Obama New Yorker Cover Remix

Based upon the Kevin Drum/ Washington Monthly suggestion, I remixed this week's New Yorker Cover based upon Barry Blitt's Illustration. It is much funnier with the thought bubble and McCain. I think it will be easy for people in the current climate to misunderstand the original. But the remix makes it easier to get that it's supposed to be funny.

Latest on Rogers Cadenhead, MBA and AP

AP seems to have given a statement to Paid Content about the bruhaha the past few days:

In response to questions about the use of Associated Press content on the Drudge Retort web site, the AP was able to provide additional information to the operator of the site, Rogers Cadenhead, on Thursday. That information was aimed at enabling Mr. Cadenhead to bring the contributed content on his site into conformance with the policy he earlier set for his contributors. Both parties consider the matter closed.

In addition, the AP has had a constructive exchange of views this week with a number of interested parties in the blogging community about the relationship between news providers and bloggers and that dialogue will continue. The resolution of this matter illustrates that the interests of bloggers can be served while still respecting the intellectual property rights of news providers.

I find it a total non-statement and completely bizarre.

Also, Robret Cox of Media Bloggers Association is supposed to be on Blog Talk Radio at 3 pm EST today. I probably won't be able to listen until halfway through.. at 12:30 PST/3:30 EST this afternoon as I have a meeting.

Hope they have a podcast later.

And hope that some real information about yesterday's meeting between Cadenhead / Cox and Jim Kennedy at the AP comes out.

My questions include:
1. what is the status of the 7 C&D notices from AP to Cadenhead?
2. what is AP going to do in future?
3. what was the tone of the meeting and who was there?
4. what agreements came out of the meeting and can we see them?
5. what precedent does this set for future blogger quotes and interactions with AP?

Hoping these and other questions will be addressed in the radio interview later today.

Hot Head Bloggers vs. Cool Headed Journalists

More on the AP/Rogers Cadenhead story (covered already here and http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000700.html).

So.. Saul Hansell sez in his condescending and rude blogpost: The A.P., Hot News and Hotheaded Blogs,

There was a lot of anger in the blogosphere last week over The Associated Press’s assertion that some blogs were infringing its copyright by publishing excerpts of its articles. When I finally reached Jim Kennedy, an Associated Press vice president, he told me that the news agency now feels its demand was heavy-handed and was rethinking its policies.

What it really sez: bloggers are out of control little children having temper tantrums.

Since when is passion for your craft and the right to free speech, and belief in Fair Use as a constitutional right, something bloggers should be casual about?

A number of bloggers I respect a great deal didn’t find the A.P.’s openness to their ideas to be enough and have declared war on it. As someone who is both a blogger and an employee of a mainstream news organization, I worry that this hotheaded response is part of what gives blogs a bad name. And it doesn’t reflect the complexity of the underlying questions, which can be traced back to when the telegraph was the revolutionary technology of the day.

What it really sez: I respect you, even if you are out of control at times. But since I'm the parent and your the children, let me school you on how to think about this. Because otherwise you'll hurt yourselves even more.

The current dust-up involves seven blog posts on the Drudge Retort (not the bigger Drudge Report) that contained short excerpts of A.P. articles. Last week, the A.P. demanded that the Drudge Retort remove the posts because they violated its copyright. Mr. Kennedy now says the news agency plans to create new guidelines for how blogs can use its material, after discussions with representatives of blogging groups and others.

What it really sez: you bloggers get into these tiffs all the time, and now one of yours has been spanked with C&Ds to remove the quotes he overused. But the nice man at AP will create guidelines for you, after meeting with your institutional representative (hopefully a grown up).

In reaction to what Mr. Kennedy said in that article, Michael Arrington declared on TechCrunch: “So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist.” Jeff Jarvis, on BuzzMachine, wrote: “Back off, A.P. Because we won’t.”

What it really sez: evidence that you bloggers are out of control.

This is followed by examples of the hot news doctrine, what AP could do to handle the situation and a little history. Consider yourselves schooled.

At the end of the article, it's particularly rude and condescending:

I don’t know what the A.P. will do. But neither do the bloggers calling for a boycott of the A.P. (By the way, that’s a silly concept as none of these blogs actually pays the A.P. any money. If CBS News or The Huffington Post — an A.P. client — began a boycott, that might hurt.)

What it really sez: You bloggers are so silly, how can you boycott something you don't pay for but you can't hurt the AP. (Um, what about all those links and traffic driven to AP articles.. I believe attention is the most valuable thing on the internet, and if that's true, and bloggers stop linking and sending readers, well, that's a huge loss!)

Mr. Jarvis, in particular, often talks about blogging as a conversation. It seems like the A.P. wants to talk, and many bloggers would prefer a temper tantrum to a discussion.

What it really sez: You bloggers want to converse but like little children, throwing temper tantrums, you are being spiteful about conversing here.

So, if I were to follow what Saul sez, I would believe that I was a little child, out of control, refusing to talk, and he was the calm, cool, collected dad, who will set things straight, make me see reason, and stop quoting those darned AP stories or thinking I have any power with my linking habits, before I go have a talk with the nice folks at AP.

Saul, please. The narrative and tone in your post isn't a good one to get anyone to "see reason." It's parental and I'm an adult. Let's start over, and try this again.

How about a headline like: Bloggers, Passionate about Their Fair Use Rights, Defend Them Vigorously

More on the Media Bloggers Association and AP - Need Retraction/Correction From AP/NYT

This is a follow up to my post a couple of days ago, detailing the AP situation and protesting their request that bloggers just use AP summaries of stories, not quote from (per fair use) their stories, and their C&D notices to Rogers Cadenhead of Drudge Retort.

Since then, AP and the NYTimes have written stories that are partially (NYTimes) or totally (in the case of AP) untrue. While I can understand how people from large institutions might only be able to understand that another "institution" (such as it is, Media Bloggers Association) might have the same buy in, power or whatever to exist (they don't represent all bloggers) and negotiate some kind of blogger policy, AP and NYT need to "correct" and restate their stories.

AP: AP to meet with blogging group to form guidelines
NYT: The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs

Note that the NYTimes article says this which is the misleading paragraph:

Mr. Kennedy said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others. He said he hopes that these discussions can all occur this week so that guidelines can be released soon.

Media Bloggers Association, per the reporting by Culture Kitchen, did not say they were "representing all bloggers" to get some sort of policy worked out with AP, but rather, at Rogers' request, are representing *his case only,* in order to deal with the 7 C&D notices AP sent him.

The NYT (is implying) and AP in its headline and throughout the article outright, completely misunderstand this, and lead readers to misunderstand that there is even an institution that can "negotiate for the blogosphere." The blogophere is made up of millions of little spheres of conversation and influence, and those are made up of tens of millions of bloggers. It's utterly ridiculous and shows a complete lack of understanding of the blogosphere to believe there is some sort of institution on the other side of traditional media. The whole point of blogging is that people do what they want, that online publishing is completely atomized, and that if some sort of policy were to be negotiated with one small group, no one else would likely follow it *because Fair Use exists* and I would personally rather follow the constitution on this one.

I think it's time for a correction/restatement/clarification at NYT and a complete retraction at AP.

Associated Press C&Ds Rogers Cadenhead, Gets Boycotted by Bloggers

What's going on is this: Rogers Cadenhead received 7 C&Ds from the Associated Press, because he quoted from their articles in Drudge Retorted. My view in looking his quotes is that they fall absolutely under fair use (they are all within the range of a paragraph quotes from 39 to 75 words) per Saul Hansell of NYTimes.

Jeff Jarvis, Culture Kitchen and others have been reporting and opining..

AP has said: "when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste" they will go after people, but Saturday, Jim Kennedy of AP backed off some and said the C&Ds had been heavy handed and they would review their blogger policy. And now, their executives have decided to suspend the earlier decision to go after people like Rogers Cadenhead due to links to their articles (um.. those bloggers were doing AP a favor linking..) and quotes. But at least according to other's reports, AP hasn't withdrawn the C&Ds from Rogers.

Jim Kennedy also said they want bloggers to use "summaries" of their articles, not direct quotes (huh? Fisking is impossible and quotes are key to getting at issues!) and therefore will keep the C&Ds in place because they "... feel the use is more reproduction than reference..."

I've been watching this with a lot of consternation the past few days.. I think AP is wrong here, and until they remove the C&Ds and agree that quotes are fair use, I think the blogosphere, and the IP crowd are right to push back and call for things like boycott.

Richard Kastelein of Atlantic Free Press created Unassociated press and has even come up with a badge for the boycott:

Culture Kitchen is reporting on the boycott here with a great summary of events.

Updated: Jeff Jarvis reports on the giant hole.

Revolution is Not An AOL Keyword

Eddan Katz wrote this piece: Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, and I acted as his editor, 5 years ago. We posted it to the bIPlog on the first day of the war in Iraq.

We had a real uphill-behind-the-scenes fight about it at the Journalism School, where the blog was then hosted, because some of the other folks on the blog thought it wasn't really under our mission to publish something about the war and culture and the internet. But we convinced them; we knew we would get it published when John Battelle, one of the profs, lent his support for us. And it got slashdotted. And Revolution was made into a tshirt. Which was all a blast after working on it all night messing with the language and placing links ... some of which are broken but I think it matters to keep them intact and original. I think the linking is a kind of expression in this piece.

Eddan and I thought up what Napsterization could be here at this blog, but in the end only I've posted to it. I still wish Eddan would, and maybe someday he will. He's really great.

Anyway.. here is Revolution. I got all misty-eyed when I reread it and moused the links, because it's passionate and it means something, even if some of it is a little out of date. Cause the war ain't over. I can't believe it. I just didn't think things could get this fkedup. But as Robert Fisk says, The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn. Right on.

Revolution is Not an Aol Keyword*

You will not be able to stay home, dear Netizen.
You will not be able to plug in, log on and opt out.
You will not be able to lose yourself in Final Fantasy,
Or hold your Kazaa download queues,
Because revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will not be brought to you on Hi-Def TV
Encrypted with a warning from the FBI.
Revolution will not have a jpeg slideshow of Dubya
Calling the cattle and leading the incursion by
Secretary Rumsfeld, General Ashcroft and Dick Cheney
Riding nuclear warheads on their way to Iraq,
Or North Korea, or Iran.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will not be powered by Microsoft on
The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base
And will not star Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee
Or Larry Lessig and Martha Stewart. Revolution will not promise penile enlargement.
Revolution will not get rid of spam.
Revolution will not earn you up to $5000 a month

Working from home, because revolution is not
An AOL Keyword, Brother.

There will be no screen grabs of you and
Jeeves the Butler one-click shopping at My Yahoo,
Or outbidding a shady grandma on eBay for
That refurbished iPod 20-gig.
MSNBC.com will not predict election results in Florida
Or fact-check the Drudge Report.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no webcast of Wil Wheaton boxing
Barney the Dinosaur on the dancefloor at DNA.
There will be no mob- or wiki- blog of Richard Stallman
Strolling through Redmond in a medieval robe and halo
As St. iGNUcious of the Church of Emacs
That he has been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Survivor, The Osbournes, and Joe Millionaire
Will no longer be so damned relevant, and
People will not care if Carrie hooks up again with
Mr. Big on Sex and the City because Information
Wants To Be Free even while Knowledge Is Power.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no final pictures from inside the
World Trade Center in the instant replay.
There will be no final pictures from inside the
World Trade Center in the instant replay.

There will be no RealVideo of 2600-reading,
Linux-booting white hat hacktivists
And Mickey Mouse in the public domain.

The theme song will not be written by Jack Valenti or
Hilary Rosen, nor sung by Metallica, Dr. Dre,
Christina Aguilera, Matchbox 20, or Blink-182.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be right back after
Pop-up ads about eCommerce, eTailers, or eContent.
You will not have to worry about a
Cookie in your browser, a bug in your email, or a
Worm in your recycling bin.
Revolution will not run faster with Intel inside.
Revolution, dude, is not getting a Dell.
Revolution will increase your Google rank.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword,
Is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will be no stream or download, dear Netizen;
Revolution must still be live.

*See generally Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Posted by Eddan Katz at March 20, 2003 05:45 AM

Trashing Our Social Relationships (with Porn) to Get Your Numbers Up

Ok, there's a lot in that title. Let me explain (though I did blog about this earlier).

First, yesterday at the Supernova / Wharton event, in Jerry Michalski's session on business and social media (can't remember exact title) we spent much of the time talking privacy, online communication, games and social networks (er, social graphs but i really hate the fad where we make up a new word for something that is already working just so we can dink around with a new set of conferences, etc. but I digress. Though I would point out that one friend who attended SGP said the women at the event all seemed to get it, and then men all wanted to run calculations on our "social graphs" entirely missing the point. Oh well.)

At the end, Jeff Clavier, who apparently was at the Social Graphing conf/camp in San Diego earlier this week, gave a wrapping up of what happened. He mixed in a little of his perspective due to his investing in apps on Facebook, and threw in some perspective on the Stanford class that did some experiments on Facebook apps and their results. One example Jeff gave was about an app maker from the class had gotten 5 million people to click into his app (though they all immediately disappeared just after) in 5 weeks (correction, not 5 days -- as Jeff said to me later, correcting this, "damned French accent" because many of us heard "5 days").

I had to wonder, why would five million people do that? What's the benefit to them? Apparently the app maker, some young guy, is thrilled (and it sounded like Jeff might want to work with him or even invest). His experiment (with all of us, the greater Facebook community, as guinea pigs) worked for him, though I'd guess it wasted 5 million people's time, for a couple of minutes each.

I commented about the aspects of Facebook applications inadvertently trashing our relationships, at times, in order to get their numbers up, and using deceptive practices and features to do it, and said it thought it was really uncool. But there wasn't time to explain what I really thought, or the background of why I think this, and so, here we go:

Ok, imagine you get some sort of email message from a friend in Facebook. This is a real friend, someone you do business with and/or socialize with and maybe have known for a long time (as in, a lot longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been out of his teens and been (on paper) counted as a billionaire). Or maybe it's someone you work with (note that there's a lot of caselaw around sexual harassment.. so accidentally sending porn spam to people you work with or work for you, or you work for, doesn't seem like the greatest thing you would want to do either).

The message asks you to click into Facebook, at which point, you are asked to "install an app" (and, why? Just to read a message do I have to install an App? Oh yeah, this is about getting the applications numbers up ... so you do it, because you want to see your "real" friend's message). Then, once installed, you are taken to Slide's Fun Wall App, which shows you some porn, and says, "Click Foward to see what happen."

See this screen shot of the first round of porn spam I got (NSFW btw so be careful opening it).

I almost clicked "forward", but scrolled around past the fold. Turns out, if i'd clicked the "forward" button, Slide would have forwarded that spam to EVERYONE I KNOW in Facebook. All 500+ of them.

Now, let me explain who everyone is. Yes, of my 500 or so contacts, maybe 300 are in the tech community (and as such, expect early-adoptor screw ups and experimentation). But 200 are not. About 10 of these people are people I grew up with (we've been together as friends since nursery school). They don't know what the "tech community" is, much less care. Some of these people are religious and I would venture have never seen porn before or it's very rare in their lives. They aren't early adoptors. They expect that any communications are going to be real, and not some tech community experiment to figure out some thing that later promotes some business/VC investment, in order to see how the world of advertising can advance.

Or, take all the people I do business with, or the people who I work with, or work for me, or I work for. It would be just great to send them some porn spam. Or my brother and sister. They would luv to get porn spam from me. Not. Or how about my extended relatives in Europe? I think they are ripe for a little porn spam. No?

So.. I unchecked all 500+ contacts that Slide had checked, and wasn't able to view the message further (what was going to come next after I was asked to hit the "forward" button). So I figured out one profile I could link to who was a friend, and then forwarded the message there, "...to see what happen."

Well, guess what? Nothing "happen." Except that the message was forwarded to the one person I left checked. In other words. It's trick porn spam, features courtesy of Facebook and Slide.

So I sent in complaints to both companies (neither have contacted me back after a month -- guys, it's a social network, you know how to reach me.. give it a try!!)

After a while, I called people in each company that I knew through the tech comany. And was appalled at the responses I got. Now, these are people I know socially, and they gave me the real answers, but with the expectation that I would not attribute to them. However, I am confident that their answers reflect the culture and real value sets within these companies.

Facebook pointed the finger at Slide (the app maker in this case), and said, "There is nothing we can do. We have no control over the apps people make or the stuff they send." Oh, and if I wanted Facebook to change the rules for apps makers? I'd have to get say, 80k of my closest Facebook friends to sign on a petition or group, and then they might look at the way they have allowed porn spam to trick people into forwarding, but until then, there would be no feature review.

Slide said that they thought Facebook was the problem, because as the "governing" body, Facebook makes the rules and "Slide wouldn't be competitive if they changed what they do, and their competitors weren't forced to as well." In other words, Slides competitors use the same features to get more users (or trick more users as the case may be) and Slide didn't want to lose out on getting more users with similar features, regardless of the effect the features have on us and our relationships.

Also both companies told me that blogging doesn't affect them, because they don't read blogs. The only thing they pay attention to are Facebook groups. Because they don't look at problems that a single person discovers.

So in other words, a person with a legitimate complaint needs to have massive agreement and numbers in a Facebook group before these companies will even discuss a problem.

And, Slide and Facebook are willing to trash our relationships (real relationships) in order to get more numbers.

Now, note that many of the folks who sent the various porn spam (not just the ones in the photos above) sent very apologetic notes, because they were mortified that they had send their contacts porn spam.

Think about that. Your social networking / application software tricks you into doing something terribly socially embarrassing and you have to apologize? Wo. That's really messed up.

In other words, your social networking software / applications are, gasp, anti-social.

One guy in the Supernova / Wharton session yesterday asked how many people were in my Facebook list, and when I said 500, implied that most regular people have say, 50-100, and therefore it's not a bad problem. Well, I'd say each relationship is probably pretty important and this is an appalling justification for these applications and social network's feature sets and behaviors.

So I have to ask, if these young boys (Zuckerberg, the app makers in the class at Stanford, etc) are so clueless about relationships and social protocols, that they would build apps and a system that promotes bad behavior like this, where are their mentors? Where are their funders (who presumably have some input and sway into what's going on)? Why aren't Peter Thiel and Dave McClure or even Jeff Clavier (who sounded like he was trying to or has invested in some of the guys from the apps class at Stanford) advising these people that while they are experimenting, that these are real established relationships, and Facebook is now mainstream, and therefore the apps can't do this to people? I mean, it seems logical (and has happened in cultures around the world for millennia) that older, wiser men would advise young, clueless hormone driven boys how to act in the community. And what of Max Levechin? I mean, he's kind of in the middle, age wise, but shouldn't he know better than this?

Is the desperation for fame and money so great, that people would simply eschew social concerns in favor of ratings which then equal higher company valuations, and more billions on paper? Or do you want your claim to fame to be: "At least 15 million minutes wasted" from your experiments on Facebook (as I would imagine the Stanford student described above could claim)?

I guess the answer is yes, and so my response is, I can't trust Slide, or Facebook. Nor do I have respect for their founders if this is the way they handle themselves and their companies.

And where are the advertisers who might put pressure? The ones on the page I show above (not all the porn spam trickery I got, but the first batch) are Toyota and Gartner?

I deleted all my Slide apps after my last blog post, a month ago, and since heard from maybe 20 people in person that after reading my post, they'd done the same. But I guess we don't count, since we only have a few people concerned.

I hope the folks who attended the session yesterday at Wharton have a better idea as to why I find this upsetting, and upon hearing that more "experiments" with Facebook apps are happening, why I might get worried and distrust the process, the results and the motivations behind them.

Note: I am aware that Facebook did recently force apps makers to default turn "off" the checked names in forward (as far as I can tell from my own analysis of Facebook and via other blogs explanations). But I have yet to receive replies to my original support notes to these companies, and feel confused about an unspoken, barely there response. It's as though after barely changing one thing aspect of a feature, in order to mitigate the problem, they want to sweep it all under the rug. But I don't feel confident that these companies either care about the spam problem, the porn problem or the social abuse problems they are allowing.

For now, the answer for me is to use Facebook minimally and Slide not at all. Interestingly, at recent social gatherings I've mentioned these issues. At almost every one, people have said they are getting off Facebook and not going back, for precisely the reasons I mention above.

I guess that's the only way to make an impression on Facebook and Slide. Shut down your own use.

The NY Times on Girl Geeks: They are Fashion, Not Technology

The
NYTimes Stephanie Rosenblum has an article in today's *Fashion* section on Girls in Tech. Wo. Not in the *Technology* section. In Fashion.

Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain talks about how girls are coding up more content online: webpages, web art, blogs and podcasts.

And then they decorate it with an image of a girl at her laptop with a devilish tail. But instead of asking one of the girls they interviewed to make the artwork, they ask Adam Strange to do the art for the article:

So when they interview people like Doc Searls, Loic Le Meur or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section or business, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical in this article than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion. I've never seen coverage with Doc or David or Loic in fashion. Maybe they should be there depending, but they aren't put there by the editors that I know of....

This is not about David or Loic or Doc (all extremely supportive of women in tech, btw), and certainly they don't choose the section the paper puts them in, but rather the way the editors and writers at the NYTimes see them, verses the girl geeks in this article.

My point is that the NYTimes puts men who talk tech and trends or social impact in tech/biz, and women who code web art / pages in fashion.

Can you tell I'm pissed? WTF?

However, the number of women in tech isn't great (Which is why we need more articles in the Tech section about this people!)

The article says that less "...than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2006, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2000 to 2005, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology."

Chaos, In Pakistan and Silicon Valley

Today are the Pakistani elections. Why do I say chaos? And why also in Silicon Valley? And how are they at all connected?

As Amra Tareen, who is in Pakistan covering the event, says in her report about the elections:

As the day progressed more people started to show [to the polling stations], people were staying back home enjoying their morning off and due to concerns of violence. In the last 24 hours gunmen in Lahore and surrounding areas have killed 8 people and injured 40.

Check out this ballot from Pakistan, which Amra explains:

For example PML-Q (Musharraf's party) has the symbol cycle, PML-N (Nawaz's party) is represented by the symbol Tiger or a Lion and PPP (Benazir's party) is represented by the arrow. People caste their vote by placing a fingerprint and a seal over the symbol.

I've been helping Amra, a friend in the Silicon Valley for 4 years, with her company All Voices. Amra is from Pakistan, though she spent some of her educational years in Australia, including getting an engineering degree, and then went to Harvard for an MBA. She was also a VC in Silicon Valley for 6 years. Now she has founded All Voices with Erik Sundelof and the help of a great team of engineers and other folks.

I'm still working on Dabble, but I just find what is happening at All Voices so compelling, that I wanted to help her do this. She's raised VC money for a news and a conversation site that is meant to foster discussion from people around news events.

And how many Silicon Valley founders go to Pakistan to cover the elections, to kick off their companies?!?!

That's incredibly unusual, and to me, shows tremendous passion and guts about both the company, and her desire to see Americans and Middle Easterners talk about what goes on in their world. Anyone can talk, but she specifically wants to see these two groups getting to know each other on a more personal level, as opposed to say, an AP report.

So what is the chaos in Silicon Valley? Well, it's not on par with the Pakistani Elections, but the alpha All Voices is out, and people are commenting, talking about the election (finding a few bugs too!), making events, posting videos and photos, and it's the first big exposure the team has dealt with.

The site is pretty simple, really. The idea is that events happen in the world, and an event within AllVoices can then be assembled by pulling in news stories, photos and videos by news sources or blogs and say, creative common's licensed Flickr photos.

But you can also make an event, which is really more factual in nature, than opinion, about whatever has happened in their world. Then you might blog or add photos or videos to your own event, or you could add those elements to events made by others or the system. For example, Amra has put video here and here and here of the people in Pakistan talking about the election, onto the event she made noting election coverage. After you make your event, the system will match blog posts, articles, images and video to it, and more folks can come along and share eyewitness stories, comment, ask questions, etc.

All this gets put onto the map and front page which lists recent and active events.

So when others come to the site, they can find your stuff based on where it happens as well as by searching or by finding your list of activities via your profile. Amra's election reporting is, of course, located in Pakistan on the map.

The sites definitely is an alpha, where there are bugs and things. Her engineers have been working on this for about 6 months, and it's really great to see what they've done.

As I said, I've helped with a little consulting on the side. Normally, I wouldn't blog about things I offer consulting for, and normally I'm too busy with Dabble, but I think this site and Amra's work has the potential for so much social good, I'm breaking my own rule.

So take what I say with a grain of salt due to my work and bias. Go visit the site yourself and decide if you think it's worthwhile. But more than anything, I encourage you to get involved in supporting Pakistan as it hold its election. Pay attention, comment, blog, make a stink, but support democracy and the people of Pakistan as they stake a claim for their future!

Yelp Reviewed: Love it and Hate it == 2.5 stars

Category: User Generated Reviewer Community

So, I've been using Yelp for a while now. I use it regularly, but I'm finding it's increasingly annoying, and if it keeps increasing, I may not want to keep using it.

One of my favorite things is that when I'm driving or walking out somewhere, and need the number to a restaurant, I can google for "yelp restaurant-X city-X" and get it back on my phone screen, with the number as a clickable link, so I can just call by clicking. Faster and less expensive than calling 411, which I think on my phone bill is $2.98 and is really slow via Cingular/ATT.

Why I Love YELP

1. It's easy to review things there, add new businesses. They are very searchable in google. Just put in "yelp whatever-it-is" and it comes up to the top. And often, if you just search the entity on it's own in google, the entity comes up in the top three. It's nice to be able to have an effect on the business, especially if they have done something (good or bad) that needs to be documented for other's reference.

2. I also like restaurant reviews where people say what they liked and why, so that I can see if I'd like them.

3. I like browsing a topic or service type in a community. However, this works about half the time. Sometimes, I'm able to find the restaurant or store I couldn't think of the name for, right away. Other times, I've got browse-results that are all over the block I know something is one, and they have everything else but the thing I want. Once I google it, and get back to the Yelp page for that item I couldn't think of, i see Yelp has a gazillion reviews for that restaurant or whatever. And it's right there in the same locational block with the other entities I was just looking about before I had to get out, go to google, and then return to Yelp just to find the thing.

I think Yelp needs a serious search and discovery algorithm review.

But the idea of browsing a location and topic or service is fantastic when it works.

Why I Hate YELP

1. Their own internal search sucks. Half the time I search for things I know are there and even have sometimes reviewed, I don't get them. I've started leaving short reviews on places I need to find again so I can pivot on my own list of reviews.

Recommending again: a complete overhaul of the search and discovery algorithms.

2. Yelp's reviewers overall are a major downer. These people flounce around like they are on "happy-drugs" or in some fantasy tv-show they themselves are starring in, where they prattle on about some crap they experienced where somehow, however distantly, they associate with the entity they are reviewing. I don't know how this trend at Yelp got started, but there has got to be a way to develop a reviewer community that where each review doesn't have that tone in the reviews. I thought it was cute at first, but now they seem to have millions of these people running around with little balance for what you actually need in a review. It's over the top.

These flouncy-reviewers don't often say why something worked for them. They often just tell a personal story. Many times I've been convinced that something would be great, only to find out the entity I trusted due to the "happy people with no skepticism and lot's of personal stories" were just going on about something totally unrelated to the qualities of what they were reviewing.

When I review, I specifically take an opposite tone, review for specific acts and quality and say why, so that others can decide for themselves whether the product or service would work for them.

Recommendation: think about promoting reviews that tell why things worked by counting "useful" ratings more than "cool" or "funny." Also, could they pls add a "not useful" button to the bottom of reviews? That would help moderate this.

3. The emphasis in the Yelp community on "1st to review" is contributing to problem no. 2. Basically, Yelp reviewers get extra chits if they are first. I don't really care except I see more and more frivolous reviews just to get this status.

I have noticed on a number of occasions, for the products and services I either wanted to look up, or review myself, that the "1st to review" was totally bogus. They had clearly not used the service, often just
"seeing it from afar." To be specific, I noticed that a rental property company had a great review from someone who had never lived in any of the buildings managed by the company, never dealt with them in any way, and had totally made up stuff. Once I saw that instance, I started looking out for more of this, and have found a lot this sort of thing, with restaurants, services (and the associated products), other rental agencies, car repair shops... you name it.

Again, having a "not useful" button would really help us mod down the people who are just there to be first and add nothing to the actual solution Yelp is trying to solve.

OVERALL

As I said Yelp has it's uses:
1. reviewing something is satisfying if you have something useful to say
2. searching for things in google produces good Yelp reviews, and they have clickable phone numbers in my phone
3. browsing an "area" for some topic is great, when it works

However, the problems I outlined will soon make the service unusable if they take over. I think they need an algorithm review (and I hope they don't use the same ones for search and browse.. they need to be different and carefully crafted).

They also need to look at some of the community features to help temper this tone that the community has taken of writing personal stories that don't tell you much except about the person writing the review. That's potentially the most devastating thing that could happen to Yelp, if they don't keep it in check: being labeled as frivolous and silly, which translates to unuseful. For me, they are nearly crossing the line on that one. I like the service and hope they get it together and rein this in, or I'll start trying other services and abandon everything I've done at Yelp for a more reasonable and useful tone.

Thanks for the Surprise!

I've made the list of NxE's Fifty Most Influential Bloggers.

Thanks for selecting me!

Actually, I had fun reading the list and finding a couple folks I didn't know about:
Neil Patel
and
Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman

One thing that didn't surprise me: there were many bloggers who were popular because they write about blogging, or making money on their blogs. Since blogging began, that's been a popular pasttime of blogwriters and the blogreadership seems to really enjoy it.

Some of the most popular posts at Napsterization have been examinations of old and new media, blogs in particular, and how the algorithms of search work for blog search systems, or how blogs game web-wide search.

Legacy Media Gloats About Fake Steve Jobs Outing

There's been a lot of gloating over the outing of the author of the blog, Fake Steve Jobs (see article below this link for gloating), which has been written by Dan Lyons, a Senior Editor of Forbes and where Brad Stone of the New York Times broke the story yesterday.

The interesting thing to me is that legacy media in NYC thinks that they are so clever for finding Lyons, or at least Lyons and his friends think this, when lots of bloggers on the west coast have spent months speculating and looking for FSJ. They even have pointed out how geeky the new media people are because they were doing things like checking the headers of email from FSJ, which appeared to point to a Boston location but that was all they got.

Brad Stone figured it out because he looked through Manhattan back channels to find a book agent was shopping a book proposal from FSJ (a few months ago, the book is due in October), and because the agent was telling publishers that the writer was a "the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine," he could compare the FSJ writings with Lyons blog and figured it out.

Well, the point is that if you are part of legacy media, and more specifically, are in Manhattan, you probably have access through your network to other media entities in Manhattan. (Note that Brad Stone doesn't live in Manhattan, but as a member of the Times, I'd consider that very strong "local" access.) Of course if you get a clue through people you know that tell you about the FJS publishing package and mysterious writer status, you figure it out this way. No bloggers out in the hinterlands have that sort of access to be able to put this together.

It reveals both positives and negatives about legacy media, that bloggers have know for a long time and that legacy media has tried to sweep under the rug now and then. Bloggers over the past few years have pulled back the curtain on legacy media, and legacy media is now better for those conversations. But it's hard to break any story like this without both online and off-line access. You need both, and so it's not so much that Brad Stone of the NYTimes did the breaking, but rather Brad Stone, person with access Manhattanite and local connections to the publishing industry who broke the story. Could have been anyone with friends in publishing who figured it out.

But to say that it's "ironic" that a legacy media journalist was the FSJ and legacy media broke it may be true, but it's gloating at the same time. And it's that gloating attitude that got legacy media into trouble in the first place, and made the public so angry with them, after things like Jason Blair and Stephen Glass. So it may be a small victory, but often what legacy media doesn't understand is that there isn't a battle. Many conferences over the past few years have devolved into an either or battle where public demonstrations of these attitudes come out. But both sides need each other and if one went away, the other would be in deep trouble, at this point.

Bloggers drive a lot of traffic back to legacy media, as they discuss news print stories, and journalists get a lot of stories out of blogs (I first noticed this five or six years ago when my intellectual property stories started to get lifted a couple days after I published them.. by.. the New York Times. They added to them, but they took the arguments, the phrases, and never said a word about where it came from. I noticed this same thing with other IP bloggers like Law Meme and Copyfight as well.) News reporters report and bloggers opine. Bloggers opine and poke and reporters go looking for more.

We also need reporters who have access, not so much of the example above, but with access to important things, in order to get good information out. This is critical for the democracy and the reason reporters are given special dispensation in the Constitution. But reporters also need not abuse that power through gloating or arrogance.

This isn't about getting over on new media by the legacy guys. Many legacy guys have become new media guys.. Lyons and Stone each have blogs and write on the daily. The much more interesting story is how legacy media is using new media tools, changing their habits (like writing anonymous parody blogs !!!) and how everyone is interacting on and off-line to get better knowledge as well as entertainment. I have to admit, I have loved reading FSJ the past year. It's been totally entertaining.

Check this out: Fake Brad has come on the scene. Maybe a little less than FSJ-clever, but it is amusing. And ironically, it's amusing partly because it makes fun of legacy media arrogance. And as Geek.com notes, FSJ and FB may be the start of a whole new genre.

Harry Potter on The Pirate Bay, Pls C&D Me!!

So, I just realized I probably know Mark S. Seidenfeld, mentioned on Techcrunch today. I believe I worked with him at my first job out of college and would love to catch up with him. I tried looking him up on the Scholastic site but they don't list General Counsel or make it easy to reach people.

So, here's the deal, if I link to Techcrunch on their C&D story, who linked to Torrent Freak, I'll be linking to the linkers who linked to the linkers who pirated something. Harry Potter, in this case.

This reminds me of when I was C&D'd by Diebold for linking to the linkers who linked to the linkers... blah blah which produced a C&D from them. It was all totally bogus and just a form of shutting down speech, but as I said, I'd love to get an email from Mark because I'd like to be in touch.

Whatever works. Mark, my email is mary at hodder dot org. Ttyl.

Principles of Citizen Journalism Project Launch

The Knight Citizen News Network and the Center for Citizen Media (Dan Gillmor) are dual-publishing their new priciples for citizen journalism:

Accuracy, Thoroughness, Fairness, Transparency, Independence and with those comes a list of Resources.

They have included some video links to interviews with people like Doc Searls, Debra Galant and Jay Rosen about these topics.

They also include one interview with me, where I say that I trust bloggers more in some cases. What really matters is that people who report/opine adhere to these principles outlined above.

Great work Dan, JD Lasica and all the others who worked hard on this!

Putting Order to the Chaos of CES, Not to Mention Making New Media Proud

at the Bloghaus. By Podtech.

John and Linda Furrier and Maryam Scoble rock for putting it all together.

Wow. Made the chaotic CES scene fun and cool. And the video uploading.. 80 mbs up and down. It rocked!

An example of their work, vlogging the CES 2007 Keynote: Ed Zander, CEO Motorola:

Bloghaus is the best!

The Best Blog Post goes to....

Sorry.. that was left over from the Vloggies.

Guy Kawasaki says this is one of the best blog posts, and as a truffle and wine lover, and someone who loves fun media, well, I say WOW! too.

Look now, look now!

The Amateur Gourmet: Chutzpah, Truffles & Alain Ducasse.

Dabble Blog Goes Live

The Dabble Blog has long been inside our invited beta pages, and not accessible.

It's now public, as we move toward opening our site. We'll be putting all kinds of things on it including news about Dabble, development issues and interesting things we see people doing when they use Dabble.

But we'll also use it to point out cool media and users doing interesting things, and post videos (we aren't a hoster.. we link to hosters and act more like a guide to video, made by users, as well as straight search and browsing).

Check it out.. it's cool!

Core Values at Bloggercon

Mike Arrington is doing the next Core Values session at Bloggercon IV. I want to wish him well, and note the information from the Core Values session at Bloggercon III that I led, because I think that session was extraordinarily productive.

In fact afterward, many people kindly said that they felt it was most useful and interesting, because they left with something tangible (the list) and they really liked that rather than me telling them what the values are I see online, or that I feel are important myself, I just asked questions, and let them come to the conclusions about the values they share and the controls they felt should exist to support those values. They appreciated the light touch guiding them to find and develop their own conclusions.

Here the list the group of 80 made during the session, of what they feel are core values for the blogosphere:

Things we value:
Democracy
Non-exclusivity
Attribution
Transparency – disclosure
Innovation
Personalization
Accessibility
Honesty
Creativity
Knowing who people are
Editorial Independence
Connectedness
Anonymity

Things we devalue:
Power law economics
Lack of Attribution
Anonymity
Wuffie-hoarding
Links for money

Good luck Mike! I'm sure you'll take us to the next level. I hope the last sessions list is useful as a starting point.

Respecting Open Space

Open space, in the camp conference style, requires some key elements to work well. I'm noticing after watching two different events develop that they may be missing what is important about Open Space.

A couple of months ago, I attended a conference on the east coast. The organizer told me he wanted to do an Open Space day, the day after his event. That day arrived, he bailed, and there were six of us who actually attended. And he insisted that I go, even though I really have a lot of other things to do. The Open Space day was meant to brainstorm ways to organize Net Neutrality support.

After the event, others who attended it suggested that Bar Camp a failure. Well.. I totally disagreed. They thought that somehow, calling an open day "Bar Camp" would make it happen.

They had a wiki with about 22 names on it, and a stellar group of people slated to attend. They had great space, in a lovely lawfirm with wifi, and everything we might need. What they didn't have was a leader to organize the space. Although one person who attended in the middle of the event suggested that if things weren't working, he could vote with his feet. And he would if he wanted to do so. Though considering there were six people in the room, it sounded more like a threat: you don't do what I want to today, or I'll leave. So everyone started doing what he wanted. The point of course of "the law of two feet" is that you don't stay somewhere where you aren't learning. But that applies to Open Space where there are maybe say 100 people, and multiple rooms where you can move and not be disruptive, not six people where you are an integral part of deciding what is happening. But with such a little group, that misapplication of that particular Open Space principle further caused the day to deteriorate as a camp. What little emerging leadership was happening was killed right there, though he wasn't wiling to lead. He just wanted everyone to do things his way.

Without a clear leader, supporting a basic framework for a day of sessions or some kind of plan, just didn't work. It wasn't the concept of Bar Camp that failed. It was a failure of the people proposing it and carrying it out.

Anyway, I'm wondering how Open Space is going to work at the Identity conference at Harvard, where today and tomorrow are regular top down conference days, where the broadcast model is followed. On Wednesday, there will be an Open Space day, led by Kaliya Hamlin and Jon Ramer. (I'm not attending this event, as I have too much work to do, but I'm noticing a trend here....)

I know the Open Space day is happening, more due to the Identity list I'm on, than the event web pages. After there was discussion on the list, I asked about the lack of information supporting the Open Space day on the website, and Paul Trevithick and John Clippinger did add a little information about the day on the session page, to let people know it was even happening. However, I had suggested on the email list that they make a page for the attendees to show that they were attending and add the speakers to the schedule and speaker's page. They did not.

The point I'm making is that I think people who do top down, broadcast style conferences are interested in what's happening with camps and Open Space, but they don't understand the dynamics of them or Open Space sensibility, and so in applying top down controls and information styles to their camps, they potentially harm the good that can come from the camp. And since the leaders of the camp are not traditional speakers, the organizers of the larger top down conference probably think they don't need to list the camp or Open Space leaders as speakers on the larger conference site because the camp facilitators aren't speaking in a traditional way. But this is not true. Listing them is critical to fostering the process of the day.

For example, we know from past successful camps that having a page where attendees say they are coming is key, because the agenda is made the day of the camp. Therefore, people choose to attend because other interesting people will be in the room, not based upon pre-arranged sessions. Secondly, the leaders of the day are key. They have to balance the right amount of support for the Open Space while leading just a little so that attendees make the agenda the morning of, and that things are pulled together at the end of the day. People choose to come, or not, based on who will be leading.

Currently, the leaders of the identity Open Space day are not on Harvard'sthe speaker list, nor does Harvard's the schedule note them, even though speakers the previous two days are listed on the schedule with their corresponding sessions.

I believe the Open Space day will go well due to Kaliya's and Jon's attention, because at least Kaliya has done this before (I don't know about Jon's work with Open Space) and understands well the dynamic needed to make this kind of day work. But the fact that the Open Space day at Harvard's Identity Conference has not been adequately supported with proper information at the event website shows the lack of respect for the dynamics of this kind of event. Since there is no sign up page, they will likely have a vastly diminished attendance compared to the broadcast conference days. A signup page might have actually brought in more people if they'd opened it up to more than just the attendees the first two days. In fact, bringing in new people to understand Identity in technology development is very important and this is a missed opportunity as well.

I do wish them good luck with it, but I wish that the Paul and John, with control of the conference website, understood better why what they have done with both the attendees of the open space day and the leaders may not help the day succeed as well as it should have. They can't blame the camp style for this, but rather themselves. If they day succeeds, it will be in spite of these problems, and due to Jon's and Kaliya's personal networking and leadership for the day.

idmashup06

I'm going to Vloggercon today!

Hope to see you there, though you should know they are sold out!

It should be a great event. I'm speaking tomorrow on the Mashups and Remixing for Vloggers Dave Toole, Josh Leo. JD Lasica, David Dudas and Jan McLaughlin.

But we talked yesterday about making it an audience discussion, which I think is much better than a panel.

Josh Leo's We Are The Media, three times in one week!

I also suggested we play Josh Leo's video from the first Vloggercon because I think it's a great representation of user generated content, mashups, and for many other reasons, it's representative of the interesting and entertaining things going on online. In fact, I played it at the Culture, Commerce and Public Media conference during my session last Monday on User Generated Content with Kenyatta Cheese, Sam Klein, Dave Marvet. I also played the first two minutes of Kent Bye's Overview of his Echo Chamber Project, as an example of news and commentary video made by users, The Guinea Pig Dreaming video, and the Bush Blair Endless Love remix. I wanted to show the audience there (typically from archives of TV, PBS or other libraries of video projects) that users were doing an interesting variety of things.

That last one got a really big laugh.

I also played Josh's We Are the Media Video again yesterday at The Hyperlinked Society conference at UPenn and the Annenberg School of Communication. The point is, digital videos are a series of edits, and each edit, with an in and out point as hypertext, is like a video map, of links. Since it was a conference on links, I wanted to show a couple examples of linking that working in ways other than what everyone there was talking about.

I also showed some Attention Trust data, with a visualization of links a user might use to see where he goes day to day.

Anyway, if we play Josh's WATM video again tomorrow, that will be three times in a week. It's that great. You should check it out.

Haven't we been here before?

Digital Maoism vs. Voice

Isn't that much like the issues we've looked at over the past few years:

Wikipedia vs. Britannica
Bloggers vs. Journalists
Remix culture vs. TV
Flickr vs. Getty Images
Wiki's vs. Blogs

All the talk this past week about Jaron Lainer's essay, The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism is another one of those 'or' things that keeps coming up around the internet. (Or Internet with a capital 'I', if the NY Times is your style guide.) As an aside, Sam Klein of Wikipedia at the on Monday, asked everyone to please (smile) stop calling it "the wikipedia." It's just "wikipedia." Ok, back to Wikipedia. So Wikipedia is not a replacement for Encyclopedia Britiannica. Instead, you use one for some things (I use wikipedia for finding links because Google's search results for many kinds of items are too polluted and unhelpful) and a reference like Britannica (well, not Britannica, but I have lots of other traditional old style references) for things that those top down, traditional reference sources cover better.

We use reporting from professional journalists for reporting, access to places individuals can't get into, and some kinds of news, and blog posts for voice, commentary, and some kinds of news and reporting. We use remix video for humor, smaller stories and short form video, and TV for long form, high production video. We use Flickr for the stream of photo images that comes from our friends and for some kinds of reporting, and we use Getty for.. well.. they are hard to use. So we don't buy a lot from them. Wikis are used for the collection of information around a topic or event, blogs are used for voice and commentary. Collective tools are used for collective action, and voice tools are used for voice.

The thing is there are choices, based on purpose, goal, need, process and style. And the choices are based on nuances that the arguments above cannot reasonable reduce to an 'either or' situation. A single thing is not meant to work in all instances. And the beauty of the internet combined with information technology is that together they give us lots of choices. Both for production and consumption.

I think the rest of the folks who responded to Lanier's essay did a great job of discussing the subtler ideas and arguments, so I'll let those stand as they were terrific. There is no need to restate the idea that some of Lanier's criticisms do not necessarily apply to Wikipedia, or that some others do apply, in specific contexts, but that wikipedia is supposed to function the way that it does.

I just wanted to point out that online, as everywhere else in life, we make choices, and the idea is to choose the best thing for the circumstances, not to expect that all things will work in all circumstances. The internet is no exception.

Blog Spam from Netscape, and Netscape's Inability to Deal With It

I keep getting blogspam notifications (more than 500) after a Netscape blogger keeps trying to post what looks like automated blog comment spam with a link payload to my blog. They are here: http://mywebpage.netscape.com/ followed by pizdetcc/refinance.html (if you go to this link, it redirects to a search site for refinance and mortgages, but i don't want to publish the link, even with a nofollow).

I emailed Netscape at their policy2004@netscape.net privacy policy address. They have no abuse address, and their Terms Of Service doesn't say anything about how blog spam creation is against the TOS. So, my only option was to email the only address about any policy on their site, to let them know they are hosting spammers and not only do they not know, but it's not against the rules at Netscape.

Well... they wrote back. See below for the full correspondence, but they responded that I should contact MY HOSTER for MY BLOG. Wo.

Netscape is hosting blog spammers and this is their answer? Talk about not getting it.

Below is the original email, and their reply:

From: policy2004@netscape.net
Subject: Re: spam from your user at http://mywebpage.netscape.com/pizdetcc/
Date: April 21, 2006 6:57:11 AM PDT
To: mary@hodder.org

This mailbox is only able to address inquiries related to Netscape Network privacy. For assistance with your blog, please contact the hosting company directly.

Regards,
Netscape Privacy Team

-----Original Message-----
From: mary hodder
To: policy2004@netscape.net
Sent: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 09:14:53 -0700
Subject: spam from your user at http://mywebpage.netscape.com/pizdetcc/

TO: Mywebpage hosting

I have gotten hundreds of blog spam in comments and trackbacks
from one of your users.

NOTE: I read your TOS and there is no where in there to report abuse, or to tell users
that "blog spam" is against the TOS. This needs to be changed so that blog spam is made illegal by your TOS.

Below is a notification I received from my Blog's software (my blog is called Napsterization) where your user is spamming me. I have received hundreds of these attempts to leave comment spam, where the payload is a link to that uses commercial site.

Please block this user.

Thanks
mary hodder

....................
An unapproved comment has been posted on your blog Napsterization, for entry #291 (Blog Comment Spam - A New Low and So Bizarre). You need to approve this comment before it will appear on your site.

Approve this comment: =17465&blog_id=1>

IP Address: 196.40.43.74
Name: misty
Email Address: foloolk3@potran.gu
URL: http://mywebpage.netscape.com/ pizdetcc/refinance.html
Comments:

I like your website alot...its lots of fun... you have to help me out with mine...

--Powered by Movable Type
Version 3.2
http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/

The Conversational Middle: Maturing of the Blogosphere

On Saturday at Kinnernet, the last session I attended before leaving was led by an Israeli guy named Uri Baruchin who asserted that something had changed in the blogosphere, and we were starting to have a problem because a meme (my word, not his, and it's what I called it as I disagreed in the session) would not spread so fast in the blogosphere now that A-list bloggers were waning in link counts (a popularity scale because it uses a single digital social gesture, the link, and does not weigh at all the many other conversational gestures of a blog over time -- that would require multiple digital social gestures and a much more complex "algorithm" than just counting links). He was worried that the number of smaller discussions required to spread news would make the blogosphere as a whole less effective in broadcasting news, and somehow this meant there was some loss of power bloggers had been holding and was now waning.

I disagreed with his thesis, and gave some obvious statistics but also some ideas. First, I said that the blogosphere's purpose was not singular. This goes for both individual bloggers and on the whole, if there can be a "unified purpose," which I don't think there is because there are too many different kinds of blogging. Remember blogs are tools, and each person takes it and uses it in whatever way makes sense, which probably means there are 33+ million slightly different to extremely different variations of blogs now.

Anyway, back to disagreeing with the "unified purpose" idea. So, if you look at this from one view -- through the State of the Blogosphere reports put forth a in October 2004, where counts for the NY Times and MSNBC were in the neighborhood of 17 or 18 thousand links, and top 100 bloggers like Boing Boing and Instapundit had 6 or so thousand links.

At that point in time, Technorati tracked 4 million blogs and 400 million links, and now, a year and a half later, Technroati tracks 33+ million blogs and 2.2 billion links. In January, 2006, the NY Times has 55,000+ links and CNN has around 53,000+ but Boing Boing has 18,000+ and Instapundit has 5,600 links (the are no longer the number 2 blog, as that position is now held by Engadget at 15,600+ links) you can see that while the blogosphere has grown 7x and the links 5.5x, the inbound link counts of the top blogs and media has grown 3x.

Also, take into account that Technorati changed its methods of link counting last August, after several things occurred (Robert Scoble complained about its link counts in comparison to Bloglines which counts every link since it started counting, and I had reported on how link counting worked across 5 services and then other's reports of frustration with the Top 100 and A-list counts where sparce posters' links were favored over frequent posters' links). So Technorati changed from counting just links on the top pages of a blog (those posts that linked but dropped off the front pages were dropped from link counts) to any link that had occurred in the past 6 months. Technorati still counts one link only per blog, no matter it's location on the blog posts or blogroll, no matter how many links come from one blog, but all link types age out after 6 months. So these statistics for the later time frame are different and not exactly comparable, but let's do it for the sake of argument here.

So, what does this mean? Well, since there are 5.5 times more links in this 1.5 year time frame, I believe it means that there are more links made to non-A-list bloggers than bloggers further down the power law curve about , that are in what I call the "conversation middle of the power law curve" (the curve for specifically link counts), than those A-listers at the top are receiving. It means to me that while a year and a half ago, when I explained the conversational middle to people like Peter Hirshberg and Francis Piscani and thought it was far more interesting than what most people were discussing then (the top of the power law, or the existence of the power law curve at all), that now there is some evidence that as the blogosphere goes main stream, it is moving more to the middle, at least as link counts go, to more personal conversations rather than pointers to a few top media sites or the blogs that are act more like broadcasters. The broadcast model for links in blogs means that many more links went to a top blog, than they were able to link back to, because it was just physically impossible. Those top bloggers are 1-to-thousands in their distribution, and yet for inbound links counts, they have thousands of inbound links as opposed to far fewer outbound links to others.

From February 2003, here is one distribution curve showing bloggers inbound link counts in the Shirky article on power law curves:

But the conversational middle, then, and now, is both say, 12-to-12 for distribution and receiving links, or 50-to-50, or for larger blogs, maybe 500-to-200, depending on the size of the conversation verses those listening and linking back. And now the mainstreaming of the blogosphere supports this hypothesis more.

As modified from Chris Anderson's Long Tail article here is a representation of what I'm postulating:

The top of the power law curve has been referred to as the A-list, and certainly last summer, when Blogher discussions erupted at the last and well packed session of the day, and so many women expressed extreme anger and frustration at Technorati's link counting methods and particularly the there was a lot of interest in figuring out ways to reveal topic communities lower down that power law curve.

At Blogher, I suggested we work on something that would show not just a few bloggers in topic areas that were at the top, but rather sift the entire blogosphere, using as many as 22 different metrics, though some are not currently available but tool builders were welcome to build some of these out, to show "conversationalness" and "influence over time" instead of the "popularity" of link counts as the Top 100 or Top 500 that was subsequently built by Feedster, currently shows. Lots of people responded with lots of interesting ideas on the subject of how to approach this. A system like this could more accurately reveal the conversational middle, to make it much easier for more than just the participants in smaller communities of say 50, to find and expose their interests and conversations. This would also, for some of the women at Blogher, make them feel more validated or exposed as leaders in their topic areas (not politics or tech stuff), or if that was not their interest, make the Top 100 less validating and congratulatory of those who by virtue of being on the list seemed dominant, which clearly was their desire.

The idea that bloggers are not passing memes as effectively because there is less influence by broadcast style bloggers, even though more small conversations are experiencing more links going blogger-to-blogger, further down the power law curve, is silly. If people are genuinely interested in something, and have something to say, they'll blog it. These conversations occurring in the middle pass and discuss memes just as before, but the linking and diffusion of the conversation is evidence of a more mature, and interesting use of the internet, not less so. And now, if a meme crosses lots of blogs in the blogosphere, I believe it's a sign of far more interest by people, than under the earlier broadcast mode of meme spreading in the older, more early adopter blogosphere. And this certainly isn't a problem. The internet as a medium is more supportive of spread, edge conversation, than the amassing of top down broadcast distribution. The act of blogging is the act of subverting old broadcast methods of communication.

The maturing of the blogosphere with less broadcast distribution and more conversation between people spread far and wide is a welcome and more democratic way of bringing together people who want to discuss like interests. Certainly there are still bloggers who are more highly read with more inbound links that resemble broadcasters in some ways, and who PR people will continue to try to manipulate, but still, there is a shift to conversation with more symmetric linking, and that is positive overall.

Our next challenge now is how to see how small conversational communities and the attendant tools that sift these conversations can use more than one or two digital gestures, and create topic awareness of blogger groups with more than just the early adopter or blog-tool favoring metrics that post categories or tag indicators do now. These metrics too are subject to power law curves and the current uses of them one or two at at time only reflect top bloggers, or early adopters, just as link counts did before, emphasizing them over the conversational middle. When the tools of exposure change, the conversational middle will become accessible and apparent not just to those in and around a particular conversation but to those outside it.

Advisors, Stock Options and FON

So this whole thing about advisors for FON has been kind of strange to watch (of course for the bloggers on both sides of it, who have been rather upset and of course for the FON people who probably didn't anticipate it and presumably were caught off guard, it's been more than strange).

So let me get this straight. FON got some