for a similar fall.

Philip Young:

Shirky has a piercingly sharp eye for the spotting the illuminating case studies - some familiar, some new - and using them to energise wider themes. His basic thesis is simple: "Everywhere you look groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, take some kind of public action." The difference is that today, unlike even ten years ago, technological change means such groups can be form and act in new and powerful ways. Drawing on a wide range of examples Shirky teases out remarkable contrasts with what has been the expected logic, and shows quite how quickly the dynamics of reputation and relationships have changed.

Senator Clinton's "Million Little Pieces" moment.

Clay Shirky — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:21:28 -0800

(A version of this article also appeared at The Huffington Post.)

Senator Clinton's campaign has launched one of the oddest bits of political propaganda in the history of modern politics. Called DelegateHub.com, it is a web site that does nothing less than lay out, in glorious policy-wonk detail, their rationale for stealing the Democratic nomination.

DelegateHub is a mix of tone-deaf assertions about superdelegates ("FACT: Automatic delegates are expected to exercise their best judgment in the interests of the nation and the Democratic Party") and endorsements from politicians who support her goal of thwarting the will of the voters ("Rep. Clyburn (D-SC) says automatic delegate support should not be based on election results.") The idea that the campaign would spend its precious time, money, and energy in a public rebuke to voters in their own party suggests that they really don't understand what we are objecting to. If they keep this line of argument up, it may lead to a "Million Little Pieces" moment for Senator Clinton.

Remember A Million Little Pieces, James Frey's 2003 memoir? When important chunks turned out to be fiction, the most interesting public reaction didn't happen to Frey, it happened to Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey had praised Frey's book on air, selecting it in 2005 for her prestigious book club and adding millions to its sales. When the scandal broke in early 2006, she went in front of her adoring fans with what might be called the Hollywood defense: "Everything done for public consumption is a little bit fictionalized anyway. That's how it works. If Frey went farther than most, well, what's the big deal? As long as the book made you feel real emotion, what does it mater if the events didn't all actually happen?"

This did not go over well. Winfrey's audience turned out to care a great deal about the truth; writing about being in jail for three months, while never actually having spent even a night there, struck them as a violation of trust. Prior to 2006, Winfrey might have been able to weather the discontent she created in her audience with classic political techniques -- go publicly silent and deal with the complainers in private and one at a time ("Dear long-time Oprah fan, We were very sorry to get your recent letter...") A couple of months of that, and the whole thing should have blown over.

But it didn't, because of the internet. Winfrey had embraced the internet as a way to talk to her fans, and to let them talk back to her (or at least her staff). What she hadn't understood, 'til Frey, was that her fans were also talking to one another, not just in book groups of five or eight, but by the thousands, in mailing lists and bulletin boards all over the net. When her fans reacted, they reacted in public, and once they could see how general their anger was, it emboldened them. They didn't back down, it didn't blow over, and in short order, Winfrey, the most universally beloved television figure since Walter Cronkite, had to call for a do-over, this time going on air and castigating everyone involved on behalf of her fans.

Which brings us to Senator Clinton. Faced with fears that she may be planning to ignore our votes, she has gone public with what we might call the Washington defense: "Of course I'm planning to ignore you if you don't vote for me, because I want to win. That's how it works. If I get elected by seating the bogus Florida and Michigan delegates, and convincing party members to vote for me no matter what you want, well, what's the big deal? As long as the process selects a candidate, what does it matter if it isn't the one most of you want?"

This will not go over well. Democratic voters turn out to care a great deal about process; Gore's Electoral College loss in 2000 was a calamity, and the idea that that sort of end-run might be perpetrated on us again by a member of our own party strikes us as a betrayal of trust. And there is no way to integrate Florida and Michigan after the fact, because no competitive election took place there, so no one knows the will of the people in those states. Even worse, not only are Clinton's rationales for increasing the delegate count anti-democratic, they are mutually contradictory. DelegateHub explains her goal to seat Florida and Michigan as a question of fundamental fairness, but in explaining superdelegates, they call the popular vote an arbitrary metric. So which is it: fair, or arbitrary? The campaign never says, because of course, there's no actual principle here. Things that increase her delegate count are good, period.

And of course, the Democratic voters are starting to talk to one another about this, not just in groups of 5 or 8, but by the millions and in public. Given the Clinton campaign's willingness to use the rules of the election to undermine the its purpose, that public conversation is going to get louder, and when the voters see how general our anger is, it will embolden us, forcing a reaction. Winfrey handled her Plan B swiftly and completely, understanding and aligning herself with her fans wishes after her initial missteps. We'll see how Clinton handles herself with the voters.

Will books survive? A scorecard…

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:45:50 -0800

New media generally don’t replace old media, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out. After TV we still have radio. After telephones we had telegrams for a good long while. So what about books? After we have networked digital books, we’ll still have and produce physical books. But will physical books be as ubiquitous and culturally important as radio? Or will they be as cherished but infrequently attended as live theater?

In my interview with Cory Doctorow, I wondered, in the midst of an overly-elaborate three-part question, whether ebooks will provide enough of what we value about physical books (pbooks) that pbooks will lose the historic significance Cory had pointed to.

We won’t know the answer until we invent the future. But, I’m going to hypothesize, predict, or stipulate (pick one) that at some point we will have ebooks (which may be distinct hardware or be software running in something other device we carry around), with paper-quality displays that are full-color and multimedia, that are fully on the Net, with software that lets us interact with the book and with other readers, that are a part of the standard outfitting of citizens, and within a physical environment that provides ubiquitous Net connectivity.

Those are a lot of assumptions, of course, and each and every one of them could be disrupted by some 17 year old at work in her parents’ basement. Nevertheless, if the future is something like that, then what of pbooks’ value will be left unreplaced by ebooks?

Readability. I’m assuming paper-quality displays, which may turn out to be unattainable without having to wheel around batteries the size of suitcases. But, even without that, the ability of ebooks to display text in various fonts and sizes should remove this advantage from pbooks.

Convenience. I am assuming that ebooks will be more convenient than pbooks: as good in sunlight as pbooks, at least as easy to hold and use, easier to use for those with certain disabilities, long enough battery life, possibly self-lit, etc. The biggest open question, I believe, is whether it will be as easy to annotate ebooks…

Annotatability. The current crop of ebooks make highlighting passages and making notes so difficult that you have to take a break from reading to do either of those things. But, that’s one big reason why the current crop of ebooks are pathetic. With a touchscreen and a usable keyboard (or handwriting recognition software), ebooks of the future should be as easy to annotate as a pbook is. And those annotations will then become more useful, since they will be searchable and sharable.

Affordability. The marginal cost of producing ebook content is tiny, which doesn’t mean prices will drop as dramatically as we might like. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine a world in which ebook content costs more than pbooks.

Social flags. You probably carefully choose which book you’re going to bring with you on a job interview, and which books get moved to the shelves in your living room. We use the books we own as tribal flags, as Cory points out. Ebooks can serve the same role when introduced into social networks, including social networks explicitly built around books, such as LibraryThing.com. They obviously don’t work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you’re going to have to get physical copies.

Aesthetic objects. Many of us love the feel and smell of books. While ebooks might be able to simulate that in some way — maybe their page displays could yellow over time — it’d still just be a simulation. While ebooks will undoubtedly develop their own aesthetics, so that we’ll call people over to see how beautiful this or that new ebook is, they can’t replace the particular aesthetics of pbooks. So, those who love pbooks will continue to cherish them.

Sentimental objects. For my bar mitzvah, some friend of my parents gave me a leatherbound copy of A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad” and other poems. It was a beautiful aesthetic object, but I also understood that it had a personal meaning to the giver. I doubt that that particular copy did — I don’t think it came from his own collection — but the physicality of the book was itself a marker for the personal meaning it had for the giver. As Cory says, the books your father read — the very copies that were in his hands — probably have special meaning to you. It’s hard to see how ebooks could have the same sentimental value, except perhaps if you are reading the highlights and notes left by your father, and even then, it’s not the same.

Historic objects. Likewise, knowing that you’re looking at the very copy that was read by Thomas Jefferson gives a book an historic value that ebook content just can’t have. It’s hard to see how an author could autograph an ebook in any meaningful way.

Historical objects. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have pointed out, as has Anthony Grafton, books as physical objects collect metadata that can be useful to historians, e.g., the smell of vinegar that indicates the book came from a town visited by cholera. Ebooks, however, accumulate and generate far more metadata. So, we will lose some types of metadata but gain much more…maybe more than our current norms of privacy are comfortable with.

Specialized objects. It will take somewhere between an improbably long time and forever for all collections of pbooks to be digitized. Thus, books in special collections are likely to be required well after we can take the presence of ebooks for granted.

Possessions. We are headed towards a model that grants us licenses to read books, but not outright ownership. (This is Cory’s main topic in the interview.) If we lose ownership of ebooks, then they won’t have the sentimental value, they will lose some of their economic value to readers (because we won’t be able to resell them or buy them cheaper used), and we won’t be as invested in them culturally. Whether ebooks will be ownable, and whether that will be the default of the exception, is unresolved.

Single-mindedness. Books are the exemplar in our culture of thinking. We write our best thoughts in books. We engage with the best thoughts of others by reading books. Books encourage and enable long-form thinking. Ebooks, because they are (ex hypothesis) on the Net, are distracting. They string together associated chunks and tempt us with links beyond themselves. It is easy to imagine ebooks providing the singleminded pbook experience: “Press here to remove all links.” But, of course, you could always unpress the button. Besides, since your ebook is on the Net (ex hypothesis), all that’s stopping you from jumping out of the book and into your email or Facebook is self-discipline. So, while ebooks can provide the singledminded experience of pbooks, some of us may prefer the paper version to keep the distraction of the Net at bay.

Religious objects. Some books have special meaning within some religions. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that an ebook is going to replace the Torah scrolls in synagogues. In fact, orthodox Jews can’t use electronic devices on the Sabbath, so they are certainly going to continue to buy pbooks. But, this is the very definition of a specialty market.

So, what does all this mean for the future of books? It depends.

First, are there other values of pbooks that I left off the list?

Second, I haven’t listed any unique advantages of ebooks. For example, ebooks will allow social reading: Engaging with others who are reading the book or with the traces left by those who have already it. That’s pretty important. Also, ebooks are likely to radically reduce the cost of reading, especially of some categories of overpriced pbooks (e.g., textbooks). Also, ebooks will make it much easier to understand the content of books through embedded dictionaries, search capabilities, and links to explanatory discussions. Also, as more of the corpus gets digitized, ebooks will make it far easier for scholars to pursue the footnotes (except they’ll be embedded links, not footnotes). Also, ebooks will incorporate multimedia. Also, reading ebooks will build a searchable personal corpus that is far more useful to us than bookcases filled with out conquered pbooks. Also, we’ll always have our entire library with us, ready to be read or reread, which is good news for readers.

I leave it to you to decide how this mix of values is likely to play out. What will be the social role and meaning of pbooks as we go forward into the ebook era? In twenty years — giving ourselves plenty of time to develop usable ebook readers, to digitize most of what we need, and to built an always-available network — will pbooks be used mainly by collectors, and scholars working with unique texts? Will they be sentimental objects? The poor person’s medium? Will physical books be the equivalent of AM radio, of the road company of “Cats,” of quaint objects in book museums — and/or the continuing pinnacle and embodiment of learning?v

Cory Doctorow in support of copyright

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:51:16 -0800

In this edition of Radio Berkman, Cory Doctorow argues in favor of copyright … the part of copyright that protects the rights of readers to own (and not just license) books.

It being Cory, the discussion covers topics such as the way in which books are like dogs and his sentimental attachment to his digital collection.

Two long posts well worth reading

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:36:11 -0800

Ethan Zuckerman ponders what good is knowing if it doesn’t lead to effective action…and he isn’t asking this rhetorically. You want to read this because Ethan himself is an extreme knower, an extreme care-er, and a full time agent of change. I found that this post caused me to have an internal dialogue in which I kept interrupting myself. The world is just so hard to change, even when the need is so obvious and urgent, and yet we can’t let ourselves believe that knowing and caring can make no difference at all. What’s at issue here (at least in my internal dialogue) is that the model of knowing, caring, and acting isn’t explaining our experience. Or our hope.

Then there’s Evgeny Morozov’s review of Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution in the Boston Review. Evgeny likes Andrew’s book although he thinks it doesn’t explain enough about why Wikipedians wikipede. The comment thread is also well worth reading.

Legal advice for online journalists, bloggers, and other webby creators

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:54:45 -0800

The Berkman Center has announced the Online Media Legal Network that networks lawyers willing to provide free services with online journalists and other creators of online works who need legal advice for free or for cheap. It could be anything from helping to legally create a company to representing you in court when you are accused of infringing someone else’s tender copyright. This builds on the work that the Citizen Media Law Project at the center.

If you need some legal help, go to the OMLN.org website. If you are a lawyer who wants to volunteer to help, sign up at the website.

[berkman] Samuel Bowles on property rights in the information age

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:25:11 -0800

Samuel Bowles is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called: “Kudunomics: Property rights for the information based economy.” He wants to look at how institutions are likely to evolve in the “weightless economy.”

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. THIS TALK WAS ESPECIALLY DIFFICULT for me and certainly contains howlingly wrong misrepresentations of SB’s ideas. You are warned, people.

“In an economy based primarily on embodied and relational wealth, individual property rights are difficult and socially harmful to enforce.” Adam Smith’s invisible hand fails in important ways. SB says that that’s not a new idea. The new idea is that we should be able to gain insight about the evolution of institutions by studying the reverse transition from the Late Pleistocene forager economy to the agrarian economy. So, SB thought he should run that history backwards, which he may get to talking about in today’s session. The forager economy may provide clues for the weightless economy of the future.

SB puts up an equation explaining wealth, which I could not follow or capture, a cobb-douglas production function. [I hear Ethanz typing. He's certainly doing a far better job liveblogging this than I.] One point: Once we domesticated animals, we turned wealth into something we could own. Network wealth = the value your connections bring you. The number of people who will help you in your field, share food, etc. Embodied wealth = the value of what’s in your head that’s actionable by your body. [I'm not sure I got that, and I'm certainly paraphrasing.]

The basic idea of the invisible hand theorem is that good fences make good neighbors. Arrow and Debreu showed in 1953 that competitive market allocations will be optimal (in the Pareto sense), but only if the markets are complete (”the effects of the actions of economic actors on one another take the form of contractual exchanges”) and increasing returns to scale are absent or small [I don't know what that means]. “Under these assumptions, goods will be priced at their marginal cost which will equal their true scarcity (social marginal cost): p=M =SMC” SB is going to show that that is not true in a weightless economy.

Much of the economy – the grain and steel economy — fits this invisible hand theorem. It works best if the goods are tangible, easily measurable in standardized ways. In this classic economy, there was sufficient competition.

But, it’s different in weightless economies, where there’s high first-copy costs, and low marginal costs. E.g., it costs a lot to produce the first copy of a CD but very little for the rest of the copies. E.g., the first copy of Windows 97 cost maybe $50M, but the second copy cost $3.

In the weightless economy, enforcing property rights paradoxically force a violation of the invisible hand theorem: You let someone charge $20 for a cd the marginal cost of which is $0.85.

In the economy of grain and steel, market structure was a mix of competition and stable oligopoly (”competition restricted to a handful of firms”). The info economy may exhibit a serial monopoly structure, but that’s not what he wants to talk about.

SB gives a summary of what he’s said so far: Dilemmas of the weightless economy: Increasing returns on both the demand and supply side make competition difficult to sustain. This winner-take-all dynamic generates lots of inequality. The critical thing: Private firms cannot conform to the p=MC rule, and property rights are both ambiguous and difficult to enforce. The institutions that have worked well for the past 200 yrs are likely to work less well in the future.

Kudu = An antelope of some sort hunted in Tanzania for its massive caloric value. When one is killed, it’s widely shared (perhaps 2/3 outside of the nuclear family). The culture of the foraging band: generosity, modesty about one’s success, sharing. Christopher Boehm (1982) wrote that group sanction is “the most powerful instrument for regulation of individually assertive behaviors.” But mobile foraging bands “and its collectivist and egalitarian norms and properties was eventually displaced by agricultural production.” The critical fact is that that increased land productivity so that a small plot of band was productive enough to live on, which provided an incentive for putting up fences and defending it. These prop rights were not enforced by states but by some form of mutual consent.

Just as agricultural facilitated unambiguous prop rights, the info economy is reversing this process. We’re returning to the early Pleistocene economy. Most of the animals could not be domesticated. Some became more valuable when domesticated. Is an online song more like a cow or like a kudu? “Will the attempt to domesticate the modern day kudu’s prove costly and ineffective?”

Arrow: “Information is a fugitive resource.” It runs away. “We are just beginning to face the contradictions between the systems of private prop and of info acquisition and dissemination.” “If Arrow is correct, how would we expect our economic institutions to evolve under these new conditions?” Institutional change is very hard to study. There aren’t that many French Revolutions to study. He is doing Markov chain models with others at the Santa Fe Institute.

“Could between-group competition and technological advance combine to induce a new property rights revolution?” Darwin explained change via in-group revolution, while Marx looked at between-group. This is complex between there are both individual and group selection processes, so they’re almost impossible to predict using math. But you can use models. There are many quilibria. Initial conditions do not matter.

He talks about his agent-based model of institutional persistence and innovation. (You can play with his “artificial history” models here: http://www.santafe.edu/~bowles It looks like a Windows executable you can download.) He describes three strategies in the model: bourgeois (own prop and defend it), civic (share and penalize those who do not), share. [See Ethan! Or watch the webcast when it's posted in a day or too. Sorry.]

If prop rights are stable, then an all-bourgeois society (protect what they have) is in equilibrium. Likewise if all civics. If all civics (share and punish for non-sharing), you can drift toward all sharers because they are behaviorally indistinguishable if there are not B who are trying to protect what they have. Using these parameters (which I am expressing totally inadequately and probably inaccurately), he and Jung-Kyoo Choi have run simulations. If prop rights are stable, the system tends towards equilibrium. If they are not — a bourgeois contests ownership — there is no equilibrium, although there is some moving clustering. Summary: “Evolutionary success of the ‘bourgeois equilibrium’ depends on prop rights being unambiguous.

But this is not the right way to understand the future because we don’t know how ambiguous prop rights will be, which depends on technological advances and the legal system.

Diff institutions have diff advantages. States are good at coercing, Markets allocate well. Communities handle the ambiguity of prop rights but fail where inequalities among members are very large. The problem of the info economy is that information creates both substantial ambiguity or prop rights and a lot of inequality (winner-take-all). The ambiguity makes it hard for the state to adjudicate. The inequality makes it hard for the communitarian values to succeed.

He ends by quoting Hayek: Whether central planning or competition works depends on whether you put all the pricing info in the hands of a central authority or adjust the prices by giving the pricing info to individuals. But now we have a third player: Markets and states, but also communities. Fifty years ago, people speculated that computers would solve this problem. SB says that we need a high level of info creation as well as making it available at its marginal cost. This is the question asked for hunters in hunter/gathering societies: Why should hunters hunt if they give it all away? Understanding this activity — mirrored in today’s collaborative environment — may help solve the problem.

Q: What do we know about the scalability of communities? The ambiguity seems to grow as groups get bigger.
A: How many people work on Wikipedia?
Q: The ambiguity there occurs in small groups.
A: Hunter-gatherers can’t take advantage of economies of scale or of diversity. Can moral sanctioning be done in on-face-to-face environments? We’re finding out.

Q: Can you talk about common pool resources (Ostrom)? [and two more questions]
A: The value of the network is the number of possible connections. There are therefore huge economies of scale. That’s where you get the winner-take-all from. Ostrom took some insights of Ronale Coase and extend them beyond firms, to include things such as communities. Are the motivations for sw engineers the same for hunters? Reputation. Fun.

Q: [me] What’s a community?
A: The non-state, non-market ways that humans connect and interact. [Hugely paraphrased!]
Q: [me] Is there enough in common among all those ways to enable it to be used as a factor in your model?
A: Communities have in common that they have a public thing, they have to figure how to share the benefits of this, and they;re not doing this primarily through enforceable contracts. But I don’t want to pin it down too much. Read “Against Parsimony” by Albert Hirschman.

Q: One of the child’s first words is “mine” because that it eanables it to differentiate itself from its environment. I think your theory would change if you asked if that’s a universal.
A: It’s not. Children differentiate themselves from their mother, but they don’t universally claim physical objects as their own. Private property is incredibly recent.

Q: In your agent-based model, could you drill down to see which types of prop rights are likely to be stable?
A: Yes, but not with agent-based models. Our theory lets us address this. We just haven’t done it. You should be able to look at the nature of the project — first copy costs, e.g. — and develop a typology of the sorts of things that are hard to solve, although changes in tech or law would change this.

Q: The gov’t role has be quite diff if you an economy of cows or kudus. How does this affect gov’t regulation?

A: My preliminary ideas: I don’t think it leads to more or less gov’t. It leads into different kinds of gov’t interventions. The aim is to take seriously when designing incentives you have to take into account that people have their own motivations. And if you introduce monetary incentives, you may get worse outcomes; I’ve recently written about this for Science. The solution to problems is always some combination of incentives designed by economists et al. and the moral incentives of most humans. These two are inseparable; addressing one without recognizing this can be disastrous. Some problem are solved not just by financial incentives but by some combination of people’s incentives and motivations.

[NOTE: Samuel Bowles is way more coherent than this livebloggery makes him sound. I lack the background to follow much of what he says. Much for me was like typing in the dark. So, I apologize to him and to you. And here's Ethan Zuckerman's far superior bloggage.]

Cory: No, three strikes and you’re out

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:04:23 -0800

I’ve posted a video interview with Cory Doctorow at Broadband Strategy Week. Cory talks about the disproportionality of “three strikes” laws that take away Internet access from those who have been thrice accused of copyright infringement. Perhaps, he suggests, we should also take away Internet access from rightsholders who inaccurately accuse people of infringing copyright. The six minutes are a string of wonderful Cory paragraphs.

Cory’s new book is Makers. His explanation of why he Creative Commonses his books is classic Cory. Which is a very excellent thing.

BTW, right before this, I interviewed Cory for a Radio Berkman podcast that will be up soon. We talked about the future of books as objects you can own.

UN’s Internet Governance Forum censors a mild mention of censorship

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:55:38 -0800

Holy cow!

The Open Net Initiative, a group that monitors government filtering (= censorship) of the Internet held a book launch at the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheik. A poster for the book — Access Controlled — contained the sentence: “The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous ‘Great Firewall of China’ is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.”

This statement was so objectionable, so outrageous, such a violation of common decency, such a hateful expression, such an offense to the tender sensibilities of UN diplomats that it must not ever be uttered. Security guards were sent to take the poster down.

If the people who want to govern the Internet think that’s beyond the pale of free speech, what the hell are they going to do with the rest of the Internet?

And, by the way, if you want to see what it looks like when UN diplomats take bold action, watch this video of the take-down itself.

[Source, video statement by ONI, BoingBoingage]

(Disclosure: the Berkman Center is a member of ONI.)

OMG. I disagree with Umberto Eco!

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:56:47 -0800

It makes me very nervous to disagree with Umberto Eco because he is so fathomlessly smart. But I think in this case I do. Sort of.

There’s a fabulous interview with Eco in Spiegel (in English) about why he loves lists. He is characteristically pithy, provocative and wise. A crucial paragraph, from the beginning:

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

I read the first sentence and was provoked, as Eco intends. Lists are the origin of culture? Please say more! But Eco doesn’t really explain, in this interview, why lists — as opposed to other forms of collections and orderings — are so important. The urge to make order, yes, but not lists themselves.

A list is one particular way of creating order. Lists are sequential and one-dimensional: Wines listed by year, or by place, or by ranking, or by the chronology of when you first encountered them. (Lists can be hierarchical, but they’re only lists if they can be resolved back down to the one-dimensional.) Lists thus are one elemental way of ordering the world. And they have a peculiar fascination, which Eco expresses beautifully. But I think it’s wrong to say that they’re the origin of culture. I think it’d be more accurate and useful to say that culture originates with collecting: Pulling things around us because of their appeal (a word I’m purposefully leaving vague).

I’m sure I’m making too much of Eco essentially drumming of interest in his exhibit at the Louvre, but the issue matters a little bit. I think (based on little to nothing) that lists emerged as a stripping down of multi-dimensional collections. Culture first happened (I imagine) when we pulled together pieces of the world that spoke to us in ways we could not articulate. We assembled them as spaces through which we could wander, or piles through which we could collectively sort (”Oooh, I particularly like that green shiny stone!”). Lists are an abstraction, and culture began (I suppose) with an unarticulated sense that some things go together — and perhaps our first conversations were about why.

Eco goes on to say many wonderful things about why we have liked lists, including proposing that listing properties of an object can liberate us from looking for the definitional essence of things. (For more on this, read his important book, Kant and the Platypus.) In fact, Eco suggests that a mother defines a tiger to her child “Probably by using a list of characteristics: The tiger is big, a cat, yellow, striped and strong.”

I have a bunch of issues with that.

First, that type of definition really just makes explicit what’s implicit in the traditional approach to definitions as essence. In the traditional Aristotelian approach, the essence is the creature’s spot in the hierarchy of beings. So, a tiger is a species of cat, and thus would be specified by its difference from other cats but also by all of the properties of the classes above it (mammal, vertebrate, animal, etc.). The essential definition and the list definition both consist of a list of properties, but the essential definition nests them so that they don’t all have to be spelled out, and so we can see which differences “count.” Eco says, “The essential definition is primitive compared with the list,” but it seems to me that a beautifully nested, hierarchical system of essential definitions is in fact more advanced — it requires abstraction and systems thinking — than a mere list.

But, I don’t want to miss Eco’s essential (so to speak) point here, which is that defining something with a list breaks us out of the notion that there is a single, knowable essence. Absolutely. There’s no eternal essence, “just” a set of properties that are relevant depending upon our circumstances. With that I wholeheartedly agree.

My second problem with this is that — as George Lakoff says in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, explicating and expanding the work of Eleanor Rosch — the mother (heck, maybe even the father) probably actually teaches the child what a tiger is by pointing at one, or at a picture of one. We learn through prototypes, not through essential definitions, and not by making lists. List-making is an abstraction and a secondary activity.

Third, the listing the parent does seem to me to not have the properties that make lists captivating to Eco. The parent isn’t trying to give a complete listing that brings a sense of mastery over the infinite and over death. She’s just pointing out some of the salient features. If it is a list, it’s not a list of the sort that Eco has charmed us about.

Fourth, while lists of properties are a useful corrective to thinking that things are exhausted by a definition of their essence, lists strip out so much that they don’t seem like much more adequate than essential definitions. A tiger isn’t a list.

This is just a fun interview in Spiegel, so I may be taking it too seriously. So, even if lists occur within culture — including the lists in literature he points to — rather than being the origin of culture, the interview does indeed help us to see why our fascination with lists is a fascination with something bigger than lists.

Google Books Settlement 2.0?

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:52:23 -0800

Google has announced a revised settlement [redlined pdf faq pdf] that it hopes will address the concerns raised by the Department of Justice and many other groups.

Here’s a summary of the summary Google provides [pdf], although IANAL and I encourage you to read the summary, which is written in non-legal language and is only 2 pages long:

1. The agreement now has been narrowed to books registered for copyright in the US, or published in the UK, Australia or Canada.

2. There have been changes to the terms of how “orphaned works” (books under copyright whose rightsholders can’t be found) are handled. The revenue generated by selling orphaned works no longer will get divvied up among the authors, publishers and Google, none of whom actually have any right to that money. Instead it will go to fund active searching for the rightsholders. (At the press call covered by Danny Sullivan [see below], the Authors Guild rep said that with money, about 90% of missing rightsholders can be found.) After holding those revenues in escrow (maybe I’m using the wrong legal term) for ten years (up from five in the first settlement), the Book Rights Registry established by the settlement can ask the court to disburse the funds to “nonprofits benefiting rightsholders and the reading public”; I believe in the original, the Registry decided who got the money. So, in ten years there may be a windfall for public libraries, literacy programs, and maybe even competing digital libraries. (The Registry may also (determined by what?) give the money to states under abandoned property laws. (No, I don’t understand that either.))

The new settlement creates a new entity: A “Court-approved fiduciary” who represents the rightsholders who can’t be found. (James Grimmelmann [below] speculates interestingly on what that might mean.)

3. The settlement now explicitly states that any book retailer can sell online access to the out-of-print books Google has scanned, including orphaned works. The revenue split will be the same (63% to the rightsholder, “the majority of” 37% to the retailer).

4. The settlement clarifies that the Registry can decide to let public libraries have more than a pitiful single terminal for public access to the scanned books. The new agreement also explicitly acknowledges that rightsholders can maintain their Creative Commons licenses for books in the collection, so you could buy digital access and be given the right to re-use much or all of the book. Rightsholders also get more control over how much Google can display of their books without requiring a license.

5. The initial version said Google would establish “market prices” for out of print book, which seemed vague because what counts as the market for out-of-print books? The new agreement clarifies the algorithm, aiming to price them as if in a competitive market. And, quite importantly, the new agreement removes the egregious “most favored nation” clause that prevented more competitive deals to be made with other potential book digitizers.

From my non-legal point of view, this addresses many of the issues. But not all of them.

I’m particularly happy about the elements that increase competition and access. It’s big that Amazon and others will be able to sell access to the out-of-print books Google has scanned, and sell access on the same terms as Google. As I understand it, there won’t be price competition, because prices will be set by the Registry. Further, I’m not sure if retailers will be allowed to cut their margins and compete on price: If the Registry prices an out-of-print book at $10, which means that $6.30 goes to the escrow account, will Amazon be allowed to sell it to customers for, say $8, reducing its profit margin? If so, then how long before some public-spirited entity decides to sell these books to the public at their cost, eschewing entirely the $3.70 (or the majority of that split, which is what they’re entitled to)? I don’t know.

I also like the inclusion of Creative Commons licensing. That’s a big deal since it will let authors both sell their books and loosen up the rights of reuse.

As far as getting rid of the most favored nation clause: Once the Dept. of Justice spoke up, it’s hard to imagine it could have survived more than a single meeting at Google HQ.

Reactions from the critics has not been all that positive.

James Grimmelmann is studying it carefully, but quickly put up a substantial and detailed evaluation of the revisions. He is deep into the details.

The Open Book Alliance (basically an everyone-but-Google consortium) is not even a little amused, because the new agreement doesn’t do enough to keep Google from establishing a de facto monopoly over digital books. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not satisfied because no reader privacy protections were added. Says the ACLU: “No Settlement should be approved that allows reading records to be disclosed without a properly-issued warrant from law enforcement and court orders from third parties. ”

Danny Sullivan live-blogged the press call where Google and the other parties to the settlement discussed the changes. It includes a response to Open Book Alliance’s charges.

How to connect your Droid to a Mac

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:26:05 -0800

It took only a little googling, but it isn’t dead obvious — until you know how to do it — so here’s how you connect your Droid to your Mac.

Connect the two via USB.

Pull down the Notifications sheet on the Droid. You do that by pulling with your giner on the very topmost menu bar in the system. You should see a USB symbol in that bar.

Click on the obvious entry in the notifications, which says something like “Turn on USB” or some such.

Check the Finder on your Mac. It should show a “NO NAME” mounted under devices. Welcome to your Droid.

(And then be prepared to trash your SD card by accident.)

links for 2009-11-06

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:03:07 -0800

Where’s the iPorn? « Ultimi Barbarorum

Insightful post on the iPhone and Apple's market power

links for 2009-08-26

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:03:57 -0700

Raymond Sokolov Reviews Virgina's Barbecue Restaurants – WSJ.com

Really shouldn't read this roundup of great comfort food before lunchtime…

(tags: restaurants usa)

links for 2009-08-19

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:09:36 -0700

Poltiics — Top 40 Media Blogs

A list of the top mainstream media blogs on politics. Interesting to see which titles are doing best in this list – and a surprise, too.

(tags: blogs politics totalpolitics)
The Total Politics Guide to Political Blogging in the UK 2009-2010

I'm fascinated that not only is political blogging seen to be on the rise the UK, someone thinks there's a business in printing a book on it. I suspect the book may be more profitable than the blogs themselves, mind you.

(tags: blogging politics totalpolitics)

links for 2009-08-04

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 03:03:28 -0700

Azeem Azhar: New ways to save the newspaper

Azeem has some ideas for the Observer.

(tags: newspapers publishing observer)

links for 2009-07-08

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:04:06 -0700

Factron iPhone case packs interchangeable camera lenses, built-in excess

Ah yes – a fish eye lens for my iPhone. Just what I was after.

(tags: iphone apple geek case lens)

links for 2009-07-03

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:03:14 -0700

The Finance Press Becomes Ever More Willfully Obscure, Clubby And Unhelpful | The Awl

"The consequence of all this insider chat is that fewer and fewer people can follow extremely important goings-on. People are tuning out what is the most important story of our lives, which is being delivered incrementally by a number of very smart people, nearly all of them working exclusively online, to a small audience of people who are financially educated enough to understand. So do your part and educate me, please."

(tags: economics financial_journalism journalism finance)

links for 2009-05-12

Tue, 12 May 2009 03:16:21 -0700

FT.com – Populism has a cost in Scotland and Wales

They have been the defining differences introduced by a Scottish Government in the last decade: free personal and nursing care, the abolition of tuition fees and the rejection of targets and use of the private sector in health. All those moves have played well with Scots voters. But objective measures, as reported by the FT, suggest they have failed: waiting times are falling more slowly than in the south and participation in higher education has not outstripped England. Worse, England is doing better than Scotland on maths and science scores, while overall GCSE performance has risen rapidly to equal Scotland’s, in its equivalent qualifications. “It could be,” says Lindsay Paterson, professor of education policy at Edinburgh university, “that the greater competitiveness and specialisation of English secondary schooling has introduced a dynamic of emulation and improvement which the more defensive policies of Scotland and Wales are not matching.”

(tags: scotland england politics education health)
Mediactive » When Others Delete Your Past

Dan Gillmor: “I’ve learned my lesson. Anything I write — for myself or for someone else — is backed up on my machines under my control. I’m creating a cloud backup as well.”

(tags: archives journalism history web)

links for 2009-05-01

Fri, 01 May 2009 03:02:11 -0700

WSJ.com – Why Book Critics Go On for Inches

Stephen Potter: The reviewer's mission "is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't, you are glad that someone else has, although obviously it might have been done better."

(tags: books reviewing critics)
Slate Magazine: 100 days of Barack Obama's Facebook news feed

How droll.

(tags: politics satire obama funny)

links for 2009-04-30

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 03:22:24 -0700

Lloyd Shepherd: Messing about with local information

Lloyd thinks about local information, and launches some experiments just a couple of postcodes away from me in South London…

(tags: blogs location news)

links for 2009-04-25

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 03:01:27 -0700

YouTube – Auto-Tune the News #2: pirates. drugs. gay marriage.

Because everything sounds better with Auto-Tune. Utter genius.

(tags: music video news youtube)

Barack Obama now available from Enhanced Editions

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:40:10 -0700

Following the successful launch of Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro on our Enhanced Editions platform, we’re very pleased to follow it with two new titles, both by Barack Obama and available now in the App Store.

Written long before he started down the road to the Presidency, Dreams From My Father is a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking the big questions about identity and belonging.

‘This may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.’
Joe Klein, Time

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama discusses the importance of empathy in politics, his hopes for a different America with different policies, and how the ideals of democracy can be renewed.

‘Offers readers on this side of the Atlantic a window not just into the mind of one of America’s most exciting politicians but into the political landscape of the post-Bush era.’ David Lammy, Guardian

As with Bunny Munro, both these apps feature the highest quality of design and typesetting, including control of type size and font, night mode, tilt scroll and many other features.

Both apps are available in the App Store now.

Fail Harder, Talk at London Book Fair 2009

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:52:22 -0700

Earlier this year, I gave a pecha kucha talk at the London Book Fair.

A pecha kucha has to be really fast – your 21 prepared slides run automatically in 20 second increments for a total of 7 minutes – and great fun. The event was impeccably organised by Jon Slack and Doug Wallace under the aegis of the Society of Young Publishers. They recently repeated the format for a third time and I recommend you to go to the fourth.

The brief was open, and for some reason I decided I wanted to talk about failure. The logic being that I thought that given that I was speaking to a room mainly composed of young publishers or students trying to enter the industry, I would share my extensive professional experience of disappointment and shattered dreams. Not in a bid to break their spirits, you understand, but to encourage them to try and be recklessly ambitious and hopelessly idealistic at the beginning of their careers – especially if someone else is underwriting those failures. It’s a twist on the old “silver lining” story but hopefully enough to be inspiring.

The pecha kucha format is unforgiving to hyperbole and imminent failure (technical or emotional) haunts the speaker. Terrifyingly, I was first up as well which didn’t help the nerves.

Anyway, the video has just been put online, which is below. My notes from the talk are also available if you can’t see what’s on screen.

Sorry about the horrific thumbnail photo.

Also available is Jamie Byng’s talk, my old boss at Canongate, who was next up on stage. We didn’t know what the other was talking about so when I gave a slide about being his “gimp”, that was meant in the nicest possible way. Here’s his talk:

For more details on the event, here’s a post I wrote at the time.

Apt’s links for September 2nd through September 16th

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:32:43 -0700

Threepress: Digital tools for 21st century publishing » Blog Archive » When to embed fonts in ePub files – Note to self. Don’t think iPhone SDK allows this yet but worth triple checking.
Creative Review – Noma Bar: Negative Space – Awesome. We ove Noma.

Enhanced Editions for iPhone: The Death of Bunny Munro

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:23:29 -0700

As you’re no doubt aware, we’ve been working on an ebook app for iPhones, for a while, under the name Enhanced Editions. We’re very pleased to announce that the first fruits of our labour are now available in the app store.

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave is the first Enhanced Editions title, and contains everything you’d expect from a top-notch ebook experience: tilt scrolling, customisable fonts and text sizes, full-text search, bookmarking, and clean, clear navigation.

But we’ve also added Enhanced Editions goodness – as well as the complete text of the novel, the app comes with the full audiobook, read by Nick Cave – synced with the text, so you can switch from audio to text without losing your place. There’s also an exclusive soundtrack and videos of Nick reading from the book. There’s even an in-app news feed, keeping you up to date with news and reviews, as well as invitations to exclusive events.

As well as comissioning another film (above) from our good friends at Asylum – who made This Is Where We Live – we’ve also launched a new site at enhanced-editions.com.

Here we’re highlighting all the great titles coming in the next few months – including books by Barack Obama and David Simon, creator of The Wire – and talking about some of the new features and design decisions on the blog.

For example, want to know more about syncing the audiobook, serif vs sans-serif fonts, icon design, or our position on epub and DRM? It’s all on the blog. Go take a look.

25th Estate / This Is Where We Live update

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:55:14 -0700

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

25th Estate, the film (above) created for 4th Estate’s 25th anniversary, has already had over 250,000 views, and been blogged about by Kanye West.

Whilst higher accolades are hard to come by, we do have some great news of increased recognition from the film world.

The film, created with our dear friends at Asylum Films, have been accepted into the following festivals:

Running this week at the South Bank BFI uber-hip ONEDOTZERO asked us specifically to take part in their CRAFTWORK 09 section

16th BRADFORD ANIMATION FESTIVAL.

Asylum’s Jordan says, “Its like the Annecy of Britain, big deal in animation, this is the website . We did rather well at Annecy
Anim’est 2009. We are in competition for Best Advertising
Selected for the Prix Arts in Linz, Austria where we are screening as part of the Inner / outer Worlds section.
This joins our many festivals already including SHORTS, SOHO, Portable, Portobello….

And, in case you missed it, here is another film we made with Asylum to promote Enhanced Editions‘ launch of Nick Cave’s new novel The Death of Bunny Munro as an iPhone app.

Apt’s links for August 26th through September 1st

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:31:07 -0700

How Big Is the Apple iPhone App Economy? The Answer Might Surprise You –
Larva Labs – Android Market Sales, Are Those Tears or is it Raining in Here? – “There?s been a lot of speculation lately about the size of the Apple App Store, most recently based on some numbers from AdMob which are summarized over at GigaOM. They came to the conclusion that the app store is worth $200M monthly, whereas the Android market is worth a paltry $5M. As sad as that comparison may be, from our experience the total is probably much lower.”
KnowEm UserName Check – Thwart Social Media Identity Theft, check Username Availability –

Apt’s links for August 21st through August 25th

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:31:24 -0700

The Current State of Video in Email – Articles & Tips – Campaign Monitor – Note to self. email campaigns.
Inside Google Books: Judging a book by its (pretty) cover – “Finally we hit upon an idea that we like — why not surface the illustrations inside the book to be its front cover?” Sweet.

Apt’s links for August 20th

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:32:12 -0700

Cleantech Group report: E-readers a win for carbon emissions | Cleantech Group – New report conducts lifecycle analysis of Amazon?s Kindle, suggesting significant environmental advantages compared to the publishing of books, magazines and newspapers.
Olivetti Lettera 22 Instruction Manual – a set on Flickr – The instruction manual for an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter.

Apt’s links for August 13th

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:30:22 -0700

Subtraction.com: Conversation Pieces – “I could frame this image, hang it on my wall and stare at it for hours”
Pynchon?s Inherent Vice ? hear the novel here… – “Rather than just viewing the list, for anyone who fancies hearing the tracks while reading the book, I?ve created a Spotify playlist here” Pynchon’s latest is my holiday reading. Uhhuh.

Apt’s links for August 11th through August 12th

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:32:56 -0700

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: The Twitter app to use on Android, I?m told, is… – “Finishing a significant consumer software application is essentially a process of nailing down a profusion of tiny details like the ones Torrez calls out here. It can seem like death by a thousand paper cuts, and it becomes even more painful when you realize that you can?t market based on polish, and no user will laud you for making sure a button is properly disabled, an icon is perfectly aligned, or a design is properly thought out.”
Worldwide Developer Phone Support – Apple Developer Connection –

Biomapping – thinking about urban spaces differently – from Heart of a City: BioMapping | Brain Pickings

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:51:06 -0800

Heart of a City: BioMapping

By Maria Popova

Why skin is the new heart and how your neighbors can change the way your feel about your street.

On the trails of yesterday’s fascinating exploration of cities as living organisms, today we look at another piece of high-concept urban portraiture that harnesses the power of art, sociology and technology to a brilliant end.

Since 2004, Christian Nold has been orchestrating Bio Mapping — a crowdsourced community mapping project, which wires people up to Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) devices, detecting their emotional arousal, and sends them on their merry way around the neighborhood. These states are then mapped onto people’s geographic location, creating a visualization of communal emotion.

via brainpickings.org

This is a mind-spinning, gorgeous project that highlights how ubiquitous social web technology will start to make us think about and experience our urban environments differently.

I’ve noticed similar effects just with having an iPhone with reliable location and mapping data on you all of the time. I navigate London very differently, especially. The mapping data has changed how I model it in my head.

Same on the South Downs when I’m mountain biking. I “see” trails and ridges and hills via a Google Earth view almost… I’m making sense of an environment that used to be the background to the road and train system around Brighton in my mental model in a different way. Re-wiring how my brain sees it, cross referencing with computer data and trails/comments that others have made, often online, leaving their trails etc. there…

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

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Notes on a crisis (plan that takes account of social media) – by Richard Stacey

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:18:42 -0800

There are five things an organisation needs to do to make their crisis preparation social media compliant.

Monitor social media in real-time

Establish a management process that delivers a response that is quicker and more specific to the needs of social media, rather than adapted only to the needs of traditional media

Create an information publication platform that is optimised to spread information effectively through social networks

Re-purpose your existing information so that it can spread easily through social networks

Incorporate social media into your crisis training.

For more excellent advice read richardstacy.com

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

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Some great thinking on networks and business ecosystems from Jeff Jarvis

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:17:54 -0800

Sure, even in the huggy ecosystem, companies fight and compete. But in an ecosystem-based economy, companies benefit – they find efficiency and growth – by working collaboratively. As I see it, the new economy and its opportunities will be built in three layers:

1. Platforms. There’s tremendous benefit in building a platform and the more people use to succeed, the more the platform succeeds. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay – you know all the examples.

2. Entrepreneurial enterprises. Thanks to the platforms, it’s incredibly inexpensive to start new companies. It’s also a helluva lot cheaper to fail (and try again). This is why I believe that the future of news – and many other industries – is entrepreneurial: because it can be. It’s not just media and its bits. It’s manufacturing (because you can use others’ factories and distribution channels and your own customers as your platforms).

3. Networks. It is still necessary to gather the smalls together into bigs: audience brought together so advertisers can buy access to them more easily; purchasing brought together to get better prices. So there is business in creating and serving these networks.

For the sake a PowerPoint, a diagram of the three layers of an ecosystem-based economy:

In our New Business Models for News Project, this is how I (crudely) drew the ecosystem for news.

How do you draw the conglomerate-based industry? With boxes, each separate, with arrows pointing to each other at a distance. Simplistic? Sure, but the change in the worldview of the new economy looks that basic when you hear the two tribes trying to understand each other.

For the rst of this post v buzzmachine.com

I really like this point of view. There’s a crunch to go through as businesses experiement with and then move over to these kinds of business models.

Very, very difficult when you are bound by quarterly P&L performance so it will need the buy in of boards if major cos are to adopt it…

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

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My notes and slides from the Next Generation Philanthropy Forum are up on the iCrossing blog #linextgen

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:41:58 -0800

For my notes click on connect.icrossing.co.uk

I’ve put some notes and my slides on the iCrossing blog and Slideshare – hope you find them useful….

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

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Ushahidi: realtime social media lessons from crises (and a model for slow news?)

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:32:04 -0800

Yesterday, at the Legatum Institiute’s Next Generation Philanthropy Forum I got to meet Juliana Rotich, programme director at one of the most interesting open source projects in the world, Ushahidi.

If you don’t know it, Ushahidi is an open source platform for communicating in a crisis. At simplest, it is a way of aggregating text messages, emails, Tweets, blog posts and mainstream media articles to form a clearer picture of what is happening in a fast moving situation, say in a war zone or a natural disaster. It’s also been put to good use in places like the Lebanon and Mexico by people wanting to monitor the fairness or otherwise of their own elections and to help with the effective distribution of vital medicines in Malawi, Kenya, Zambia and Uganda.

So on a geeky level Ushahidi’s obviously fascinating, on a humanitarian level it’s seriously inspiring, but there are lots of other elements of the project which are useful to consider.

Listening to Juliana’s presentation (I understand the videos will be live on the Legatum site soon) and chatting to her in the break, there a few notes I made that I will share here:

Web as witness: This is my take on what Juliana was saying, but I got a sense that by managing information on Usahidi served both as resource for people involved in it but also to put things on the record. As Juliana put it: “If a tree falls in a forest and Google doesn’t hear it, does it make a sound?”. Ushahidi means “testimony” in Swahili – so I guess this purpose has been baked in to the development of the platform.
Spreading social web beyond developed countries: Juliana is interested in how you stop “social media becoming an enclave for developed countries”. There are so many talented developers and creative people in the developing world, and she wants “to invest in those minds”. You can see her point – a massive latent cognitive surplus, to borrow Shirky’s phrase, is in developing countries, with all its incredible potential denied to the networks for now. If I was a VC with a long view, I’d think about heading for Africa…
Mobile is key to connecting the developing world: This is not news, I appreciate, but mobile handsets and access are the way that the developing world can connect right now. As Jared Cohen of the US State Department said in his speech earlier in the day, the economy of Kenya is so reliant on mobile payments that it would collapse tomorrow if you were to remove the GSM network. The mobile is the “default device” for Ushahidi’s developers, said Juliana. She also lamented that Twitter lacks a text message interface [I paraphrase]: “With SMS Twitter could become the pulse of the whole world – not just the developed world.” Now there’s a thought…
Near-realtime filtering: A major challenge for Ushahidi is filtering information as it comes in in near realtime. There may be disinformation from antganists, but also incorrect information, and alot of echo (re-tweets count as this) and maybe spam. Ushahidi uses manual filtering, Akismet and Swift River, a kind of crowd-filtering approach which “rescues data from the river and puts it on the bank”. This process involves a lot of human intervention at the moment, but they are working on algorithms to automate a lot of this.
Realtime media with a slow news legacy?: It strikes me that the combination of fact-checking and contextualising of realtime information is an immediate benefit of Ushahidi, with emergent benefits being that complex data has been curated which can be used by journalists, NGOs and others who want to analyse and learn from a crisis later on. This model is maybe how news organisations need to think about their role. I first heard about Ushahidi via the Al-Jazeera Labs project using the platform during the recent war in Gaza. Is there a case for the BBC to run a similar model when breaking news hits, or for news organisations to cooperate with a Usahidi like model to make sense out their reports and the mix of witness accounts on the ground?

There’s more on this approach in this video, which highlights the danger of rumours in a situation like the Mumbai terrorist attacks:

An Introduction to Swift River from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

Swift River looks like it could be a very important development, not just for Ushahidi, for everyone living with the explosion of data brought about by the realtime web. There are obviously lessons here for news organisations and others (i.e. most organisations and communities of interest).

: : Bonus link: I’ve posted some more notes and my presentation slides from the Next Generation Philanthropy Forum on the iCrossing UK blog.

: : One more thought. Friends of mine in NGOs have told me before and the theme came up again yesterday that it is impossible to micropayments efficiently online because of the cost of transactions. That is to say, if I donate £1 to UNICEF online at least 21p of that pound will be lost to the transaction cost in the *best case*. PayPal or Google Checkout should develop a charity / NGO model – imagine how much money could be freed up for NGOs they were able to ask millions of people to send a few pence or cents?

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Mainstreaming of the social web and instant personal content: It’s (all) not pretty

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:43:33 -0800

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation about trends in the social web for 2010 to our clients at iCrossing in the UK.

Predicting anything about the web is a fool’s errand, but one somehow many of us can’t helping running anyhow. However, the main, underlying trend that it is hard to see being undone or even slowing down for some time, is what I called the “mainstreaming of social media”.

The image I jokingly used to illustrate this was a Daily Mail headline from early 2009: “How Facebook could raise your risk of cancer”

Image: Daily Mail Facebook cancer slide

If the Daily Mail says it gives you cancer, I reasoned, it was something that had become part of everyday life in Britain.

Ho ho ho…

There is a darker side to mainstreaming of the social web, of the putting into the hands of every single person the means of production and distribution of content. And the realtime element that Twitter and mobile devices brings makes that instant personal production and distribution.

Create. Capture images. Publish to the world in a moment.

Today I read thoughtful posts from both Paul Carr and Euan Semple about some of the “citizen journalism” that came out of the Fort Worth massacre last week and of other examples of where people have behaved in questionable ways using Twitter and the web while those around them suffered. Questionable…

Euan rightly talks about our sense of right and wrong needing to catch up with the technology. Absolutely: the next decade will see the emergence of new social norms (and doubtless some laws too) about what behaviours that are enabled by instant personal content.

Is it your prerogative to tag me in a photo of a party is the low end of the social conundrum. What about images of my children? What about tagging my house on a Foursquare map?

Are you being criminally negligent if photograph me bleeding in the street instead of instantly trying to apply a pressure bandage. How about if you photograph me being beaten up and don’t intervene? That might help me. How about if you photograph me being beaten by a police officer and pause to publish it to the web to ensure your device isn’t confiscated with the evidence before coming to apply a pressure bandage?

In situations like this where is the line between egotism (hey guys, check my citizen journalism style and also how edgy a life I am leading) as Carr would have it, and being useful by bearing witness? Where is the line of taste, legality and responsibility to be drawn.

We don’t know yet.

In my early days of blogging there were a lot of debates about responsibility. Were we citizen journalists? What did that mean? What interests did we need to declare, how did we ensure there was some fact-checking.

Two things have happened since. Creation / distribution of content has sped up – whether it is Posterous or Twitter or just much improved Wordpress, the means of doing this stuff just gets easier with every passing day.

And the other thing that has happened is that social media tools have spread. The original disruptors, look almost conservative when presented with the mass of people all experimenting and familiarising themselves with the realtime social web. Most people have no reference points around the journalistic profession, other than journalism as they often see it practiced: intrusive, trivial, exploitative, voyeuristic…

We’ll work this out, this social web thing. And there will be horror-shows, mis-steps and calamities along the way. But the fact that everyone can create and publish is here to say. Social media’s not something you can be for or against…

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More than a Twitter “how to” masterclass – Guy Kawasaki, a brand living by the Tweet..

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:17:50 -0800

How I Tweet

Nov 02, 2009 –

Way back in July of 2009, I explained how I used Twitter. Lots has changed since then, so this is an update to explain how I tweet. As a small business owner, you can adopt my techniques to use Twitter as a marketing tool.

Question: How can you follow more than 180,000 people? [...]

via openforum.com

Guy Kawasaki is of the “personal brand” school of Twitter user – and what a personal brand it is. His use of Twitter is always evolving and it is always worth taking note of, even if it bears little relation to your personal use of the platform.

Few brands (yet) will have four full-time Twitter writers working on the platform or use the spread of processes and tools that Mr K does. But for Guy Kawasaki Twitter “is what I do” – maintaining his network and his personal brand’s usefulness to it is how he does business.

Look beyond the “how to” aspect of blog posts like this (and he links to a bunch of others at the end of it) and there are many interesting implications for individuals’ and organisations’ life in networks to be drawn out…

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

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Internet access as a human right takes a knock in Europe – FT

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:58:47 -0800

Plans to make internet access a “fundamental right” are to be dropped, a move that paves the way for European law enforcement agencies to cut off web users who have been caught downloading pirated films and music.

The European parliament has agreed to drop an amendment that was aimed at countering so-called “three strikes” laws, legislation that allows law enforcement agencies to shut down internet connections that have been allegedly used for illegal file-sharing .

via ft.com

Once this silly three strikes distraction has passed from the minds of the industry and legislators, internet access will become a human right in the same way as access to water and electricity is.

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Inspirational innovators from philanthropy: from HuffPost’s Game Changers

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:40:28 -0800

HuffPost’s Game Changers celebrates 100 innovators, visionaries, and leaders in 10 categories who are harnessing the power of new media to reshape their fields and change the world. With your help, we’ve picked 10 people who are changing the game in philanthropy. We honor and salute them.

via huffingtonpost.com

Huffington Post runnings its Game Changers programme, asking people to vote for the innovators in media, green, politics, business and other areas. I’m looking forward to taking a look at them all but highly recommend you start with the philanthropy section, where innovators behind initiatives from Kiva to a social network for philanthropists are celebrated.

Lots of inspiration here, whatever your field…

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Denying physics won’t save the video stars | Cory Doctorow – Times Online

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:28:56 -0800

Proposing to terminate your access to the information society because you share living quarters with an accused copyright infringer is madness. The entertainment industry has mistaken the net for an apocalyptically uncontrolled entertainment medium. It wants to take charge of it so that it can be made into a medium more hospitable to its interests.

via timesonline.co.uk

Cory Doctorow taking apart three strikes legislation makes many good points in this article.

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If the NUJ aren’t very, very careful, they will find history condemning them to the same fate as the NUM - the National Union of Monks

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:01:23 -0800

There are several reasons why all roads wound their way towards the National Union of Journalists today.

One was a piece that appeared in MediaShift this week; one that returned to the theme of revolution…

http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/11/changes-in-media-over-the-past-550-years318.html

For me, there was nothing ‘revolutionary’ in what was being said; in fact, in my little world I would these days venture to suggest that this was accepted ‘orthodoxy’ - that the arrival of the web is currently changing the way world communicates and interacts with itself in a way not seen since 1500.

That we need to party like its 1499, not 1999…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=260

But what made David’s piece pertinent to the current debate was his musings on how the put-upon scribes and monks of the time might have felt as they - as a professional trade body - were made all-but irrelevant by the march of technology.

‘There aren’t good records of their protests,’ writes David,

‘But I can just imagine their reasoning: that people would be overwhelmed by too much information; that they would become isolated reading at home rather than coming to church; that mediocrity would prevail if publishing was put into the hands of ordinary people.

‘Basically, all of the same criticisms we hear of the Internet today. In the end, the scribes lost and the printing press won. With the benefit of historical perspective, we view the result as inevitable. And we are seeing the same dynamic play out today with traditional journalism and the participatory internet… ‘

For me the challenge now facing the National Union of Journalists is the same challenge that faced the NUM 550 years ago as the National Union of Monks found the great unwashed trampling all over their lawn; after all, who needs a trained sub-editor when you only have 140 characters to play with…

A gilded dropped cap; or finessing out an awkward column turn… they are skills of another age. As are those of the paper boy and girl. Delivering news on the back of a bicycle is soooo 1499.

And that’s got absolutely nothing to do with the machinations of the Murdochs or the Baileys. My Little Man is nine-years-old; its not in his genes with a ‘g’ to read a newspaper; what’s in his jeans with a ‘j’ is a mobile phone…

… and there lies our future. Somehow.

Yes, defend your members’ interests. Of course.

But, for me, their best interest is served by learning to embrace the new, not stubbornly clinging to the old….

Read this and the language is that of political opposition; indeed, of the NUM; as if either this Government or the next has any real idea how to tame this web beast…

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=44673&c=1

If neither vision sits easily with the NUJ, what exactly does? Where’s the plan?

If we can start to sketch out a future - and it is still only a sketch - it is increasingly likely that our futures will be small - and localised. ‘Localised’ to a postcode or a place; or likewise ‘localised’ to a subject or a passion.

As the web smashes everything into a molecular wasteland of disparate content and disengaged readers, the new DNA of news will be rebuilt via networks that are small, but perfectly-formed.

Communities of place or passion coalescing around part-time sifters of data, etc, etc…

That’s the new landscape. And if the NUJ don’t ‘get’ this soon, by the time the back bench of the Daily Express is looking for a new living, the likes of a Josh Halliday and his www.SR2blog.com will have populated this new world without them.

I look at what Will (Perrin), Nikki and Mike are doing with their 4iP funding out of TalkAboutLocal and why aren’t the NUJ starting to feed their people into those kind of workshops?

Trying to see if they couldn’t start to promote and support the new forms of journalism; what lessons can they learn from www.thelichfieldblog.co.uk ? Is there a model that - together - we can build to the benefit of their members?

Digging in behind the barricades of traditional political rhetoric - inky workers of the world unite against the bosses and the Press barons - ignores the simplest of truths.

That the bosses and the barons are bust; they’ve gone. Or are going.

Our future lies as a cottage industry; one that just needs a little organising. And for that, history can still be our guide…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=30

When it comes to our re-invention, Jason and Nigel are spot on. The answer will come from the bottom up, not the top down. A point seemingly lost on Rupert and Co.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:48:20 -0800

I’ve never met Jason C Fry. Quite like to; think me and him could have a ball.

http://reinventingthenewsroom.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/this-is-broken-from-game-stories-to-well-everything/

I have met Nigel Barlow on a couple of occasions; I was slightly non-plussed to discover that, in his eyes, I was the ‘Godfather of Hyper-Local’; particularly given the fact that in oh-so many ways, we ain’t done anything yet.

All we’ve ever done, really, is sat at our kitchen table and wondered aloud how www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity might get to work and whether or not we could get to somewhere approaching a ‘not-for-loss’ position via www.addiply.com

On both counts, the jury remains out.

But, nevertheless, it was nice to be mentioned in Nigel’s latest despatches…

http://thoughtsofnigel.blogspot.com/2009/11/journalism-models-and-rick-waghorns.html

Both pieces had a thought in common - re-invention.

How would we do this journalism-thing if we started with a blank piece of paper? If we knew what we know now, in 2009, how would we do it? Be it beat sports writing in the case of Jason - or local news in the case of Nigel.

And, in fairness to both, they appear to come to the same conclusion. That you’d start from the bottom up; work with what was once your audience and try to start over again with the smallest forms of journalistic life; or else, try and find something that was fresh and analytical with which you might once again win favour with your former newsprint fans.

Which is all what Evslin’s Law was about; start from the very bottom and (re-)build your way up.�

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=238

And what is the lowest form of news life? What the lad from Wired once described as the ‘news’ that his daughter had scraped her knee in the school playground that afternoon. That’s the very first molecule of news life; that’s where we should start… from the bottom up.

On the streets. Or rather at the school gates - and the news that matters to me.

NOT with the news that News International thinks matters to me.

Today and it was the turn of The Times editor James Harding to tell us what the future of news will look like as he delivered the tablets of stone carved out by His Master to the Society of Editors.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/17/times-editor-james-harding-online-charging�

“We are going to rewrite the economics of the newspaper, newsgathering and delivery business,” he said.

Really?

From on high. You are going to impose a solution on this great, moveable feast that is the web and drop so many pay-walls down in front of our eyes in the sure and certain knowledge that we won’t all just ebb and flow our way around you…

For reasons that aren’t too hard to fathom, I’ve had cause to wander up and down the highways and byways of Northumberland of late as Addiply launches out of TrinityMirror’s micro-sites.

And because we’re open, we’re transparent and we’re accountable, so we can all see the kind of numbers that these micro-sites are delivering.

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&r1=1&r2=1

I’ve never been to Allandale. Put ‘Allendale’ ‘Northumberland’ and ‘population’ into Google and you come up with the figure 809.

Or 2,120. Wikipedia appears a bit confused.

But either way, in that context I don’t think TM’s numbers for Allendale are that shabby - in terms of penetration; in terms of the relevance of that particular news platform to that particular community.

It probably beats the penetration level achieved by The Times.

And, in that regard, I think it ought to be deemed something of a success. A model, almost. Because you’re delivering news almost to the school gates; the BBC can do the rest…

All we need to do now is re-populate the rest of the UK with similar micro-sites for the news that really matters to you… and we might be onto a winner.

Just.

But the answer will come from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Whatever Rupert and his many minions will claim.

The Age Of Imposition is over; the Age Of Participation has only just begun.

Here’s a challenge. Why not take all we see, all we know and start to understand and tell the people of Stoke all about it, the people of Leeds, of Wigan, etc, etc…

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:17:18 -0800

For many a reason, Sarah Hartley and I have found ourselves wandering along similar paths of late.

Which is why I read her latest blog piece with interest… and, to be honest, admiration.

Because there is a very fine line that we all have to walk here; on the one hand trying to keep up with the London Twitterati whilst at the same time trying to work out what difference any of us can actually make with regard to communities that desperately need to find a voice.

It is a line that Sarah managed to tread with a fine sense of balance as she juggled her way between the £1.40 conference at Reuters one day; a social media surgery in Leeds the next.

Whether I’ll be able to follow suit is another matter…

Here’s the piece…

http://sarahhartley.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/musings-on-the-week-a-north-south-social-media-divide/

… the comments that follow are well worth a read too… I suspect for North/South you could suggest inside M25/outside M25; even after 15 years in Norfolk, I’ve still to discover where Norwich sits in the great North-South debate. I do know, however, that it is well outside the M25… we don’t do dual carriageways.

Why Sarah’s thoughts struck such a chord isn’t hard to fathom; last Monday I was in Stoke; delivering a lecture to the kids at Staffs University before enjoying an Indian buffet meal with Mike Rawlins, of TalkAboutLocal and www.pitsnpots.co.uk fame.

On Thursday, me our Ian and Harry Harrold met up in Norwich to plot our next moves; on Friday I was in Newcastle; having lunch with Peter Atkinson MP; talking through the kind of issues that his constituents face in rural Northumberland; be it in terms of broadband connectivity, brand placement, etc, etc…

And, yes, I am going there with a business hat on; I have got a product to promote; a service to sell.

Here’s www.addiply.com on www.pitsnpots.co.uk and, of course, Northumberland is suddenly very dear to our hearts as we partner up with TrinityMirror’s ‘Your Place’ platform and offer hyper-local advertising space across their 20-odd sites at a fiver a throw…

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&r1=1&r2=1

… so, we’re not a charity; I have a commercial reason to be stopping in the Quality Hotel in Hanley of a night; to be playing mine host in the Northern Counties Club on Hood St.

And I wasn’t there pumping out the virtues of Twitter; I know what Twitter can do - you whack a #ncfc tag onto any Norwich City related football tweet and you’re delivering me free content on www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity - among our ‘#ncfc’ community can be found Ed Balls MP, BBC Radio Norfolk marketing their digital audio wares and - as of last night - City skipper @GrantHoltyFooty

Whether he’s the real McCoy, we’ve still to establish - the feeling this morning was that it was a fake.

But the point is that we’re publishing conversations of interest and relevance that help make MyFootballWriter a more sustainable editorial platform; that tag isn’t there for one day only; it doesn’t disappear off into the ether somewhere - it has a practical purpose.

It delivers me fresh content. That’s free. Whilst I’m sat in a curry house in Stoke.

And this, for me, is what Sarah is driving at… out there, outside the ‘Beltway’, what practical difference can these new tools at our disposal make on the streets of Leeds, of Norwich and of Stoke?

Or rather, in her words…

‘What do the views of a bunch of always-on wired meeja professionals in London have to do with delivering news and information services to people working in tough but essential spheres such as the mental health sector, or living in areas where broadband access is still an aspiration not a reality?

… but all in all, for me at least, it was an afternoon inside the echo chamber, the reverberations of which will probably not even reach Islington, let alone Leeds…’

For those who don’t know their Stoke, there is a very real possibility that Stoke Central could return the first BNP MP at the next general election. Of the nine BNP councillors that sit on Stoke City Council, six come from within that Parliamentary constituency.

Should Stoke Central return a BNP MP, you can imagine the level of outrage that will follow in the talking shops and coffee houses of Islington.

It is, you suspect, one reason why Will Perrin, TalkAboutLocal and 4iP are now out there on the ground in Stoke; using Mike and his experiences on the frontline with www.pitsnpots.co.uk to galvanise new community start-ups; to nurture the kind of grass-roots debates that need to happen… out there; where the metal really meets the meat.

And if www.addiply.com can somehow help the like of www.pitsnpots.co.uk to become a ‘not-for-loss’ model; that our offer of a 90% revenue return can help sustain the level of street debate that is desperately needed within these set-upon communities then great…

I’d far rather have a night at the Quality Hotel, Hanley, selling my wares there than mixing with the greater and the good in the heart of London town.

I don’t know where, say, the Media140 roadshow is heading next; I think it was Sydney last time out… they have some wind in their sails; they’re re-shaping our meeja future. Smart people; bright minds.

Good luck to them.

OK, here’s a challenge for them. Why not have the next UK Media140 event in a Stoke?

Or a Leeds? Or a Burnley? Or a Norwich? Or a Wigan? Or a Hexham?

And not charge.

I’ll speak. And I suspect Sarah will. And Mike.

Let’s see if we can’t actually start to make a difference. Where it really matters.

On those streets that aren’t paved with new meeja gold.

The more I see, the more I know… do I start to understand? That part of our future might not be networks, but glass silos?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:46:45 -0800

‘The more I see, the more I know; the more I know, the less I understand… (P Weller, Changing Man)

So, Twitter lists.

Apologies; this involves a little story.

As the more Addiply-aware of you will have, hopefully, twigged we now have a little thang going on with the good people of TrinityMirror and their far-flung North-East, hyper-local outpost; the JournalLive ‘Your Place’ platform…

http://www.journallive.co.uk/northumberland-sites/

Means that we can now offer an little Amble solicitor the chance to advertise to his local community for a fiver a week rather than take a chance that a Google text ad would ping half-way round the world and back again onto his preferred site in Amble… it’s a simple philosophy that is now open to any SME in rural Northumberland looking to digitally market their wares.

Here you go, peeps… take your pick…

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&r1=1&r2=1

Naturally - given this is the Age of Collaboration; that whilst content may still be king, collaboration is queen, etc… - I’m more than happy to help Helen, David and the TrinityMirror Co ’seed’ some awareness of Addiply; we’re working together.

As we all have to.

So, I therefore start to tart myself round Twitter looking for digitally-minded folk in the region that might ‘get’ what Addiply offers them. Simple, accountable, place-it-yourself advertising for a fiver a week.

@HallMeister, in fairness, finds me. She’s smart that way.

But off we go to @Girl_Geeks_NE and out pops @ElegantIntros

Our Louise runs a posh dating agency out somewhere near Hexham; seeking out the alpha males of Walker, Wallsend and Byker…

http://www.elegantintros.com/

So far, so simple… Ponteland, you sense is posh. OK, place an ad there Louise…

That’s great. But I now want to see who else is out there on Twitter; running a small, digitally-minded business in the North-East. So, I kinda figure that someone, somewhere must have a ‘Twitter list’ of North-East businesses…

And old smarty pants Louise, does…

Like the rest of us, not quite sure why she collected/curated/managed/edited/coralled a list of 165 North-East businesses together under one ‘roof’ - her own, note - but there it is…

@ElegantIntros/north-east-businesses

… which I duly follow.

Now that list is just the kind of list that I was looking for; I don’t know any of them from Adam.. I live at my Mum’s in Norfolk; or at least for as long as she’s in the N&N, I do.

So the chances of me putting together a list of that relevant nature that’s 166-people strong? Nil.

Could do it; but bit like SEO… have neither the time, the energy or the inclination. Not when someone has already done the hard work for me. Louise Northwood, in this instance.

But what’s fascinating in all this is the value that is starting to emerge.

Wittingly or not - and, obviously, she knew what she was doing - but Louise has collected a list of value that, crucially, she controls. And Twitter gave her ‘the kit’ to do it.

She is the gatekeeper to a list of 166 names that I want access to… and Twitter ring-fenced them beneath her brand, @elegantintros

I can’t get to that list without going through Louise, so to speak. Or without Twitter.

I can sift through all 166 little avatars and message them directly; or else I can appeal to the Mistress of the Message and ask Louise to let me in…

Now, for my marketing needs re Addiply and TM’s Northumberland sites, I’d probably pay a micro-payment for access to that list… if a Port & Lemon on the Quayside fails to suffice.

And then Twitter and Louise can divvie up that micro-payment between them.

What’s really interesting is the fact that whereas we thought this new world of ours might be networked - that silos were sooo old-fashioned - here comes Twitter installing glass silos into a network; in that we can now press our Twitchy noses against the glass of Louise’s @elegantintros/north-east-businesses ’silo’ - but we can’t touch.

Not to them en masse… as a group… as a list… as a community.

Not without an invite.

Or, in theory, a micro-payment.

And it’s empowering Louise to be a woman of influence. She’s the one with the ticket to the ball.

For now. Until the next person builds a bigger and a better Twitter-list.

Now I look at other lists. And I look at @DavidCohn - he of SpotUs fame. Top lad.

And I’m following his lists @DigiDave/colleagues cos I strongly suspect that there will be people of value therein; my squidgy nose is pressed up against his glass silo wondering what I have to do to get in… and would I pay to market either myself or my wares to that particular crew…

Possibly; I’d pay five bucks on the door… he’s a smart lad; he probably hangs around with a cool crew; his list is one on which to be seen…. etc, etc.. I could do some business in there; make some good connections with people that Dave has already edited for my benefit.

For that’s what he’s done. He’s subbed out the run-of-the-mill; discarded the flotsam and jetsam and concentrated his efforts and his invites on those that are making the right kind of sounds, not those just making any old noise.

He’s acted as a filter; as an editor.

And in doing that he’s made my own life easier… right, those are the people I need to be talking to… over there.

And for that simple act - of putting a list of his mates together - both @DigiDave and Twitter deserve a reward. And therein may lay the genesis of a business model.

Very interesting.

The more I see, the more I know; the more I know, the less I understand… (P Weller, Changing Man). This, however, I do understand…

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:53:31 -0700

Mr Matt Waring and I have yet to come up with a catchy name; but we’re pondering doing our own conference thing come the New Year.

But it’ll have something to do with elephants. As in the big one in the room. The one no-one really likes to mention.

I suspect, like most good ideas in the history of www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity and www.addiply.com inspiration will only come via a spot of lubrication.

But, anyway, the point is that we are beginning to think that it is high time we started to address said elephant in room and, grabbing the bull by both horns, ask one of the more fundamental questions of our times: ‘This web thing… how does it actually make anyone any money?’

Three and a bit years into all things www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity and I have a few ideas; definite answers are rather harder to come by.

Which is why I’ve now instituted Paul Weller’s ‘Changing Man’ as our theme tune; having been stuck in endless traffic jams of late - either en route to do a panel session at #alikeminds in Exeter or on to HelloDigital at Birmingham the week after - there is one, particular verse that has become etched in my mind as summing up the state of this digital nation of ours…

‘The more I see, the more I know;

‘The more I know, the less I understand;

‘I’m a changing man; built on shifting sands…’

In the three and a bit years since I first started to build a new digital home for myself on the shifting sands of the web, there’s much I’ve come to know. And there’s bits that I’ve come to understand. How both marry together into a sustainable whole is - even now - another matter.

What do I know?

That part of the answer will be in sourcing revenue from relevant advertising that both appeals to and is of service to that particular web community.

That local advertisers like simple, straight-forward tenancy deals.

Give them a price per week or per month and they ‘get’ that.

They have neither the time, the knowledge, the cash or the inclination to tweak their ad words to fit someone else’s SEO.

That there is an under-lying assumption at local/niche level that journalists are owed a full-time living.

That’s a big one.

Why do we assume that the future of news on the web will allow anyone to command a full-time living?

I can get www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity and www.myfootballwriter.com/ipswichtown to just about work on the basis that - right now - it is ’staffed’ by two part-time reporters; boys who have a ‘portfolio’ living; that churning out a ‘good read’ once a day in Tom’s case - once before and after every Town game in Dave’s case - is just a part of their working lives.

Right now - without having the revenue opportunities that a fully-fledged MFW network would bring in terms of top-down advertising and content syndication possibilities - I can’t offer them anything more.

They are but part-time curators of their respective sites; we remain endebted to #ncfc for delivering us fresh and rolling content from what was once our audience to keep MFW ticking over.

That I now understand.

That there is no guarantee whatsoever that any of us are going to be granted a full-time living once the sand beneath our feet stops shifting.

But what I also know and understand is that with the right tools at our disposal we can start to the way someone might dig out a part-time living on the web.

Or - and this remains our first rung on the ladder - how someone could start to move beyond that oft-quoted position of ‘not-for-profit’ and get to ‘not-for-loss’.

And I make no apologies for returning to www.TheLichfieldBlog.co.uk but, for me, they are as close as anyone to seeing how a part-time living might work.

Here’s a news story…

http://thelichfieldblog.co.uk/2009/10/30/lichfield-mp-quizzes-government-over-canal-restoration/

… and there’s £60 a month.

And there’s those two boys offering their community a service when it comes to advertising.

For a tenner a month - Lichfield Garrick - you can now place your ad in front of our 11,500-odd readers.

Or else, Lichfield Garrick you can chance your arm with you-know-who in the hope that some mutual SEO magic will get this… http://www.lichfieldgarrick.com/About-the-Garrick/Unforgettable-Film-Season/ - on this www.thelichfieldblog.co.uk via a black box in California.

And, yes, £60 is peanuts. But it’s a start. And how can £60 become £120 become £240, etc, etc…? By HM Government recognising that the people of Lichfield will have specific social, economic and medical needs that HM Government needs to target via appropriate ‘messaging’.

That’s when it starts to work. Or rather that’s when it starts to part-time work. And that’s the bit that I do now understand.

That the web owes no-one a full-time living. Least of all a journalist. �

OfCom sees grassroots journalism underpinning a thriving community media sector? Fine, now put your money where you mouth is. On the streets of Alnwick, Ashington, Amber…

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:01:24 -0700

It’s been a while. Apologies. Had jobs to do; people to see.

Suffice to say that last week was ‘one for the album’; but for the likes of ‘Mr Darcy’, AJ, Yvonne, Jas and everyone else on the ITU Dept at the N&N the Old Dear wouldn’t be propping herself up in bed this morning, reading her copy of The Times.

Anyway, in amidst all such dramas, Addiply took another small step in an interesting direction when we launched out of 22 of TrinityMirror’s hyper-local sites in the North-East.

I can now let Patrick explain…

http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-a-local-ad-network-for-local-people-addiply-raises-its-hand/

Or, indeed, Laura…�

http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/536095.php

On a street level, it means that our Sarah can now advertise her PR wares to the good people of Ponteland for a fiver a week…

http://ponteland.journallive.co.uk/

… and save herself a small fortune in time and money in optimising her site/campaign to end up in exactly the same spot.

While on an elegant network level, we can now offer potential regional advertisers the opportunity to place their brand in 22 market towns across Northumberland… and, more importantly in this Age of Pixelisation and Transparency, they can now do that knowing exactly what they’re buying into; what am I getting here, Rick, for my every last ad dollar?

Well, here you go…

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&r1=1&r2=1

There are several points that, for me, are important.

One, is that we don’t forget our roots; we’re not Mr G. All we’re doing is trying to get people into a position where they can run their sites on a ‘not-for-loss’ basis. To try and see if we can get a first foot on the first rung of the ladder.

Addiply isn’t the answer. Because there isn’t one answer. An answer that will fit every blossoming digital community and platform out there. Hopefully, however, we can become part of someone’s answer. Be they Nikki in Digbeth or TrinityMirror in Northumberland.

Secondly, I think it is important that we give credit where credit is due and gratefully acknowledge the fact that TM have taken a leaf out of David Cohn’s book and looked to collaboration as being their queen; the most powerful piece on this new, digital chessboard of ours.

That in seeking one, possible answer to their own hyper-local experiments they have been prepared to engage with what’s happening on the streets of Lichfield and having witnessed what Addiply is starting to do with www.TheLichfieldBlog.co.uk so the likes of David (Higgerson) and Helen (Dalby) have had the courage of their curiosity to see if this could also work for them on the streets of Alnwick, Ashington, Amber, etc…�

Hence the last post; that collaboration will be the key to our survival; that if nothing works, then together let’s see if this might…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=324

But on the day that the great and the good of OfCom are twittering on about where next for the provision of local news in this country - ‘@foodiesarah: Ofcom sees opp for thriving community media sector underpinned by grassroots journalism #westminster…’

Then they need to start putting their money where their mouth is; turning all that fresh-mined medical data from the regional health observatories into the type of perfectly-targetted messaging that can make a real difference to those trying to sustain local news platforms - be it on the streets of Ashington in the case of Helen and TrinityMirror or Lichfield in the case of Ross, Phil and Co…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=309

That’s the opportunity that the powers-that-be in Westminster and Whitehall need to grasp; they need to starting unlocking the state purse to subsidise new media start-ups through cost-effective and audience-efficient advertising campaigns…

… and in an election year, it is a message that also needs to be hammered home to the various political parties; where am I going to find my voters these days if its not via the pages of the local newspaper. A thought process that, to his credit, Michael Fabricant MP has already twigged on the streets of Lichfield.

‘Ah, there you are… ‘

So, if I was Sly Bailey, the next time I had tea at Claridges with anyone of Mr Purvis’ ilk - or I bumped into our ‘Digital Inclusion Champion’ Martha Lane Fox - that would be my message…

Give me advertising, give me a fiver a week and give me a chance to ride out this ‘Perfect Storm’.

Part of an answer, for me, is something simple, rewarding and available in three clicks. Part of every answer, however, will be collaboration between big media and small

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:16:43 -0700

There have been several interesting posts of late; all of which on their own merited deeper consideration in this neck of the woods.

Alas, my time hasn’t been wholly my own of late; only kid duties have called.

But this was great; like really great…

http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/09/29/mtc09-moritz-wuttke-dont-rely-on-google-and-develop-your-own-adsense/

Because the author - in this case Moritz Wuttke - was delivering the same message to the same audience [the World Association of Newspapers] as Matthew Buckland was earlier this spring; namely that newspaper publishers had to start thinking outside the Google box; that maybe AdSense wasn’t doing them any favours…

In short, Matthew Buckland was describing www.addiply.com in his call for an ad model that delivered a 90% return to publishers…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=272

Just as Mr Wuttke was describing Addiply when he suggested: ‘…that newspaper publishers make advertisers work far too hard when it comes to buying adverts. It should be possible within three clicks, he said…’

As it is.

On Addiply.

And then there was this piece… by Shelby Bonnie. Let’s kill the CPM…

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/25/lets-kill-the-cpm/

And these lines…

What will a new solution need?

Simple. In the end, I realize that to make the business of marketing work it can’t all be art. You have to have a way to create a streamlined process… Simplicity can lead to scalability, which allows for more efficiency for publishers, agencies, and marketers.

Where do we start?

First, just stop using the CPM. Yes, it will break every model and process that the industry holds dear, but we need to get rid of the crutch. The ensuing turmoil will bring creative thinking, new ideas, and entrepreneurial passion….

Yes, he’s describing… OK.

If I look back over the last 12 months in this roller-coaster world of ours, there are two lines that stand out. One, almost, inevitably by Clay Shirky. ‘Nothing works, but everything might…

The other comes from Mr Cohn who I first bumped into at Jeff Jarvis’ www.NewsInnovation.com gig at CUNY in the autumn of 2007. David subsequently went on to win Knight funding for his Spot.Us project out of San Francisco… all of which inspired those wonderful lines about if, online, content was king, then collaboration was queen. And as with the game of chess, we all know which is the more powerful…

http://www.digidave.org/2009/03/collaboration-is-queen.html

Superb.

It was to such thinking that David returned with news that a certain Warren Hellman was about to pump $5 million into the launch of a Bay area newsroom that would, it appears, have collaboration at its heart.

http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2009/09/hellman_and_partners_to_launch_1.html

Or, at least, that was David’s hope… http://www.digidave.org/2009/09/dear-warren-hellman-some-solicited-advice.html … as various parties, the New York Times and the Berkeley School of Journalism among them, sought to find a new, not-for-profit way of providing the Bay area with the kind of news that the San Francisco Chronicle once laid claim to.

Of course, we have our own interest here. Cos for the last 5-6 months we have been collaborating with said J-School; looking to see if we couldn’t empower Richard Koci Hernandez’ kids to run OaklandNorth and MissionLocal on a not-for-loss basis.

Behind the scenes, that process continues as we tweak and twidde with our $ Addiply.

But the point is simple. For me, in media’s darkest hour of need, big media and small media are starting to work together; there is a growing sense that the solution - perhaps - lies in this vast, great melting pot that lies between the two…

…that if we can apply some of that big media ’selling’ science honed and refined over 300 years of newspaper production and ad sales to some of the street-level solutions that such community-minded folk as David at Spot.Us and, hopefully, us here at www.addiply.com have come to recognise as key to our own survivals, then maybe part of an answer may emerge.

I suspect the answer may be beyond all of us; part of an answer may however be within reach.

Welcome to the world according to OfCom and Oliver & Ohlbaum… and the world that, I suspect, Mr Rusbridger sees…

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:28:56 -0700

As news emerged today that three more weekly titles were off to meet their maker…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/22/trinity-mirror-weekly-closures

.. it was re-assuring to discover that OfCom were there to be found with their finger precisely on the beating pulse of this regional media nation of ours…

This is a particularly fascinating and insightful document… one to be pondered at length if it is now to form a bedrock of OfCom policy going forward; which - you would like to presume - it will given that the over-burdened and invariably under-whelmed UK tax-payer has just funded said masterpiece.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/lrmuk/

When in doubt, tis always a good time to get the consultants in - in this case, the boys and girls from Oliver & Ohlbaum - http://www.oando.co.uk/ - and a macro-economic view of the nation’s local news landscape…

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/lrmuk/macroecon.pdf

Which then, presumeably, offered the foundation for this…

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/lrmuk/Salford_local_media.pdf

As presented to a gathering of the great and the good by Stewart Purvis at Salford University.

As a piece of ‘No sh*t, Sherlock…’ it is almost beyond compare.

I know headlines to individual slides can over-simplify, but ‘Online specialists have taken market share from local and regional newspaper websites (p15)…

Or ‘The Internet is drawing traditional revenue steams away from local media… (p14).

You’re kiddin?

The best one is the data chart that offers examples of local news provision (p8); that the Manchester Evening News ‘provides Greater Manchester focussed content, with a few national stories…’ And that the Salford Advertiser provides content focussed on… Salford.

Albeit on a smaller scale than the Manchester Evening News.

Given the crisis currently befalling the world’s great media institutions - the publishers of said Manchester Evening News principal among them as GMG seek yet another round of job cuts in a bid to keep The Observer alive - it is at least heartening to know that the industry regulator knows what the Manchester Evening News does.

The fact that OfCom offers up ‘Channel M’ as a prime example of someone like GMG looking to morph itself into a ‘local media consortia’ of their overly-fond imaginings merely re-inforces the impression that the OfCom clock has stopped c2007… that the ‘Perfect Storm’ in which we are now engulfed still, to them, appears somewhat distant.

There is no sense of what’s happening right now, right this minute… to any of their thinking. As much as the likes of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger might try to emphasise the point.

Twice.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=313

And, in particular… ‘in delivering this line… ’I don’t think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news in the press and broadcasting…’ he actually went over a phrase again.

‘I don’t think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem - even begun to wake up to this problem - as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news…’

Go back to the work of O&O and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Rusbridgers of this world were making a fuss about nothing…

That if you flick through to P30 of this, even the ‘low case’ example would see EBIT margins dipping to, say, 10% by 2013. You can get 15% on P29.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/lrmuk/macroecon.pdf

All the MEN, the Salford Advertiser, etc… have to do is share their print costs/capacity with every other regional newspaper publisher in the North-West and then hack away at their individual ad sales teams to build a pan-regional ad tele-sales operation that could service MEN, Trinity’s Liverpool titles, NewsQuest’s Bolton operation, Granada TV, Key 103, Smooth, Galaxy, Channel M, etc, etc… and all would be well.

There’s a 30% saving to be had there. Chop, chop…

If only someone had a fully-networked, self-serve, 90% revenue return ad system that we could take off a shelf and just over-lay across all concerned and then offer pan-regional, highly-targetted branding opportunities to advertisers large and small…

Oh, someone has…

Of course, it should come as little or no surprise to find ‘big’ Government turning to a ‘big’ consultancy firm in its search for the ‘big’ answers…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=244

The fact that there might simply be no ‘big’ answers doesn’t actually appear to pop up on their radar; this idea of Mr Shirky’s that ‘Nothing works, but everything might…’ appears a conceptual leap too far.

What bugs me most, however, is the underlying assumption that come 2013-2015 we’re still looking at a ‘Newsprint’ Britain, a ‘Television’ Britain and a ‘Local Radio’ Britain. And not a ‘Digital Britain’.

In a ‘Digital Britain’ there is no them and us; no TV, no radio, no newspapers… just this glorious, heaving mass of ‘digital publishers’… all trying to wipe the smug grin off the BBC’s face as we scrabble for survival on the one, single platform that is the web; the ‘big’ now shattered into the small.

Try as anyone might, it is a future that OfCom doesn’t appear to ‘get’ at all.

�

For me, the choice is simple… Either you give people the chance to place an ad themselves or you let others put a bag on your head…

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:39:46 -0700

It is a block that we walked around many moons ago…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=100

And in the 15 months since, my knowledge of all things SEO hasn’t improved. I remain pretty wedded to this notion that if the content is good enough, your community will find you; you’ll find a place around their campfire provided you add something of relevance and interest to their conversation on a regular basis.

… that and the fact that I had neither the will nor the simple wherewithal to pay anyone to optimise my site on a regular basis in the hope that I would somehow look that much sexier to a Google spider.

Of course, once we decided to ditch the Google AdSense strip and launch something rather more home-grown onto an unsuspecting world in the shape of www.Addiply.com, so my need to work my way up the Google rankings with £400-a-month’s worth of ‘optimisation’ held even less appeal.

Even in these straitened, League One times we’re still pulling around 20,000 monthly uniques to MFW/norwich not having a spent a bean on optimising our site.

All of which, therefore, made news of Google’s impending move into the display ad market rather interesting… or rather, wryly amusing as the Man from G explained one or two of the problems with the current display ad market as publishers and advertisers alike try to tweak and twiddle themselves into the most optimal state possible in the hope that the right ad (display) would find its way onto the right, relevant site…

Here we go… http://tinyurl.com/m9lc2d … and, in particular…

“With a multitude of display ad formats, and thousands of websites, it often takes thousands of hours for advertisers to plan and manage their display ad campaigns,” he [Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of product management] said. “With this complexity, lots of advertisers today just don’t bother, or don’t invest as much as they would like.”

“On the other side of the equation, some publishers are left with up to 80% of their ad space unsold. It’s like airlines flying with their planes mostly empty… We believe that a better system built on better technology can help grow the display advertising pie and benefit everyone…”

Whereas planning their text ad campaigns is a piece of cake, right…?

Because I’ve had two conversations in the last week with two smart, web-savvy people for whom both the cost and the complexity of tweaking the right ad words to make any ‘AdSense’ was getting beyond even them…

… that they didn’t have the ‘thousands of hours’ to plan and manage their campaigns. And, more importantly, neither did they have the will or the wherewithal to out-source that planning to a third-party agency.

That, in short, they were the sum of all Mr Mohan’s fears; that when faced with such complexity - and, dare we say it, such obscurity when it came to quantifying the actual results - that they didn’t bother.

And on the ground - on the corner of 17th/Main or behind the counter of Josh & Archie’s Shop - people don’t have the time, the energy or the MSc in data manipulation to product-stroke-ad place with kind of dexterity and understanding now required.

It is a dark art, getting ever darker. And as whole swathes of local and niche advertisers look to take their first, tentative steps on-line, they simply don’t ‘get’ it.

Particularly not in a depressed economy in which every last ad cent-stroke-penny needs to be accounted for.

Which is one of the reasons that I trawled through the YouTube archives for a piece of Not The Nine O’Clock News brilliance.

Only for the word ‘gramophone’, IMHO you can substitute ‘Google ranking’… and watch the kind of fun that any SEO marketing company can have with the unsuspecting advertiser-stroke-publisher for whom - even now - this remains a whole new world.

http://tinyurl.com/m9lc2d

People want simple. They want accountable. They want open. And honest.

They don’t want a bag on their head. Or the slimline salad dressing.

I want to place my ad there.

How do I get it there? And what does it cost? A tenner a week? Fine. I get that…

And to my mind - particularly out there in local/niche land - it needs to be no more complicated that that.

What can I get for a tenner? OK. You mean I can just place my ad there, myself?

Yes.

If you don’t ask, you don’t get… right? OK, here we go… Dear Mr Twitter…

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:32:00 -0700

If you don’t ask a question, you’ll never get an answer…

So on the back of today’s news that Twitter were starting to open up their terms of service - and that the ‘a’ word was starting to cross their mind - so I figured I’d ask a question. About advertising.

And could we do it? You know, run a strip of Addiply off a Twitter page…

Bollo*ks to it… They can only say ‘No’.

Subject:

Advertising…. on Twitter… Addiply… self-serve DIY… Ashton Kutcher…

Date:

11/09/2009 12:45:00 GMT Daylight Time

From:

RickWaghorn

Reply To:
To:	partner@twitter.com

Chaps,

My name is Rick Waghorn; I run a clutch of new media ‘thangs’ off my kitchen table in Norfolk, UK.

A ‘beat’ sports reporters network… ie/eg www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity

And the urls to www.mybaseballwriter.com www.mybasketballwriter.com etc

A new media blog… http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk

And a self-serve DIY automated text ad system… www.addiply.com

Which I spoke about at Jeff Jarvis’ www.newsinnovation.com gig at CUNY in the Fall of 07.

You can see it in beta trial mode in SF, on Berkeley J-School’s hyper-local news sites www.OaklandNorth.net and www.MissionLocal.org

All we’ve got to do now is persuade Richard [Koci-Hernandez] kids to go sell a hyper-local ad to the Pizza parlour on 17th/Main…

Addiply is a self empowerment tool; gives the publisher - OaklandNorth, TheLichfieldBlog or intriguingly Ashton Kutcher - the chance to run their own, DIY ad dept… set their own rate; Pay-Per-Week, Pay-Per-Month, CPM, PPC… and take 90% of the revenue thus generated.

And it’s based on a bid model… Hence Berkeley could offer a slot at $5 a week and then watch as their local community bids ‘up’ to the market price.

PayPal take 3% for ‘automating’ the payment; Addiply takes 7% for dishing out a simple piece of JavaScript code that you drop into the site.

ie/eg www.TheLichfieldBlog.co.uk

OK, say you’re Mr Kutcher…. and you’re Twitter.

3,500,000 followers… what price would Coca-Cola pay for a text ad on his site?

Say he sets his rate at $500 a week; gets Coke, GM, etc, etc to bid up from there… now if we’re looking at 90% revenue return to the ‘publisher’; you could split that return between Twitter and Mr Kutcher… 15-75? 20-70?

Would it beat the return that, say, running a Google AdSese strip would offer?

Can Ashton be bothered pal-ing up with an ad network when he can now empower himself to be his own ad generator… he could even have a monthly auction for a space on his site…

Of course, we could then create our own ad network... www.addiply.com/twitter and Coke, GM, etc… could then pick out the Twitter ‘personalities’ that they’d like to advertise with themselves…

They wouldn’t necessarily even need to go to an ad agency.. could sit in a boardroom and decide ‘Right, which folk are we going to brand with this month…’ and then ‘drop’ the text ad down from on high… knowing that it was perfectly targetted into their chosen audience/personality… that they weren’t paying for it be sprayed everywhere… it was going just where they wanted it…

As for Mr Kutcher, he sits back and lets his DIY ad system do its stuff for him… lets the bidding commence; lets the market find its own natural level for a space on his Twitter page… and picks up his check off PayPal at the end of each month.

The only thing he’d ever need to do was approve the text link. That’s it.

Simple, open, honest, transparent and efficient, right?

All the best, etc

Rick (Waghorn).

links for 2009-11-21

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:03:39 -0800

Tweeting at the Speed of Scale « Dachis Group Collaboratory | Social Business Design Nice stuff from my American colleague, David Armano, on formalising the process of staff engaging with the public (tags: dachis socialbusinessdesign twitter publicrelations marketing socialmedia strategy...

links for 2009-11-20

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:10:26 -0800

What Twitter's New Geolocation Makes Possible "Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will...

links for 2009-11-18

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:07:17 -0800

American Airlines Fires Designer Who Reached Out To Disgruntled Customer | Techdirt (tags: design americanairlines travel publicrelations customerservice bloggingguidelines guidelines transparency fired) Singapore Internet Users Spend Half of Online Time on Social and Entertainment Sites - comScore, Inc (tags: singapore...

links for 2009-11-17

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:38:02 -0800

On the horizon of a real-time networked society Great presentation - again - from Jaggeree - "I’m interested in thinking a lot about the value within sentiment streams. Thinking about it from a totally different direction from advertisers pushing sentiment...

links for 2009-11-16

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:06:32 -0800

The Internet Marketing Driver: FaceYahoogle – The Impact of Facebook, Yahoo, and Google on Website Traffic "I see FaceYahoogle sending large amounts of traffic to a wide range of sites. The abnormally high percentage of traffic coming from Google, Yahoo,...

links for 2009-11-12

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:06:34 -0800

Digital Influencer mapping: Who do you need to know online? Some great graphs and info in here... (tags: influence publicrelations journalisttraining journalism visualisation strategy brands marketing) What IF We Redefined Influence? The New Influence Factor in Social Media | Brian...

links for 2009-11-11

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:06:26 -0800

The Pacific Garbage Patch: Published | Spot Us - "Community Funded Reporting" "Today in the New York Times science section you’ll find a piece written by Lindsey Hoshaw about the Pacific Garbage patch and an accompanying photo slide show. This...

links for 2009-11-10

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:10:38 -0800

Libel Reform Campaign - Free Speech Is Not For Sale (tags: libel freedomofspeech journalism internetlibel) cybersoc.com: [Robin Hamman's] interview about internet libel on 5 Live | Martin Stabe I didn't realise this audio existed... nice to stumble upon it (tags:...

presentation on meaningful playfulness

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:57:09 -0800

My Headshift colleague Eliot (@eliotf) pointed me towards an interesting presentation, Hiding Data, Content and Technology in Real World Games, shared by Chris Thorpe recently. I love how Chris describes layering a highly useful interface on top of play around...

bbc radio and music social media jobs

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:19:43 -0800

phonebox ad outside BBC broadcasting house Originally uploaded by robinhammanJust a quick note because I reckon this is a dream opportunity for at least a handful of regular readers of this blog... BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2 &...

Killing straw men

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:30:45 -0800

Paul Carr has written a post for TechCrunch about citizen journalism and social media entitled After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth. Normally I ignore TechCrunch alone, but so many people I know were impressed with the post that I had to read it. Sadly, it’s riven with poor logic, straw men and factual inaccuracies.

Paul starts with a straw man:

…after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.

The discussion about the impact of social media on people’s privacy, behaviour and ethics has been going on for years, and there have been many, many examples of people using social tools in ways that can only be described as foolish.

This is not, however, a reflection on social tools so much as it is a reflection of human nature: Some of what gets done with social media is good and some is bad. This is not news, nor new.

We do need some proper studies to see just what sort of effect these new social technologies are having, but going off on a moral panic about social tools is neither smart nor helpful.

Carr goes on to say:

And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq.

[...] In reality Ms Moore’s was tweeting minute-by-minute reports from inside the hospital where the wounded were being taken for treatment.

It’s no real surprise that people who use Twitter might use it during such an event. And most people who use Tweet have a relatively small community. Moore now has her Twitter stream set to private, but even now she has only 29 followers, so she most likely thought that she was speaking to a small number of people and it turns out that’s pretty much true: If you search for her Twitter ID, you can see that she was retweeted a little bit, but not massively. I know Twitter search isn’t the most reliable, but there are only 8 pages of search results for her ID, starting 8 days ago. That hardly speaks to a huge retweeting.

Furthermore, whilst Twitter lists were used by the media to collect Tweets related to Fort Hood, Moore is on six such lists, which between them have a grand total of 67 followers.

Carr goes on:

That last twitpic link was particularly amazing: it showed a cameraphone image – of a wounded soldier arriving at the hospital on a gurney – taken by Moore from inside the hospital. Unsurprisingly, Moore’s – [sic] coverage was quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike, something that she actively encouraged by tweeting to friends that they should pass her phone number to the press so she could tell them the truth, rather than the speculative bullshit that was hitting the wires.

Carr claims that the bloggers and mainstream media outlets picked up on her tweets, but I just can’t substantiate that. I have searched Google News and the only mentions of “Tearah Moore” are people reposting or quoting Paul Carr’s article. Searching for “MissTearah” brings up two articles, neither from a mainstream news outlet. One is from a German blog, the other from The Business Insider, which runs her photo.

Further digging does reveal that the Houston Chronicle in Texas ran her photo (no. 52) with the caption “MissTearah submitted this photo to Twitter purporting to be from the emergency room in Killee.” Australia’s Herald Sun does the same but uses the caption “This Twitter image from user misstearah, claims to be from inside a hospital near the shooting.”

Technorati and Icerocket show the same pattern amongst bloggers: A few people are talking about Carr’s post, not Moore’s original Tweets.

When I mentioned this on Twitter, Carr responded:

@Suw I linked the Independent in the post http://bit.ly/37HwCy Here’s NYT and AP trying to ctct: http://bit.ly/3IeG94 http://bit.ly/4DdsEY

The Independent post that Carr links to is actually a post by Jack Riley, a tech writer, that he’s written on his own Independent Minds Livejournal. Independent Minds is the Indie’s user generated content platform, it’s not a part of the Indie’s journalistic output. The other two are links to Tweets by the New York Times and the Associated Press trying to get in touch with Moore, which is what you would expect from journalists who think they may have an eye witness to talk to.

Let’s just look at Tweets from the MSM to Moore (oldest to newest):

@robertwood: @MissTearah give me a call if you can. I’m a reporter and wanted to do an interview. 512.474.5264

@DavidSchechter: @MissTearah Please call WFAA TV in Dallas 214-907-5964

@vietqle: @MissTearah I’m with National Public Radio in DC. We’d like 2 talk w/ people at Ft. Hd. Can you contact me? vle@npr.org or 202.513.3999. Tx.

@waldon_m: @MissTearah please call me at 2022157069 or email mwaldon@ap.org

@waldon_m: @MissTearah i am a reporter with The Associated Press. Please contact ASAP

@waldon_m: @MissTearah please contact the AP 202 641 9807

@waldon_m: @MissTearah please contact The Associated Press if you can 202 641 9807- thank you.

@BBC_HaveYourSay: @MissTearah Hello, it’s James at BBC News in London. I saw your picture from Fort Hood. It would be great to talk to you today. Are u free?

@BBC_HaveYourSay: @MissTearah Thanks for letting us know. We thought the email was suspicious. I’m glad we did not publish your pic. I’m sorry to trouble you.

@xocasgv: @misstearah http://twitpic.com/ohye0 - Hi, this is Xaquin G.V., Graphics Editor at The New York Times, read you witnessed the event. Any cha [sic]

So, six journalists get in touch, with Michael Waldon not appearing to have much luck in getting hold of Moore at all. The brief exchange with @BBC_HaveYourSay is also interesting - make of it what you will. As Moore’s account is private now, there’s no way to see what her response was and thus tricky to interpret that tweet.

But other than the three posts mentioned above that use Moore’s photo, I couldn’t find any other mainstream media news outlet that quotes from or mentions Moore by name, nor do any bloggers that Technorati or Icerocket can find. Equally, the number of retweets are negligible.

Carr’s assertion that her tweets were “quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike” just isn’t supported by the facts.

Now there is a discussion that could be had about the content of Moore’s Tweets. She did not have access to completely accurate information but from reading through some of the reTweets and the few Tweets that Riley archived, Moore seemed to feel that the information she was getting was coming from relatively reliable sources. She was also Tweeting what she was witnessing, which is information there’s no reason to doubt.

In the middle of a shooting, in a lock-down situation, is it really any wonder that your average eye witness actually isn’t all that well informed about the bigger picture? People caught up in events can tell us what they see and what they hear, but they can’t necessarily fact check right there and then and I feel it’s rather unfair to expect them to.

Carr also talks about a picture Moore took - a blurry image of someone on a gurney further down the corridor:

Rather than offering to help the wounded, or getting the hell out of the way of those trying to do their jobs, Moore actually pointed a cell-phone at a wounded soldier, uploaded it to twitpic and added a caption saying that the victim “got shot in the balls”.

In the caption to her Twitpic, Moore says that she was at the hospital for an appointment. She doesn’t appear to be a member of medical staff, so would have no role to play in that situation. Whether it is reportage or poor taste to take and upload such a picture — given that there is no way to identify anyone in the picture and you can barely see the wounded soldier — is a matter for debate.

(Carr mentions HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects patient confidentiality in the US. I’m not clear how HIPAA privacy provisions would apply in this case and would need an expert to advise.)

But to insinuate that it’s pure selfishness and that Moore should have been ‘doing something’ is misrepresenting Moore’s situation.

Carr himself, though, did appear to have a problem with Moore’s conduct, if his tweets are anything to go by:

@paulcarr: By the way, doesn’t @misstearah have a fucking job to do while all these people are dying? Just wondering.

@paulcarr: Looks like @misstearah’s twitter account has been taken down. Only took the army an hour to respond to that particular threat.

@paulcarr: Also, Twitpics from inside the hospital? From a cellphone? Really? Precisely how many moral and legal rules does that break?

Carr then goes on to talk about the Iranian elections:

For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really.

What is astonishing is Carr’s arrogance. Whilst the election wasn’t swayed, it is wrong to think that the social media action around the elections achieved nothing. I’d like to hear from Iranians on this, but I would imagine that just knowing the world was listening, that people out there cared, that normal Iranians could be heard outside of their own country would be an empowering experience. We might not know for some years what the full effect was, but to write it all off because the election wasn’t swayed is just shortsightedness.

Carr goes on:

And so it was at Fort Hood. For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.

Another straw man. Eye witness reports have never been focused on saving lives, but on reporting what someone’s experiences. And as for misinformation and breaching privacy, the mainstream media is just as good at spreading that as anyone else, if not better.

A further straw man is Carr’s complaint that social media is making “our humanity [...] leak[...] away”. It’s a meaningless statement, on a par with the anti-electricity rhetoric from the late 19th Century. Ethics are not tool-specific, they don’t change from technology to technology. If that were so, all the positive, constrictive, humanity-affirming actions that are taken through social media would simply not be possible.

Finally, Carr mentions the video of Neda Agha Soltan’s final moments:

Even if you’ve seen the footage before, you should watch it again. But this time bear in mind the following: the cameraman was not a professional reporter, but rather an ordinary person, just like the victim. And what did he do when he saw a young girl bleeding to death? Did he run for help, or try to assist in stemming the bleeding? No he didn’t.

Instead he pointed his camera at her and recorded her suffering, moving in closer to her face for her agonising final seconds. For all of our talk of citizen journalism, and getting the truth out, the last thing that terrified girl saw before she closed her eyes for the final time was some guy pointing a cameraphone at her. “Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.”

This is totally disingenuous. Neda was on her way to a protest in Tehran and was shot in the heart when she got out of the car to get some air (the car’s air conditioning wasn’t working well). Several people attended to Neda, including Dr Arash Hejazi, who said this about the incident:

A young woman who was standing aside with her father [sic, later identified as her music teacher] watching the protests was shot by a Basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight her heart. I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim’s chest, and she died in less than two minutes.

Carr’s assertion that the people who videoed Neda’s death should have been doing something is absurd. Others were already doing what they could and it doesn’t sound like there was anything more that could be done.

However harrowing it is to watch a young woman die, there are times when such scenes have to be captured and relayed to the world, to illustrate the appalling conditions and repression that people are suffering. Had she died unrecorded, it’s likely that no one outside of Iran, possibly outside of her immediate community, would have heard of her murder. Instead, she became seen as a symbol of the Iranian protests, even as a martyr.

I was at a panel discussion about social media in repressive regimes a while back with Kevin, and an Egyptian blogger told of how even his friends and family did not want to believe that the police were abusing prisoners until a video of such abuse ended up on YouTube. We might not like it, but unfortunately it can be an important not just in rallying protestors but also as documentary evidence to persuade others.

There is even now a graduate scholarship at the University of Oxford named after Neda so there is hope that, both in Iran and outside, her death was not meaningless.

The key thing that Carr forgets is that what is unacceptable in our relatively safe societies may be necessary in oppressive regimes. Tools we use for play here can be used for survival elsewhere.

More fundamental questions, about whether or not it is right for journalists to stand back and record events instead of intervening to try to save people’s lives is a discussion that has been ongoing for decades. I don’t think that it’s one that’s going to be solved any time soon, either, as there are compelling arguments for and against.

What we should do as individuals, though, when we are confronted by such events is a question worth examining, by each of us and in the frame of our own capabilities. I think most people would try to help and wouldn’t even think about taking photos or video; others would try to help and then think about recording events when the helping is done; and yet others simply won’t be able to help and will only be able to record. Should we criticise and demonise those who record the events around them in a way we don’t approve? Or is it a question for individuals to decide for themselves?

Paul Carr’s main point appears to be that citizen journalists can’t get stuff right, so they should shut up, and those that record events instead of helping to save lives should be ripped a new one. Yet his main assertions are unsupported by the facts, his interpretation riddled with holes and his straw men pathetically easy to demolish.

There are interesting debates to be had about technology, social media, citizen journalism and eye witness accounts, but sadly Carr’s post touches on none of them in any meaningful way. I am befuddled as to why people on Twitter are seizing on it as breaking new ground, as it simply doesn’t.

(To keep the discussion all in one place, please comment over here!)

Cars: There’s an app for that

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:12:32 -0800

Suw and I are taking two weeks off. Most of the time, we’ll be here in London enjoying a holi-stay. I might engage in some deep-thought blogging after recovering from a really too busy 2009. In the meantime, I’ll just engage in a little light coolhunting.

Someone recently was picking my brain about the future of in-car technology. I think that one of the knock-on effects of the iPhone is that people will expect apps and add-on services in a wider range of consumer electronics. Cars will not just have on-board computers to manage the engine but also on-board computers to navigate, entertain and inform much as we would expect in our home.

Hobbyists have already been adding these kind of systems to their cars for years, and Prius drivers love to hack their hybrid cars. High-end cars have complex environmental and entertainment systems, but we’re starting to glimpse how these activities will filter into the mainstream.

Satellite radio services in the US have been using some of their surplus bandwidth to provide information services, and with 4G data services such as WiMax and LTE service expanding in the next few years, mobile data will provide the kind of bandwidth that we’ve previously thought of as restricted to DSL and cable. Faster wireless connections will bring new forms of entertainment, expand the use of web services and provide new opportunities for information providers.

GigaOm has a great post on a prototype system in a Prius.

As a journalist, the question is whether news organisations will let another opportunity slip by them.

Playful 09

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:16:16 -0700

I’m at Playful ‘09 today. I’m not going to be taking verbatim notes, as is my usual habit, but instead just jotting down a few random notes.

Roo Reynolds
Films based on games, often not very good. Minesweeper film trailer (from College Trailer). The only good film from a game is Tron.

Leila Johnston
Wrote Enemy of Chaos, adventure book written for the aging nerd market, not many books for that demographic. Character believes “Obsessive regulation might stave off decay” [sounds like our government].

Kareem Ettouney
How do large teams collaborate? Given bands, with four people in, struggle to get along. It’s actually quite hard to encourage collaboration. His company started with five people, everyone “had the moans”, critical of past employers. As soon as you start hiring talented people, how do you minimise the moans? People are using 2% of their talent and feel unfulfilled, want to do more. How do you increase their input, get a level of ownership that doesn’t create a mishmash. Traditional pyramid structure with specialists to produce work does function ok, old school model. But when you start working with exceptional people, you remember how you used to feel when no one was listening to your ideas.

So started to talk about ownership. Get people to own - means that there’s a responsibility and accountability, that’s the price. Share the problem, let people have ideas, but the hard part is to give your idea time, investigate it, present it. Email thread is not enough, if you want to own your area, earn it. People love the responsibility. Preconception was that the important bit was the ideas, but that leads to incoherence.

But when you share pragmatic aspects, e.g. deadlines, selling to clients, that allows people to rise to the job. No more old-school artistic direction any more, doesn’t work. Shift artistic director role from mastermind to matchmaker, trying to match skills. Share the journey. Harder than the pyramid style. Important too to have personal projects - makes you less precious. Downside of creativity is becoming precious and losing objectivity, because it hurts. Healthy to have your own avenue. If something doesn’t come out at work, it has to come out somewhere else and better it comes out in your own project, if it doesn’t it clouds your thinking. Companies who say, “Everything you do we own” are shooting themselves in their foot, because their staff are jaded.

Daniel Soltis
Tinker-it. Important to get people to feel that they can take something, like a radio, apart and do stuff with it, and change the way that they relate to it. Made a weekend-long immersive street-game. There are tech problems with games - keeping track of players, game state etc. Then iPhone came out, which changes everything. But walking around starting at an iPhone screen is not really all that great. No tactile pleasures as with game pieces. Cross-over between traditional tactile items and tech, e.g. GPS puzzle box that only opened when in the right place, was made as a wedding present.

Lucy Wurstlin
“Play is nature’s training for life. No community can infringe that right without doing deep and enduring harm to the minds and bodies of its citizens” - David Lloyd George.

Play or Die. 4iP. Education via games and technology.

Robin Burkinshaw with Matt Locke
Robin create two Simms characters, Alice and Kev. These are homeless characters: Kev is a drunken looser, Alice is his daughter. Set personality traits in Simms to negative traits, like quick to anger, says inappropriate things. Gave Kev the goal to try and date 10 other characters - impossible given character traits. Game turned into a moving storyline around homelessness.

James Bridle
Awesomeness more important than innovation. Awesome should be proper, God-fearing awe, in a “Space is big” way. Chap who did an illustration for every page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Another chap, Tom Phillips, who found a Victorian novel and is drawing on every page, pulling out a hidden possible narrative. Heath Robinson, “I really have a secret satisfaction in being considered rather mad”. Heath Robinson was also name of the precursor to the Colossus computer that helped break the Enigma code.

Babbage, first great weird machine builder. Although he never build his Difference Engine. Wasn’t capable to build it, wasn’t sure it would work, never got funding, but did build bits to demonstrate his theory of miracles: He believed that miracles were just very very unlikely events. Would get his guests to crank the handle of his device at dinner parties to try and demonstrate unlikely events. Calculated odds of the Resurrection - said it wasn’t a miracle just very unlikely. Wrote to Tennyson about The Vision of Sin to correct his poem about birth and death rates. Started designing a Naughts and Crosses engine, analysed the game, and thought he could do it - maybe he could finance the Different Engine if he built a Naughts and Crosses machine.

People have build a Naughts and Crosses engine - MENACE. Was done by one of the Bletchley Park code breakers. Built a computer out of match boxes. Machine could learn - it had beads inside that correspond to each possible move, and you take beads out of failed moves and put them into successful boxes. James built it… lots of matchboxes and beads (well, beans, as ran out of beads).

Go. Simple rules, but very complex to play. Very hard to model on a computer. Tried to calculate how many matchboxes needed to model Go. 304 needed for OX, with 10 beads. Go would need 3.4 x 10^15 matchboxes, each with 3610 beads in each matchbox, each being 18m^2. If you built it, it would be slightly larger than the Crab Nebula.

Katy Lindemann
Would love to talk about robots, but is going to talk about behaviour change. (And robots.)

There was a game where little robots, which needed to cross New York but could not get there without help from humans. For months, none of them got lost because New Yorkers took care of the robots.

Japanese have a tradition of play and robots, very hopeful, love tech and excited about the future of technology.

But these weren’t designed to change behaviour. Play is fundamental to culture and society. Playing is how we learn and grow up. How can we use playful design and experience to actively encourage behaviour change. Games are a gateway drug to learning. But not necessarily best way to change behaviour. How can we game real life and make the every day, mundane things through play. High Scores. Integration about high scores, interesting way to get people to change behaviour.

E.g. housework. Japanese are building a house robot to do the cleaning, but meantime we’ll have to find something else to motivate. ChoreWars - get experience points the more housework you do.

Encourage more efficient driving. Turn it into a game. Fiat EcoDrive: USB stick in car monitors driving behaviour and then analyse on computer. Gives tips. Can set targets, can better own scores, can share scores with others. Collectively shows CO2 emissions.

Getting diabetics to regularly check blood sugar is tough. Digit, glucose monitor that attaches to Nintendo DS. Rewards good behaviour.

But it’s not all about scores. Sometimes it’s just making it fun. Fun makes it easier to rewire the brain. A lot of democracy stuff is not fun - petitions, writing to MP. How do you give kids a voice? Making it ‘cool’ doesn’t give you the sense that you’re being listened to. No pay off.

Writing robot, in Houses of Parliament, could let people write stuff, and Twitter it, and it’d be written out at HoP.

How to get people to exercise more? We know what we should be doing, but don’t do it. Make it fun. Dance Dance Revolution. Schools in US include DDR in their PE lessons. Wii Fit approved by Dept of Health.

But also make everyday stuff fun. About taking the stairs. [Reminds me of the "racing up the stairs to the 11th floor" wiki page we had at DrKW, as was]. This project turns a staircase into a piano. 66% more people chose to use the stairs than normal.

Recycling. Firstly, make it easier, change the infrastructure. But not enough. Pay for recycling? If you stop paying, will people stop recycling. Bottle Bank Arcade - was used 100 times, where nearby conventional bottle bank was used twice.

Tassos Stevens
The Ashes. It’s all about the question, “What happens next?” If you see someone throw a ball to someone else, can you turn away before you see if they’ve caught it?

Sport generally have simple dynamics. Cricket a bit more complex. Ashes decided over two months, no one can watch it all, gives you permission to miss stuff. Punctuated play, and gaps lets you talk about things. Cricket is unclear even who is winning until the end. Lets people tell each other stories, as the potential imagined outcome shifts. Result can be determined by Acts of God - the weather. Strong tribalism too.

Russell Davies
Two types of model railways: ones that try to replicate the world, and ones that put the railway in their garden where you can’t try to replicate anything, building a bubble of suspense. Bubble building vs. world building.

Barely games: collecting, negotiation, pretending, inattention. Most important is pretending. Never hear enough about pretending.

Mornington Crescent, is pretending to be a game, but because it seems like a game it’s almost better than a game.

Collecting: Pokemon. Game you’re supposed to be playing is way too complex, so make up your own, like Top Trumps. Noticing game. About negotiation.

Collecting things is great for pretending. Works when you’re a kid, but good for adults too. We do pretend, all the time.

Luxury items are pretending items, can’t get the case with the machine gun in parts… but you can get a barbeque set.

Pretending metaphor breaks down if it’s too obvious. Computer desk top is… like a desk. 3D Mailbox trying to make email fun, “Every message is a jumbo jet”. Why aren’t we using it? Because it’s tone deaf. Not subtle.

Need to bury the pretending detail, so it’s not in your face.

Lots of games are quite demanding, want us to pay attention and touch the screen. Want to pay attention to the world.

What would a barely game app involved:

- Walking around, i.e. not looking at the screen
- Uncertain or socially decided rules
- Things that either can be useful or stupid
- High pretending value

SAP - Situated audio platform, audio stuff that’s related to geolocation.

Molly Range
Two ways of telling a story: One tells and others listen and react; or everyone co-creates. Scandinavian story telling tends towards co-creation. Opens up to experimental productions. Scandinavians go “beyond fun” to use play for political protest or learning. Engage people, bring new perspectives, create change. But lack standardised way to prove the value of play to people outside of gaming.

Duncan Gough
Kes - film about a boy called Billy Casper, filmed in ‘69 by Ken Loach. Bit of a feral kid who finds a kestrel, finds the nest and steals a baby kestrel. Firm roots in theatre and radio plays.

Storytelling has developed, e.g. The Wire. Episode, seasons, story arcs and box sets with developments on all scales.

Language of games.

Stand-alone vs ongoing story
Serial and serial quests in MMOs
What would it be like to play Friends, or The Wire?

Fictive worlds - like virtual worlds or MMOs, but more story based. Sense of player vs environment, bringing a story like Kes to life. Adventure games, if you stand still nothing happens in the world, but you want the world to carry on without you. Want the world to be active, living.

Branching narratives aren’t scalable. But decisions must have consequences.

Prior art? 80s was a classic era for children’s TV drama. BBC was concerned that kids would leave TV for games and the web. Kids TV, e.g. Press Gang about a school newspaper, and Running Scared, about a girl on the run from gangsters. No archives of them though - no way to go and watch them again.

Sad, but a good opportunity for a golden age of gaming to happen. Looking for

- web-based fictive world
- simple, directed story
- interactive, allegorical

Alfie Dennen & Paula le Dieu
Bus Top - city-wide network of programmable LED panels on the top of bus stops, one at least in every London Borough, open API.

Want to let the public actually take part in public art as usually they don’t get the chance.

Routes and pebbles — routes might have 5 or 6 installations, and the pebbles are individual panels. Creates a giant canvas. What stories can be told? What sort of visual narrative?

Will be able to use things like Flickr, Twitter, their API and an online tool to interact with the panels. Very lo-fi, pixelate experience. Canvas will be live for 12 months leading up to and through Olympics.

Rex Crowle
Likes wonky drawing, doodling. People get hung up on drawing and expressing themselves and worry that what they are creating is somehow wrong.
Now works for Little Big Planet - game that’s not finished until people are playing it and making stuff. Customise the character, the world, the soundtrack. Internet makes it much more flexible, and you can fix flaws after launch.

Simon Oliver
Makes games for the iPhone.

How do you design fun? Top-down game design is hard. Prototyping works - find the fun.

Simplicity. Games controllers got more and more complex, and that scares people off if they aren’t familiar. iPhone interface is much simpler and instinctive. If it’s too complex or not fun, chuck it.

Tim Wright
Life’s ambition: To play golf on the Moon with David Bowie.

Read Kidnapped by Robert Louise Stephenson, which features a shipwreck and a walk from Mull to Edinburgh. Book says shipwreck happened on June 29th, and arrived in Edinburgh on August 24th.

Is it possible to walk the same walk as the book in that time?

Kidmapped - recreating the walk, podcasting and mapping the way. Put the whole book up on a wiki, chunked by day and could then comment on it. Read the book out in the locations it was setting. Other people came out to read too. Became not just about the book, but also about the landscape.

Also ended up being sent poetry, art, and ended up playing golf up the mountain.

Writers create maps and date travels through them all the time, so why not, as readers, recreate those journeys?

Chris O’Shea
Interaction design.

We work too much and lose our sense of play.

What if you could see through walls? Installation that uses infrared torch and a projector to mimic seeing through walls.

“Flap to Freedom” remote controlled chickens that people thought they were controlling by flapping their arms. Forget about looking silly and have fun.

Mirror installation where the mirrors will self-arrange to reflect your face back to you, and move as you move. Similar one with police car beacons that turn to face you as you walk amongst them.

Social experiences. Let people play together.

Researchers determine mainstream online journalism still mainstream

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:04:39 -0700

In a shocking (possibly only to the researchers) conclusion, a study of major media online journalism newsrooms in the UK has discovered that they follow a relatively narrow mainstream agenda. I think that is a fair summary of an interview on Radio 4 with Dr Natalie Fenton from Goldsmith University Media Research Centre in London speaking about her book New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age. From the synopsis on Radio 4, “Dr Natalie Fenton from Goldsmith’s University in London, … argues that instead of democratising information, the internet has narrowed our horizons.”

I haven’t read the book, seeing as the release date on Amazon is tomorrow. I am sure that book covers the themes in greater depth in what can be covered in a couple of minutes on radio, but I found the interview infuriating.

Dr Fenton and her researchers looked at three online newsrooms, two of which I’ve worked in: the BBC News Website, the Guardian and the Manchester Evening News. I might have to pick up a copy and see if her researchers’ interviews with me are reflected in the book.

First, I would say the book was out of date a year ago based on changes here at the Guardian. We were just beginning our print-online integration. We are still going through the process, as are many newsrooms, but one thing we have done is combined web and print production as much as possible to not only reduce duplication of effort and work around re-purposing print content. This frees up journalists to do journalism and not just ‘copy and pasting’ as Dr Fenton puts it in her interview.

Secondly, I think her conclusions, as expressed in the interview, are undermined by a selection bias. As Charlie Beckett at Polis at LSE says in a blog post from a year ago when they unveiled their draft conclusions, there are problems with the methodology of the study and some of the assumptions underpinning the research. Dr Fenton comes to conclusions about online journalism based on research from three newsrooms connected to traditional news organisations. Is it really all that surprising that she finds their agendas in line with mainstream media organisations? The news environment is much more complex outside of most newsrooms these days than inside, which is one of the problems with the news industry. By condemning online journalism at traditional organisations as focusing on a narrow agenda as Dr Fenton does in the interview, isn’t this more accurately an indictment of the narrow agenda of the mainstream media seeing as the websites track closely the agenda of the legacy media be it broadcast or print?

Thirdly, online news operations connected to traditional news organisations have never had a major stand-alone newsgathering facility. The BBC News website once did have some original newsgathering capacity. I was their reporter in Washington. However, most of the newsgathering capacity rested with television and radio journalists whose work was re-purposed for the website. The situation is more complex at the Guardian now. We produce more web-only content during the week than we do print-only content.

Fourthly, Dr Fenton says that online staff are desk bound, and online newsrooms rely on “less journalists with less time to do proper investigative journalism”. Can we have some perspective on investigative journalism please? Really. Fighting to perserve investigative journalism and investigative journalism only is like trying to save the auto industry by fighting in the name of Porsche. Investigative journalism has always been the pinnacle of our craft, not its totality. It’s important, but investigative journalism was a fraction of pre-digital journalistic output. Again, if Dr Fenton has an issue with lack of investigations, then it’s an issue to take up with the organisation as a whole, not the online newsroom. Having said that, I’ll stand by the Guardian’s investigative output online and off: MPs expenses crowdsouring, Datablog, Trafigura, just to name a few Guardian investigations and innovations here in 2009.

Lastly, I think the narrow frame completely ignores the work of digital pioneers who are constantly pushing the boundaries of journalism. I think of the Guardian’s Matthew Weaver and his live digital coverage of the G20 protests this spring and his recent project to track post during the strike using GPS transmitters. I think of the Guardian’s Simon Jeffery with his recent People’s History of the Internet and the Faces of the Dead and Detained in Iran project as other examples of excellent digital journalism, journalism only possible online. I think of the work that my good friend Chris Vallance has done with BBC 5Live’s Pods and Blogs and iPM on Radio 4. I think of the many projects that I’ve been proud to work on at the BBC and the Guardian. Chris and I brought the voices of those fleeing Hurricane Katrina to the radio and also US soldiers fighting the war in Iraq radio audiences through creative use of the internet. I consider myself primarily an online journalist, but I’ve been working across multiple media for more than 10 years now. I covered the Microsoft anti-trust trial for the BBC News website, BBC radio and television. I’ve done webcasts from the 29th story of a building overlooking Ground Zero three months after the 11 September 2001 attacks. I tweeted from the celebrations of Barack Obama’s victory outside the White House after a 4000 social media-driven month of coverage of the historic 2008 US presidential election. Online journalism isn’t perfect, and it reflects imperfections in traditional journalism. However, in the hands of a good journalist, digital journalism offers up radical new opportunities to tell stories and bring them to new audiences.

My experiences and my career aren’t representative of the industry. I have been doing original journalism online for more than a decade. That is rare, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I lost a lot of colleagues in the dot.com crash when newspapers and broadcasters slashed online budgets. After an interview with the late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings in 2002 on the one year anniversary of 11 September attacks, he took us on a tour of their much slimmed online newsroom. He spoke with pride about the work of the online staff, but he said, “The Mouse (Disney, ABC’s parent company)” didn’t see it that way and continued to make deep cuts.

In 2009, the picture is much different. Print and broadcast journalists are doing more original work online. We have more online-focused journalists than even when Dr Fenton was doing her research. Journalists cast off by ailing journalism institutions are re-launching their careers on the web.

I chose the internet to be my primarily journalistic platform in 1996. I chose it because I saw unique opportunities for journalism. When I did, it was a lonely choice. I faced a lot of prejudice from print journalists who based their views on lack of knowledge and fear. A passion for the medium kept me going despite some of that prejudice. Everyday I get up and help push a unique medium just a further journalistically. (To their credit, my colleagues at the BBC in radio and television told me almost on a daily basis with respect and admiration how I was the future of journalism.)

These prejudices against online journalism are parroted by Dr Fenton in her interview, which I guess is one of the reasons that it made my blood boil. I hope the book paints the reality in a bit more complexity than was possible in a few minutes on air. I hope that she includes some broader examples of how online journalists do original journalism that can’t be done in any other media. However, if the interview on Radio 4 is representative of the book, it’s a reality I don’t recognise. Bad journalism begins with a thesis which never adapts to new information. It’s the same with bad research.

Plain English fail

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 09:17:55 -0700

I wrote a post about jargon the other day, and in the comments someone asked me what I thought the worst bit of social media jargon was. I realised then that individual terms, even quite jargon-y ones, can be used in such a way that they can easily be understood because of the context. Equally, terms that by themselves don’t seem too bad can be brought together in a such a concoction that they immediately lose all meaning.

I discovered such an example today, via John Moore (via someone who Tweeted it). John blogs about the Dachis Group’s attempt to explain what they mean when they use the phrase “Social Business Design”. John said:

I tried explaining/defining the term to a friend the other day but did it poorly. (I think I know what it means, but I don’t.) It’s about using online applications (like ‘social media’ tools) to help businesses improve communication across all departments inside the company and communication across all vendor partners and customers outside the company to create a more efficient and more coordinated way of doing business.

At least that’s what I thought. After reading Dachis Group Managing Partner Peter Kim’s short explanation of what Social Business Design is, I’m totally lost.

And, at risk of basically reproducing John’s whole post (you totally have to go over and read the comments though, some of them are just fabulous), here’s Peter Kim’s definition:

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.

Its goal: helping organizations improve value exchange among constituents.

Social Business Design uses a framework of four mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes: ecosystem, hivemind, dynamic signal, and metafilter. This model can be applied to improve customer participation, workforce collaboration, and business partner optimization. Doing so provides insight to help measure and manage business to produce improved and emergent outcomes.

Some of these words are perfectly fine all by themselves, but put together they are meaningless. “Collectively exhaustive archetypes”, anyone?

This is a perfect example of a company pulling together complex-sounding jargon and complex and hard to parse sentences to make themselves sound cleverer than they really are. It reminds me very much of one of my earliest consulting gigs. A company wanted me to help with their communications and one of the things I needed to do was get a good idea of what they did. We spent several hours in a meeting trying to come up with a way to describe their focus without using any jargon. It turned out that they just couldn’t find ways to talk about their work without resorting to neologisms that would have been utterly confusing to anyone outside of their industry.

They, like Dachis Group, suffered a total plain English fail. In my opinion, no business should use language which obscures meaning, but for a company like Dachis Group that is supposed to be encouraging communication and collaboration, it’s a double fail.

links for 2009-10-23

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:30:16 -0700

LinkedIn Best Practices For Business | e-Strategy Internet Marketing Blog

Suw: A bunch of ideas for how to get the best out of LinkedIn.

(tags: linkedin careers careerdevelopment networking business clients socialnetworking tips)

links for 2009-10-22

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:30:16 -0700

TweetStats :: Graphin' Your Stats

Suw: Twitter statistics in glorious technocolour infographics. Says I tweet twice as much as I used to… not sure that can be right!

(tags: twitter tweetstats statistics metrics measurement socialnetworking graphs infographics)
Comcast's Twitter Team Coaching Salesforce.com — Twitter CRM — InformationWeek

Suw: Salesforce plugin helps businesses monitor Twitter for customer complaints and to address them in a timely manner - and we all know time is of the essence on Twitter. Sounds like a good idea.

(tags: salesforce twitter crm plugins monitoring)
Is Twitter Revolutionizing CRM? | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog

Suw: I just took at look at Co-Tweet and it really is a very good tool, one I'll be recommending to my clients. I don't use Salesforce, so hard for me to test their plug-in but has to be a no-brainer for Salesforce users.

(tags: twitter crm cotweet co-tweet salesforce plugins business management)

links for 2009-10-21

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:30:16 -0700

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Columbia writes off the MSM. Now what?

Kevin: Alan Mutter has a pretty scatching post on the 98-page Columbia University report on Restoring American Journalism. "The annual sales and number of jobs associated with the media industry are not sufficiently large to make them a priority for a federal bailout during this period of unprecedented economic distress. The federal investment in improved rural broadband penetration contemplated in the stimulus package would give consumers a greater choice of information than a handout targeted to a limited number of defined news organizations. Assuming for the sake of discussion that a handout were in the offing, who would choose which news media to support?"

(tags: media online journalism businessmodels internet broadband)

John Mair demonstrates how to really not get it

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:49:50 -0700

I’m sure everyone’s fed up of the Jan Moir debacle that’s been occupying the UK Twittersphere for the last week, but I was made rather cross by this ill-judged and misinformed article by John Mair on Journalism.co.uk yesterday.

For those of you blessed enough not to have heard about the Jan Moir/Daily Mail controversy, suffice it to say that she wrote a hateful and homophobic article about Boyzone singer Stephen Gately, who died of a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Moir’s piece caused uproar amongst the online community, particularly on Twitter, causing some advertisers to remove their ads from the page and forcing Moir to apologise (in a manner of speaking). There have since been acres of print and pixel devoted to unpicking it all.

One such piece by John Mair, a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University, makes a number of mistake that I think are themselves worth unpicking.

Mair’s first mistake is to say that “blogosphere went mad seeking revenge”. Lots of people were very cross with Moir’s piece, but to dehumanise people’s reactions by lumping them all together as “the blogosphere” and then to trivialise the reaction as “going mad” and “seeking revenge” is to mischaracterise the entire episode. It implies that everyone who reacted to Moir’s piece somehow lost their sense of proportion and overreacted in a little moment of insanity. This is rather insulting - people were justifiably cross with Moir and the Mail and, whilst people were vociferous, to characterise them as seeking revenge is hyperbolic.

Mair’s second mistake is in his second paragraph where he implies that celeb-Twitterers Stephen Fry and Derren Brown organised the protests on Twitter and Facebook. That’s also not true - this wasn’t a crowd, baying for blood and lead onwards by the Twitter elite. Stephen and Derren were, like everyone else reacting to a rapidly spreading meme. There was no movement and they did not organise anything. They just helped the meme along. (It’s important to note that memes are like ocean waves - they don’t move the water itself, they move through the water.)

A little later on, Mair asks, “So how democratic are these manifestations of the virtual mob?”.

Ok, so what exactly is “democracy”? The dictionary on my Mac says:

democracy |di?mäkr?s?|
noun ( pl. -cies)
a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives : capitalism and democracy are ascendant in the third world.
• a state governed in such a way : a multiparty democracy.
• control of an organization or group by the majority of its members : the intended extension of industrial democracy.
• the practice or principles of social equality : demands for greater democracy.

Looking at that list, none of those really apply to the phenomenon we observed. There was no organisation and no group ergo no members, unless - and I think this is where Mair gets confused - unless you label the people who complained, post hoc, as a de facto group that must therefore have organisers. That’s a rationalisation that doesn’t hold water - anger with Moir spread through Twitter organically: as one person Tweeted their disgust, others found out about the article and then expressed their own feelings. There was nothing orchestrated about it and the concept of ‘democracy’ cannot and should not be applied. A spontaneous expression of a shared opinion is not a democracy.

What about “mob”?

mob |mäb|
noun
a large crowd of people, esp. one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence : a mob of protesters.
• (usu. the Mob) the Mafia or a similar criminal organization.
• ( the mob) the ordinary people : the age-old fear that the mob may organize to destroy the last vestiges of civilized life.

Was there a mob? There certainly were a large number of people involved, but were they a crowd? Were they grouped together in one spot and intent on causing trouble or violence? I think it would be stretching the definition of ‘mob’ too far to use it to describe the people upset by Moir’s homophobia.

Mair then tells us that the internet is a double-edged sword, something which is undoubtedly true, although it is more accurate to describe the internet as neutral - neither good nor bad, and therefore capable of being used for good or bad. But the tone of his assertion implies that actually, he thinks the internet is baaaaad.

Now we get to the meat of the wrongness of this piece. Mair compares the expression of disgust at Moir with the hounding of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand.

It can lead to interactivity and enrichment but it can also lead to bullying by keystroke. The zenith of that was the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand row in the autumn of 2008 but nowadays broadcasters, especially the BBC, are facing ‘crowd pressure’ from internet groups set up for or against a cause or a programme; they are an internet ‘flash mob. With the emphasis, maybe, on the ‘mob’.

When Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand rang up the veteran actor Andrew Sachs on October 18 2008 and were disgustingly obscene to him about his grand-daughter, that led to a huge public row on ‘taste,’ mainly stoked by the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday.

Fuel was added to the fire through comments by the Prime Minister. The ‘prosecuting’ virtual group was the editorial staff of the Mail newspapers and its millions of readers in Middle England. In support of the ‘Naughty Two’, more than 85,000 people joined Facebook support groups. Many, perhaps most, had never heard the ‘offensive’ programme. Just two had complained after the first broadcast.

The BBC was forced after a public caning to back down, the director-general yanked back from a family holiday to publicly apologise, Brand and his controller resigned and Ross was suspended from radio and television for three months. The virtual mob smelt blood: it got it.

The Ross/Brand incident bears no resemblance to the Moir incident. Ross & Brand’s stupidity would have gone unnoticed by the vast majority of people had the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday (and a variety of other newspapers) not brought it to their attention and demanded that ’something be done’ - that something, of course, being complaints to the BBC.

There was no “‘crowd pressure’ from internet groups” nor was there any sort of “internet ‘flash mob’”. There was only pressure brought to bear by the tabloids via the medium of the internet. The protest was not grass roots, it was orchestrated (oh the irony!) by the Mail and Mail on Sunday. Mair knows this, as he explicitly states it, yet still he uses this example as illustrative of the awfulness of the internet and the propensity of internet users to mobbish behaviour. Sorry, Mair, I call bullshit.

Mair then goes on to cite another irrelevant example, the protests over Jerry Springer; the Opera:

Fifty five thousand Christians petitioned the BBC to pull it from the schedules because of its profanity and alleged blasphemy. They engaged in modern guerilla warfare tactics to try to achieve their aim. Senior BBC executives had to change their home phone numbers to avoid that pressure. That campaign did not get a ‘result’. If Facebook had been in full flow then, the 55,000 may well have been 555,000 and the result very different.

The offended Christians were, again, organised. And again, it was not a spontaneous outpouring of dissatisfaction. They did not use “modern guerilla warfare tactics”, they used the communications tools open to them at the time, just like everyone else does. They didn’t succeed in getting the opera pulled, perhaps because the BBC felt that, in this case, the claims of offence were out of proportion. Would they have been successful had they been able to use Facebook? I would hope not, but the BBC’s spine does go through soft phases.

Mair concludes with:

This is activism by the click. It needs no commitment apart from signing up on a computer. It gives the illusion of democracy and belonging to a movement whereas in reality is it membership of a mob, albeit a virtual one? Is this healthy for democracy and media accountability or not?

Here Mair lays his biases bare. He may as well have said, “I just don’t like the whole idea of the audience having opinions and having a way to express those opinions. The fact that lots of people seemed to agree - quite independently - about how awful Jan Moir’s article was puts the fear of god up me, because suddenly I am accountable not just to my paymasters, but to my audience. Directly. And who’s going to protect me when these scary people with opinions come knocking at my door? Wasn’t it so much nicer in the old days, when the audience couldn’t answer back?”

Groups of people on the internet who all express a similar opinion are not de facto mobs. Expressing an opinion can be a part of democracy, but democracy is not simply the expression of opinion.

Mair’s piece is risible. He fails to understand Twitter, sees this as an opportunity to demonise the internet and draws false comparisons between unrelated incidents. Frankly, the media’s buggered if this is the prevalent attitude in our universities.

links for 2009-10-20

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:30:18 -0700

Data.gov.uk Newspaper | Newspaper Club

Kevin: The Postcode Paper looks quite a bit like Everyblock on paper. "It gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics." They see it as "a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for the first time."

(tags: data newspaper government local London design UK newspaperclub)
What I've learned about Hyperlocal (Scripting News)

Kevin: Dave Winer shares some lessons from the hyperlocal project, InBerkeley.com. He says: "I thought we could apply the same approach that worked in bootstrapping weblogs, RSS and podcasting for a local site. One or two people start writing about their personal experiences. A small audience develops. Debates, discussions follow. More perspectives. At every step you invite people to participate. You always ask for the people who used to be called the audience to become full participants. That's how the idea scales. As I said, it worked for blogging and related technologies. Permalink to this paragraph
Instead, what happened at InBerkeley.com is that the people thought we were running a news organization, and they did stories the way reporters do them. That can't possibly work, imho — for the same reason the news industry is in crisis."

(tags: hyperlocal journalism local news newsmedia)

New Business Models for News talk

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:58:59 -0800

Here’s my talk on CUNY’s New Business Models for News at our summit in New York:

Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for News 2009 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

And here’s my latest Prezi:

Newspapers want enemies, not friends

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:20:51 -0800

On today’s On Point, Michael Wolff, Steve Brill, and I talked about Murdoch and Google and the show’s blog quoted me thusly:

But News Corp isn’t the only one making the mistake here. I think the mistake that Google has made in this – and I’m an admirer of Google, I wrote a book to that effect – but I think that Google thought that they could become friends with the newspaper industry. And the newspaper industry isn’t looking for friends. They’re looking for enemies they can blame for the problems that are actually their own from the last fifteen years of inaction in the face of this dying light. And so it’s impossible for Google to become friends with the newspaper industry.

Gained something in the translation

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:57:09 -0800

Tweet: A tweet paraphrased my link-economy line and showed me I’ve been saying more than I thought I have. **

In Twitter today, one @rpaskin paraphrased something I’ve been saying – and said again in my talk at Web 2.0 Expo Tuesday (generously covered in that link by Aneta Hall). My line has been that in the link economy, value comes from the creator of the content and from the creator of a public (formerly known as an audience). That is, Rupert’s wrong with he says that Google takes content; it gives attention.

Anyway, @rpaskin tweeted this: “In a link economy, there are values from creating content and linking to content. There’s no value in just reproducing content (Jeff Jarvis).”

I didn’t say that exactly but I think it better expressed what I have been trying to say. Or at least it added a perspective and raised a fundamental and important question, namely:

Is there value anymore in reproducing content? Is the six-century-long reign of Guttenberg and the industries he created really over?

Wow. Maybe so. In my discussions of the link economy, I had been concentrating on explaining and defending the side of the value equation brought by Google, aggregators, blogger, Twitter, et al rather than on the loss of value brought to those who reproduced – rather than created – content. But in looking at the entire equation, what @rpaskin says stands to reason: There is no value left over for the copiers. Indeed, online, if one copies, one is considered a thief because it’s only the thieves who copy.

The problem is, of course, that it was through the making and selling of copies that monetary value was extracted and that is why it is so upsetting to those who did so that they can’t do it anymore. It’s upsetting that they don’t see other ways to recognize value. It’s what makes folks including Murdoch say silly things that betray ignorance about the workings of our new world.

I’m sure Rupert knows exactly how the scribes Guttenberg put out of business felt.

ALSO: Speaking of speaking of Murdoch, you can hear me doing so – along with Michael Wolf and Steven Brill – on Murdoch’s tilting against Google’s energy-efficient windmills.

** Once again, I’m experimenting with using tweets about posts as subheds summarizing those posts.

Podcast madness

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:21:07 -0800

I had the privilege of being on This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, John Dvorak, and Baratunde Thurston right after appearing on This Week in Google with the aforementioned Leo, Gina Trapani, and Mary Hodder. Much fun.

The opportunity of bankruptcy

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:50:48 -0800

Tweet: How bankruptcy can help a newspaper get theah from heah. Don’t squander it. **

I fear that Tribune Company – and other newspaper companies – will come out of bankruptcy having squandered the opportunity it presents to rebuild from the ground up.

At the New Business Models for (Local) News Summit at CUNY last week, my friend and mentor Jim Willse, late of the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, asked us to create a model for an existing news organization to morph into what we proposed as the new structure. That’d be painful and thus controversial, I said, to which Willse – never one to mince words – responded, “No shit.”

Can they get theah from heah? I’m not sure. A company that employed more than a thousand workers may end up employing just a hundred as it gets rid of printing and distribution infrastructure – the barrier to entry that became a barrier to change. Those shut-down costs are tremendous (that’s where bankruptcy helps, though). The cultural shift for people who remain is huge (I have spoken with many newspaper and magazine folks lately who – like me – held out hope that it was possible … until they gave up and quit). The need to reinvent business methods and models is urgent. And in the end, if it all works, the new company will be much smaller, a fraction of its former size, which is hard for executives, analysts, and shareholders to swallow – but it’s profitable and thus sustainable and that has to be the ultimate goal.

To make this volcanic transformation, I say a newspaper must start by getting out of the printing business (as Dave Morgan argued at our CUNY conference last year). Oh, it may still print a product as long as enough advertisers and readers stick with it to make it profitable and as long as it is valuable to promote the the digital brand of the future. But print can no longer drive the business; it’s just not sustainable.

When the Ann Arbor News folded this summer and was replaced by its owners with an online, community-based site, they chose to continue publishing twice a week to continue distributing coupons, circulars, and ads; it is printed by another paper in the company. [Disclosure: I consulted on the project.] Similarly, in the UK, the Birmingham Post went online and went weekly in print. My reputation aside, I’m not religiously opposed to paper. But maintaining a printing business is no longer an advantage; it’s a burden. So I say get out of the business and outsource whatever printing you do.

What about distribution? Well, as the circulation of the paper dwindles to naught, its value as a delivery platform also falls – to the point that coupon companies and stores like Best Buy will have to find alternative means of distribution. I think there’s a nice, if transitional business there for someone. Should it still be the newspaper company? Well, I’d give the same advice that is given to every startup: concentrate on one thing and do it well, get rid of the rest. So I’d say the paper should – as many pretty much do today – outsource its distribution.

Ad sales? That’s perhaps the toughest transition. Classifieds aside (they’re permanently lost anyway), newspapers are built to sell mass metro audiences to large advertisers. Sales staffs don’t drum up new business so much as they manage existing lists. Those folks aren’t likely to be able to sell entirely new kinds of ~~advertising~~ highly targeted marketing help for whole new populations of smaller merchants who couldn’t afford the newspaper before. Beside, such a staff doesn’t scale when you have to sell to so many new customers in networks. Build-it-and-they-will-come automated platforms don’t work; advertising still must be sold. This is why, in our models, we projected new sales forces – citizen sales – arising to sell at a local level. So for our transforming paper, I’d build networks of local sites and local sales and keep just enough of the old people to sell the big, old accounts that remain – if they can be re-educated.

Marketing is all but gone. If this newly constituted service isn’t sold by its public – if that public doesn’t collaborate with it and feel an ownership stake – then it will fail.

Now for editorial: I’ve written often about the new roles journalists will take on. As the marginal cost of information in a community falls to zero – as the internet and its tool enable communities to share much or most of what they know and need to know – then the question for journalists is how they add value and fill in gaps with reporting at the core as well as curation, community organization, and training. In our models, we forecast almost as many journalists as worked in the old paper newsroom, but they work for – and often own – more than a hundred companies. The core of journalists working at the new news organization is smaller.

Bankruptcy enables a newspaper company to shed its past. It can get out of contracts and leases for paper, printing plants, delivery, trucks. It can also get out of labor contracts, reducing severance costs. That is terribly painful but I fear it is as inevitable as the end of the ITU (the typesetters’ union). It offers a one-time chance to rethink, reinvent, and rebuild the company for the future. Is it better to stretch out the pain and never get anywhere? And if tough decisions and actions are not made, the likelihood that the company will die and all will be lost only increases.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has already come out of bankruptcy but without such a radical transformation. It, like other news companies, is taking out bricks a few at a time rather than building a new kind of company. That’s the opportunity I fear other bankrupt newspapers – Tribune Company, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Sun-Times – are squandering. The same can be said of other industries.

To take advantage of bankruptcy, a company has to have courage and bold visions of the future. Do newspaper companies? So far, we haven’t seen evidence of it. But it is possible.

** At Craig Newmark’s good suggestion, I am going to try to summarize posts – longer ones, at least – at the top. Old fart that I was, I at first thought of this as a UK-style subhed. But then I realize that the appropriate model is to put it in a tweet. So I’ll try that.

’nuff said

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:28:41 -0800

(Thanks, Ed Reading)

Nose, face, cut, spite: Blocking Google

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:29:43 -0800

There’s been a swine flu of stupidity spreading about the Murdoch meme of blocking Google from indexing a site’s content (to which Google always replies that you’ve always been able to do that with robots.txt – so go ahead if you want). I love that The Reach Group (TRG), a German consulting company, has quantified just how damaging that would be to Google: hardly at all.

TRG took the content of the 1,000 domains controlled by the 148 German publishers that signed the so-called Hamburg Declaration (a veiled shot at Google) and analyzed how critical they are to Google search results. TRG asked the question: “How empty would the first 10 Google search results be if one could no longer find anything from the 148 German publishers?”

It’s quite another matter if Wikipedia were not there. It appears on 13% of first-page results. That is, one entity – Wikipedia – is on the treasured first page almost three times as often as all of Germany’s top publishers. How does one say this in German? Yow.

This chart shows that sites of the Hamburg Declaration publishers have 5% share of a position on the first page of search results:

This chart shows that Wikipedia has 13% share of the No. 1 position in search results:

TRG further notes that Wikipedia represents only 0.01% of pages in the Google index – vs. 4.01% for German publishers – yet even so, Wikipedia pages clearly get more clicks and links and thus, Googlejuice.

RELATED: Jason Calicanis fantasizes about Microsoft paying The New York Times to leave Google’s index for Bing. Let me explain why that would never happen. 1. The Times is not stupid. 2. Times subsidiary About.com – the only bright spot these days in the NYTimesCo’s P&L – gets 80% of its traffic and 50% of its revenue from Google. 3. See rule No. 1.

Michael Arrington then joined in the fantasy saying that News Corp. could change the balance by shifting to Bing, but ends his post with his own reality check: MySpace – increasingly a disaster in News Corp’s P&L – is attempting to negotiate its $300 million deal with Google.

Microsoft can suck up to European publishers all it wants – even adopting their ACAP “standard,” which no one in the search industry is saluting because, as Google often points out, it addresses the desires only of a small proportion of sites and it would end up aiding spammers – but it won’t make a damned bit of difference.

As Erick Schonfeld reports, also on TechCrunch, if WSJ.com turned off Google it would lose 25% of its web traffic. He quotes Hitwise, which says 15% comes from Google search, 12% from Google News – and 7% from Drudge (aggregator), and 2% from Real Clear Politics (aggregator). From HItwise:

But so what if News Corp does withdraw from Google? So what, indeed? Will other publishers join? No, they’ll celebrate the chance to grab more juice. If I saw any publishers pull out, I’d run at the chance to create topic pages to grab the little juice they have.

SEE ALSO: This analysis from The Internet Marketing Driver showing the importance of Google, Facebook, and Yahoo in driving audience to many sties. What they then do with that audience is then up to them. According to the imperatives of the link economy, it is up to he or she who gets the links to monetize them.

[Hat tip to friend Wolfgang Blau for twittering the TRG link. If I mistranslated, please corrected me.]

WWGD? – The videos (7)

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:30:39 -0800

At last! A week of videos comes to an end. Here are the last of the videos from the aborted v-book edition of What Would Google Do?:

Here I ask how Googley headhunters would operate:

And, finally, a video from Oxford about the future of the university:

WWGD? – The videos (6)

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:31:49 -0800

And they never end: Here’s the sixth day of videos from the aborted v-book edition of What Would Google Do?:

A touch dated now, here’s a video I made on my Flip a year ago arguing that it was the Googley way to do video because it serves the creation generation:

A very quick little video about Apple generosity that asks about other companies’:

My advice to German media

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:36:09 -0800

I have an op-ed in today’s Welt Kompakt newspaper in Germany giving my advice to a German mediasphere that I see becoming more protectionist. It’s not online (ironically) but so you can see the play, a PDF of it is here and here. [Update: Here's the piece online.] This is my original English text:

* * *

At the Müncher Medientage, I spoke to 500 German executives from my home in New York and dared to give them some advice about their fate. I urged them to learn these lessons from watching American news companies shrivel and die: Protectionism is no strategy for the future. Every company in every industry (especially media) must be reinvented for the post-Guttenberg age—for the Google era. And the only sane response to change is to embrace it and find the opportunity in it.

I have been impressed with the innovation and openness to change I have seen in German media: Axel Springer shifted a large proportion of its revenue to digital; Bild equipped Germans with video cameras to report news; Burda invested in the networks Glam.com and Science Blogs; Holtzbrinck innovated in its incubator; WAZ created a world pioneer in DerWesten.

But when the times got tough in the financial crisis, I suddenly saw German media looking for an enemy to blame for their problems. The head of the Deutscher Journalisten-Verband called for legislation to condemn Google as a monopoly, an enemy of the press. Dr. Hubert Burda, a digital visionary I greatly admire, urged that copyright law should be expanded to protect publishers, whom he said deserve a share of search engines’ revenue. Chancellor Merkel is considering such changes in copyright. A group of publishers issued the Hamburg Declaration saying that all online content need not be free (though that has always been completely in their control).

Schade. In these pronouncements, I hear echoes of American media’s funeral hymns. I see companies resisting the new reality of the internet age by trying to preserve the old rules of their old industry. Take, for example, Rupert Murdoch vowing to put all his news properties behind pay walls just because that’s how media used to operate—when that will only reduce audience, traffic, influence, and advertising just at the moment when growth is needed most. He is even threatened to block Google. That is simply suicidal.

Though I sympathize with media’s economic nostalgia, I must say that swimming upstream against the internet is futile. The better idea is to go with the flow of the internet, to see and exploit its opportunities.

Rather than fighting Google, learn lessons from it. Google understands the new economics of media. That is why it is successful—not because it exploits old media companies. Those old companies still operate in the content economy, begun 570 years by Guttenberg, in which the owner of content profited by selling multiple copies. Online, there needs to be only one copy of content and it is the links to it that bring it value. Content without links has no value. So when search engines, aggregators, bloggers, and Twitterers link to content, they are not stealing; they are giving the gift of attention and audience. Indeed, publishers should be grateful that Google does not charge them for the value of its links.

This link economy brings three imperatives for publishers. First, it requires them to make their content public if they want to be found. That is their choice, but if they retreat behind pay walls, hidden from search and links, they will not be discovered and they only create opportunities for new, free competitors. Second, the link economy demands specialization: Do what you do best and link to the rest. This specialization also brings a new efficiency that can make publishers more profitable. Third, in the link economy, it is the recipient of links who must exploit their value. That is still the publisher’s job.

Google has earned an estimated 30 percent of online ad revenue because it serves advertisers differently—and better. Here, too, Google understands a new economy, one based on abundance rather than scarcity. Publishers, even online, still sell scarcity as if the internet were print: only so many ad positions for so many eyeballs—what the market will bear. Google instead charges for clicks; it sells performance. Thus Google takes a share of the risk and that is what motivates it to place advertising all over the internet, to create more relevant positions for ads that will perform better for both the marketer and Google. That is why advertising has shifted to Google—not because it is enemy of the media but because advertisers prefer it. We call that competition.

The most important lesson to learn from Google is that it grew huge not by trying to acquire and control content on the internet, as publishers do. Google doesn’t want to own the internet, only to organize it. So Google created a platform that enables others to succeed with technology, content, promotion, and advertising revenue. That is Glam’s model, too, creating networks of hundreds of independent sites and then helping them succeed. I believe that platforms and networks will form the basis of the future of media—and much of the next economy.

At the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach, I am running the New Business Models for News Project, envisioning a profitable future for news if regional newspapers covering cities die. Though national news brands—whether this publication or the Guardian or The New York Times—have a future, regional newspapers across America and Europe are in trouble and some will die. Yet I am confident that journalism in those cities will not die, because there is a market demand for news, which we believe the market can meet.

We believe that news will emerge from ecosystems made up of many players—journalists, citizen journalists, citizen salespeople, volunteers, technologists—operating under different motives and means. Today, in America, we see hyperlocal bloggers earning $100-200,000 a year in advertising; these are real businesses. We see an opportunity to help them make more money by creating local, regional, and national advertising networks. We see the opportunity for a new newsroom to continue beat and investigative reporting and to work collaboratively with these networks. Without the cost of print and distribution, these new news organizations become smaller but profitable.

If you are trying to protect old jobs in old structures of old companies in old industries, then you might see my vision of the future as a threat. But if you embrace change and innovation, then you will see opportunities to reimagine and remake journalism, to find new ways to gather and share news collaboratively, supported by new revenue, reaching profitability thanks to new efficiencies.

Publishers will not get to that bright future by urging government to protect them from innovators and competitors. No, if we want anything from government, it should be universal broadband to encourage society’s migration to a digital economy, and a lack of regulation to assure a level playing field for innovation.

I hope that once the desperation of the current economic crisis subsides, my German media friends will not try to retreat to their old models but will instead continue to invent new ways and to again become leaders in innovation. That is the only sensible path to survival and success.

LATER: I should add disclosures that are also on my disclosures page. I was paid to come speak to editors at Axel Springer (publishers of Welt Kompakt), Burda (I’ve also spoken for their DLD conference), and Holtzbrinck.

WWGD? – The videos (5)

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:25:59 -0800

And they never end: Here’s the fifth day of videos from the aborted v-book edition of What Would Google Do?:

First, a lesson in turning a challenge into an opportunity from the German publishers of the Wikipedia Lexicon:

This one’s probably not for you. It was intended as an appendix to the book to suggest ways for the unGoogley to get Googlier:

The balance shifts

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:50:24 -0800

At yesterday’s New Business Models for (Local) News summit at CUNY, I ran what I called a reverse panel with big media folks – NY Times, Washington Post, Gannett, Star-Ledger, Impremedia, Politico – sitting up front but ordered to listen to the wishes and needs of the people in the room. I threatened to cover the big guys’ mouths with duct tape. (A few of them seemed to honestly fear I would do that. I do need to investigate this reputation I’ve garnered.)

The putative war between mainstream media and bloggers has been declared over again and again (myself, I reported a truce three and a half years ago… oh, well). So I won’t act as there aren’t still the lone snipers in the mountains. Bloggers from medium-sized cities had plenty of complaints about the disrespect they see from their local medium-sized media outlets.

But importantly, I did see a shift in the balance of power yesterday. The big media guys on this reverse panel made it crystal clear that they not only respect but need the work of the bloggers/citizens/little-media-guys/whatever you choose to call them. The big guys acknowledged openly that they are shrinking and can no longer even pretend that they can do it all themselves.

For their part, the bloggers also made it clear that they respect and thus want attention – promotion and credit – from the big guys.

Group hug.

We are at various fulcrum points. The big, old media outlets can no longer act as if they have no problems; it’s obvious, they do. The upstarts are beginning to catch a glimmer of critical mass; we see blogs starting up all over and there are lots of new news organizations – most of them not-for-profit – rising in San Diego, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Austin; now they are joined by the for-profit local Politico. Even if you disagree with me that the future of news is entrepreneurial, there’s now no denying there is a future there.

And so the room was filled with people who were, each in his or her own way, building that future and they all recognized that they have to work together to do so. The future of news is also an ecosystem. That’s what became apparent yesterday and that, for me, was the highlight of the event.

* * *

We’re doing our post-mortems on the event at CUNY to figure out what to do better next time – and it’s clear there is a need for more of these gatherings here in New York and, we hope, across the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, bringing together builders. We heard a lot from the room about what they want next: More best practices from the kind of real experience that fed our models…. More practical advice for making money…. More education…. I’ll come back with additional thoughts after my thorough-going exhaustion wears off.

My personal thanks to the team at CUNY – led by Peter Hauck, Jennifer McFadden, and Matt Sollars – for doing great work in the models and the event and to the funders who made it possible: The MacArthur Foundation funded the events (and the prior summit led directly to a request to do the work we presented at this one); the Knight Foundation funded the work on our models and presentation of them at the Aspen Institute; the McCormick Foundation is funding ongoing work on new business models; and the Carnegie Corporation is funding work on hyperlocal labs. We’re also grateful to Mignon Media – Nancy Wang and Jeff Mignon – for their incredible work on the models; David Cohn for his tireless efforts helping us organize the events; Borrell Associates for their data and advice; and all the companies and individuals who participated yesterday. And we want to thank Ted Mann of inJersey/Gannett and Jim Schachter of The New York Times and their colleagues for helping to organize the event. Thanks.

WWGD? – The videos (4)

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:30:57 -0800

Sick of me yet? There’s more to come. Here are two more videos from the aborted v-book edition of What Would Google Do?:

An argument to connect even the customers of products into their own instant communities so they can share what they know (attn: GaryVee):

And how to win arguments about the internet:

The future of business is in ecosystems

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:39:22 -0800

Last week, I said that the future of news is entrepreneurial (not institutional). Today, a sequel: The future of business is in ecosystems (not conglomerates or industries).

At the Foursquare conference last week, I was struck by the miss-by-a-mile worldviews held by the chiefs of big, old conglomerates and the entrepreneurs starting new, nimble companies. The conference is off the record, so I won’t quote anyone by name. And in truth, these are the same conversations I hear often elsewhere. Having these different tribes conveniently in the same room merely focused the contrast for me.

In one moment, a very successful mogully man was slack-jawed in amazement at how little money – “$50,000!” – one of three entrepreneurs had used to start another fast-growing enterprise. The big man thinks big – that’s what made him big. The small guys think small and get big by using existing platforms and depending on their users to like and market them. To the new guys, it’s so obvious.

Here was the key moment for me last week: In a discussion about the importance of distribution, some start-up guys – each the creators of new enterprises that took off like gun shots – were asked by a representative of the big, old club which company they would most want to do distribution deals with. The start-up guys cocked their heads like confused puppies. Why would we want to do that? they asked. What was unsaid: Doing a deal with one company would be so limiting. We get our distribution through customers and developers, through embedding and APIs and social connections. That’s how we grew so big so fast for so little. Don’t you see that?

No, they don’t.

This week, we see this contrast, too, in Rupert Murdoch’s threat – he thinks it’s a threat – to cut off Google. Nose. Face. Cut. Spite. Murdoch – whodoesn’t use the internet – does not see how distribution works today. He does not understand that being open to the link economy brings him free distribution, free marketing, great benefit. That’s because he, like his fellow old machers, won by taking control rather than giving it up. This new world is utterly inside-out from the world they built. It breaks all their rules and makes new ones (which is what I tried to analyze in What Would Google Do?). That’s what makes it so damned hard for them to understand it.

In our New Business Models for News at CUNY, we saw quickly that a big, old newspaper company was not going to be replaced by a big, new newspaper company but that instead, news would come more and more from ecosystems made up of scores of companies operating under different means, motives, and models, each dependent on the others to optimize their success. That is why we built in networks that enable separate sites to join, creating critical mass they can sell to advertisers. That is also why we factored in the benefit of platforms, cutting their infrastructure costs to near-zero.

And there, I believe, is the structure of the future of business in the new, post-industrial, decentralized, opened economy. Oh, sure, every economy has always been an ecosystem made up of interdependent relationships. But they were based on zero-sum arithmetic: take and control so others cannot. They work at arm’s length. They negotiate every relationship.

Sure, even in the huggy ecosystem, companies fight and compete. But in an ecosystem-based economy, companies benefit – they find efficiency and growth – by working collaboratively. As I see it, the new economy and its opportunities will be built in three layers:

1. Platforms. There’s tremendous benefit in building a platform and the more people use to succeed, the more the platform succeeds. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay – you know all the examples.

2. Entrepreneurial enterprises. Thanks to the platforms, it’s incredibly inexpensive to start new companies. It’s also a helluva lot cheaper to fail (and try again). This is why I believe that the future of news – and many other industries – is entrepreneurial: because it can be. It’s not just media and its bits. It’s manufacturing (because you can use others’ factories and distribution channels and your own customers as your platforms).

3. Networks. It is still necessary to gather the smalls together into bigs: audience brought together so advertisers can buy access to them more easily; purchasing brought together to get better prices. So there is business in creating and serving these networks.

For the sake a PowerPoint, a diagram of the three layers of an ecosystem-based economy:

In our New Business Models for News Project, this is how I (crudely) drew the ecosystem for news.

How do you draw the conglomerate-based industry? With boxes, each separate, with arrows pointing to each other at a distance. Simplistic? Sure, but the change in the worldview of the new economy looks that basic when you hear the two tribes trying to understand each other.

And if you haven’t had enough of my silly charts, here’s another on video.

WWGD – The videos (3)

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:30:04 -0800

Another two videos from the aborted v-book edition of What Would Google Do?:

In this, I recreate at my whiteboard slides some of you have seen about a process v product view of our emerging world:

And introducing Schwagman:

WWGD – The videos (2)

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:30:29 -0800

Yesterday, I threatened you with a stream of videos that were supposed to be in a v-book edition of What Would Google Do?. Here are two more.

First, a discussion about beta-think – releasing products as betas to learn and collaborate – and the end of the myth of perfection:

Next, a video my editor likes better than I do about capturing the wisdom even of the moving crowd. I recorded it last winter on a very cold run over a nearby interstate (so cold, it was hard to talk).

WWGD? – The videos

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:31:59 -0800

In addition to What Would Google Do? the book, the ebook, the Kindle book, the audio book, the video, and the PowerPoint, we were planning to release a so-called V-book with videos interspersed throughout the digital text. Never happened. So in a bald effort to drum up sales anew for my book (or frighten them away), I thought I’d share the videos here, one or two a day.

The first: a rumination on progress in front of the estate Ditchley near Oxford:

Another from the Ditchley estate about the haha (bald attempt to find a useful metaphor about openness and collaboration):

I was inspired to put up these videos because this reader wanted more videos here. Blame him.

Gadget of the Month Club

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:29:29 -0800

Hey, Verizon (& Google & Apple & Dell & BestBuy….).

I want to try the Droid but I am already in indentured servitude to AT&T for my iPhone (and have no particular desire to lose it). As much of a gadget geek as I am (I’m no Leo Laporte – my wife would’t let me be – but I do love the darned things), it’s still just not worth the $2,600 commitment to get another phone, even if Michael Arrington is having orgasms over it.

I’ve been arguing on This Week in Google that what I want is a Gadget (or Phone) of the Month Club. Let me try it. It’s worth it for the phone and device companies because they just might seduce me into buying. They’d get more press from the folks who matter – early adopters. They’d sell more gadgets and service plans. They could even use it to try out new gadgets (who wouldn’t pay to be a beta tester for the coolest gadgets?).

I wish someone (are you listening, Best Buy? is there an entrepreneur out there looking for something new to do?) would start a club that would rotate gadgets among freaks every month (or two). Obviously, it won’t work if we all expect to get the Droid as soon as it’s out without paying full freight. So charge more for that privilege. Every month, the one-month fee for a particular device goes down. I’m willing to pay a premium to try the Droid the first month or a Chrome-powered netbook. But I’ll wait three or four months to get my hands on a Nokia N900. The market will determine the demand: let us bid up the premium for the first-month Droid. Mind you, I’ll also pay an entrance fee to be a member of the club (maybe a dozen of us can do it on our own).

If I fall in love with a gadget I try, I can buy it. If I don’t, Netflix-like, I send it back and then get the next one. If I break it, I pay for it. Whoever runs this club doesn’t have to put up all the capital to get the hardware; our fees and deposits will create good cash flow.

What’s not to love?

: LATER: Surely Dave Winer would join the club. He just bought two new gadgets and already stopped using one.

Tough love for media

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:46:52 -0800

Here in a bit more friendly video format is the keynote I gave to the Munich Media Days (in English) a week ago, which I linked to earlier. I decided to be blunt and tough and tell them I was worried about the protectionist talk I’ve been hearing from Germany and that they need to have hard discussions about the change that will waft over there from here. Carta also put up a transcript.

Jeff Jarvis: “Google is not an enemy, Google is a model” from Carta on Vimeo.

The temporary web

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:03:33 -0800

I’m fretting about forgetting things, not just because I’m getting older (on top of middle-aged surgery and its inconveniences and a dicky ticker I now have sciatica; I am a parody of age). I’m fretting about us all forgetting things because we’re using Twitter.

Twitter is temporary. Streams are fleeting. If the future of the web after the page and the site and SEO is streams – and I believe at least part of it will be – then we risk losing information, ideas, and the permanent points – the permalinks – around which we used to coalesce. In this regard, Twitter is to web pages what web pages are to old media. Our experience of information is once again about to become fragmented and dispersed.

I talked about this shift on a recent Rebooting the News with Dave Winer and Jay Rosen (audio here; shownotes here).

My own worry is that I’m twittering more and blogging less. Twitter satisfies my desire to share. That’s mostly why I blog – and that’s what makes the best blog posts, I’ve learned. I also want to store information like nuts underground; once it’s on the blog, I can find it. But when I share links on Twitter, they’ll soon disappear. I also use my blog to think through ideas and get reaction; Twitter’s flawed at that – well, I guess Einstein could have tweeted his theory of relativity but many ideas and discussions are too big for the form – yet I now use Twitter to do that now more than this blog.

It’s not as if I couldn’t and shouldn’t also blog about what I talk about on Twitter; tweets can become the trial out of town, the blog Broadway (a book Hollywood). But Twitter competes for my time and attention. It is so much faster and easier. It’s good enough for most of my purposes. So the blog suffers. And I suffer. I discuss less here; I’ll lose some of you as a result and you are the value I get from blogging. I lose memory. And I lose the maypole around which we can gather.

On Rebooting the News, we also talked about what it takes to get an idea, a meme to critical mass. Blogs, I said, are better at that because they can gather attention over time. On Twitter, an idea can, of course, be spread but its half-life is that of a gnat. I’m proud of this post – The future of news is entrepreneurial – and it got retweeted for almost 24 hours, which is forever in Twitter time. Most things come and go in matters of minutes. So Dave and I were talking about getting new conventions used on Twitter but Twitter turns out not to be a great way to make that happen because ideas and conversations disappear in smoke.

Paul Gillin just asked whether soon, everything you’ve learned about SEO will be worthless. That’s because search is turning social and our search results are becoming personalized, thus we don’t all share the same search results and it becomes tougher to manage them through SEO. Put these factors together – the social stream – and relationships matter more than pages (but then, they always have).

It means nothing that I fret or worry about any of this. Change is inexorable, even – especially – in the agent of change. But it’s always important to stand back and see the implications in change and I think we’re going to need to find new ways to hold onto memories and make memes happen. That or I have to hold true to my vow to blog more.

: OH, AND… I got distracted by reading Twitter (really) and so I forgot to mention the other Twitter issue: distraction. I’m finding it much harder to stay focused on doing one thing because I now can do so many. That doesn’t mean I’ll end up thinking less for a blog post (or book), only that the stream interrupts the thing (the post, the page) in more ways.

Podcast mania

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:41:47 -0800

Podcasts, podcasts, everywhere…..

This month’s MediaTalkUSA for the Guardian is up with guests Jay Rosen of NYU and Michael Tomasky of the Guardian. We talk about Politico’s rear-guard action against the Washington Post with its new local service; the election; the White House and Fox; and government support of journalism.

Here’s the latest This Week in Google with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani (in which she announces her new book about Wave)

But that’s not all… I was also privileged to be a guest on last week’s Rebooting the News with Jay and Dave Winer.

And if you’re not sick of hearing me, see the post below for two more audios.

The week I couldn’t shut up…

The future of news is entrepreneurial

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:24:41 -0800

The future of news is entrepreneurial.

There’s a lot in that statement. It says: The future of news is not institutional… The news of tomorrow has yet to be built…. The structure – the ecosystem – of news will not be dominated by a few corporations but likely will be made up of networks of many startups performing specialized functions based on the opportunities they see in the market…. Who does journalism, why and how will change…. The skills of journalists will change (to include business)…. We don’t yet know what the market will demand and support from journalism…. News will look disordered and messy…. There will be more failures than successes in the immediate future of news….

That statement also holds many implications for sectors of the economy and society: investment (put money into the new, not the old)… public policy (don’t protect and preserve the incumbents but nurture the startups by creating a fertile and level playing field)… education (how do we train journalists when everyone can do journalism? – how do we train everyone?)… marketing (advertising won’t be one-stop shopping anymore and that means it may support news less)… PR (influence will be no longer be concentrated)… technology (there are opportunities here)…

Finally, that statement does not say some things. It does not say that the incumbents’ institutions will necessarily die, only that they have proven not to be the source of innovation and growth in news.

One more point: The statement is essentially optimistic. It says there is a future to be built.

This is not the discussion we hear about the fate of news journalism. That discussion defaults too often to current models and old realities, to protection over creation, to fear over opportunity.

Columbia’s Reconstruction of Journalism report, in my view, gives up on the business prospects for news and resorts to what I believe are desperate measures – namely: the public option for news. The Washington Post has run two op-eds lately endorsing tax-supported journalism (pardon me for asking, but are things that bad there?). Alan Mutter reported on a Harvard confab last week that “gravitated to the predictable yadda-yadda: foundation funding, federal subsidies, subscription schemes and a smattering of random ruminations about revenue.” That’s hardly uncommon; it’s all we hear.

Bit by bit, I’ve separated myself from that worldview, first by teaching a course in entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY, then by directing the New Business models for News Project to research and propose sustainable futures for news. But I didn’t boil down my essential worldview to this – the future of news is entrepreneurial – until now.

If you buy this view – and, I know, many won’t want to – then it affects so much, as I’m learning myself. Last week at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, I presented to my colleagues our New Business Models for (Local) News (the segment of the project funded by the Knight Foundation, which we’re also presenting at a Nov. 11 event here that will be streamed) and the discussion turned afterward to one aspect of what we do: what we offer students in career services. No longer is that just about getting job interviews at big publications – though, of course, it still will include that as long as it can! – but it now should expand to giving students who are starting businesses the services of an incubator (which we are doing for my entrepreneurial students who are now launching businesses) and perhaps to giving them the training they need to be proprietors of journalistic businesses: We’re teaching them in our January intersession how to build their own brands online. Should we give them a workshop to help them with billing and business? I’ve asked the heretical question about teaching hyperlocal blogging: How will they learn to sell ads? These are questions raised by the entrepreneurial worldview.

The public policy implications of this view for government are many. Last week, I gave a Skype talk [I'm still not traveling, post-surgery] to a session assembled in London by MP Sion Simon looking at government’s possible role in the future of news – what it should and should not do (see posts here, here, and here). Here in the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission is holding sessions starting in December (where I’ll appear on a panel with folks who don’t agree with me about all this) and the FCC appointed Steven Waldman to continue the work of the Knight Commission looking at the information needs of communities.

As my Guardian column this week makes clear, I get hives at the notion of government interference in news – in speech of any sort. I especially fear government taking a role as a nonmarket player competing with not only the weak incumbents but also with the tender sprouts of entrepreneurial ventures. I also fear talk of governments – in the U.S. and Germany – extending copyright just to protect incumbents. What should government do? Broadband for all. I’d start – and stop – there.

For investors, the entrepreneurial worldview says not only that it’s time to get their money out of old media companies – that, given their market caps and bankruptcies, has already happened – but also that it is time to invest in new and innovative ventures. That requires investors to believe, as I do, that there is a robust and growing market demand for news and that there are new opportunities to meet it efficiently and profitably. But until we start proving that, investors will be shy. This is why I wish that the capital that has gone into not-for-profit news ventures in cities across the country had gone instead into creating for-profit enterprises: so we can prove the market, so we can learn how to make news sustainable. That is god’s work.

For other industries that work with news – advertising – I would have scouts, laboratories, and pilot projects staying on the forefront of entrepreneurial developments in news and even encouraging it with marketing dollars. Ad agencies and sponsors have tremendous opportunities to build relationships with customers in new, more targeted, more effective, and more efficient ways but they must shift spending to online to learn what works and create it; their old habits of one-stop-shopping with big media only leave them behind.

As for technology, there is much development of news already occurring in startups (I’m a partner in one such effort, Daylife, and I advise others; we are seeing some sprout already alongside our New Business Models for News Project). But the technology giants can also play a role. I’ll write more about this another time, but I believe Google should be packaging what it already has to help create a framework for anyone – anyone – to build news enterprises (and it should stop wasting time trying to make friends with the dinosaurs who only want to find enemies to blame for their problems). I also want to see it help support labs to develop its tools – especially Wave and Marissa Mayer’s notion of the hyperpersonal stream – for news; this, I believe, will force us to rethink our fundamental assumptions about what news is and that, in turn, will lead to new opportunities.

Where does this leave the incumbent institutions when I say the future is not theirs? I’m no longer the only one holding them accountable for their lack of innovation in the last 15 years – even Ken Auletta is. But what’s done is done and looking back, I now see it was probably my mistake to think they could have reinvented themselves. I talked with someone recently at an old, large media company who said he believes it is impossible for them to remake themselves for this new, much smaller entrepreneurial world. There’s just too much shutdown cost and pain involved and the people inside these towers don’t think like people in garages. Still, I see opportunity for them. That’s why, on this blog and at the Aspen Institute this summer, I pushed the idea that when journalists leave those towers, their companies should invest in their futures as entrepreneurs: Set them up with blogs, sell their ads, promote them, and continue to reap the value of their experience and brands (without the cost). The Washington Post should fund the next Politico in town, not see its talent walk out the door to start it elsewhere.

And what of these journalists? Well, that’s why I’m writing this. That’s why I teach what I teach. I believe journalists must become entrepreneurs. They don’t all need to be sole proprietors of hypersomething blogs. But they need to make smart business decisions when they decide where to put their effort. They need to sense and serve the market. They need to work with innovators. They need to see a future for journalism that looks different – better, even – than its past.

The future of news is entrepreneurial.

* * *

Most people use their blogs as the laboratory to try out ideas. Lately, I’ve been using appearances and columns to test notions, leading up to this blog post. Here are a few instances lately when I’ve talked about news’ entrepreneurial future.

I gave a talk via Skype-video to Medientage München (my talk, in English, starts at 22 minutes in) in which I tried to be tough and tell the audience of 500 German media machers that the old models won’t work in the new world and that it is time to face this reality bluntly, leaving politeness behind. (The talk lasts about 25 minutes; I’d listen to the last 10 when I’m questioned by the editor of Spiegel.de and the audience surprised me with its reaction to tough love.)

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

I also talked about this last week in Coventry University’s session that asked whether journalism is in crisis:

And here is a link to my Media Guardian column today, in which I used this line and it was, I’m glad to see, promptly tweeted. In it, I said:

The future of news – and there is a future – is being built by entrepreneurs who in change see opportunity, not crisis. . . . Instead of declaring surrender to changing market forces, we should embrace them. Crisis? I see no crisis, only inexorable change.

* * *

Based on all this, you’d think I’d disagree with a post headlined Why I Don’t Think Journalists Need Business Skills. But I don’t. In it, Philip John argues the need for networks and services to perform business services for journalist entrepreneurs. I agree. That’s why we projected such a framework in our New Business Models for News Project. That’s what Mark Potts plans to build with his startup, Growthspur (or actually, Growthspur will train the sales organization John imagines). And I think John proved my point by writing a post that’s very business-savvy.

: LATER: Robert Picard argues for journalists to be responsive to their markets.

Why I’m voting for Chris Daggett

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:32:48 -0700

Actually, I already voted for Chris Daggett. Sent in my absentee ballot the other day.

To my New Jersey friends, I urge you to take the pledge, vote for Daggett, and declare independence from the corrupt and incompetent party politics of this state.

I’m a life-long Democrat but this time, in the race for governor of New Jersey, I’m voting independent.

It’s as if I got three votes in one:

I’m voting for Daggett because I am confident he is the best candidate for the office. Daggett happens to be a neighbor of mine and I’ve gotten to know him better as I’ve helped the campaign in very small ways in recent days, shooting Flip videos and sitting in on strategy sessions. This is the first time I’ve ever done that; as a professional journalist I bought the doctrines of separation and objectivity and so actual involvement in my community was verboten. But online, I’ve been preaching the new gospel of transparency and interaction and after telling you that I voted for Clinton and then Obama, I’m now telling you that I’m voting for and actively supporting Daggett (I also contributed to the campaign).

Daggett is the one candidate making the tough decisions about the budget and taxation. He has a plan to reduce property taxes while also holding down local spending, which will force municipalities to find new efficiencies through collaboration. He holds a doctorate in education and I trust him to work to improve the schools. Daggett is an experienced manager and a good man. So he has my vote.

At the same time, I’m also voting against the two parties – and there are my other two ballots. Chris Christie is aggressively unimpressive and, worse, a cynic who tried to foist a platform without a plan on the state; I wouldn’t trust him any more than the worst Jersey pol – and that’s saying a lot in this place. John Corzine is a smart and decent man and has made tough decisions, I think, but he has not proven to be a good manager (I wish he’d stayed in the Senate). But as the Star-Ledger said in its endorsement of Daggett, it is time to repudiate the parties. They deserve it. We deserve better.

Daggett has had incredible momentum in the polls, passing the 20 percent mark more than a week ago while both of his opponents fall into a dead heat. All Daggett needs to win is 33.1 percent. But his biggest challenge is that people who want to vote for him fear that he can’t win or that they’ll be helping the person they don’t want get into office. Daggett’s answer: “It’s never wrong to vote for the right person.” He really can win.

It has been frustrating watching a campaign with little money fight the guys with too much money. I had no magic digital buttons to push. On my Guardian podcast (out next week), I said that I fear Joe Trippi is wrong: The revolution won’t be televised because campaigns will still be televised and that’s why there’ll be no revolution.

Oh, me of little faith. I’ve learned a big lesson about politics and revolutions in the last few days, thanks to Micah Sifry, who wrote a post suggesting that the Daggett campaign should overcome the I’d-vote-for-him-if-he-could-win threshhold by starting a vote-pledge site: If 100,000 people sign up with me to vote for Daggett, then I’ll vote for him. The Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran said on Radio Times Friday that if people thought Daggett could win, he would win. That is, the state wants to vote for Daggett. So this was Micah’s idea to demonstrate that to the voters.

Before the campaign could do a thing, a supporter, Alex Higgins, put up his own pledge site at DaggettPledge.com. Isn’t this precisely how politics is supposed to work today: rising from the people. The voters are organizing voters for Daggett. They are using the internet, not huge war chests of party dollars. They are connecting online, without the interference of media. New Jersey voters are rallying behind Daggett and declaring their independence. It is inspiring to watch.

[* See update below.]

Go watch it. Really. The counter is ticking off more voters for Daggett every few seconds. Their names and towns are scrolling across the top of the screen. You’re watching the new democracy in action. Of the people. By the people. Thanks to the internet.

So if you’re in New Jersey, please go take the pledge. I know you’re not enthusiastic about Christie or Corzine. No one is. I know you’re not loyal to either state party organization. How could anyone be? We threw around the word “change” a lot in the presidential campaign. Well, this is real change, change you can count on, changing the party structure in our broken state. This will send a message not only to Trenton but to Washington. This will be a blow for independence.

Take the pledge.

: MORE: I asked Micah for more of his views on this and he sent this.

I’ve long believed that we need more competition in politics–in 2002, I wrote a whole book about third parties in American politics called Spoiling for a Fight, which argued that independent candidates and third parties can play a healthy role in putting new ideas into circulation, shaking up the system and opening up new political coalitions for change. Unfortunately our current system is rigged in favor of the two major parties. It shouldn’t be that the only way to get rid of one of the major party’s incumbents is to vote for the other major party. That just leads to a cycle where no one really has to take responsibility for anything, they just have to blame the other guy. Sometimes you want to vote for a third choice and say no to the other two! It’s long past time that we figure out a system that enables you to vote positively for what you want, instead of worrying that you might “waste” your vote. But that’s how winner-take-all systems work.

The thing about the internet is that it’s really good at solving the dilemma of collective action. That is, lots of us often hesitate to get involved because we think our individual vote can’t make a difference; our $25 or hour of volunteering can’t, by itself, change anything. It’s only when all those votes or dollars or actions get aggregated that we can see their impact. Deciding to risk your vote for a longshot candidate is a classic collective action dilemma. You want your vote to count, and you don’t want it to do harm. So very often we get candidates who try to run outside the two-party framework, and they sometimes get a flurry of attention, but when push comes to shove they fade because most voters rationally worry that the candidate they really want “can’t win,” and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But New Jersey voters don’t have to wait til next Tuesday to signal to each other what they’re thinking. When I heard that Daggett was polling at or near 20%, it occurred to me that if his numbers went up another 5% of the vote–roughly 100,000 people–that would put him into full contention. And 100,000 isn’t that large a number for the internet. You can get 100,000 views on YouTube or 100,000 hits on a blog post pretty quickly. If enough people talk to each other in New Jersey over the next few days, they could convince each other that there are enough switchers out there and the whole race could swing pretty fast.

That said, I have no idea if the Daggett Pledge will work. I think it’s great that Alexander Higgins just took the initiative and got it going without asking anyone for permission; it’s probably better that way. But people are probably going to have to do more than just sign their name on a website; I’m sure the major party campaigns will try to spread as much FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) among the public about how authentic this is, and it is the internet–people should ask for more proof that this trend is real. But the net can make that easier too. If voters want this badly enough, they can make it happen.

* UPDATE: I don’t know what’s happening with it, but the pledge growth seems a bit too linear, even overnight. I sense a clever geek at work. So I don’t know what the numbers are. Doesn’t much matter; the only numbers that do matter come Tuesday. Pledge or no pledge, I’ve cast my lot and vote.

Editor as star

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:59:32 -0700

Kai Diekmann, the head of Bild, the gigantic German newspaper, is a journalistic celebrity of a sort we don’t have here: utterly charming, lustily egotistical, brashly opinionated, infuriating to those he infuriates (a friend of mine calls him Germany’s Roger Ailes), beloved to his fans, witty, quick, clever, innovative, and never afraid of the spotlight.

Now he has a blog. And a store. I’d heard about his blog for sometime but it wasn’t seen outside the walls of his office. Now it has gone public. He says he’ll do it for 100 days. I predict he’ll be addicted.

There’s a 360-degree tour of his office, starring him. Click on his possessions and learn more – about, for example, a piece of the Berlin Wall signed by Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, and George Bush (41). He has a bio and lots of photos. Diekmann interviews himself (Why are you writing a blog, he asks. “I’m just incurably vain,” he answers). He posts video he shoots himself – “ich bin Videoblogger-in-Chief für Bild.de” – including one in Baghdad and another of him getting a shot. He brags about the commercials for Bild made by Bild’s readers, who understand its brand well. He links gleefully to an interview with a competitive publisher and scion of a German publishing family (founders of Der Spiegel) who says the esteemed Süddeutsche Zeitung won’t be around on paper in 20 years – but Bild will. He tweaks the liberal competition, the taz. On his “fan club” page, he shows his critics (and I thought I was brave exposing underendowment). In his store, he sells books (starting with his own) and hoodies, buttons, totebags, and mugs with his own mug (as Che Diekmann) and Bild branding as “the red-hot chili paper.”

The guy has balls. And he’s getting attention, which surely is the goal.

I can’t imagine Bill Keller or Marcus Brauchlidoing this, can you? Not even Alan Rusbridger or Will Lewis. Not even the editor of the New York Post (who’s he?). Piers Morgan is the closest thing I can imagine to Kai in the anglophone world, but he had to leave editing to become a star. In Germany, Kai is a brand. In the staid world of anglophone journalism, that’ll probably be sniffed at. But on the social web, I see little choice but to be open and human and even – gasp – have a sense of humor.

I have some personal history here to disclose. See my own story about introducing Diekmann to the Flip video camera here. I later went to speak to editors and executives of Bild’s parent company, Axel Springer, at their retreat in Italy. There, Diekmann was constantly recording every event with his own version of the Flip camera, to his colleagues’ grudging acquiescence. Does he do this all the time? I asked. Yes, they moaned. Sorry, I said. At that meeting, I pushed them all to blog and I’m not suggesting that has anything to do with Diekmann’s effort. But I’m glad to see lots of blogs emerging from Axel Springer. On a very different level, see the blog by the editor of Die Welt. The form knows no limits.

Diekmann took the Flip and surprised me by not just equipping his journalists – other editors’ reflex – but instead equipping his readers. He took interactivity and didn’t just allow readers to comment on what his paper does – as other editors do – but instead had them define his brand. He now has taken the blog and surprised me again, making a comment on the form and his paper and his industry and himself. And it’s fun to watch.

: Later: I left a comment on Diekmann’s blog and in no time, I got email from him. He’s reading what his public is writing.

Howard Stern 3.0: The future of entertainment

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:14:16 -0700

We just got a glimpse of Howard Stern’s next life, I think. I was running errands today listening to a repeat of the show from this week when I heard Stern talk with a caller about what he could do on the internet. Thanks to my handy Sirius Satellite radio, I was able to – Tivo-like – back and up repeat what he’d just said and I wrote it down:

Tomorrow I could go on the internet and start my own channel with my own subscribers. You’d be able to click and watch us on TV, watch us in the studio live, streaming. You’d be able to listen to us streaming. You’d be able to get us on your iPhone. You’d be able to do everything right at the click of the internet. I wouldn’t even need to work for a company. I’d be my own company… So true it’s ridiculous.

Sounds like more than idle admiration of technology to me. Stern has a year left on his contract on satellite. He’s so valuable to Sirius, they surely will make him an offer it would be hard to refuse. But I suspect that much of his last reported $500 million contract came in stock and that stock is now worth $0.59 (I know all too well, because I own some), so continuing with satellite would still be a gamble. Besides, he has plenty of money and no divorce settlement to pay off (or so it would certainly appear). This week, he was lambasting Rush Limbaugh for ripping off his listeners selling them T-shirt; in response to a question from Gary Dell’Abate, Stern said even an extra $1 million wasn’t worth that. Could he be rationalizing a cut in pay?

On the internet, Stern would get the complete freedom he has long lusted after. He would share his revenue and value with no one but his staff. Now that we can listen to radio over the internet – on our internet-enabled phones – we can listen to him anywhere (is this why he has refused to allow Sirius to put him on the iPhone? I’m still unhappy about that). He would have direct relationships with his fans. He could charge them (and, yes, I would pay for it; he’s why I subscribe to satellite now … see, I am not a pay bigot). He could sell advertising in new ways. Fans could get him anywhere, anytime. If he’s smart – and he is – he could open up enough tidbits to go viral, letting his audience market him for free.

I wrote about Stern as a pioneer in my book. He rethought radio networks and built his own. He brought satellite radio to critical mass. But satellite radio was always a transitional technology, waiting for ubiquitous connectivity that would enable on-demand programming anywhere. (I tried to warn Sirius’ president, Mel Karmazin, here.) Now our phones can give us radio and soon Stern will be ready for them; they will make him portable.

There’s a larger trend at work here: Entertainers (radio, music, comedy, books, columnists, even filmmakers) will have direct relationships with their audiences. Like Stern, they won’t have to work for companies or go through them for distribution. That’s already happening, of course, on the web for creation, distribution, and monetization. That idea is even extending to funding. Look at Kickstarter – a Spot.US for creativity – where your most loyal fans who most want you to make something can fund or invest in it, maybe for nothing more than the privilege of helping you (this is the Wikipedia ethic). It returns to the age of patronage, only now the kings don’t fund the artists, the public does and less money is wasted on middlemen.

Maybe this is all wishful thinking. I’ve been dreading Stern’s retirement (but I think so is he). So I’m hoping that he makes the leap to the next generation and that others will follow his example. Am I reading too much into his conjecture about the internet? If I am, I’ll bet Karmazin is, too.

: Tim Windsor adds in the comments: “Sounds like Howard needs to make a pilgrimage to Leo Laporte’s TWiT Cottage to see how this can be done professionally for surprisingly little money.”

Right. Leo shows it all: how to do live video with chat and also distribute across many platforms.

twitter tool test

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:02:13 -0800

twitter tools is giving me grief – sorry about this

3 reasons why being a dad hasn’t made me a better person

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:51:52 -0800

I’m riffing this off of Tara Cain’s blog post 3 reasons why being a mum hasn’t made me a better person as it struck a chord. As Tara says, there’s a lot of highlights to being a parent but there are downsides. And as this cold/cough won’t let me sleep, it seemed like a decent idea for a blog post…

Becoming More Emotional

Boy, no kidding on that one – and this totally took me by surprise. At first, for guys, when a baby comes along, it’s pretty much business as usual. There’s a wee person about the house that you have to get up at all hours to feed but that’s really it. They cry a lot when you pick them up and they are just… there. And you know you have to look after them.

But somewhere along the line some gene in you flips. Now for everyone it’s different but for me, anything that involves a father and daughter now cracks me up. This first became obvious after rewatching one of my favourite fun films Armageddon and as it approached the end, I was in a flood of tears, totally uncontrollable. Fricking Armageddon! Since then, I’ve noticed it in other things – The Time Traveller’s Wife for example. God knows what The Road will do to me…

I used to joke with Graham Lindsay at the Scottish Daily Mirror about this as he told me that parenthood made him unable to read tales about child cruelty. I thought he was talking bollocks until junior came along. I can still read those stories, but dear God they get my blood boiling more.

Much amusement for the wife and friends. Much embarassment for me.

Child(ren) Come First

This is a bit of a combo of Tara’s points 2 and 3. But yeah, I’ve seen every part of my life ’suffer’/benefit from having a kid. I don’t go out as much as I used to and if I do, I go out after the little one has had her two bedtime stories and cuddle for falling asleep. I’ve seen me walk out the door at clocking off time (knowing I’ll have chunks to do in the early hours of the morning) so I can get home and play tig or princesses or something like monster hunting down the woods with my wee best pal. I’ve gone without things I’ve really wanted because I saw a nice top or toy for junior. I’ve taken her and her pals out when someone else was equally happy to do it.

It’s also probably made me more selfish because if I get the option of anything to do, playing with junior is the first call (though I am going off the swimming lessons at 8am on a Saturday morning after two years of taking her).

(three things that have surprised me though: how little sleep I actually need at times when dealing with the wee one – though I’m sure that’s taking its toll in its own way . Also, how much I always hear madam moving about or talking in her sleep, even if I have been sleeping (again, sure that’s talking a toll) and how well I operate with a hangover and children (though the way round that one hasn’t taken a toll – less drinking or nights out!)

Made Me More Intolerant

My personal politics used to be fairly left-leaning (that’s not a statement of political party alignment but my own personal politics) and I’d like to think they still are, but having a kid does make you less tolerant of other people’s foibles – especially if they are a parent – and it’s practically a full-time job to haud one’s wheesht as they would say in Scotland.

Things like the woman who let her children die in a dirty nappy? In the past I may have moaned about the system and so on. Now? I’d kill her and sack every social worker involved in that case, making sure the world knew why they were sacked. Come in home from work tired and don’t want to play with your child? Tough. You have a child, relax later (though why you wouldn’t find playing with your child fun and relaxing I don’t know). Want to watch a TV show/surf the web/do something solo while your child is awake and not doing anything else? Get to hell. That child’s a gift to you and never asked to be born to you, so you owe it your time while it’s awake. Farmville, Smallville and Coronation Street can all wait until your child/ren are in bed.

(See what I mean about intolerant?)

What about the other parents who read this? Has parenthood made any changes to you that surprised you?

Happy Anniversary Sesame Street. Here’s the perfect cake to celebrate

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:35:28 -0800

As Google shows today, it’s the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street, making Big Bird more like an Old Bird now. But it brought back a memory of something – the best Sesame Street cake ever spotted. And perhaps – if we all band together – we can get the recipe off the girl that made it.

Cake Excellence in Scotland

That was made by the slightly wonderful Anne McLuckie of Edinburgh PR firm Holyrood Partnership where I spent some time consulting on digital media matters with Contently Managed – but one thing Anne would never reveal was the recipe behind the sugar rush that was her great cakes.

Buuuuut, her boss Scott Douglas is a great believer in the power of social media, so perhaps if we all send them an email asking for the Cookie Monster Sesame Street Cake recipe, he’ll put the recipe up on his blog. If you want the recipe to the best legal sugar rush you’ll have this year (or want to talk about his new podcast or need some PR and don’t fancy using the Contently Managed team) then drop him an email here or use this contact form.

Dear Daughter 4/11/09 – Well you aren’t going blind

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:18:13 -0800

Well you did the eyetest and passed with 20-20 (or 6-9 as they apparently do in the UK, according to the optician), but the best hoot came from after you got the eyedrops put in and it left you with pupils that were wild! It looked as if you had taken LSD or acid with the wide-eyed pupils.

Anyway, you’re still sitting at least 5ft from the TV from now on – and watching it less too.

Anyway, I need to go and find your school socks. I never realised that the sock monster preyed on whole families (of course I beat the odds there by getting you to just buy me 21 pairs of the same black socks on a bi-annual basis), so I’m off to sock-hunting (and while I’m doing it I’ll change the lyrics of ‘Going on a Bear Hunt‘ to Sock Hunt.)

Dear Daughter 3/11/09 – Eyesight test time

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:10:06 -0800

As per the previous Dear Daughter posting, got you an eyesight test but if you can tell me in the morning that you can read this OK without squinting or struggling to make the words out then we’ll cancel.*

ps, sorry about crashing in beside you, but you always say you want more cuddles. And besides, blame your sidekick-to-be. Permission to bully has been granted.

* wonder if this gag will work in RSS readers…

Dear Bump 3/11/09 – you take those hormoans back right now

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:02:27 -0800

Dear see-you-in-May Bump, whatever one is releasing into your mother’s bloodstream just now could you stop? She’s being a tad grumpy and I’m crashing with your sister tonight because of it – if I thought the womb had room, I’d come in and annoy you.

For this, you’re getting called Zanzibar. Or couch, ‘cos that’s certainly what I associate you with mostly at the moment.

Book Review: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:12:25 -0800

And here we have the follow-up book by the author of The Time Traveller’s Wife (great book, not so great film) and it’s a strange one. Review without spoilers follow…Book is about a twin who dies and in her will, leaves her flat to her sister’s twin daughters. Other people live in the block of flats, including the dead person’s lover and an OCD chap. A cat also turns up. Every one of them is written as quite a flawed, almost unlikeable person.

On page 1, the twin, Elspeth, dies and then stays away until page 63 out of a 387 page novel. This is not a fast paced book. In fact, if you think Defying Gravity moves slowly, this book will torture you. But I’m assuming it’s meant to be a character study, and if so it’s an interesting one because there isn’t a likeable character in the book. In fact, only the OCD chap has any real degree of sympathy.

Elspeth eventually comes back – partially – and appears to be quite the friendly ghost and the reactions to there being a ghost are fairly decent, with the obvious worry over ‘is she watching us all the time?’ and the book plods on with the ex falling for one of the new twins, the twins growing apart and OCD man trying to conquer his OCD.

There’s little bits of incident hung together under the guise of plot, but nothing that would get the pulse racing – even the first of the so-called twists that has been mentioned everyone online – is fairly easily guessed, the second is too and the third should be straight as well if you’ve noticed the title and twin behaviours.

The last 100 or so pages have more meat to them bones (har!) and it comes together decently but not spectacularly with a slight bit of open-endedness left for the reader (or rather a guessing ending).

It’s an overlong book and could easily have had 50-100 pages chopped out without loss, but I wonder if – due to the success of the TT Wife – that an editor would be afraid to chop anything and upset the writer?

Is it worth buying? I’d say get the paperback or put it on the Xmas list for someone to get you. It’s a decent read, it’s just not worth the hardback price. I don’t grudge it though as I bought the TT Wife in paperback and would happily have paid more for that one, so to me this is karma balancing things out.

NOTE: if anyone else who has read this wants to post spoilers in the comments section, feel free. I’m going to do that in the first post with a thought or two about what happened to the character on the last page and some just desserts…