Celebrity Worship in the Post-Modern Internet

Doc Searls in a post on celebrity, black holes and productivity comments on celebrity as a form of coasting. Below is my reaction. I think there is more to it. Let me know what you think.

I've been talking about celebrity a lot since Thurs afternoon re: MJ, FF, EM, etc. Doc and I discussed this a month ago in depth too. I've been trying to figured out for the past year what the hyperdrive of microcelebrity is on Twitter that so many run after. And then the real celebrities hit twitter en masse and the hyperdrive of real celebrity is there as well. That drive diminishes at times one's ability to have a real conversation because some of those diving into conversations have agendas like trying to get the attention of the perceived AList (whatever that is.. oh yes.. the high follower counts, goosed by the twitter suggested follower list, provide us with a definitive answer... thank the gods).

But the triple-hit celebrity death match on Thursday drove me to my thought which is that most people need to follow, most people need something to worship, and most people have given up serious religion (of the type where you spend like 20 hours a week in church and the pope or the ayatollah or the supreme leader or whoever is your celebrity representative communicates with god for you and leads you and makes the decisions and you worship him to get to god because you can't talk to him yourself).

Michael Jackson and other celebs are the replacement for that sort of seriously time consuming difficult religion, because media and post-modernism make it easy (where premodern means god is above man, modern has everything equal: god, man, nature, and post-modern means nothing is more important than you). If nothing is more important than the individual, but he/she needs to follow something bigger than the self out of insecurity or whatever and there is very little ritual left post-old-style-religion to set people on their own course of confidence, productivity and humility in the world, and you have the media machine the past 100 years that now includes internet and self-publicity on things like twitter, well.. you have the perfect primordial soup to grow the MJ, etc worship replacing organized religion we see now. And of course, the celebrity version is so much easier and more fun, kind of like fast food.

Doc is right, celebrity worship is a tremendous form of distraction, but I would argue most don't have the confidence, discipline, or for that matter the interest in spending their time on more constructive things. While most are capable of much more, there is safety in worship. That's why the church/temple/mosque of old was so effective. It filled the rest of your time after work and set the order that god was first, then the supreme leader as the physical manifestation, then puny you, so you would worship up the hierarchy. Oh, and you were given a structure to think about life and death. Which is frightening to many. And there was a structure for work and discipline, however messed up these organized religions have been over the centuries.

In Post-Modernity, celebs fill the worship channel, effortlessly, where the celeb hierarchy is the order and the media connects you. Microcelebs are the long tail of this channel. Nothing going on with the top? Well.. there is always Guy Kawasaki or iJustine. And if you as the worshiper can get nearer to the celeb so much the better. People used to say: god is my savior. Now they say, "I remember exactly where I was when I heard MJ died." It's a way of placing yourself close to the worshiped thing.

Not to mention that you don't have to think about death if you go with the celebrity distraction mechanism, except when Farrah and Michael and Ed McMahon leave us, at which point people seem to just increase the worship but don't really have to face facts about their own lives.

It's utterly silly, and of course the internet and socialmedia send this tendency and need an order of magnitude higher than before. But I think it's a rat-brain need for the masses to worship something, and celebrity is the post-modern fast-food solution.

Opiates anyone?

She's Geeky

Hey.. She's Geeky is a few days away, and you can still sign up.

The list of great women attending is here: She's Geeky Attendees and Registration

Really looking forward to interacting with all those awesome girl geeks on Friday and Saturday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View!

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? 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 advisors who are bloggers and nice names to associate with for credibility, but also folks who can actually advise the company on what they are actually doing. Those advisors say they are advisors in their blogs or other public spaces. Rebecca Buckman in the Wall Street Journal questioned the ethics of these advisors anyway, saying they can't be impartial if they blog about the company. Okay, that's her opinion. Those advisors haven't been offered anything yet, but the presumption is that they will make lots of money and therefore will only write positive things if they are on the advisory board. Maybe the advisors can't be impartial, but they have a right to blog what they want to, and we'll read them if they are transparent and we want to, the same as with her reporting. That's the deal. People blog. People scrutinize.

Okay, so let's be clear, most advisors do get some stock. But let's say hypothetically that FON has 40 million shares, and gives it's advisors, hypothetically, 10k shares each. And those shares are actually options that the advisors have to buy, and pay taxes on the difference in price between the value and the option price, even if they don't sell the shares they buy that day (where do you sell shares from an early startup.. there is no market for that) and likely, they are buying years before they are actually selling. All this probably means these advisors need some extra accounting, which they also have to pay for regardless of whether they ever see any profit from the stock. And FON got what, $21.7 million in venture funding? So, they have to sell for like, $217 million, minimum, to make those presumably non-preferred, common stock options worth something? And then, if the advisor pays the taxes, and the shares turn out to not be worth anything, that's another thing that the advisory/shareholder has to pay the accountant to get back (the taxes paid years before that are essentially a loan to the government).

So, like, maybe, MAYBE, those shares will be worth something way far down the road, after money is fronted by the advisor for options and the corresponding taxes and accountants. Maybe they would be worth, for common stock, I don't know, $10,000, if things worked out really really well? Or most likely, based on odds (and this is in no way a speculation about the company as it actually stands) worth nothing or a very small amount. It's just extremely unlikely that advisory boards make out on their stock options. And yet, here are all these people so pissed off over these advisorships, and this concept of gatekeepers to information who may (way down the road) make some money for their time as an advisor.

I realize there is a powerlaw and a corresponding curve where broadcast comparisons can be made to blogs at the top of that curve. And life isn't fair. Some people are born in different places, get access to better educations, learn how to write better, and end up with more highly read blogs at the top of the powerlaw curve. Some people are born with perfect noses. You can either accept it or yearn for plastic surgery. If you spend your life comparing yourself to others, you'll be miserable. Or you could just go about doing your thing and try to help people when you can, working toward righting some measure of inequity, making life more fair for everyone. One thing about the internet: the transaction costs for publishing are relatively cheap compared to legacy media, meaning you can whip up a blog and compete on pretty open terms with Google, the NY TImes or star-studded bloggers who get asked to join advisory boards. I will point out that the list of people on FON's advisory board is pretty star-studded. If this issue hadn't come up, I would have looked at it and thought they asked everyone to be there as much for their name status as for their actual advice. But now this issue has prompted bigger questions than just whether FON is using this group for their names or big blogs.

I want things to be as fair as possible too, and I'm all for better tools and information visualization to expose the blogs and people who are in the 'conversational middle' of that powerlaw curve of blogging. But is slamming this particular group the way to go about this? It sounds like a case of self pity (even if that's not what some of the people pointing out the problems intended) instead of addressing the real problems around powerlaw curves that are not a result of direct actions by these particular advisors. Rather, powerlaw issues are a result due in part to our human tendency to want information from perceived 'authorities.' Powerlaw curves happen, and my answer is to look for tools to thwart this very human tendency and that bring in new voices.

Additionally, one of my advisors for Dabble, who has been an advisor for maybe 20 companies over the past ten years told me that he's never seen anything from the stock of advisorships, even though some of the companies did well in one way or another.

The truth is, advisor stock is such a crap shoot. I've never heard of anyone who takes it seriously as actual compensation. It just isn't for real, and it's more of a headache for everyone, than anything else. When you are making a company, you can do as Ross Mayfield suggests and make the advisory board a useful and a strategic thing. But really, for me, my advisory board is a group of people that I talk with regularly, that I'm really so lucky to have helping me out, giving me precious time. While I will give stock to these advisors, they aren't thinking about the stock, but rather they care about helping me out. Some of them are famous for 15 bytes, and some of them are not. I asked them because I wanted to honor the contributions they'd made already and keep it going more formally.

I'd love to have their stock turn into something in a few years, a token for all their time and supportive help. A small gift for their enormous contributions at some critical moments. And that time doesn't including blogging. I don't need them to blog about Dabble and if it's going to cause problems for them, I'd rather they didn't. It's just unnecessary. But I do need their advice. And by calling them advisors, they get some stock. But it's token, a pittance, a gesture that doesn't begin to cover the help they are giving me.

They'd be better off if I took them out to dinner once in a while than for the stock they might someday get something for in the future. That is such a long way off.

I really think people need to chill out and get some perspective here. I mean, blogging is about being transparent, as the advisors of FON were. So as readers, you can decide what you think about their advisorship and disclosure, without the WSJ telling us the FON advisors are unscrupulous when they did in fact disclose. We readers are not robots believing everything we read with no critical thought. We see the disclosure and we take it into account in our mental calculations around the quality of information we get from any sources. So why make the FON advisors miserable for helping out.

If you want to change concentrations of power in the blogosphere, complaining about a few advisors won't do get us there. Point out the larger issues and then do something about them. That's constructive and hopefully very useful for us all. I would love to see A-Listers like Shelly Powers and Seth Finkelstein actually make something that changes the system. You both understand the problems well, but we need something constructive. Show us what you think would be the right way to change this situation, beyond people asking for links, because that isn't the answer. It's not scalable and links are a silly way to handle the demonstration of influence, at least all on their own. Other digital social gestures are needed and I'm looking forward to a greater solution than what folks have discussed in the last few days.

Notes from James Surowiecki's Talk at Intelligent Television

Intelligent Television conference info here.

1. Openness bridges all of these mechanisms: open source, p2p, shared work.
2. Intelligence is distributed rather than centralized: the knowledge is spread out in many locations
3. Bottom up works better than command and control mechanisms
-- people are better at understanding their own needs than the top
4. We are better off casting wide rather than narrow
-- don't know where the info is much of the time
5. Open access to creativity, knowledge -- benefits are greater the more people are involved
-- when people learn more, we learn more.. it's anti-rivalrous
6. Be very hesitant to filter who belongs to community
-- don't keep people out
7. People act better the more info they have

8. The internet allows us to become technically able to do so much more
-- distributed info and aggregation are so much more powerful
-- possibilities are immense

9. Different ways to tap into open systems
--obviously people using open systems to make money
-- Innocentive.. people go to register as a 'solver' where 10. You then get access to a problem set
----- if you solve a problem, you get a prize, but he company owns your solution

11. Systems that allow people to give ideas and innovation a piece at a time are interesting, because lots of people contribute. Prediction markets and prices work this way.

12. Can profit from an open content system.. leave everything open and free and then make money from talking about this stuff..

13. People find pleasure from the value of competition
-- from contributing to the growth of the pool of knowledge

14. Many of these systems are inefficient, because in a strict sense, they are redundant..
but the point is that even though this is the case, if we expand our ideas of efficiency, it's tremendously efficient.

15. What are the challenges to these systems?

Internal
-- problem with model in that a network or self organized model, it's difficult for individuals to contribute due to echo chamber effects...army ants .. work in ways where they do just what the ant is doing ahead of them.. if they start walking in a circle.. they actually die.. worry that if humans imitate others.. we will degrade because nothing new happens.. group loses collective intelligence.. drawing knowledge from just a few
-- challenge is to keep the ties in the networks loose.. and open and flowing

External
-- profound counter to our most deep seated ideas around authority, knowledge and expertise -- people have a fundamental desire to pick "the expert"
-- traditional need to develop a product, and then show it after it's out.. instead of working with people all along..
-- traditional needs to develop IP are challenged

16. Arthur Miller in the Harvard Law Review just wrote an article saying that what we need now is 'common law' for ideas.

17. Tom Bergeron -- host of dancing with the stars on why people like this.. because it is about
"wholeheartedly uniting our skills is the basis for all human interaction"

18. Collective systems may work better when there is an answer people think they can find, verses when a lead user or expert may be better at finding the right thing.

19.. Our imagining of the 'genius' is the failure to see that works of art are actually based on others ideas ... works of art always borrow from other works of art.

Microformats and Media

Last night I attended a sort of meet up for people Tara Hunt had invited me to, to talk about microformats and media. She had wanted to start with photos, I think because of Riya, but it became clear after talking a bit that similar elements apply to rich media whether the piece being discussed was a photo or a video or an audio piece. The group started out mostly on computers trying to do a group chat, but I didn't have a computer, so I tried typing notes on Josh Kinberg's computer, but the software wasn't recording everyone's comments and it wasn't all that constructive.

I pulled out my notebook (I hadn't brought my laptop) and started writing a short list of elements that are common across all media types, in terms of what elements users publish over and over either on services like Flickr (and other photo sites) or Blip.tv (or other video sites) or audio sites like iTunes. At this point, everyone put away their laptops (funny how the paper can trump the computer once in a while, and while I don't really do paper, except for my notebook, it works for me at times like this). We centered around the notebook and the common document we were discussing, which consisted of a growing list of my notes:

If you want to know who attended, there are photos on Flickr. But the interesting part for me was realizing what we could make with this microformat, for users to publish with, for the publishing tools like Structured Blogging, which takes microformats and makes them into something bloggers can publish through plugins or through other tools that will be built later.

Microformats, as Tantek explained, need to have a page on the MF wiki that shows use cases that cover 80% of what users do now (as a rule of thumb) though arguments can be made for less, if they are really useful (like tags which are much lower across all users). On the Microformats list, the way Tantek and Ryan run it, it's been hard to tell what they meant by examples. When they would make these requests for examples, and I would then look at what people post for the examples, it didn't make any sense to me. But after talking, I think I understand what they want.

It's like the difference between taxonomy and folksonomy. Microformats come out of bottom up user generated use cases. Where as media metadata formats like SMIL and MPEG come out of top down committees. Not that they are bad, we are using those top down formats too in my other work. But as with taxonomy and folksonomy, so with microformats and top down metadata. They both have value and they each come from very different use cases and points of view.

We agreed that the Media metadata page had examples, and yet, it was overgrown, needed pruning, focused on metadata from the top down, instead of examples of what users do now. So last night Tantek explained what they meant by examples specifically. For example, we need to literally cut and paste a blog post from a user that can be used as an 80% use case, to show something as an example. Fair enough. So now, we need to add these examples in a constructive way, in order to argue the media format elements and microformat need for media publishing. We can think about a short list of elements that users use most of the time, when putting some media online, whether it's a photo at a service, or on their own blogs, or a video or audio piece.

Those elements (from my notes last night) are in the first list, becuase they reflect what I see online, though I will go find stats and use cases to back these up, or argue that the 20% useage of something enriches the whole community and so how far that argument goes -- tags are an example of that.

Base elements:
* Title
* Html URL
* Media URL
* Tags
* Description or quotes (subsets of the object: a video quote and tags/description associated with it, a region annotation note for a photo, or the quote of a podcast and tags/description -- the detail for these subsets exists in the 'more info' section below)
* Creator
* License (defaults to copyright, if none exists, but it's there, by US law, and many other areas of the world)

and for audio and visual:
* Duration

Other info:
(This is not the same for all types of media, and is published by users in very limited ways in practice, or is captured from the device or service or in some way, invisible to the user, and therefore often depends on a service to pick it up.)

The second piece is figuring out the elements and schema that lie around those 80% use cases.

I don't think this is so hard now, despite how chaotic and crazy media metadata can be, where some of that is reflected on the media metadata page. Though that page is a very good attempt to organize the chaos. But I now have a picture of how to make this happen in my mind, that is simple, and gets us to a place where we reflect what users do in practice, bottom up. So, based on my notes last night, I'm going to try to fulfill Tantek's requirements, and see how far I get with it. Will update here with pages as they happen.

Dan Gillmor: It's Official

Dan mentioned that cool things were bubbling.. but now he's offically announced:

The Center for Citizen Media

It's one of those coasty deals:

He'll be working on "the grass roots media sphere", teaching a class at Berkeley next fall, holding meetings on both coasts on the topic, and helping journalism students and researchers with online emergent citizen journalism.

I'd say interface and usability for that kind of information is most important at this point. Making online information understandable to folks who are not bloggers or early adopters is hard, but having this kind of study be well focused for graduate students who will take what they learn with them into industry is critical.

Good luck Dan! It sounds great!

Tristian Louis on the Value of a Link

He's done the math (and the end of his post quoted below totally made me laugh):

Data for the rest of us?

In acquiring Weblogs Inc., AOL has now provided us with some numbers traditional media are willing to pay for a blog. Looking at the numbers above, one can try to guess at the value of a link from an external site. a single link on the weblogsinc network represents 0.002258559942180087 percent of the overall network.

At the different rumored price points from AOL, it looks as follows:

Link	$25 million value	30 million value	40 million value
1	$564.64	$677.57	$903.42

I don't know if those values are based on any real rationale but it's nice to dream up the value of one's blog based on this.

Should we now assume that traditional media companies are willing to pay between $500 and $1000 per site that links into a blog?

Not quite. The incremental value is in the size of the network and the underlying tools. Jason and Brian have been working on developing a blog authoring technology, called BlogSmith, that sits at the core of their network and one has to believe that AOL saw some value in the software too. However, one can easily say that blog valuations are going to be easier to make after this deal since it provides the first yardstick in that space.

Read the rest.. it's quite clever. You can't characterize the size of the network based on in-bound link counts, in part because there are at least 25 other digital social gestures that matter, 10 or so that we can currently count, and yet hardly any of the services are counting them and in part because just counting links doesn't mean very much. There are many other factors in terms of quality of each gesture. But still, I think Tristan has made a very funny post and you should check it out! A for effort and humor!

Metrics for Weighing Blogs

Last week I spoke at Bill Flitter's eBig monthly meeting on Blogs and RSS. My talk was about metrics and weighing blogs. Shel Holtz recorded my talk (thanks!) which is here (warning, giant mp3 follows that link) or see it here at the Hobson and Holtz Report.

Oh My

It's true. Ms. Manner's would be appalled.

All things mechanical..

...seemed to fail or their failures became apparent yesterday.

I got a beep on my phone indicating voice mail, but there was no ring. So I got into VM and found there were 50 messages from the past two weeks. Took me 20 minutes to listen to them. Thank you Cingular.

And if you called me in the past two weeks, I'm sorry, the calls were apprently not all ringing through and for those who left messages, neither were they getting to me quickly. And now they magically are again. Thank goodness for small favors. I guess it's a favor when you pay for service and you actually get it?

And the DSL, from SBC Global.. spotty to non-existant for most of the day yesterday.

And my car, at the shop for a regular checkup.. they replaced some sort of dual oxygen censor.. and now it appears one of the new censors was bad. So I have to go in again. But the 'check engine' light that came on yesterday while on the bridge was not fun.

Lastly, Firefox and moveable type 3.2 are not cooperating. Third time this has come up with the new version.. I otherwise love the new 3.2, it's organized, easy, and thank god they made it possible for me to customize the new entry windows.. so that it can exist at a reasonable size. But they have no info yet on keywords (what are they, how do they work, are they like categories, can i display them.. so i'm not using them til i can figure out the value). Hopefully, after three attempts, I'm still hoping to get this and my other post on Andrew Rasiej up there.. after all.. the election is tomorrow!

By the end of this day, I wished I'd stayed in bed.

Feedster and AOL

Well, the blog search news is hopping this week, as Feedster has now announced their Deal with AOL:

MyAOL

which will have RSS search and a news reader, along with some other stuff.

Congrats, guys. Nice work!

For the Vox Populi, Part II: A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work for Keyword Search

This is part II continuing from a post on URL search I did yesterday. It follows a post on how URL search and link counts are done by Bloglines (as an information search tool, not a news reader tool), Blogpulse, Feedster, Pubsub and Technorati. The third will cover subscription search (watchlist) performance, the fourth will look at special services and the fifth will look at spam and controls for it. The sixth will summarize and make recommendations about how to best use the services.

Keyword search

Keyword search is very different than URL search, from the user perspective.

URL lookups are more straightforward in terms of user motivation: a user looks up a URL to see everything that links to it. No matter the search motivation, the user still wants to see all links, and all five blog aggregation tools that I reviewed in the last post, give results in reverse chronological order, with some kind of link count. So whether users are doing an ego surf (looking up their own URLs) or checking out who links to a client, their own company, the New York Times or the post of a blogger they are interested in checking influence or conversationalness, the results in that chronological form satisfy these different needs, together with the number of links, at least at first. It may be that a user then wants to sort the results to see more 'authoritative' posts first, from the results list, but that is more often a secondary need, and not currently offered by any of these five services. Since blogging and RSS search are very much about the 'aliveness' of the activity, serving results in reverse chron order does satisfy most user needs (this observation is based on user testing I did that looked at search results on URLs, keywords and topic browsing -- the last of which doesn't exist yet, though I built a front end system that did it, and tested it repeatedly with users).

Conversely, keyword search is harder to get right in terms of user expectations. First, user motivations for searching are different and spread more evenly across a more complicated set of goals than with URL search. Does the user want a quick taste of what is out there around a particular topic? Or do they want every instance of a keyword match, with an accurate count of those instances? Do they want to see only the most relevant posts that use the keywords, or the most recent? How each results is laid out is also an issue in satisfying user's search needs, because we have all been trained to map our information expectations, consciously or not, to Google keyword search results. They have us viewing keyword search results in very particular ways. And yet, the part of the web that is alive is very different than that which is static. So keyword search results for live data are naturally different, and yet we find ourselves first looking through our Google eyes that see relevance first, before we refocus on the live, and chronologically ordered results, that may be formated a little differently.

Below is an image with screenshots of Google, in order to compare it to Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse and Bloglines (again, Pubsub does not have historical search, so they have no results to compare for this test). Each of the four blog search tools were captured with the first result for the term: napsterization. Google results give context about the number of results, but there is no indication of time. All four blog search results note the number of matches they see, but also include the time of a post. Bloglines has a "subscribe" button to pull the feed into its newsreader and Blogpulse and Feedster offer XML buttons for putting the feed into the user's newsreader. Blogpulse offers to track the conversation and provides a profile of the blogger for additional context.

But note the format of all of them. Everyone maps to a format that places a link at the top of the entry that corresponds to the except below with the match. Feedster and Technorati bold the search term as does Google. Bloglines and Blogpulse don't. Below the matching excerpt, they all place a link to the blog, and follow with context they find relevant. Google shows the size of the page, the others follow with dates and times of posting, and Technorati gives the number of links to the blog as an indicator of authority.

But the point is, blog search results are similar to web search results, with some additional information presented. The order of the results is different, though, in an attempt to meet most users' expectations and goals with the information, and more closely match the results with what is interesting about blog information. Google serves what they believe is the most relevant information, based on page rank. Blog search companies give what they see as most relevant, which are results are in reverse chronological order.

The picture below is simply a way to visually compare results:

Additionally, I've included another PDF chart comparing how the five blog search companies handle keyword search. Note that Pubsub does prospective search, so their value is in feeds of keyword searches an not historical information. I'll also update this post and chart if additional information comes out, as I've been doing with my first post in this series. Future posts will summarize and give more sense of the value of these search tools, but I'm focusing on how these things are done, and more long terms results of search quality here.

KeyWord Search Comparison Chart

Comparing search completeness, timeliness and cleanness

Right now, Doc Searls is running a short term look at blog search, including URLs and Keywords: The Sam Test and Your Findage May Vary. He is looking for the speed and inclusiveness of delivered results across several services. But comparing just the services I can review with historical search, I can see that Blogpulse, Feedster and Technorati seem to have very high, accurate results, with little duplication. Feedster has more results in the same period (48 hours) because they mix del.icio.us results into their search results instead of separating them as Technorati does. I'll be curious to see what the counts are, based on Doc's criteria. But my own counts show about 45 results talk about this in the past couple of days, and it appears that Blogpulse, Feedster and Technorati each have almost all the results, and Doc reports that Technorati was able to grab them the fastest.

Compare this to a very specific survey I did last fall that encompassed a week of results (not dependent on the speed posts were pulls into each search service but rather looking at duplication and coverage of the activity across posts). In that survey, Blogpulse won hands down. But since then, Technorati has redone keyword search, removed the 7 day result limit, and while results only go back to last October (the start of the redone database) their new keyword search is doing very well and shows dramatic improvement. In Doc's recent test, Technorati wins in the speed/coverage test. In my tests, which were based on completeness and cleanness, Technorati and Blogpulse both did well, but if it's true that Technorati was faster, I didn't notice because enough time had passed that Blogpulse had parity with similarly complete results and as clean of results. Also, Technorati has reduced duplication over the past 10 months, bringing it more in line with Blogpulse's cleaner result set from last year. But it appears from Doc's test that Technorati is now faster than Blogpulse, a few hours after an event, to pull in posts. Overall, Technorati's keyword service shows marked improvement and does very well.

The best interface, with most interesting options again has to go to Blogpulse, which has links to tracking the conversation (links to a post instead of just links to a blogger) and profiles for bloggers, as well as a clean easy-to-read style.

Additionally, in various test searches, Feedster still appears to mix blog posts, top down news and del.icio.us data together, though it did not appear to be as much of a problem as it was 10 months ago. Depending on your goals, this practics may or may not be helpful. And as the keyword survey below shows, it was not helpful for that particular use case, because repeated Associated Press articles cluttered the results so badly. However, Feedster did get the originating post in last year's survey, which was difficult, and no other service got.

In contrast to the current tests, below is the 10 month old survey of two searches for: kryptonite lock, and kryptonite bike lock, across 4 blog search services. Searches compared results to see which service provided the best user experience and results. The user task was to grok where this meme had started and to get a sense of what people were saying.

Search Comparison Summary dated 9/19/04

Kryptonite locks became a major story for bloggers this past week, when a bike rider (whose bike was stolen because his kryptonite lock was compromised with a bic pen), made a video of how to pick the lock. Bloggers picked up the story with speed by Tuesday 9/14/04, though things appear to have originated from a biking forum post from 9/12/04 that then was blogged on 9/13/04 (appears to be this one). That video appears on many blogs starting around Tuesday of this week. So keyword search for "kryptonite lock" and "kryptonite bike lock" (searches were NOT done with quotes) works across all services to find out what's going on with this story in the blogosphere. Also, by 9/17/04 (Thursday), the story appeared in newspapers across the country, both original stories by those news outlets, as well as by AP and Reuters stories.

All four searches returned results in reverse chronological order. Only Feedster got the originating blog post from Anarchocyclist. Blogpulse had the cleanest result set, with the fullest set of returns, though not complete. Many of the major blogger's posts were missing from the Blogpulse set, but they were also missing from Technorati's returns.

Blogpulse had by far the cleanest results sets (only three duplicate posts out of 160 and 241), cleanest and easiest to read presentation, no top down news posts (Feedster had around 70% of results from AP, Reuters and other news services and it was hard to distinguish them), so groking the blogosphere's take on this topic was easiest with them. Blogpulse had all results listed by blog post title, hyperlinked to the posts, that were spotchecked. Blogpulse gave the best overall experience and returned results data, despite missing some posts.

When blogs posts across the four services were isolated from the news stories that were listed in say, Feedster, as just another post, all four services did give a picture of what was happening across blogs regarding people's thoughts about the locks. However, the easiest and fastest way to do that was on Blogpulse as stated. Feedster's extreme mixing of top down news stories with blog posts may satisfy some searchers, because the order is most recent first and the news stories are more recent (followed by blog posts). But the actual experience was that the Feedster returns for this kind of search where results might produce both types of entries was not great, because the results pages resembled Yahoo news, and therefore getting the blogosphere take was much more difficult.

Technorati is giving a suboptimal experience, both because of the limited results returned due to forced phrase search, the extreme amount of duplication of posts, the lack of title hyperlinks that returned the correct post every single time, and the presentation.

Results in detail:

1. Technorati returns 41 results for -- kryptonite lock -- and 18 results for -- kryptonite bike lock --

Of the 41 results, 40 are actually shown (41 was somehow missing), 2 were exact repeats of nanopublishing.weblogs.inc and 12 were from badassgeek.com from "1 day 13 hours ago" and 9 were from "20 hours and 8 minutes ago." Those 21 "posts" were identical and obvious by skimming through them. The net result was that of the 40 shown posts, 19 were unique and 21 were repeats of 2 of the 19 unique posts. Because the search default is for phrases, these searches, not put into quotes, still return results in quotes and this severely limits the value of the search. As an example, the originating blog post that appears to have started this meme in the blogosphere uses the term: kryptonite U-locks, and Technorati's search would not therefore pick up this post for the phrase: kryptonite lock, though other search services did. Just to test, kryptonite U-locks did not return the Anarchocyclist post from 9/13, which it should have, but it did bring up 3 results that did not appear in the other two searches.

Earliest posts are from 2 or 3 days ago for the 'kryptonite bike lock' search and 4 to 5 days ago for 'kryptonite lock' search because of the phase search limitations. Posts do not show where the meme originated, and start well into when the blogosphere discovered this issue. Posts are shown 20 per page so paging through was not onerous.

2. Feedster returns 410 results for -- kryptonite bike lock - and 663 results for -- kryptonite lock

300 of the results for kryptonite bike lock were from Tuesday 9/14 forward and all posts before this were not about the bike locking picking issue. Feedster is also showing major news stories mixed with blog posts, and the only way to tell is either from the icon they use: a large blue square with a white "i" in the middle, or by reading each source. However, they use this for many informational blog posts as well, and so reading the source became a time consuming task to figure out what is coming from a blog and what comes from top down media. In fact, more than 70% of the "posts" were actually mainstream media articles, and if the goal was to find out what the blogosphere was saying, on an issue that appears in both places with lots of "press," Feedster was making this goal difficult. In fact the returned results looked very similar to a search on news.yahoo.com for the same terms. Percentages were similar for the 663 returned results on kryptonite lock. Feedster allows any instances of the searched words appearing in any order to be included in the returned results. Spotchecking post title links produced some posts that were not the ones Feedster returned on results pages.

Earliest posts go back months because they do not limit search to 7 days, but the older posts are not about the lock picking story. Posts were shown 10 per page, so paging through 30-50 pages was onerous to get to the beginning of the blog meme.

3. Bloglines returned 212 results for -- kryptonite lock and 129 for kryptonite bike lock

Numerous duplicates of posts were found. 4 of 1 post, 12 of another were duplicates -- because there were so many and so many pages of posts, I didn't do an exact count, but every page of results had numerous repeat posts, however, one post from Slashdot had over 40 entries as individual posts, and I would guess 40-50% of the entries were duplicates. Also, Bloglines has some AP and Reuters stories mixed into results, though not the 70% returned results that Feedster did. Bloglines had about 25% news stories, though they did not distinguish between these "posts" and blog posts, and it was even more difficult to tell them apart than the Feedster results. Bloglines allows any instances of the words appearing in any order to be counted as a result. Spot checking the title hyperlinks produced posts that were not the ones Bloglines listed.

Bloglines first story is from Eyebeam on Tuesday 9/14/05 for a blogpost on breaking the locks with a pen. This was not the first post, but was very early in the meme. Posts are shown 20 per page so paging through was not onerous.

4. Blogpulse returns 241 for kryptonite lock and 160 kryptonite bike lock Blogpulse had very few duplicate posts (maybe 3 which was amazing compared to the other three services), and no top down news stories. 143 of the 160 returned results for kryptonite bike lock, and 224 of the 241 posts for kryptonite lock were all blog posts, all on the bic pen topic, all matching their respective searches. Presentation was clean and easiest to read. Blogpulse had all results listed by blog post title, hyperlinked to the posts. All spotchecked post titles were correctly linked to the actual post returned in their results.

Blogpulse did not get the originating post for this meme, nor did the search for Kryptonite Bike Locks get the Engadget posts that kicked off the top down news and many of the hundred or so blog posts that followed this week. However the kryptonite lock search did pull the Engadget posts. Lots of Live Journal results; maybe 50% of entries are from Live Journal bloggers.

Earliest posts go back months before the bic pen results. Blogpulse returns 10 posts per page, so paging through 16 and 24 pages was a bit onerous.

Check out Newsweek: Getting down with the masses

Just saw this on Newsweek:

Scroll down.. on their main page to see it on the right side. Pulling in bloggers to contrast their thoughts with Newsweek's reporting, and showing what bloggers write about Newsweek articles and writers is a very cool idea. Nice!

Also, congratulations to Technorati on providing data to Newsweek.

For the Vox Populi: A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work

UPDATED: Recently, there has been some blogosphere discussion about different blog search services. People have been asking me for a year and a half to compare them, and I've been reluctant. However, after last weeks confusion, I decided that if folks like Robert Scoble are having difficulty comparing the search results of different services that we've been using for some time, we really needed to get a few things clear for users. Also, Doc Searls suggested that it was about time. And the other day, he said it again in person.

I'm going to do this as a six part series, the first of which is below, on how services track links to blogs. The second will be on key word search, the third will cover subscription search (watchlist) performance, the fourth will look at special services and the fifth will look at spam and controls for it. The sixth will summarize and make recommendations about how to best use the services. I picked the five services I look at every day: Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, Blogpulse and Pubsub, and so I'm familiar with them over time. I see watchlists or alerts via RSS feeds from all but Bloglines, of both URL and keyword searches, many of which are duplicate searches that allow me to also track how the services do with their searches. Note that I'm not reviewing Bloglines as a newsreader, partly because I use Netnewswire for the most part, with Bloglines as one of my backup readers, and partly because there is no comparison to the other services because they are not news readers at all.

Additionally, Blogpulse had this write up in Marketing Vox, suggesting it might be a Technorati Killer in the estimation of a blogger they were quoting. However, because what Blogpulse covers is fundamentally different, and their philosophies about how to age information is different, they are not so similar when comparing results of URL searches for inbound links. Depending on the user's needs, one or the other service may suit those needs better. However, due to some of the additional features Blogpulse is now offering, it is doing some of the things that bloggers and others really want from other blog aggregation companies, yet aren't being offered, like rank, citations and recent posts. So in this sense, they are different and more interesting, if Blogpulse information is what you are looking for about you or others you want to analyze.

Finally, Adam Pennenberg notes that these kinds of services are like public utilities, so it seems like a good time to compare and contrast the services.

This exercise is an attempt to give readers and users of the services a comparison of how the services work so that they can take best advantage of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses in order to track URLs, keywords, other special services, and alerts or subscriptions or watchlists (the services each use different terminology in order to differentiate themselves but users tell me the terminology is just terribly confusing and they wish that as an industry we would settle on one term and use it across all the services and then get on to figuring out how to provide the service better).

Matt Hurst of Intelliseek (parent to Blogpulse) has a post on evaluating blog search services which is very informative. It includes information on search generally.. which I think applies very much to evaluating key word search, which will be covered in my next post. URL search is a little more straightforward in that people want to see everything that is linking to the URL they are looking up. But he makes some excellent points.

In disclosure, I should say that to one degree or another, I'm friends with people at all of these companies, as well as having worked for Technorati in the past, and currently a member of its advisory board.

URL Searches for Inbound Links

Two weeks ago, Scoble compared the inbound link counts for Dave Sifry's blog on Technorati (735 links at the time of Scoble's post) and Bloglines (2,644 links at the time of Scoble's post). However, the way they are contrasted, isn't actually comparable. First, Technorati's count is actually for inbound sites or sources. In other words, you can have 10 links from a blog, but that blog counts once as a 'site'. So Dave has 735 blogs that have linked to him at least once, at this moment in time. Technorati also only counts links and sites from blogs that have a link on the front page. Therefore, if a bloggers blogs, which bloggers tend to do, their old posts scroll off the front pages and therefore the links in those old posts go off the Technorati count at the same time. Blogroll links stay in the counts because they are permanently on the front pages of blogs, but if a blogger's post links to another blog, that link only gets counted so long as it's on the linking blog's top home page.

Bloglines on the other hand, gives a total link count, for all Blogline's history. If a blogger is linked to 10 times, in the history of Bloglines aggregation of links, those links count as ten, towards Dave's Bloglines total. Bloglines doesn't give a base count of sources doing the linking. Also, Bloglines shows you everything since they started tracking blogs, so Dave's first link goes back to a post on August 22 2002. Technorati would age that post off their link counts, since that blog no longer shows the post on the front page (it long ago scrolled off the page). However, I wasn't able to look at Dave's first link on Technorati, because the service kept returning error messages about high search volumes, so I can't compare their first result to Blogline's first result.

Note also that Blogline's total for Dave's blog is now, two weeks after Scoble's post, 2730 links verses Technorati's total sources (each blog counts once) is 712. Bloglines is higher that two weeks ago, because it has an aggregate count of all links. Technorati is lower, because some blog posts have scrolled of those blog's front pages, and until new links are made, Dave's source count might continue to fall. And based on each company's information philosophy, this is actually as it should be, and is correctly counted using each methodology. In fact, the difference is very useful, because one can compare Dave's current activities, blogroll and post links at 712 from Technorati to his historical link count at Bloglines of 2730, maybe discounted a little for duplication of posts. My assessment might be that Dave is currently a heavily linked to blogger, but three years ago, didn't have so many links, and has grown over time, in an upswing to say, around 2000 links total over the history of his blog. Probably this has occurred because of the growth of Technorati, and as its CEO and the place Dave blogs about Technorati, his blog has had it's link counts grow as more attention is paid to Technorati.

On the other hand, my blog has 1012 links from Bloglines over the past couple of years (discount 20% for dups) but 205 site links in Technorati. My assessment might then be that Napsterization is more of a steady blog.. with 800 links over the past two or so years, and since I already know that the blog had similar link counts a year ago.. that it's more conversational, linking out and in at similar rates over the past year or so. Not much upswing but a steady conversation ongoing.

Below, in chart form, is a comparison of Technorati, Bloglines (as an information search tool, not a news reader tool), Feedster, Blogpulse and Pubsub. The chart is a PDF (blog software doesn't render html charts so well... but if you have a suggestion about getting this data into my post, please email me at mary@hodder.org) but as feedback for this post comes in, I will update both the post and chart and note the updated time and date. I'm going to treat this survey as somewhat of a wiki, so that I can incorporate feedback to make this the most accurate survey possible.

Please note the footnotes, as they explain additional information about specific categories of information and how specific services work in those categories of activities. Also, note that some services perform poorly in the URL lookup category, but their usefulness will become apparent in the keyword category, or for subscription search or for other special services. Please don't write anyone off due to a poor showing here in the URL section. All five of these services are very valuable, as they each show us different things, and frankly, for my information needs, I want and use all of them each day to track myself, my projects, companies I consult for, and all of my areas of interest, which are numerous. Often, the combination is the only way to get an accurate picture of what is happening online across blogs and RSS feeds.

NOTE: I've updated the file just now to take into account revised and clarified information about Blogpulse and Technorati. Blogpulse has a bug in their URL search, wherein, if the http:// is not at the front of the URL, very little information is returned. And so rather than 9 links for napsterization, there are 477. And Technorati, I wanted to point out, does not count links in its link counts that have scrolled off the front pages of blogs, but they do still show search results that match keywords that have scrolled off. So users may see older results, but not see them in link counts.

And additional update regarding Bloglines. They noted that they only serve results for searches from blogs that at least one subscriber has in the list of subscriptions. This has been added to the chart under information philosophy.

PDF file of comparison of how Blog search work.

Also, please use the comments below to tell me about areas that need more information, or suggestions. I'd like this to be as accurate as possible and will correct or update with information as I find it, or it's sent to me. Thanks very much for suggestions.

Oh.. and you have to answer a question to comment.. so please remember to do that, or the comment system gives you that obtuse answer that your comment is 'of questionable content' which isn't really true.. just that haven't answered the question. Thanks!

Welcome to The Vlogosphere

It is different here. I'm dipping in my toe, have been since December.. and really, I've only made one vlog post myself. I learn both from watching others and doing this myself. The read/write nature of video is very very different than text or the genre of blogging.

What's interesting to me is how I'm now discovering the vlogosphere as I once did with the blogosphere about four years ago.. back when there were maybe 100k blogs... I had no idea what I was looking at because it was all mysterious then: the format, the linking, blogrolls, and the people, online trust and references. There were nuggets of magic, people who came through asynchronously to share and converse both information and points of view that were personal, passionate, deeply held and often far more expert and full of breadth than legacy media. I was taken, I knew there was something there.. but I couldn't figure it out until I started blogging at bIPlog and realized the linking was creating many trails of conversation; it was writers following those links, extending the conversation still further, that was making something totally new and exciting and relevant. Yes there were and are diarists, essayists, as well as others who put out bad information, and so I'm speaking here of those who blog about topics in a conversational way only. A blog is a tool as we've said a million times.. so let's not go back to that old skirmish. The point is, there are some kinds of blogs that create a conversation in blogging, through discussion and links and comments and still more posts, that are compelling, and give free speech a big push over the old analog world. Fast forward through four years of arguing the stupidity of blogging verses journalism because we don't need to go through that again either. We know they are complimentary and different, and need each other to survive.

But now.. vlogging as a low-transaction cost production medium, with reasonable bandwidth and storage costs, and vloggers with time and interest are creating a new kind of story telling that is very different than the text blog entries I can search, skim and remix aggregated by various services like Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub and Blogpulse. Vlog-posts are little movies, or a post wrapped around a little movie. One cannot link from within a movie, but one can reference, remix, explore. I know at last count there was a directory of vloggers that listed about 200 of them. So it's small now, but considering the power of video and the time it takes to make vlog-posts.. it's a pretty good start. I also thing there are probably many more folks online making video.. that aren't included there.

The ways we determine conversation in vlogs will be more along the lines of visual and aural references. Even if we had a transcript to search them, we would not get context or what is shown visually or in the sound beyond the words, nor would we get the references from one piece to the next, as we can now mouse over a text blog's links to see intended references. Vlog references must be viewed in order to see them. So conversation in media, just like in the analog world, for now, will not be tracked by counting hypertext links or key words. It will be different, and I wonder how we will show those vlog-posts conversing or remixing media in meaningful ways.

As I discover vloggers, get to know their work, see what they are thinking about as they explore and forge ahead with their vlogging work, I find myself presented with similar sensations of discovery and mystery as I did when I first was discovering blogs. And yet, because it is a video medium, the experience is different, I'm making the references between their pieces and the referenced subjects in my mind, I'm taken into a story that is not skimmable but rather gives me sound and visual narrative as a complete picture, where I see clips that may quote from others, but are no different in presentations from any of the other clips that may not be quoted. This kind of recognition was something I did in my early days of blog reading, making connections. But it was easy for all those aggregation services to make the connections for me, as they counted up links and made searchable key words in the texts. But who will be the Technorati or Pubsub of vlogging? What will we do with this medium to transform it from an industrial art that cannot be recognized computationally except by humans?

It's a whole other kind of media literacy, of understanding digital sharing of borrowed work, of seeing what remix and re-expression is about. This is true both for us, as viewers and makers of video, and for the computers we want to aid us in searching and discovering video and video conversation.

I also wonder, will broadcast and narrative legacy video producers claim that vloggers aren't 'real' in the same ways journalists have about bloggers? Or will we have learned enough to get past that to the much more interesting question of where the relationships between the top down and bottom up content with lie and how they might get on .. whether and when it will be complementary or contradictory?

The MIT Survey of Bloggers

is here...

B2B Blogging Successes

At conferences like RSS Syndicate and Bloggercon, people hold sessions about how to make money with blogging. Sometimes they mean for the company a blog represents, by running ads in the RSS streams, or by selling (God forbid) the streams. For me, blogging is more like being in a civic club, where the benefits are not direct, but rather come in other forms like meeting interesting people and learning. However, there are people doing well at making money blogging, essentially.

One thing I see over and over, as I mention the few blogs that are making money, is complete disinterest in them because people don't seem to understand the model or what's possible.

Esme Vos at Muniwireless.com is has complete editorial control over her topic blog on municipal wireless, but she also runs ads at the bottom of pages, has a company profiles page where vendors pay to list themselves, and she sends out a weekly newsletter with ads. She's given up lawyering for the time because because it's so lucrative. In addition, she's thinking of doing a conference on municipal wireless next winter which should also make a little money for her time.

She's also creating databases for future ad models as well... but these are currently in development and under wraps. This will further match B2B entities to their benefit, without compromising editorial integrity, which Esme is something she very strictly controls.

The point is, she's making money, but specializing in a niche topic, doing really good editorial that no one can buy off, and selling services to vendors on *her* terms, which means they only get so far in, the information is fairly distributed to them, and it's something they need, so they pay.

Another example is Schizophrenia.com by Brian Chico. Chico is running a central site for people interested in this topic, which means he can sell ads from pharmaceutical companies.. and apparently he's doing quite well.

What's common here are high quality and well written content, high editorial integrity, consistent topic discussions, and good business practices monitizing appropriately the parts of the site that can support the editorial stuff.

Baby bloggers are much more fun

They have no constraints.. they are less known.. and they don't have as many relationships usually.. so when they see something or hear it, they blog it and it's fun.

Blogging for a while, and working in tech, I won't blog anyone who's paid me money, unless I was an employee.. so Technorati is okay, but I'm just not comfortable blogging clients. And then there's all the secrets people tell you, and well.. those are offlimits as well.

So I'm telling you, I'm officially boring. Mainly because of these constraints.. it's just hard sometimes to say what I really think, but maybe for other reasons as well. Geez.

Joi notes something about being boring as well.. and he may be for this reason too. Don't know.

RSS Syndicate: Martin Nisenholtz and Doc Searls

Yesterday, Martin Nisenholtz of NYTimes talked about design issues and information online. Specifically, he stated this design problem: showing serendipity and showing organization.

I love this. Two years ago, I heard him speak, and interface, social information issues, design, were not on the table.

He scrapped his speech in favor of talking off the cuff with everyone about yesterday's announcement about TimesSelect for $50 a year for Op-Ed and news columnists, and a few other things.

He justified this charge as needing to cover the the cost of reporting.

Doc is now talking about the 'inevitable end of print' and how the NYTimes should charge for the new stuff, because it's timely. The old stuff 'lines birdcages' and therefore because the archives only make $1 million a year now (compared to the $1.3 billion a year they have in revenue), charging for archives is a folly.

In fact, charging for content in these ways, I think, is a folly, no matter whether it's old or new. Because you remove yourself from the conversation by having articles behind the firewall, where it can't be linked to, and it's only for a few people. But information economics is about having the network effect where information matters the most because the most people see it and use it.

Btw, I think this is Doc's best talk.

RSS Syndicated: Biz Models for RSS

I'm at this conference, RSS Syndicate, at a panel called New Pathways to Profits: Exploring Business Models. Amos Schwartzfarb, of Work.com, Alex Williams of Corante and Paul Forster of Indeed.com are talking with Mark Harmon.

So, Forster just suggested that one business model might be to have a conference blogger doing regular updates, and then charge for those, via RSS.

Say what? How bout that's a value add to make the conference better. And what about all of the rest of us who live blog.. are we competitors in that model?

And Forster just talked about sponsored job results? But not with ads. Is that like sponsored search results? I really love those.

Consumers, markets, monitization. Over and over. Wo.

Okay. As Doc just blogged:

Listening to a panel talking about "monetizing RSS feeds" with advertising, among other forms of "content" they "pour" into a "stream" for an "audience," yada yada yada blah blah blah... arf.

I say.. guys, you're in the matrix. You need to take the red pill, and get off the consumer rant.

Ps. this is freely live blogged for your pleasure. No ads. Just in the moment. Enjoy.

Adam Pennenberg Column Republished: With Credit Card Fraud The Merchant Pays

This is open sourced journalism.. Adam wrote this column but he can't run it on Wired because his column is on online media and this is not an online media issue. So here is it.. published openly.

Please republish at will.

With Credit Card Fraud The Merchant Pays
By Adam L. Penenberg

Lawrence Comras, owner and operator of Greenhome.com, figured out an elegant solution to credit card fraud. Unfortunately it worked so well, he almost went out of business -- and therein lies a cautionary tale for any merchant who has set up shop on the internet.

Greenhome, founded five years ago, is a small scale Bed, Bath and Beyond for the environmentally conscious (think Mother Jones readers). Products include appliances "that keep your home free from toxins and pollution" and "minimize your energy consumption;" apparel (loads of hemp); furniture constructed from "sustainably harvested trees" or "post-consumer plastics;" and for the kids: toys, bedding, clothes and art supplies that are free of toxic chemicals. With a low overhead -- Comras runs Greenhome out of his Bay Area garage -- and a growing demand for all natural products, he has created a nice niche business.

But as any online merchant can tell you, there is an awful lot of credit card fraud. And who pays? Unfortunately, the merchant. So while you have to hire a bank to authorize credit card transactions, if the card turns out to be phony, you're the one stuck with the bill.

For instance, in 2002, Greenhome got fleeced for a few thousand dollars in fraudulent charges. Someone purchased three flat screen computer monitors ("They take a tenth of the materials to make, Comras says, which means "they take up less space in landfills.") Only later did Comras find out that the card had been stolen. When Comras reviewed the transaction, he learned that the zip code didn't match. But it went through anyway. That's because all it takes for authorization is for the credit card number and expiration date to match. Even if the street address and Zip code don't, the bank typically OKs the transaction.

Before this, Comras hadn't given much thought to credit card fraud. But he realized he faced a significant problem. The approval process was completely binary: yes or no, yet he didn't have access to all the data he required to ensure a smooth transaction. Comras realized there was almost no limit to how much money he could be liable for if he were hit with a flurry of fraudulent transactions.

But being something of a geek, Comras came up with a way to combat the
problem. He set up a system that would rely on preauthorization, much like the system hotels use when they ask for a credit card when you check in. In Greenhome's case, it would ping the credit card account for $1. Of course, almost everyone will have $1 available in his account. But in the process, Comras would learn whether the zip code and address match the credit card number and expiration date. If it didn't, Greenhome would reject the transaction.

In a sense, Comras was able to code a program to instantly pre-authorize transactions before the bank authorized them. And all it cost him was 35 cents a transaction – the same the bank charged to authorize them. For 70 cents a sale, plus the usual 3 percent credit card charge all merchants pay, Comras thought he was protected.

It worked well -- for a while. Then earlier this year, Bank One customers started calling, asking why they were being charged a $1 transaction fee. Someone was running stolen credit cards through his system at the rate of about one a minute. It was very methodical. Maybe automated, maybe not. The perpetrator ran about 30,000 of them through the site in one month. And for each one, Comras was charged 35 cents. That wiped out every penny of profit he earned that month.

He called his bank, which had helped him engineer his credit card fraud solution in the first place, and demanded it not charge him this fee. Greenhome had been proactive, trying to help prevent fraud, he argued. Yet his bank refused to let him off the hook.

Comras' theory is, "It's possible that the banks have done the calculus and it's more in their interest to force the merchants to put whatever they want through because the banks can charge more when there is not a match." What he means is that the banks charge a slightly higher rate for transactions when the zip code doesn't match, yet they don't inform the merchants.

In other words, the banks don't care, since they make more money on
fraudulent transactions anyway.

So let the seller beware

Friday night, 6-9pm Citizen Journalism Event in SF

Friday night (YES, the 13th!) at Varnish Fine Art 77 Natoma street between 1st and 2nd St. and Mission and Howard.

This event celebrates and supports two things:
1. support for Dan Gillmor's Citizen Journalism project and the conversation in general
2. celebration and support for JD Lasica, who's book, Darknet, came out yesterday according to his website .. or Amazon says 4/15 but whatever.. it's still fantastic as he's worked long and hard on this book about the Darknet and remix culture!

Congratulations JD!!!!

And look forward to seeing all you citizen journalists on Friday.

Comments are working now!

Switched from Typekey and MT Blacklist, to SpamLookup. So the answer to the comment question, just in case you decide to leave one and don't know, is 'napster.'

Comment away!

Existential Parisienne Blogging Party

Tomorrow. At the French Sentate.

300 bloggers. The conference is just a pretense for us to get together to blog, no?

Halley Suitt, for her panel tomorrow on Corporate Blogging, was thinking of being very Jean Paul Sartre, which would mean her panel would only IM chat, silently, while the audience chat over IRC.

It reminds me of that play.. from the 50's.. where the curtain opened, and a baby cries off stage.. and then 20 minutes go by.. with nothing onstage and no sound, then the last gasps of death.. and then silence. The curtain closes. And it's all very existential. But I digress. C'est la vie.

Did I mention, it's raining and sunny at the same time, here in Paris? See the photos here. Oh, and I'm here to connect with people who blog or have EU companies with social media enterprises. And eat the amazing food. And it is amazing.

Saturday night blog party

Was a great success.. mostly because Gregory Brown who had not read blogs before left with a blog and four posts. Photos here and here.

Directory of Feeds?

Check out this press release on Nooked making a directory of RSS feeds.... Yes.. I can understand that desire for this sort of thing. Categories include: Arts & Humanities, Entertainment, Recreation & Sport, Technology, Automotive, Government, Reference, Business, Health, Regional, Education, News & Media, Science. Yes, that covers the entire world of RSS at Nooked sees it. And yes, we are again left feeling that top down categorization is lacking, but none the less, they say:

Nooked is also inviting businesses to submit their RSS feeds to the Nooked RSS Directory, which will provide a useful means of increasing their RSS subscribers.

Reminds me of a story a friend tells about how in 1993, his secretary maintained a directory of all websites.. and so whenever anyone would make a new site, they would fax her the URL, so she could add it to the list. Then one day, some guys came by, asking about the list, and she mentioned it to my friend, who forgot about it. Later it turned out to be Jerry Yang at Yahoo. Was the basis for their hierarchical list.

The point is, though, that we cannot make lists of RSS feeds. We have to have search for them, and discovery. There is no way a list is scalable, categorizable, or anything else.

More Interesting Stuff This Week

Still catching up. Got no sleep Friday night, and ended up with a bad cold. In bed working.. but hopefully I'll make my meeting this afternoon. Oh and did I mention, a snow storm is rolling into NYC .. supposed to be slow moving, and so the airlines are reporting on their websites that flights may not go as planned today or tomorrow. Yeah. Did this delay thing out of here last month and now it appears I'm doing it all again. So it's snowing out the window.. lovely .. it reminded me of more things I'd meant to blog the last few days:

A podcast on the napsterization of TV (12.47 mb mp3, from Webtalk radio). One interesting point is that when the Supernova site was shut down a few months ago, it was over the distribution of movies and music, but the prosecutors didn't touch the TV aspects because of the perception that TV is free anyway and they didn't want to get into that argument. It was just easier to deal with the obvious movie and music copy-written content being distributed. They go off into podcasting about 20 minutes in.. or so.. so the title is a bit of a misnomer for the last 2/3.

Also, Adam Penenberg wrote last Thursday about the lack of attention the Wall Street Journal gets online.. because nobody can link to them. Adam and I talked about this a few months ago.. when I was at Technorati and he interviewed me for an article in August about the service. I mentioned that while the NY Times has tons of links, and is one of the most "authoritative" sources online, the WSJ is non-existent.. as far as linking and discussion attention go from bloggers, because they are a walled garden. I've blogged about it for a long time.

Adam takes an interesting view.. not about linking, though he does quote JD about the WSJ's lack of linkability, but rather the effects of this. Adam says that people are not finding the WSJ in google searches, or hearing it talked about, and so the WSJ is in danger of becoming irrelevant. And this may not be very reversible, if things continue as they are, because the WSJ.com biz model is based on the walled garden/paid subscription model. Their competitors like Forbes are free online, sans registration even, and therefore, it's allowed Forbes to get pretty entrenched as the source for online business news.

Wordpress Upgrade Party

Stopped by Matt's place last night, for his upgrade to 1.5 party.

Om Malik had just arrived into town from DEMO, and lots of other folks were around, including Niall Kennedy, Tantek Celik, Sylvia Paull, Ana Vasconcelos, Min Jung Kim, among many others.

Lot's of folks sitting around on the floor and at the table blogging, chatting.. taking photos and posting them online.

Great time Matt! Thanks!

Blogging News...

Elise Bauer just updated her Weblog Tools Market analysis today.. or rather published the results today. There is so much information analysis, I'm sure this took many more days than today to do. This chart shows the percentages of tool use based upon an analysis of Google links.

And Six Apart went live with their new site.

Kudos to both!!

Wink

I'm here at the Emerging Technology conference put on by the Media Center. Mark Fletcher is talking about Bloglines... introducing himself, his company and the recent news.

"One of the worst kept secrets on the web," said with a little smile on the Ask Jeeves acquisition of Bloglines.

Also, for fun, at the hotel, 800 people are arriving tomorrow for a "who wants to be a millionaire" conference.. unrelated to ours. Should be fun!

There are Feeds and Then There are Feeds

For the past three years, I've used a news aggregator. In the beginning, I had only a few feeds of the more read blogs, some intellectual property blogs because my first blog was on that topic, and at some point early on, the NY Times and the BBC started using RSS and I added those feeds too. At some point, I switched RSS aggregators, to get better features, and found it was easier to add feeds. So I added every blog I read. I would read the aggregator a couple of times a day, looking at posts written by friends, people who blog about expertise they have in a field and filter that field for me, and others with interesting content.

And about a year ago, I started adding Technorati watchlists, as well as Feedster and Pubsub search feeds, and del.icio.us, Furl and flickr feeds on tags, and looking up terms on Blogpulse and Bloglines, to see who linked to my blog, wrote about key words I cared about or were on a topic, project or company I was tracking. Sometime last summer, I realized that more than half my 300+ feeds were search feeds -- key words, URLs and in some cases other focusing information like say, the middle 50% of bloggers based upon inbound links. I would put these search criteria into any one of these services, on myself and my blogs, topics and people I'm interested in, companies and institutions I work for, and that I most often went to read those first. If I were working on something, I'd read the 20 or so search feeds that matter, maybe one or two bloggers that matter... and later go back and read the rest of my RSS feeds for more general use.

Then, after a while, I started reading all the search feeds first, and a few blogger's feeds, but the rest of the single blog feeds have become less important. Often, I see those blogger's (whose single feeds I subcribe to) posts in my search feeds, because they do blog on those topics I care about, though not all their posts are on those topics fit those search criteria. With a finite amount of time, increasingly defined information needs, and a desire to raise the signal to noise ratio, I rely more heavily on the search feeds, than other traditional RSS feeds that send me a single blog's or legacy news feed.

So will search feeds have ads? And will that mean that key word search terms might be sold to advertisers in order to match ads within these search-RSS-feeds, in the same way key words on are sold by traditional search services?

Clarification on Jeeves/Bloglines

Frank Barnako, of CBS Marketwatch, has written a piece suggesting, sort of, in 'Bloggers won't keep a secret' that I was asked NOT to blog the Jeeves/Bloglines story in my post (that appeared on Saturday, not Friday). In fact, no one who told me about it asked me not to blog it, though they all know I'm a blogger. I blogged the story after hearing it from different sources, because the information was clearly out.

However, if asked not to, I don't blog what people tell me in confidence, unless the information gets blogged elsewhere, and then I may comment on it. The many many people who do share confidential information with me, can attest to the fact that I've never blogged, nor shared, it otherwise. I also don't share currrent or former client information online or in person. Sorry.

Also, though my bio is out of date, I've graduated from SIMS at UCBerkeley, and now work as a technology consultant for several web 2.0-type startups as well as legacy media companies.

Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines

(Updated 12:30pm. This was apparently going to be announced Tuesday, not Monday.)

That's the scoop. Ask Jeeves is integrating Bloglines into their search system (it's not yet live on their main site, til Monday as reported).

Noted however that on Ask Jeeves new blog (it's a baby, three days old!) at the top, blog search, and the sidebar, Top Blogs and Most Popular Links go straight to Bloglines.

So Mark Fletcher will be their newest employee (starting next week?). Congratulations, Mark and Bloglines! Oh, and welcome to the blogosphere, Jeeves!

One thing to note, Ask Jeeves, or any other search company, could build a system like this very quickly. What they would have trouble doing is getting all the data, structured, organized and pulled, going back more than say, a month. That's because blog posts fall off the front pages (depending on frequency of blogging and how many posts the blogger displays) and go into archives. If you think about how many kinds of blog software exist, which means many different kinds of data structures for the blog post data, which then it's very difficult to get all the various types of data structured into a single database, just imagine how all the variants of those professionally and homegrown blog publishing systems differ for archival posts. Lots of people customize their archives, as I have in MT and other blogs I participate in with Wordpress, Typepad, etc. Spidering and structuring archives is really tough, tougher than getting the stuff on the tops of blogs right. The point is, a comprehensive database of blogs structured well, going back a couple of years, is really valuable. As is the knowledge of how to put that database together, and run it, along with understanding why this kind of search is very different than those done by Google or Ask Jeeves, whose results don't understand the temporal qualities of blog data, or other aspects that make it different.

Also, I'm sure Jeeves is asking himself how I know this. I learned it from a couple of folks. Once that happened, it seemed reasonable to blog it.

Objectivity vs. Fairness in News Media

Adam Penenberg has a great article in Wired this week: Heartaches of Journalist Bloggers.

It starts out talking about journalist's struggle between their paying gigs and their non-paying blogs.. but on page two, gets into issues around opinion. Because blogs are often about opinion, and journalists are often held to the old objectivity standard, there is conflict.

But I wonder, if journalists were held to a fairness standard, both in their paid work, for legacy media, and in blogging, would this issue would dissipate? What if journalists were responsible for fairly conveying stories, situations, and people? If that were the case, then when they express opinions on their blogs, and the expectation of fairness applied there, would people (blog readers used to new media standards and editors used to legacy media standards) see the point of view as consistent, and therefore acceptable? Readers find transparent bias to be good, because they feel they can make up their own minds about how to see information presented, and journalists, I think, might find fairness a more reasonable standard to follow, than objectivity.

CNN has RSS Feeds

Here. Including most popular now available through RSS, as an easy way to get what was on that page, which is determined by the most clicks on the CNN.com site. Good for them!

A little request, but if they would just send video through RSS+bittorent, I'd be very happy!

Technorati's New Key Word Watchlists

Dave sends word.. check them out.... I've been using watchlists for a long time to keep track of things. I find them very useful.

Blog Business Summit

I'm speaking at the Blog Business Summit to be held on January 24 and 25, 2005 in Seattle, WA.

There is a reduced price deal for speaker referred attendees if you follow this registration link here. The conference should be very informative for people who are not familiar with blogging but want to figure out how to incorporate it both internally as well as to communicate with customers externally.

In addition to blogs, there is one session that will include wikis, which I will introduce. It will be relatively short, considering the powerful contribution wikis can make to businesses. But I'm excited about the chance to show those unfamiliar with them just how cool and useful, and inspiring of creativity and collaboration they can be.

Doc, The Pool, The Laptop and A Lister's

In The Alpha Listers. In Newsweek by Steven Levy. Doc comments.

Doc mentioned the shoot two weeks ago, but didn't think it would make the cover. Not sure, because I don't really see magazines except online. But there he is.

The lesson is that there's a new force—spearheaded by people who work for no bosses and whose prose never sees an editor's pencil—that provides the water-cooler fodder for the larger high-tech community. Its power extends not only to high-tech cool-hunting but also to what's politically correct, geek style. (Open source... gooood. Onerous copy protection... eeeevil.) And the significance of this phenomenon has some important implications for the way opinions will be formed in the decentralized world of Internet media.

Distributed. Flat. Non-hierarchical. Channeling Doc: when demand supplies itself. Applying that to blogging: people want a point of view, so they make it with their own blogs and they get it from other blogs.

Reminds me of Jay Rosen last Friday at Votes, Bits and Bytes, saying that the time will come when someone says to a journalist, "... you're not really a blogger...." There is a place for reporting and a place for blogging as a tool; they overlap, but they are often very different. But they each serve their purposes.

Hot News

Sorry for the lack of posting.. been traveling.. was at a meeting of conspiratorial technologists and lawgeeks the other night.. at Google in NY... looking at new technologies. Now I'm in Boston at Votes, Bits and Bytes, and stuff is popping in here.. and out there!

First of all, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Grokster and Streamcast cases. EFF says they look forward to Betamax all over again! Sent via Jeff Jarvis.

And...

Secondly, Google news has applied for a patent that may allow it to monetize Google News. Interesting, because it would allow for a permissions system that would allow more new story to be displayed by Google News in exchange for a some user information by Google (how many people click through, etc) as well as to figure out how to pay news sites for their content. Adam Penenberg wrote about this recently, wondering how they would go down this path.

Unrelated, but popping at the same moment:
Esther Dyson took this picture of Joi, Greg and me. (I hate the part that has me. I look a little odd.) It showed up immediately on my 1001 window on the side of my screen. But then Ross Mayfield immediately left a note on Greg's head, noting how his cool FotoNotes invention was the basis for Flickr's notes. Fotonotes, Flickr and 1001 rock!

The Red Couch

Robert Scoble is proposing that the book (nee, working title: The Red Couch) he and Shel Israel will collaborate on be discussed entirely on a blog... and that the rights be sold on Ebay.

Very innovative. I like it. Though it appears from the first post that Shel is kicking and screaming about the public nature of it, as well as the Ebay. So far, those are the two things that make it so cool. The topic, business blogging, doesn't sound so interesting on the face of it. But maybe for people who know nothing of the blogosphere, including how to navigate here, here or here, it makes sense to sell them a business book on blogging.

However, I'm doubtful those folks will get the perpendicular nature of blogging (compared to analog communications) unless they actually engage in it. It's just too hard to describe something like this to someone who hasn't seen it. Imagine describing a car to someone who had never seen one, without showing them or giving them a ride. Think about the difference in your perceptions between walking down the street and drivng in a car... the ways we take in information and sensations of movement and time are so different. You simply have to get in the car to comprehend the difference fully. But who knows, maybe the readers will get something out of a book on blogging, before they start the blogging. Good luck to them both, describing this particular change in sensation and in meaning on so many levels, to folks who have no idea. Robert and Shel will have to heavily rely on metaphors and stories, which will distance the reader from the experience and reality of it, in order to bring comprehension. That makes this a very hard task.

Listen to Robert, Shel, on the openness and rights' sale, though. He knows whereof he speaks.

Last Night's Blogger Dinner

Was a great time. Lots of folks showed up... including Jeff Clavier, Sean Gilligan, Renee Blogdett, Ted Shelton, Doc Searls, Esme Vos, Christian Crumlish, who brought his partner, Briggs Nisbet (and who writes a lovely gardening blog), JD Lasica, Rafael Ebron (of Mozilla), Marc Brown (of Buzznet) who was up from LA, Naill Kennedy, Kaliya Hamlin of Integrative Activism and her husband Brian Hamlin, who ".. is like the world's foremost expert in computer recycling..." as some have said, Ian Kennedy, Damon Darlin of Business 2.0, Daniel Gould... I'm sure I'm forgetting a few folks here, but it you could, please note your blog in the comments... it would be nice to complete the list.

Thanks to everyone for coming out. You all made it a very nice evening.

Several of these people, including Ted and Ian, Damon, Marc and Briggs, among others, I hadn't met or had never really had a chance to chat with them. So that was a big treat. Great food, a very nice time, and terrific geek-centric fun.

Oh, and sorry for posting this so late. Today has been a doozy. Not complaining, as I'm very fortunate to be busy.. but each time I wanted to blog, I couldn't. I have a number of posts written part way that are more essay like, and I'd like to get them up over the break.. when there's time to contemplate a bit more what's going on right now online. There's so much interesting stuff, it's amazing!

Noted

Susan Mernit is blogging over at engadget. Rock on!

Remember the Blogger Dinner is Tonight, 7pm.

Beckett's. 2271 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley. (510) 647-1790. Email me (mary at hodder dot org) if you are coming, so I can let the restaurant know.

We have 22 so far. See previous blog post for map and directions. Looks to be fun!

Thankfully, I'm Not an Aberration

Adam Pennenberg wrote a very nice wired article about me.

Thanks Susan, and Doc for the nice comments.

And Jeff!

Blogger Dinner Thursday, Dec 2 in Berkeley, 7pm

7pm December 2. At Beckett's. 2271 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley. (510) 647-1790

Doc Searls is going to be visiting and we were talking about how there are rarely blogger events in Berkeley, and we'd like to have one here. Please send me email at mary at hodder dot org to RSVP so that we can give Beckett's some idea of how many.

Thanks, and see you there.

ACM on Blogging

A whole issue. Here.

PubSub Launches Their New Site

So at the PubSub party last night, I chatted with Bob and Salim about what's going on there.

First of all, they are monitoring 6.5 million blogs and seeing 600,000 posts a day. That's pretty amazing. However, many of the 6.5 million blogs have feeds that haven't pinged them or updated in some time, so they prefer the more conservative 3,606,000 active blogs as the number they actually monitor day-to-day.

They've also changed the interface, making it far easier for users to see that PubSub is really about defining a search for subscribing in my aggregator (those searches can actually include several searches, for example: napsterization.org/stories -- to get all instances of someone linking to me, combined with "mary hodder" and "napsterization" to get all instances of the keyword use in posts, and then being able to define interesting subsets of the blogosphere.. so that I only get posts say, in the 40% to 80% conversational middle of blogs as they are ranked by inbound links... and on and on...).

PubSub does something interesting that the other blog services don't do... which is that they don't collect the data and store it... instead they match the data to the subscription searches and other things they collect and monitor, and then toss it. So they don't have to worry about structuring it in a database for later. It's an interesting premise, this idea of not searching historically but rather searching just what comes through, which they call "prospective search."

Nice work guys.

Journalism, Blogs, etc.

JD points to this list of journalist's websites and blogs. Notable missing sites: Ken Auletta and Adam Penenberg.

Also, Staci Krammer, whom I met for the first time last week at Bloggercon III, but have been reading for a long time, wrote about it (nice mention of my led discussion on core values) at OJR. She was an active participant with interesting thoughts about the topics we discussed, and I loved chatting with her about other stuff as well. She's at ONA this weekend. I thought about going, but couldn't spare the time. I hope it's fun, and Jay Rosen wins an award tonight!

I Vote for Rosencon

By Jay and Zack. Seconded by Doc. Confirmed by Ernie and Peter.

Last Sunday... NY

Happened to be in NY and was, for about a half hour, checking out the new Time Warner building at Columbus Circle while waiting for a friend to arrive on the subway. I walked to the second floor landing area... between the wings of stores, where Crossfire was setting up for a Monday night show. Outside the roped area, there was seating. I sat down next to a middle aged white guy, with ear-bud. Looked like a technician. We started chatting, and I asked what he did. He said he was the lead cameraman for Crossfire. I asked what he thought of the previous weeks events, with Jon Stewart, and the fact that 1.5 million downloads of the 15 minute clip had taken place within 24 hours of the show. He wasn't even aware that it had happened. And from the look on his face, he seemed not to understand what 1.5 million downloads meant (a lot, a little...).

Then he told me that when they do the show, the hosts typically keep chatting with the guests, while the audience files out. This time, after Jon Stewart, the audience was begging for more, and refused to leave. So they cut the microphones, and the audience still wouldn't leave. So the hosts and Jon Stewart had to leave the stage to continue their talk, in order to get the audience to leave.

Most amazing though, that this broadcast camera guy had no idea that people were downloading the Jon Stewart/Crossfire clip, much less at such incredible rates right after the show.

Update: I'm at Accelerating Change and Zack Rosen just said that 865,000 people watch Crossfire regularly.

Giant Blog Lovefest

Here. And here, here and here.

Core Values of the Web Discussion Ideas for Bloggercon

(Cross posted on the Bloggercon III blog.)

In thinking more about core values we believe ought to be brought to our online dealings—either as a practice, as guideline or in theory—I wanted to understand more about instances where people have trouble with certain behaviors. I wanted to look at why we are concerned and what we want or need in order to create trust and value with each other.

I'm interested in these things: Why we value information online; What context or peripheral information cause information to be more trusted; Why we respect people; and What we need to see visually to trust information we find online, if that is possible or desirable. We appreciate it when people help us with information we need, share insights we hadn't thought of, or give us new windows into previously closed systems or institutions.. Those types of information, presented in a particular format, largely explain why blogging is so popular and appears to be so persistent. (I’m specifically referring here to topic blogging, versus say journaling, though depending on the relationships between reader and writer, what appears to strictly be a journal to some may actually provide insight for others....)

We also appreciate it when people are honest with us. We like it when they share their motivation for publishing, or at least lead us to believe that we know what their motivation is, based on their blog's content. And we like it when we feel we can trust that they're telling us about ethical issues we can't see. The blogosphere has a history of outrage over blogs that have been less than honest about their origins, identity or economic relationships in an attempt to fool readers and linkers into believing things are other than they actually are. However, we cannot force disclosure. We rely on and trust people to tell us the truth about their economic or other relationships.

One thing we've enjoyed the past few years in the blogosphere is a relatively pure state, where people are motivated to blog, link, and connect for many reasons other than money. This is partly because it's been difficult to make money with most blogs. It's the reason that “money and blogging” have been discussion topics at previous events, and at this one, because some bloggers do want to figure out how to make money with their blogs in ways that don't conflict with readers’ sense of ethics, so that they can keep their readers. It has also been possible to blog for profit or other hidden reasons, and therefore online communities have reacted strongly when these examples were discovered.

Many blogs exist without any advertising support, and readers have expressed respect and appreciation for the idea that these blogs are as pure as possible. Because there is no monetary support for the writer, these writers are simply expressing themselves for their love of getting out opinions and ideas. Or because they love to connect with people, and to iterate ideas and talk back to media or other institutions that used to be difficult for individuals to talk back to due to the high transaction costs of mass publishing. Whether this is actually true, or real, it has been people's perception, and supporters of blogging have held up this kind of not-for-profit blogging as laudable, showing examples of how blogging has changed things for the better.

Another model, a slight variation on the one above, has also developed. In this case bloggers who otherwise appear to be operating under the intentions, ideals, and principles of the pure blog model, have taken ads that are unconnected to who or what the blog writer is, how the writing is done, or (mostly) what the subject is. This kind of blogging has been perceived as mostly pure. And those well-schooled in the cues of online communication have believed they could differentiate between when some economic or other benefit has gone to the blogger for her writing versus when an algorithm randomly placed an ad on her blog via some program. AdSense, Blogads, and many self-negotiated ads and sponsors are present on some blogs, but we see them and believe that some sense of integrity has prevailed where the blogger is not paid directly for writing, either writing a certain way, or for writing anything at all. Rather, the ads have often been dependent on readers clicking through, and thus, we haven't seen that ad model as inherently corrupt. Most bloggers I know make between $10 and $100 a month with ads, though I know a few who make thousands of dollars. However, because we can watch the quality of the blogging and because it appears to us that that is not influenced by the ad relationship, we believe we are still seeing the bloggers’ unadulterated voice, opinion, and link referrals—which is the reason we want to read blogs.

Some people may be upset about the monetizing of blogs because they feel that if bloggers have any economic interest in what they write as it is tied to a business model that rewards sales of say, a product they have written about, or if they are paid to write at all, bloggers will be less free to say what they want or believe, because their motivations for writing change. People have gotten a taste of something that didn’t easily exist before: mass distributed and searchable publishing with individual voice, and they don’t want to give that up, even if it isn’t as pure as they perceive.

Others think writers who profit from more than randomly placed ads may be steering themselves and some part of the blogosphere back to top-down media model. They don’t want to see blogs dependent on and beholden to the business side of things, as large media organizations are with other interests than just finding some measure or kind of pure truth, or having biases in ways that purport to show one view when in fact they show another, among other criticisms.

We could label blogs without any ads, sponsors or other monetization as being the pure blogs as ‘angelic,’ the ones with AdSense, etc on the side as slightly ‘heathenish,’ and the ones with actual business models as ‘devilish.’ This sort of labeling construct at times seems to underlay criticisms about blogs that make money, but I think it is unconstructive. Although it is important to bring it to the surface, to make it explicit and discuss it, if only to make clear that it's there. For those who get to define the labels, labeling values and behaviors is powerful, but purity or devilishness only reflect one set of values. People, like the blogosphere, are much more dynamic and varied than those few labels, and therefore they need more dynamic cues in online systems to tell what sort of actions are taking place so that they can make up their own minds about whom to trust and read.

Other value systems that could be applied to blogs without ad systems versus blogs that make money of some sort, could be that of a protestant work ethic or a capitalist ethic, where earning money is much admired, if done relatively honestly. Therefore, money-making blogs that explicitly tell us they do so are the heross of that framework. Or there’s the communitarian value system that values those who promote and enrich the community, those who promote the good work of others, those who share credit, those who collaborate well, etc..., There is also the leadership value system, where those who ferret out good information or push memes or are especially innovative are valued.

Another thing to consider with value systems such as these applied to what is specifically seen on a blog is that they don't take into account other ways authors benefit from blogging. This is because they only consider the direct act of blogging and not the secondary effects outside of the blogosphere inn the author's life or work. I know many bloggers who have found opportunities due to their blogs. I myself have been offered jobs, have been asked to edit books, have been asked to dinner with interesting people that I didn't know but who read my blogs, have been asked on dates, and have generally been treated very differently and much more invitingly in a wide variety of situations because of my blogs, than if I didn't have them. But because these opportunities are not openly apparent on my blog, unless I write about them, readers are not aware of these secondary opportunities. Yet they happen regularly, and have been an extremely positive benefit of blogging, though I didn't start blogging for this reason, and I don't write anything in particular to make anything happen. However, this second degree of reward is potentially corrupting, depending on the circumstances. A blogger who takes a different job might find the blog more highly scrutinized, or that there is pressure to write differently by the new boss. Jeremy Zawodny recently wrote about this after moving back to the search division within Yahoo.

So what values do we use to understand online communication and communities? How are we going to show information about our activities, so that people with different value systems can make their own decisions about our blogs and the information they come across?

Also, are the acts and cues to understand online information presented with these core values different if blogs make money in some way, versus if they do not?

I'm interested in making a list of the values we believe are necessary for blogging or are open questions to discuss in the Core Values of the Web session. I'll start it here:

1. transparency of relationships and motivations for writing and linking
2. transparency of identity, including pseudonymous writing
3. excellence of content—by which I mean writers honestly writing what they believe, even if it turns out to be untrue in the iterative process, versus publishing known untruths
4. editorial independence
5. linking for attribution of ideas

Please add to this list via comments below or bring ideas to the session Saturday.

Ebay Gets Closer to Blogging

Look at this... it's for the sale of 2 (3 more were added) invites to a wedding in England... since the wedding dress sale last April on Ebay, where the seller of that dress was only allowed about 5 entries, this new sale has 7 entries, and there are comments. For the record, the seller of the wedding invite doesn't want to attend because she doesn't like the bride and hasn't seen the groom since he started seeing the bride two years before. Turns out a number of other invitees saw the listing and threw in their invites for the same reason, so thats why the offer has gone up to 5 spots.

Funny stuff, but more importantly, Ebay has gone bloggy!

More on Appending Stuff

John Battelle is quoted in the Business Standard (of India):

Searchstreams analysis: What searchstreams offer, according to John Battelle of Searchblog, is the “ability to capture and record your search history as well as the things you looked at, all in one package.”

Battelle, who is also writing a book on search, explains further: “What I really wish for, both to tell the story of my search, and to annotate my book, is the ability to take that searchstream and turn it into an object – a narrative thread of sorts, something I can hold and keep and refer to, a prop to aid in the telling and retelling of how I came to my answer.

So I would include in the definition of a search stream my RSS feeds of searches at about 10 search services, that I pull into my aggregator, as well as everything I search when I go out to search sites.. and so the ability to append this stuff, to leave my notes for myself easily at the place of the search or aggregator level, and maybe share them with people, would be cool. I want notes for lots more than photos or for putting contents into a discrete blog or a wiki, or the tool I mentioned earlier today.

Google News

Adam Penenberg's article (Google News: Beta Not to Make Money), which I read yesterday (but was too sick to blog -- can't wait to get over this stupid cold) mentioned Google News' business model, or issues with it due to the fact that they do not have agreements with the news sources they use to populate the service.

At the time, his assertion that headlines and snippets of the stories were not used under fair use, but rather would have to be negotiated for some consideration, and that's why they can't place Ads on the site, made me want to mention this case I blogged some time ago.

Ernie Miller wrote up the case that occurred a while ago about copyright and newspaper headlines in Japan. I wrote in my post then, and think still, that something similar aledging that headlines are copyright protected would not win here in the US because the title of an article would fall under the "names, titles and short phrases" which don't get copyright protection, partly because they are factual, even if they are a kind of expression (tends to fall more in the trademark area of IP for names and phrases).

But the snippets of the stories themselves that Google News uses are more of a question for me, as far as the original publisher's ability to control their copywritten content placement in commercial situations. Google News might not get to use that content next to ads, if this were tested. And that may be because they are so big. Other smaller services (see this search on Feedster) are using both headlines and snippets of both blog posts and news articles, and they all sit right next to Ads on their site. And so far, there appears to be no problem.

Jeff Jarvis blogged this. As did many others.

News Pointer

Stephanie Olsen/cNet has this on RSS and Ads: Web news feed syncs up with ads.

I'm quoted with this:

"When you're just slicing and dicing information, does that give you the right to sell it?," said Mary Hodder, a Web product manager for Technorati, a search engine for blogs and RSS feeds.

"There is a business model there, but you have to manage it responsibly, because the social media (of RSS) is different from old media--it's an active group, and they're not interested in being 'overmessaged' to," Hodder added.

In between those two statements, though, I said that we (all of us online, those that create and those that search or reuse) haven't really worked out what's fair between those small online publishers and those that cache, search, re-serve or reuse data. We're just sort of winging it with copyright, social norms around caching (think Google and their cache of everything for starters), what we have as creators that we want shared verses what happens when someone repackages. And as a user, when paying for the repackage, are we paying for content, or the time saving repackaging or search? I'm not sure and but I do think some of this will be decided by what is in the minds of users as they create, reuse, or subscribe to RSS feeds of many people's content, laced with ads, or sliced and diced in other formats.

But I do think there is a business model in RSS, in fact, several different business models, though it's extremely early adopter at this stage of technology use right now. So there is a lot to be seen. But it's very interesting stuff, and I definitely encourage experimentation with it all, as Olsen chronicles in the article, so that the online community can figure out what works and what doesn't technologically and with users / creators.

ONA Talks Available in Audio

Niall Kennedy has done a terrific job recording the ONA event the other night and posting the audio files. In particular, he managed to boost the sound (there were no mikes at the event) for my talk. I hadn't met Niall before, but he was really very sweet.

Also, Jeff Veen gave a terrific talk on "amateurism." Other folks I enjoyed seeing there, either speaking or in the audience include Scott Rosenberg, Paul Grabowicz, Susan Mernit, JD Lasica, Jackson West, Mark Fiore (who does really need an RSS feed!) and many others I'm sure I'm forgetting (sorry!).

Blogging and the Future of Journalism at ONA Last Night.

I gave a talk on this topic: Blogging and the Future of Journalism last night at ONA in SF. It was only 10 minutes, followed by SFist.com Editor, Jackson West and then a few questions.

I addressed what I think has just become the present of journalism and blogging: the social relationship and conversation in a severely collapsed time frame, online, between journalists and bloggers. The extended entry has my notes that I used to frame this for myself beforehand, but I did not cover them completely. What matters is that the Dan Rather/CBS story kills the notion that bloggers are antagonistic or separate from journalists. That's not to say that there is love all around. What I mean is that while bloggers have an ethic around their work that often includes some agenda, but also is about iterating ideas and issues, and journalists have an ethic of objectivity, in order to report facts and issues, so each of their goals are not necessarily always the same, the new working relationship by bloggers interested in news stories, and journalists who get blogs and online conversation, is extraordinary.

I know, you're a blogger or a blog reader. You're thinking, I've been seeing this in one form or another for a couple years. Big deal. But ONA is a conservative organization, and I think, reflective of the rest (and most of) the population that doesn't participate in blogs, and it seems important to take a second to highlight how extraordinary this new (for the last couple of years) social interaction is. Clearly many journalists, including CBS/Dan Rather, still don't understand it. It's foreign to them. You have to realize, we are ahead of the curve, that's ahead of the curve, that's ahead of the curve here... with RSS and aggregators, with understanding the social interaction between bloggers and journalists because we participate in it on some level, with online queues for communicating that people who haven't spent time online don't see -- what's happening in some ways is invisible to them.

The conversation between bloggers and journalists is new and radical. And the CBS/Dan Rather story takes things to a new plateau, where bloggers participated in a feedback loop with journalists who get it. Both sides participated in fact checking each other. And both sides riffed on each other's work, analyzing, investigating further, making journalism of different sorts, from one writer to the next. However, the common factor was they published online, they connected to each other via links and their websites, and they did it damned fast.

Aside: last night, Paul Grabowicz from UCBerkeley's JSchool told me that for journalism students are suddenly saying, gee, I think I need to know about this blog stuff because of the CBS case.

What would have happened if the memo's were discovered to be fake 4 months from now? What would have happened if the memo's were seen as fakes by CBS and others who published the original story, but the answer was simply to publish a letter to the editor or a correction on D17 as would have occurred 10 years ago? It would be the same old scenario we've tollerated for years where incorrect information is front page and corrected in the back, and people are cynical about the media.

What's different here is the social interaction, the ability to connect to people, to see what matters so fast, analyze it, moderate the more useful up, moderate the not useful down, in a group fact checking process.

Last night, after the talk, one person asked me how this was any different from Usenet discussions from 10 years ago. What's changed and why does this matter? In other words, he posited, it's nothing new. I agree in a way, but I strongly disagree in another. It is discussion by people, readers or audience, right after some news article goes online, or TV, and yes the timeliness factor is similar. But newsgroups can go off topic, writers don't "own" their words in the sense that they are publishing in their own "house" or blog, for everyone the see, search, look up links and see links out to sources and others. It's a change in tools that may in a way be relatively minor, but the effects of the increased attachments of words to a single writer/blogger, and the ability to see that persons words on their site, attributed to them that in some ways is dependent on this presentation, causes readers, and journalists, to react differently. It feels different. I would make the analogy to telegraph communication verses phone communication. Usenet feels like a series of telegrams, but blogs feel like a phone call.

I believe this new level of cooperation and interaction, as embodied by the CBS case, is not early-adopter-new, in that we've seen a few smaller examples of this before. But CBS is the case that signals the sea-change of a new standard, a new understanding, and shifts the interaction from those people who are so far ahead of the curve, to those less literate with online conversations. This new cooperation causes journalism from both professional news organizations and bloggers to be seen as a conversation, as productive and useful and symbiotic. It's a chance to break out of the cynicism and frustration the audience has felt for years by not being able to effectively converse with those reporting news. Neither blogging nor journalism is going away. They can't live without each other. They need each other, and the CBS case makes it clear that we have a better news world because of the cooperative conversation they make together.

Notes for the talk:
I think the future is right now.... it's this week... being demonstrated in the blogosphere and in online news...
--- it's a process and a relationship...
--- it's social...
--- it's a conversation between bloggers and journalists..

You know parts or all of this story...
I want to emphasize the process and relationship...

Three ideas to review...

1. The Dan Rather/CBS story puts the final nail in the coffin that blogs are antagonistic or separate from journalists

2. blogs cooperated to make analysis and news, with journalists who understand this new symbiotic relationship

3. fact checking -- another layer because traditional journalists talking about process and editing..

--- blogs accelerate the fact checking to a tremendous degree
--- blogs were the first ones to bring public criticism
--- blogs winnowed weak criticisms from the strong ones
--- -- between the right wing, looking to knock down the memos
--- -- left wing looking to knock weak arguments
--- Note: Bloggers can have different agendas and that's okay in the the blogosphere, whereas journalists are not supposed to, they have different ethics policies...
-------bloggers are allowed to have any ethics though they may be moderated down in the discussion if their words are not useful or valid, -------while journalists are supposed to abide by an ethical standard of objectivity and fairness

so the story continue...
---- experts' reviews were considered by both journalists and bloggers
---- Howard Kurtz -- and his column in the WDC Post led the way in mainstream attention
---- and Michael Dobbs led the way in investigation
----- took the ball from the blogosphere and ran with it,
----- they have money, put together experts, talked to sources, and got access to CBS news, and when they sent questions, there was an official CBS response which a blogger might not have gotten
--- bloggers took what the Post did, and continued the second round of fact checking, and started to put the pieces together..
--- Boston Globe spoke to an expert, that a blogger had already spoken to and written up this expert's work...

-----The Boston Globe screwed up their work because of misleading heading:
------ saying there the expert backed up the authentication of the story
------but really, that expert was skeptical..
------and wanted to reconsider some new information...
------but since the Boston Globe said it ...
------the bloggers took on the title and the story differences
------ Boston Globe was corrected by bloggers,
------ The Globe then ran a correction on the headline

SO, blogs are part of the fact checking process, and it's a developing iterative process, how bloggers and journalists can cooperate in the fact checking process...

fact checking goes both ways....

-because blogs need to be fact checked,
-so newspapers followed on with more fact checking of what bloggers came up with,

It might have come out.. but it might have taken months...
after the original 60 Minutes story came out,
other newspapers printed the news with no skepticsm...
so if the blogosphere hadn't fact checked,
would there have questioned it in the traditional press....

Stupid to talk about blogs vs. journalism.. because it's not an either or situation..
but this story does prove that it is a symbiotic relationship

Everyone needs to be fact checked...
when the right puts up something the left will fact check,
when the left puts up something, the right will,
there are rational people on both sides..
...so Josh Marshall said, hey, these are some pretty good arguments on the right, about the memos, and we should look at this...

Fact checkers will be on both sides,
and have agendas
but the hardest fact checking will come from the opposite side..
but its still a symbiotic ... relationship

If CBS had recognized the contribution that bloggers had made,
they would have come out looking good...
If they said they had just made a mistake..
but the test for any of us in any profession
not just journalism
is how do you fix your mistakes,
so if they'd been as diligent about fixing the mistake as they were about getting the story..
they would appear more credible and legitimate...
they even ignored criticism from the Washington post and NYTimes..
they had both published that morning
when Dan Rather talked Friday night..
so while CBS ignored bloggers,
they also ignored the Post and Times...

---- CBS should have been able to look at all the activity, the press and, and the bloggers, and say hey, something is wrong... and do more fact checking...

Where as the WDC Post has come our really well...
in this new world and with these new relationships
they recognized the importance of journalistic ethics,
but they knew evidence was there...
they only wrote and investigated because the information was there....
even though bloggers gathered it and analyzed it....

Instead, CBS is still saying "we can't prove they are authentic"

What's key is this recursive behavior:
-where journalists put out information,
-bloggers fact check, information is filtered and the best information rises,
-journalists fact check bloggers and report again,
-bloggers follow on with more investigation and fact checking
-and on and on.

It's what should have been going on all along, pre-Internet,
but we haven't had the tools to be able to collapse the time it took to do this,
or the space between people, to make this possible,
until now, where these tools and publishing platforms were made
to connect information and people on the interent,
to allow people to participate in the journalistic process.

Before, it would have been a small correction a week later,
a letter to the editor,
or months later a realization that in this case, the documents were false.

But now, with blogging and journalism operating in a symbiotic process,
we can realize information analysis, fact checking and correction very quickly.

Talk I'm Giving Tonight in SF!

Tonight at the Online News Association event at CNet. On the Future of Journalism and Blogging. 5:30-8:30pm. Don't have a website to direct you to, but CNet is located on 2nd Street in San Francisco, between Howard and Fremont. Many others are talking as well. RSVP to Patti Smith, psmith at knightridder.com

The State of (Bay Area) Online Journalism

CNet Headquarters,
235 Second Street, between Howard and Folsom
San Francisco

5:30 – 6:30 Registration, wine and cheese

6:30-6:35 Welcome, Jeff Pelline, Editor, CNet News.com, and Bruce Koon, Executive news editor, Knight Ridder Digital

6:35-6:45 THE STATE OF MARK FIORE

The groundbreaking, medium-shaking cartoonist shows off his latest

6:45-7:00 TECH TRENDS

Jeff Veen, principal, Adaptive Path

7:00 -7:20 THE RISE OF THE OUTSIDERS

Blogging and the future of journalism
(Me! I'm going to talk about the relationships between journalists and bloggers.)

Citizen journalists
Jackson West, Editor, SFist.com

7:20-7:50 THE ROLE AND IMPACT OF NEWS AGGREGATORS

Moderator: Neil Chase, managing editor, CBS Marketwatch.com

Panelists: Bill Gannon, editorial director, Yahoo!

Jeff Pelline, editor, CNet News.com

Tim Olson, interactive director, KQED.org

Salon (invited representative)

7:50-8:10 QUESTIONS

8:10-8:30 Closing comments and farewell

Ernie Miller Has The Definitive Timeline on CBS/Rather

Here. It's long. It's worth reading. It tells a story of traditional media that is further and further out of step with the way people interact with information, credibility and conversation, and what matters.

The New Business Model Is the Old Business Model, Sorta...

I've been thinking about why people in the top down, traditional journalism media business have so much trouble with the new distributed horizontal media 'business' (if you can call it that, what with all the free online media from bloggers and other content creators).

The traditional media folks keep getting stuck on trust and credibility, upset as they are by the fact that people pay so much attention to Fox news or blogs or The Daily Show, all of which require the user to decide what is credible, real, questionable or a flat out lie, or a joke. This conflict between people with different frames of trust has always been with us, but it's amplified by information technology, and the ease with which networked communities flit around from source to source, gathering information wherever they decide, not the traditional media editors of old who used to control our access much more than they do now, which is zero.

The conflict is one of metaphors and frames, where users have varying concepts of how they see trust, credibility and truth, depending on who says it and how it grooves with the information purveys stated role (ie, when Fox tells us something, users know it's a half truth, so if we expect it, we are not upset by it, verses say, Dan Rather/CBS, who tell us they are telling us the complete truth, and we should 'trust them,' so when the alarm bells go off, we are much more apt to be upset about it, and feel betrayed by them or disgusted.)

So depending on how each of us frames trust, credibility and truth, information takes on different meanings. For some of us, watching how bloggers link, and what they link to, is a kind of trust model we understand and want to see. Political bloggers link to an article or blog post or book, and it means something, a kind of truth. For others, this is bunk. They only 'trust' a recommended book or article from the NYTimes, or CBS. They don't want a bunch of cranks and crazies pointing out what interests them. They frame trust as information from controlled editorial sources, following traditional journalistic processes.

What does that have to do with business models? Well, the old model, pre-internet, was that the local newspaper published news framed in the local views around truth and filtered by trusted editors, and the locals bought it. End of story. The publisher, the reporters, the editors and readers, all lived in the same physical community, and so didn't have to think about what that community was. They self-selected into it because they moved or lived there to begin with. And because they lived together, they understood each others frameworks around trust and credibility, even if they disagreed over them, or had differing political frameworks. It was subtext in all of their minds. Living together physically gave them some common contact and frame of reference for each other's understanding. So the information filter, the local newspaper, simply reported based on the physical community its framework of trust and truth, and there was the business model.

This new information model, which traditional media folks seem to be avoiding and utterly confused by, because it doesn't fit with their framework of journalistic integrity, editorial control or truth and trusted information, has to do with networked communities with a great variety of frameworks of truth. These communities are hard to see if you are looking for a physical representation. They are expressed through links, blogs, comments, forums, games, chat rooms, and the people, well, the people are fickle. They flit around from site to site, or worse, the use those damned aggregators to read hundreds of blogs and news sites. They have different information values, are time sensitive, and abomination! They have such a variety of frameworks of trust, truth and credibility. It's out of control!

Some people think a blog is okay, if they read it for a while, to find some truth, some information, to iterate on a question, to find expertise greater than those in traditional media. Some people get all their news from the Daily Show. Cripes. And some people think they NYTimes is still it. Thank God for small favors.

The new business model? It's a lot like the old one. Just perpendicular. And it feels invisible if you look on the internet, and can't see it the way you could look at your physical community. It's about finding a networked community, one that might include 20 people in Silicon Valley, 20 people in India, and 20 in Belgium. But they might just be exactly the right 60 people, if small by old media standards. Or maybe it's 60 thousand or 6 million. Just depends on how they self-select into the community. But you can be sure it's most likely not location based unless it's specifically, topically about a location.

Then work backwards. How do those networked people frame trust, truth and credibilty. Figure it out, then figure out why they self-selected (user experience, a desire to connect over a topic or game or share their creativity), and then figure out how to filter information for those frames and community needs. And figure out the user interface. It's the interface, stupid.

But wait, that's not all. You must also figure out the social interaction between people. Because just like when the telephone was invented, and they thought it would all be about people making business calls, but they were wrong, it turned out people just wanted to talk to each other, the internet is also all about the distributed social communication between people, whether it's a business person or a friend or a blogger you don't know. It is the social interaction that matters. It's a lot of figuring, to be sure. But get all that, and voila! You too can be in the information business online.

I realize it's not so simple to execute. That each of those elements is a big sticky nightmare of latenights, user testing and consideration up the wahzoo, each requiring much thought. I'm just really damned tired of arguing about whether we do it, why people don't trust old media (because they are just as trustworthy and just as untrustworthy as the next website or blogger, ya know? Use your judgment on each, please, and you'll be better off, though it's true the traditional guys don't keep much power in this model, except as authors who earn trust and respect through transparency, openness about biases and honesty, not to mention linking love for their fellow creators.)

Oh, and btw, this is very democratic in the Jeffersonian sense, where makers of information have to think about what they create, and users have to think about what they are seeing, and those that are smartest win. Those that are most controlling and have the most money and lobbyists and distribution channels, don't necessarily, as they have in the traditional media business of late. I mean, they may win in court, or not, but those that overcontrol on the internet are losing in the practical sense that users have control, and will self-select into a different system or whatever, if you put up a roadblock. Just ask Napster and the children of Napster. Napsterization is about the loss of control, among other things.

Just get on with the business of your model: filtering information for a community that understands truth and credibility in a certain way, and wants to interact with each other.

Scoble on RSS Aggregators Frequency of Polling

Robert looks at how often aggregators poll for new posts, figures out that we are heading for a mess of bandwidth issues what with all the aggregators constantly going looking for news posts and other content across blogs and websites. He asks what we might do to solve this and how often different aggregators update. Many of those listed in the comments look for new posts hourly. And many of the commenters suggest that sites should only serve changes or give a 403.

But, I was thinking, what about smarter aggregators that learned the posting patterns of the writers? How about aggregators that got a sense for the frequency of posting, and then polled at that rate? I tend to post once a day, often in the morning, because that when I have time to write. Robert posts practically in his sleep. Why can't my aggregator poll a blog like mine once or twice a day, and Robert's hourly? And Jay Rosen about once every 5 days or +5 days after his last post since he tends to do long essays about that often?

Rather than trying to engineer just based on changes to the website content, why not get smart about people's social patterns and then users can do a complete auto-refresh if something comes up and there's a conscious need....

This is social media after all, and it's not just about the tools, but the social interaction... we have the engineering part figured out somewhat as far as syndication and aggregation, but where is consideration for the social interaction built into the tools... if we are to be polite about our polling, we ought to think about how the other end works (writers - people) and react accordingly in the makeup of the tools.

Oh, and one other thought, what about using the pings put out by blogs with new content? Why not have my aggregator subscribe to ping-o-matic or whatever, so that when pings come into ping-o-matic, pings go out to subscribers like a dinner bell. Content that's good and good for ya. MMMmmm.

The Power of Word of Mouth
Online It's Cluetrain

If you are in one or another online communities, you know they are powerful amplifying tools for spreading information. Sometimes the information is good/true/real and sometimes it's not, and it's important that readers and other writers pay attention to the credibility of those passing information as well accurately passing information along as they restate and comment on it. But often information and communication take on a life of their own online, and that's why I think the previous post, on blog comment spam caused so much commenting, as well as email directly to me. In fact, Tom at LevelTen emailed me after the post, and describe the entire situation, saying he didn't really want the information out online. But nothing he said would appear to be damaging to him. Rather I encouraged him to post the whole thing in comments to my blog and those others that had experienced the illegitimate comment spam.

I think the way to fight false information is to shed light on it. This medium is about iteration, and bloggers know the value of getting the most true and real information out there. The point is to get to it, often through the group process of multiple bloggers linking and discussing, to inform, to question, to learn and to create the best information about an issue that we can. It may well mean conflicting opinions or frameworks are stated, but still, readers and other writers over time have the option of reviewing those varying viewpoints, and adding or iterating themselves. That reflects a healthy discourse and is, I think, the main goal of many bloggers, though not all blogs fall into this category of purpose.

Buzzmetrics did a study which the Center for Media Research has noted because of the effect a lawsuit, and online communities passing the word had on a particular brand and industry.

I met Jonathan Carson, the CEO of Buzzmetrics at Ad Tech a couple of months ago, and he told me that his company assesses online communications from sources such as usenet groups, public IM, chat groups and forums, bulletin boards, public email lists and blogs, among other things. They take everything, and crunch it, attempting to make sense of all the different types of online communications and the kinds of things being said, usually when a company or entity asks. The analysis is packaged into a report for that entity. They started four or so years ago, weathered the dot-com bust, and more recently have done lots of work for health care companies.

So the study they just did, on online communications around Transfats, Oreos and a lawsuit filed against Kraft/Oreos for using Transfats is interesting. Key findings summarized by the Center for Media Research:

Key Findings of the Report:

* Prior to the lawsuit, consumers did not link Oreo and Kraft to trans fats, but rather to other topics like recipes, purchasing, product feedback and dieting. However, following the suit, 90 percent of messages mentioning Oreo referenced trans fats or the lawsuit.

* Before the lawsuit, 82 percent of conversations about trans fats occurred in dedicated nutrition, fitness and health forums with self-appointed and often authoritative subject-matter experts. But after the suit, mainstream forums, such as wedding planning, home management and teen communities, grew to account for over 30 percent, while health forums accounted for just over 50 percent.

* Numerous international consumers jumped into the U.S. Oreo suit, highlighting anti-trans fats steps taken by their governments. Some consumers even expressed conspiracy theories involving food manufacturers and the U.S. government.

But reading < ahref="http://www.buzzmetrics.com/about/pc_news_transfat.htm">Buzzmetrics writeup, this came up:

* Consumer-Generated Content Accounts for 40% of Trans Fats Web Searches – Online commentary from consumers played a crucial role in moving trans fats from isolated pockets of interest to mainstream discussion.  Nearly 40 percent of the top 100 Google search results for "trans fats and oreo" were consumer-generated, i.e., blogs, personal home pages and message boards.  Top media sites – like CNN.com, NYTimes.com and MSNBC.com – accounted for only 20 percent.

Amazing but not surprising. So online, the perspective as determined by Google search results is that of the top 100 results, at least with the Transfat issue, 40 were consumer generated, 20 were from top down media, and the remaining 40 were other? Corporate sites? Non-profit? Government?

That's facinating. It's very strong evidence that entities who are used to dealing top down with carefully scripted messages and broadcast mentalities, like Kraft, are very much in need of rethinking what marketing and PR are about, how people want to get information, who they trust and why online communities which often deal with a level playing field, where no one controls the message, where individual integrity and transparency of motive are often more valued by individuals.

Blog Comment Spam - A New Low and So Bizarre

I received the following blog comment spam two days ago, for a web design firm:

LevelTen, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, is a professional web consulting and design company. We specialize in best-in-class website design, Flash multimedia, corporate identity, and print graphics. LevelTen features an integrated team of web consultants, creative designers, writers, programmers and marketing professionals that know how to get online results.Our business-driven approach separates us from typical web design companies. For more than five years, we have built a reputation for creating a positive return on investment for our clients. If you are serious about your web success, we can get you there. Strategic thinking, top designers, personal attention, competitive prices, real world results - discover the LevelTen difference.

Normally, I just add the URLs into the spam blocker, and report them to the larger spam blacklist. But this seemed like a legitimate company, and very odd that they would do this. Usually I just delete the spam comments, but I decided to email the company with this:

Spamming people's blogs is offensive and not the way to generate traffic to your site.

It's rude and shows you have no idea what social media and blogging are about.

Stop this practice now. It's ridiculous. I've banned you from my site and let other bloggers know as well, and put you on the blacklist for blog comments.

Tom at the company responded:

Thank you for your message. We are not posting these spam attacks. Someone is using an automated script to do this and we have already invested many hours trying to stop them.

Have you received a spam posting in the last 24 hours? All blog owners report the attacks coming from IP 64.17.153.1 which is a gateway at ixwebhosting.com, e.g. they can't just shut it down without shutting down hundreds of websites. Do you see a different IP?

Do ban the IP and let all blog owners you know to ban the IP as well.

In the mean time if you have any info that could help us stop this person, please let us know.

You can read more here: http://www.leveltendesign.com/help.php

Tom McCracken
Director
Lorentz Consulting / LevelTen Design

What possible gain could comment spammers achieve with what Tom characterizes as "cyber terrorism" on his Help site? Is it cyberterrorism? Or do the spammers hope that some legitimate looking comments might allow them to also post other kinds of spam that connects back to their interests in gambling, porn or prescription drugs?

This is bizarre, and a new turn in the comment spam fight. I get around 500-1000 a week, and oddly enough, it is often attached to this post on comment spam.

In any event, if you get the same spam, please email Tom because he is collecting information to go after the spammers. Unfortunately, right now, he appears to be able to do little to stop the practice.

The News

Just got back from Burningman... will upload a little video shortly... but in the meantime, catching up on the aggregator, I saw a story about Conrad Black. Reminded me of the Toronto airport, in July, sitting, waiting for my plane. There was a flight to NY, that repeatedly made a 'last call'... there was some tention a few gates down over it. Everyone was on the plane, and it seemed odd that they kept announcing last boarding, where as our plane, and the rest were barely getting any notice for boarding at all (gotta love Air Canada - which btw, I DO NOT recommend.. just avoid it.. worst rt flights ever).

Anyway, he walked in to the area with about 10 gates, walked very slowly down past me, 3 or 4 gates down toward the NY flight, waited while a giant (as in big, though not quite as tall as Black) goon followed 20 feet behind. Black looked kind of unnerved there, wading through the riff raff. When the goon caught up, Black turned left, walked slowly to the gate and got onto the plane. Oh for the love of a private Gulfstream IV. Those were the days.

Digital Ethics II.. and the New Commodity In Online Media

Talking with Adam Penenberg, he notes, continuing the conversation on digital ethics, linking and transparency:

I caught your post on digital ethics (Aug. 26) and it brought to mind the old Spy Mag spoof "logrolling in our times," when the editors would print a complimentary blurb on the back of one author's book next to that of a book written by the blurber--and you guessed it, he got a nice blurb from the guy he had just blurbed... quid pro quo, I guess.

In the case of Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searles, I think a disclaimer before the link would have been in order -- as in, i'm quoted in this piece but I like it a lot, too. In the interest of transparency, a reporter must divulge conflicts of interest, and being quoted in a story that you are pointing to, in my opinion, counts as a conflict of interest. Shouldn't bloggers subscribe to the same standard??

Good point. In fact we talked more about the disintermediating effect of blogging on journalism. I think that blogging disintermediates it in many ways, but one new thing I hadn't thought of in quite this way until I said it to Adam was how blogging changes the business relationship between authors and creators, and publishers and editors. Basically, editors and publishers, in their old media format, commodify authors and creators.

In the old analog media, you bought Time, and they aggregated the articles.. and while you might know a byline or two, you trusted Time to get the right info, and the authors, with few exceptions, were not promoted, and were not the focus of reader's attention. Publishers and editors had the control and focus. Authors were commodities.

In the new online model, with deep linking and bloggers and low transaction costs for publishing, authors are the focus, and editors and big media publishers are both much less necessary, and the control they held is disappearing.

In otherwords, in the new model, the commodity becomes editors and traditional publishers. And the focus and attention, that which is linked to, valued and discussed, are authors and creators (partly because they assume the role of publisher and editor). A great author, a great creator, online, will get attention because their creativity and value stand out and originality can't be commodified.

This is one of the reasons why digital ethics means author ethics are so important. We want to see where people link, what the relationships are between them, and make our own decisions as readers and conversants about what those author relationships mean, as we take in the work. It's the author who matters, and the author who must decide how and what to show about their own biases and relationships. Because otherwise the online communities will decide for that author. It's so much cleaner if authors and creators give it to us up front. Readers like it and we need it to evaluate trust because authors have become uncommodified.

(BTW, I know you were wondering why (the f-word) I'm blogging right now.. well, I'm in the office; we've been cranking.. all day.. the joys of startup life... it is fun though.)

Digital Ethics

Ben Casnocha wrote a post on the ethics and transparency of linking to people/posts that link back to you favorably. In other words, what appears to be reciprocal appreciation. He mentions the example of Jeff Jarvis' referral to Doc Searls' article on the fate of radio, where Jeff enthusiastically point to Doc.

Ben then quotes Doc's comment on his blog about how we figure out the ethics of linking, and pointing others to pieces we are positively mention in, and how others will see this, in a transparent online world where links can be looked up and people note the exchanges. The idea is that pointing or referring to others, is both directing attention, and letting readers know where the ideas originated from, while the writer iterates further. And so Doc says:

My point, which just came to me...

Much of what we're doing here amounts to teamwork. It's not formal, or even conscious in many cases, but it does involve lots of "yes, and..." posting. Sometimes praise is involved. More often it isn't. What matters is that we're not doing it alone. And that we're only beginning to understand what that's about.

So I would say it's right to point, for referrals and attribution, and lineage of thought, for community building and transparency. I'd rather know that Doc and Jeff refer to each other explicitly, than have it all happen behind the scenes, as if we all develop every idea in a vacuum, the way old style journalism appears to develop their stories. The people formerly known as the audience still maintain some of the training from big media, where we were led to believe this was true and real. It is not.

This is a matter of people getting used to the new online queues, the new behaviors and tools that support them, including both first and second order ones. But as people adjust, I think this ethical question will be worked out, and people will see the transparency and linking for what it is, and appreciate knowing the lineage up front, so they might make their own decisions about the ideas, the texts and the relationships within different communities who collectively collaborate on ideas and plans.

MT 3.1 Debuts

Last night Moveable Type 3.1 debuted at a little Six Apart party in SOMA/SF. Lots of fun folks, good conversations and dry saki fruit drinks (martini style). Lovely party. 3.1 has some cool new features which I'm looking forward to trying out. Discussions ranged from serious coders telling me how with ads in RSS right around the corner, they are working on plugins for all the aggregators to strip the ads out... to blogger/non-techies who were excited about the latest release... to how yummy the food was, and while the space was cool, but they might pass on the art.

Various people showed up like the always lovely Jeff Veen and Jeremy Zawodney and Sylvia Paull and Phil Wolfe and Mark Graham and Elise Bauer among others. Oh, and Doug Bowman, the famous and difficult-to-hire-because-he's-so-busy web designer (but he did promise me two weeks in November so I'm going to hold him to it). Afterward, a few folks headed to Lobbycon, which was borne from the "lobby talk" at Blogon.. it was held at the W Hotel.. and maybe 20 people were there.

One interesting thing was standing in the lobby for an hour and a half, observing the people who were just in the hotel because they were staying there. Amazing things were happening. Business people were wondering around looking for stuff to do, people were hooking up, a dj was spinning. Humans are fascinating.

But I digress. The SixApart and Lobbycon events were both fun. Thanks guys!

ps, I almost forgot the shwag: a 32mb key fob with a copy of 3.1... with autographed box from Ben and Mena.

Transparency and Trust

JD Lasica/OJR: Transparency Begets Trust in the Ever-Expanding Blogosphere

Survey's have shown that most people trust the NYT, NPR and the LAT for online news. But:

Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and president of Advance Internet, gave a different answer: "I have learned to trust the voice and judgment of my fellow citizens."

Me too. Smaller bloggers are interesting, because they are making symetrical conversation with each other, sharing information and iterating, collaborating, but big media tends to focus on those that are at the top, because it fits the broadcast model they know. But I'm really interested in the huge conversations going on at the level where bloggers link to each other more symetrically, with say 50 to 250 inbound links each. Those are the ones where others bloggers see interesting ideas, come back for views and expertise that are valuable, time and again. And those are the places where people speak to each other, find connections and answer each others questions to find more truth and discourse.

From Technorati data, this chart from OJR shows how sites like Slashdot are in the top 5, for inbound links. Its not about conversation at this level. So why is this important? Blogs use and refer back to mainstream news, but they are also creators of content, act as filters, and have specialized expertise. So the NYT does get lots of links because people are discussing and linking to those articles. But sites like Slashdot are in the top 5 as well. It does resemble broadcast at the top of the chart, but as you move down it, it becomes more conversational and symetric in linking between blogs, and that where the real interesting stuff happens.

Elise Bauer On Blog Systems

Great post reviewing the current state of blogging software and systems...

Nice pie chart on tool use, too:

But the best part is the discussion in the comments that iterates the list of tools and issues that much further.

Registration Systems for News Sites...

Robert Andrews commented on the Online News Association maillist, and on his blog about registration systems and users/readers frustration with online news sites that each require registration. His thoughts about a common registration system are understandable, but his suggestion that we get something similar to Passport (totally creepy) or Typekey (I have mixed feelings about it; see below) are problematic. Also, Adam Pennenberg has written something for Wired this last week on news site registration, where he admits to committing "..identity theft against my multiple selves..." as he tries to remember his many registration personalities across many news sites, while trying to protect his privacy by registering as people with wildly different demographics. I have to admit, I'm an 85 year old man living in Atlanta on the Washington Post's site, and have many other identities, for the Chicago Tribune, the LATimes, the Miami Herald... and for the NYTimes? I registered eight years ago describing my black lab, now deceased, which is still my login ID. So can totally identify with his story. Maybe I'm paranoid. Although I don't mind the targeted ads at all; in fact I prefer them, because if they are good, I actually want the information. But I hate the collection of my reading habits that are potentially available for some individual, company or government to sift through and put together. What do I have to hide? Nothing. But that's really not the point. People who have nothing to hide, start self-censoring when they know they are tracked and watched. And that corrodes the democracy and the commons. And it leads to totalitarianism. That's not the democracy I signed up for.

Identity Commons and Sxip are both working on creating a common user ID that could work across websites, including registrations, blog commenting, for reducing different kinds of spam and email including trackback spam. But there are problems and they are in development, so we have to wait to see what they come up with. But there are lots of security and privacy issues, like who keeps the data (Identity Commons is doing a distributed system) and for each instance where a system like this would be implemented, you have to think about who is using it, and what do trolls or spammers or other baddies have to gain from gaming the system. The controls that keep them in check may also be collecting information on the rest of us that as we learn more about the effects of our own online activites, we feel uncomfortable with and cause us to shift our intellectual consumption.

Adam and Robert both suggest a single registration system for logging into publishers sites. It would be great if publishers used a single system, for the convenience, but what happens when someone subpoenas the records of your activities across all those sites? How do you keep people's reading habits private? Sooner or later, it will happen. It's a matter of when and how the information goes out of the hands of the collectors, and into to other's hands.

Regarding Typekey, have you used it? I've installed a bunch of Moveable Type 3-series blogs recently, and set up Typekey both for the blog's back end and as a commenter, and find the whole thing disconcerting. First, as the blog owner, I have to connect myself via the blog to Moveable Type, by registering and giving my blog info. Then with that code they've given me on their site, I install it into the configuration on my blog's backend, which the system then syncs with MT back on their end. Then users come along, and when they want to comment, the blog redirects them to create a profile with Typekey if they don't already have one, which makes them able to post on any blog that require Typekey for comments. When a comment is made, the Typekey/MT site inserts an image on the comment located at the blogpost, linking back to the Typekey commenter profile located at the Typekey site. Each time *anyone* looks at the blog, MT gets a signal or ping, because that image has been called up from the Typekey site, as part of the opening of the weblog somewhere else, so MT could collect data about not just the blog and the commenter, but about everyone who visits that blog, somewhere out in blogland. And if you visit several blogs that all use Typekey and have these images planted there, even though you haven't signed up for Typekey as a blog owner or commenter, you can in a way be tracked, your reading habits recorded and strung together.

The upshot is that the three steps that Typekey and MT create to control comment spam also allow them to collect and use lots of data, beyond just the blog owner's registration or even commenter verification. I understand that they want to provide this service, and it's free, but it's disconcerting, Their privacy policy, that I can find, on typekey.sixapart.com concerns whether they will sell my email or other personal info not available on the web, as a commenter:

What about my privacy?

We're committed to providing a service that respects user privacy. Therefore, we will not publish information that you have not chosen to make public, nor will we share your information without your explicit permission. We're not in the business of selling email addresses, and we give users the option to choose whether they'd like to send their email address to the sites which they are commenting on.

Who runs TypeKey? Is it safe?

TypeKey is a service of Six Apart. We're a well-established weblog software company, with hundreds of thousands of users and offices in the U.S. and Japan. We're committed to making sure TypeKey is reliable, safe, and secure, and we've made sure our privacy policy is as protective as you'd expect: We don't want to send junk mail to you any more than you want to receive it.

TypeKey never shares your password information with site owners, and comment information is only retained on the site you've commented on, not on the TypeKey service. TypeKey is a service for authentication and, >in the case of comment registration, we leave it up to the weblog owners to decide who can post to their own weblogs.

And their Typekey Comment Registration FAQ says this, though there is no link to the privacy policy and searches on the site turn up no privacy policy but this reference:

Using TypeKey means that all of your private information, like your email address and password, will be maintained in one place, rather than saved in weblog systems around the world. The information you submit to TypeKey is governed by a privacy policy, whereas information that you might submit to individual weblogs would not be.

Why should I trust Six Apart to not sell my data or share it with unauthorized privacy?

Because not only are we, as individuals, committed to protecting our users privacy, but, we as a corporation, will also provide a privacy policy that outlines specifically what we will do with your data. Our privacy policy is simple: We will not sell your email address or other personal information. And, without your explicit approval, we will not share your information publicly or with partners.

Fair enough, they won't share my info if I register, unless they get my permission. But what about my visits to blogs that have their profile image on them?

I did find, by googling "privacy typekey," this privacy policy and the key points for non-registered users and the collecting of info (from different sections) appears to be:

• Six Apart automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, cookie, and the page you request.

• Six Apart receives IP addresses from all users because this information is automatically reported by your browser each time you view a web page.

So what matters here is that not only is the Typekey system capable of collecting IP address information and the reading habits on registered users, both blog owners and registered commenters, but also anyone who accesses a blog that uses Typekey with a planted profile image. I would love to see Typekey's privacy policy state that it was not collecting my IP address across blogs; that it was deleting the last three digits from of the IP from it's system; that it was not available for subpoena. I understand they might want to crunch it for a week or two after collection, but at that point, deleting it would be great. And yes, IP is personal identification. A few mistakes not withstanding, just ask the RIAA how they are finding users they are suing for providing music uploads.... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

Services and publishers that want to create single login registration need to think about the same issues, and make better systems than the current state of Passport or Typekey, so that not just the sharing of a registered user's email is addressed, but also what happens with the collection of reading habit information internally, what they will do when they get subpoenaed for the information they collect, or when the government comes along wanting a copy of the database under the Patriot Act, etc. One of the key tenants of freedom of speech is intellectual freedom, and the freedom to read in private, without fear of surveillance, because if people don't have that, they will self-censor. And it leads to corrosion of the intellectual and democratic health of the system.

It's a Form of Social Media: Blogging AND Journalism

Blogging vs. Journalism has been done on the web and in on a million panels over the past few years, and it's pretty much been put to rest over the past two years, that it's not an either/or situation, but rather, something where blogs AND journalism need each other and interact pretty closely at this point, at least in an obvious way on the blog side, and in a more opaque way on the journalism side.

Blogs are not at all just one-way in their interaction, unlike journalism which is one way (though a couple of publications like Wired link out, and a few more have started, but it is extremely limited overall and they are still totally clueless about conversing with their audience so that doesn't happen much at all). It is the social interaction of blogs that makes them a conversation, a multi-way interaction, and while few journalism outlets link back, the public is discussing news articles whether journalists like it or not. Journalists can join in, or at least read their readers thoughts on the day the stories come out. Or they can ignore them and be unaware of the conversations as the occur, but it means they are out of the loop with their readers and other reporters who are online blogging and interacting with readers.

Trustability on the internet, particularly with regards to blogs, has been discussed quite a bit on the blogosphere and in traditional media. Basically, whenever any journalist makes a statement dismissing blogs as untrustworthy, they are generally dismissed, at least online, because first of all, blogs are tool, as is newsprint, and what you write is flexible. It can be accurate or inaccurate depending on the person or publication. But all anybody has to to say is "stephen glass" and "jayson blair" and the whole argument is moot (see Adam Penenberg/Wired's article from last week on New Media's Age of Anxiety which covers this issue of the public's ability with the internet to cover journalists and Fisk them if they get it wrong -- Penenberg has a pretty full list of examples of Journalists making things up, including the May 14, 2004 UPI story that references a poll on Journalists relative truthworthiness to other professions, a poll which he says doesn't exist. He was also the journalist at Forbes who broke the Stephen Glass plagiarism story to begin with as well. Also note in his story that he links to everything he can to support what he is saying -- practically a requirement for blogging, but also a form of social interaction, and not often done by journalists, though Wired is one of the few publications to do this -- and they should. I hope he's also checking out who links to his story to see what readers thought about it.)

As far as I am concerned, Doc Searls, Jenny Levine, Ed Felten, Donna Wentworth, Jay Rosen, Ernie Miller and Dan Gillmor are far more trustworthy and accurate in their blogs, and often sources of reporting, than the NY Times will ever be overall, for a couple of reasons. I'd take Ed's analysis of any copyright/security/DRM issue any day of the week of an NYT article on same. Reasons include: Firstly, if they screw up, they print a top of their blogs, an obvious mea culpa, that sits in the same spot on their blogs as the earlier piece they are correcting. Secondly, they have a body of knowledge and expertise that goes deeper than generalist reporters. And thirdly, they are absolutely upfront about their biases, letting readers decide how to take their assertions. Fourthly, their link to their sources to underlay their own authority. I could go on, but you get the point.

This is why I usually refuse to do news stories generally. Because almost everytime, I've been severely burned by inaccuracies by a generalist who is lazy about the big picture, going after something sensationalist instead of what is real -- taking the time to do something well so that the real story is shown for what is interesting about it or might be a bit complicated. Blogs often have to tell and retell, before trad media gets the hint, and then all of the sudden you see the reporters telling the real story in the mainstream press, but they do it as if they existed in a vacuum, with objectivity and no bias. So I find rules journalist's live by, editorial control, etc. to be disingenuous if held up as reasons why traditional journalism is better and more trustworthy than blogs. The bottom line is you are responsible for evaluating anything you read, no matter where it gets published. Doesn't matter if it's newsprint or online.

Also, the way we tell authority across blogs is not yet a set thing, and can include being a longtime reader, a personal recommendation from someone you trust, job status of the writer, inbound links, meme pushing, top 100 lists by other calculations than inbound links, posting history and context, etc. Additionally, to say that bloggers don't have to abide by any rules is false. Say something incorrect or dishonest on the internet, and the blogosphere will go after it with a vengeance and expose it. Matt Drudge already had a bad reputation before the Kerry intern thing, and now he is so dismissed. No one respects him and a lot of people removed him from their RSS readers and blogrolls. So there are far more severe corrective penalties, and far quicker, than what exists in traditional media. Again, it's the social, interactive form of this media, between blogging and journalism, that has led to this environment.

Regarding the issue of whether bloggers have editorial oversight, a few do, so it's not absolute as to what category of writer follows traditional rules, though most bloggers don't have editors. And most of the journalists I know spend most of their time with editors pitching stories, not getting editorial oversight on a finished story. In fact, Katie Hafner, among other journalists, shared a few stories with me, as she had turned them in, that I compared to what was published, and there was very little difference. To me the real issue here with journalists is an unwillingness to be transparent about sources (link to them!) and biases, and yet that attitude is sort of being unwound by blogging anyway, whether they like it or not.

The bottom line is people are fed up with bad journalism and so blogs are a nice complimentary addition to get additional information on a story, fact checking, and for adding more complexity to the discourse. It is because of linking, which is the basis for online conversation across blogs, and our ability to find those who links to us, that makes the blog AND journalism social media equation different than what existed before the internet, between journalism and the public. Journalism used to be a very one-way affair (despite letters to the editor which relied on a big time lag, and a different place for publishing the letters than the articles discussed in the letters -- front page verses page D9). Neither form, blogging or journalism, is a replacement for the other. In fact, they need each other and could not exist or live without each other at this point. Bloggers rely heavily on the reporting done in news stories, and Journalists often rely on stories bubbling up on the blogosphere -- for both framing and a pointer to sources and events. But far more important is the social interaction and increased quality of discourse that occurs now that the internet with the rapid interactive quality of personal publishing is possible with the social technology tool that is blogging, as it mixes with traditional media.

BlogOn Update

This conference I'm organizing for July 22 and 23 (register by today and it's $50 less than it will be tomorrow, use the UCBerkeley code, and it's an additional $50 off, either before or after today) is moving along. Lot's of interesting speakers lined up to talk about social media (which includes much more than social networks and blogs) and the business opportunities for investing and creating businesses. Our intention is not to talk about social media exclusively, as that's been done before, but rather to talk about what parts are opportunities, where tools need to be made to see things happening between people, and what investors should focus on when considering these opportunities.

Also, we've added a scholarship registration, so that community bloggers who can't afford the $149 blogger fee can be comped. We ask that you submit a little info to us, and then we'll ask a few to help out on a couple of things. But we feel it's important for people who create social media to participate, no matter their ability to pay the conference fees.

If you are interested please register!

NYT and RSS

Christine Mohan of the NYTimes sends word that they have a new expanded set of RSS feeds.

RSS Feeds at Traditional News Sites

Nothing earthshaking, but the Online Journalism Review/Staci Kramer have a piece on the current state of RSS feeds by news sites, noting that by having them, news sites can drive traffic to their sites and stay relevant with bloggers and other readers who want more control (like the Richard Miller story at the top of the article -- he built his own RSS feed for getting Wall Street Journal articles out). K. The usual, except for this chart which shows who's onto RSS and at what level (excuse the horrendous information display of this info; in the article, it's almost impossible to grok unless you read it carefully, but if you take the time to read it, it's really interesting as a timeline of RSS adoption. I reordered it and hopefully it makes more sense linearly. But I don't have time to make a graphic right now to show it better.)

Online News & RSS:

The Ground Floor
news.com
csmonitor.com
nytimes.com
wired news
bbc.com
salon.com

On Board
baltimoresun.com
boston.com
cbsmarketwatch.com
espn.com
Guardian Unlimited
reuters
slate.com
time.com
washingtonpost.com
fastcompany.com

Testing
projo.com
philly.com
thestate.com

En Route
wsj.com
MSNBC/newsweek.com

Thinking Hard
Belo
Morris Digital
Knight-Ridder
AJC.com

Not on the Radar
stltoday.com

What Does it Mean When A Blog Stops Updating?

So what is dead, what is not updated, what is abandoned? Well, I think, reasonably, dead is a 404, as in, the information is no longer available. I think the archives of blogs, and their linking histories are actually very interesting, so the fact that Technorati keeps them in the index to me is important and useful. I mean, Google doesn't delete webpages when they haven't been updated after three months. In fact, when a page goes 404, they still keep the cache. So what's up with the dismissiveness of the NYT article?

I would say that not updated means that it's not recent, and for me, abandoned might mean after six months? Maybe? It depends on the blog, how it's used, what the readers feel about it, what the writer considers is the status, whether it keeps getting links, even if the dates on the posts at the top grow old. It depends on what the information is used for, what the blog is about, whether people still discuss and leave comments, why it is not longer updated. There are many factors as complicated and non-standard as people are, because blogs reflect the highly complex and unpredictable lives people lead. After all, most blogs are not paying gigs, but rather complements to, expressions of, or reactions to something, and with that in mind, it's no wonder that people come and go, or abandon all together. Especially if they don't find an online community to talk with. It's not so much about having a big audience for the great majority, but it is nice to have a few folks that matter, conversing with you. Writing is a lot of work, and so those online relationships are sustaining for some people. In a series of interviews with bloggers I did this spring, I asked whether they liked writing their blogs. One third like writing very much, and the rest hated it, but did it because the rewards, and they were varied, were worth it.

I know a number of bloggers who are only travel bloggers, so they post when traveling, say over three months through South America, and they email us when they start up. And then when they return home, the blogging stops for a while, until their next trip. Or the ones who do it for knowledge management, and so, blog over the school year, but take the winter break and summer off. Or for research projects of limited duration. Or the ones that blog for a specific event, leading up to it, through it and just after, and then not posting again for a while, until the next big event.

Blogs are flexible, and people use them for as many different reasons as blogs exist generally. It's stupid to characterize the genre as being just one thing. I think the NYT piece was simplistic in a way, stating that because a blog hasn't been updated or is used for a purpose that is not about daily postings.

That's not to say that I am in that category. I will be back regularly, but I'm still figuring out things, getting things back in order.

Blogads Survey Results Are Out: 55% Find Blogs Extremely Useful for News

Blogads/Henry Copeland conducted a survey, where 17k people responded. Results are here.

Interesting things: respondents were women at 20%, men at 79%. Henry emailed that the women on average were 10 years older than the men.

Educators were the highest responding industry, at 14%, though computer professionals were the largest job category at 11%. 43% consider themselves opinion makers, 40% democrat, 91% from the US, and self-identified spending online was highest at $0 for every category (from travel to music to consumer electronics) except books, which had 23% of the respondents saying they spend $100-199 per year online. Amazon must be thrilled.

But the most interesting stuff for me is that 54% get their news primarily from the internet, and 55% find blogs "extremely useful," reading an average of 5 blogs per day. Also, they spend 10 hours per week on blog reading. Why? They reported that they do it for news they can't find elsewhere (79%) and for a different perspective (77%).

Wow. That backs up the surveys I did earlier this spring, where people self reported 45 minutes per day on average of online news reading, and said they read blogs primarily for the two reasons in the last paragraph. That demographics was a Craig's readership, with broadband at home. While the data from the Blogads survey is a sample of people who visit Henry Copeland's site, or were directed there by other bloggers, the information he has collected is extremely interesting of this subset of the populace.

Comments Are Back On

People were complaining, so I restored them, after the barrage of comment spam last Thursday through Sunday. However, if they come back, and MT-Blacklist gets overwhelmed by the rate of spamming, or we don't figure out the longer term issues with Moveable Type and upgrading, I may have to turn them off again (by blowing away the comment templates -- there is no global on/off switch).

Moveable Types New Licensing, Pricing for 3.0

Everyone and their blogging dogs have commented on Six Apart's new Moveable type licensing and pricing, complaining vociferiously. My thought is, I know they need to sell the software to have a business model and stay sustainable. But my group blogs would be $702 and $599 respectively under their new upgrade scheme (which we really need for a couple of massive fixes), though they are on educational sites; asked them and still no word on educational prices, though they've asked us to wait while they figure it out. I'm a little unhappy because I'm the one that got a couple of departments at Berkeley to install MT, and now most of those people want to change to other services. So instead of those crazy licensing schemes that don't fit anything, at least that I'm involved in, how about a flat fee?

What about $50 a blog/site, no matter how many authors or installs that make up "one" blog? Posts are posts, aggregated on one blog, no matter who does them. How about, "one" blog with "one" name. Got a different name, with a different URL, implying different content? Then it's another $50. And then charge extra for support, which we don't need anyway and never had or got used to. Frankly, I'd pay $150, including $50 for napsterization, plus foot the bill for the two group blogs even if they are hosted on educational servers. But all my activities together would run around $1500 as it stands now and I can't upgrade for that. It just seems like too much.

It's not what they are doing, it's how they are doing it. I think if they went to the user base and asked how the users would like to see it happen, they would get much more cooperation in getting people to pay for their software and suggestions for fringe cases like the group educational blogs. But they don't appear to have done that, or at least across the 100 or so blogs I read daily, I never heard about any survey to see what Six Apart users thought or got any notice though my blog pings MT with each post. I can say I'm guilty of not visiting the Six Apart site regularly for their latest. But then I don't visit Microsoft or Macromedia either.

I'd love to see Six Apart work something out that works for both bloggers and the company. I've really enjoyed using their software and teaching it to dozens and dozens of others. But they need to change what they are doing or risk their whole community of users.

Ar·ma·ged·don with Comments

You know, I love comments. I love being able to leave comments on another's site, on a topic that is not part of my Napsterization topic area, or any of the other blogs I sometimes write on in group blogs. I love people who don't have blogs being able to comment here. But this is too much.

Last Thursday, I had over 1000 comment spam, each with a different IP, different email address, different message, different URL which means that I had to individually add each URL to MT-Blacklist, though the root URL was mostly the same over about every 120 spam. Tried to kill, as more and more spam was flying in, and got nowhere. Tried blocking IPs but no dice. Tried changing the templates and URL's but nothing there either. They adapted. Friday, had another 1000. Saturday, 1500. Sunday, I shut comments off, even though the logs were denying tons of attempted spam.

So maybe it's a bit dramatic to say it's a decisive or catastrophic conflict. But I'm not kidding, 4500 spam (and 4500 separate email notifications from those Borg spammers who want us to think resistence is futile) in four days is absolutely fucking ridiculous. Assholes ruining our discussion. I mean fucking hell. What is this? Hours spent removing this crap is totally frustrating. Why? It's not like they are succeeding with their Google pagerank. Google doesn't appear to index comments anyway. Hello. Stop with the fucking spam okay?

I know the new Moveable Type 3.0 has a registration system, but I'm not sure that's the answer, though I haven't upgraded yet due to waiting to hear from them on emailed questions about their licensing for educational purposes (though I'd really like to because living with the couple of whopper bugs has been awful the past few months). Yes, I'd like to see everyone with their own blog. But then, when someone wants to comment, it means, if they comment once a month, that they actually have one post a month on their blog, possibly on many different topics. Not sure that's a great solution for people who are not regular bloggers.

And comments attached to a particular post mean that all the comments are in one place, though I know Technorati can help find conversations across blogs but only if there are links to one another or everyone uses the same key words. However, it means that over time, blogs and links have to be maintained if they comment on other blogs on other servers, in order to keep the whole conversation alive. While I would like to see this, sometimes dead blogs just get removed or links break. So comments from infrequent commenters are nice to have all in one place at one discussion.

I want to have comments, I don't want to have registration (for many reasons), I do want MT-Blacklist to have the functionality to take care of these issues. Maybe it would stop comments once a barrage starts -- no more than 5 comments in an hour, and then the ability to force a temporary halt to the publishing of comments without owner approval. Whatever it is, the system needs much more flexibility to see and control submissions. And MT should functionallly allow the global turning off of comments, and the global turning back on, once civility has been restored. Right now I have that choice only by blowing away the various comment's templates which I did a day or so ago.

May 12 Panel on Non Fiction Media (Blogging v. Journalism)

YAJvBP. Okay it doesn't have the ring of a YASN, but what does? Anyway, I'm hoping this discussion is less about Journalism v. Blogs and more about how they complement each other, how they differ and why that is important to the media biz and biz in general as it tries to navigate the new media landscape, because how the discussion of blogs are this or that is irrelevant in the same way that describing a book as any one thing would be silly; who would say all books are diaries, or cookbooks, or novels or children's pop-ups? These are genres in the sense that they are publishing tools, but that's it. They are not any one genre of types of material or people or writing or photos or whatever. A Blog is not a moblog any more than a blog is a diary or a list of links or a rant or a content management system or a corporate marketing tool.

Or how about discussing the definition of interactivity (as in, let the user be able to reconfigure the environment and alter the content), why linking is key to life on the web and why it makes the web different from other media, how honesty prevails (and fast) in online discussions, or debate verses true deliberation (where many views and truths can be distributed and discusses for the good of the commons and democracy), or what about the commodification of news information to the extent that you can't make money online with that, and instead you have to rely on metadata, clicks and ads, and relationships with your communities of interest?

I say this all not so much because I know anything about how this panel will proceed, but more because so many panels in the past have just stayed on the Blog v J topic.

So you might say those are high hopes, but then check out the panel:

Dan Gillmor - Technology Columnist - Mercury News
Susan Mernit - Principal, 5ive,
Chris Nolan - Politics from Left to Right
Scott Rafer, CEO of Feedster
with Chris Shipley moderating.

Dan told me the other day that he has refused to address this question (the YABvJP question) for the longest time because it's long gone as a topic, and I know Susan is totally down with that, and I'm guessing the rest of them won't go for the simple blogs v. J thing either. So, go to the panel for the good stuff! An interesting discussion iterating the topics that matter to date with digital non-fiction media....

Wednesday, May 12, 2004 6:30 to 8:30pm at Fenwick & West at 801 California St. Mountain View, CA.

JD Lasica's Put His New Book Draft on a Wiki

He writes:

I just published the first few chapters of "Darknet" -- my upcoming book on the digital media revolution and the conflict between Hollywood and technology enthusiasts -- on a public wiki.

How very au currant. Participatory book editing. Napsterization approves. Prrrrrrrr.

Bo ke: weblog in Chinese -- Andrew Lih

From The Challenges of the New Media in China panel.

Isaac Mao: 300k bloggers in china -- 150k on CNblog.com. Another problem in the Chinese blogosphere is that the communication tends to be one way from English blogs and media to Chinese blogs.

Isaac Mao, then Fons Tuinstra, then Andrew Lih (L to R)

Andrew Lih on wikis and wikipedia. Make it easy to do good, and make it about a neutral point of view. Make it copyleft.

He reports a five-fold increase in wikipedia use. It's a many-to-many participatory model. It has not been blocked by the PRC.

(We're going through speed presentations on the last panel, because the conference is a little behind. But really, we could have spent all day on the Public Opinion in Chinese Cyberspace panel earlier today, but they only had an hour. I was just getting a handle on the conflicts and issues they navigate as they deal with subtle pressures over content and online communications... when it ended... they talked about different levels of these pressures from the government, from minimal, to more intense issues and censorship. Also, sometime there is no government pressure, and instead they feel it companies like Intel and Microsoft. Also, one of them mentioned that often the regular press is stifled over some particular issue but that online publishers don't get any pressure for writing on the same issues. This may be due to the fact that there are 78 million users, and 40 million computers, so it's less than 10% of the populace that even gets online.

Also, it's the 10th year anniversary of internet access in China. To support the business of the internet, short text messages are encouraged, on cell phones usually, but the discussion is "bad" and so higher level discussion and understanding is often lost. Also, with 40 million computers/78 million users, life in internet cafe's is very controlled and surveilled by the government.)

Madanmohan Rao, research director of the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre, from India is speed reading his presentation. It's hot in the auditorium (they forgot the airconditioning for the weekend -- thanks to the engineering department who is renting the hall to the jschool...). He's talking about content management, weblogs, sharing knowledge, wireless. Yeah, everyone's all for it. We vote yes. Okay, it's grueling. But we're hanging on.

Next up: Fons Tuinstra, chief editor of Chinabiz Ltd. "Blogging from China." Says that people don't take blogging seriously, because there are few bloggers. Is 300k bloggers a lot? Yeah, it's a lot more than when he first arrived in Shanghai.

Chinanewsman.net -- we were asked to look at it, but it's been blocked, so we get nothing. Maybe the maker of that site will switch to Chinanewsman.org next.

Andrew Lih: I consider Howard Dean the Napster of elections. We still have P2P, even though Napster is gone.

Xiao Qiang: (in closing) I think the last panel sounds quite technologically deterministic to me. It's a long way to say that the Chinese society can be so free. But I don't want to end on a pessimistic note. I havne't been back to China since 1989. But at that time, the Chinese were so fixed in their social structure, they belonged to their communes or whatever, and there was very little horizontal communcation, and no technology underpinning the market economy. But now, how many people have cell phones, how many are on the internet, how many travel? Yes, still totalitarian. But it's more interconnected, from the bottom up, and sociologists will tell you that more interconnectedness means more openness. But is that good? Is it all for good. That's why we had this conversation here.... To follow China is to follow a great unfolding.

There's a group of us having dinner tonight at LaNote, organized by Kevin Wen, including Isaac and Liang Lu, along with about 45 other people, in Berkeley.

China's Digital Future Conference

Just started. Webcast there as well. First introductions....

Orville Schell, dean of the JSchool at UCB: Now in China, there is the question, what does it mean to be Chinese? The internet is one of those places where you begin to see the discussion, weblogs, chatrooms, txt messages.

Will China change the internet? This is an old theme in China: use technology from the west but then also reject politics, value, all the things that create revolution and radical change. Can China use what it wants but keep its own identity, keeping out what it finds too foreign? He quoted John Perry Barlow: the global space you are building will naturally be free of the tyrannies you are imposing... and then noted the posting on the internet in China recently with 14 questions for the propaganda department, why they exist, posing the kind of challenge that Barlow would have been proud of.

Annalee Saxenian, our new dean of SIMS: The Politics of Standards. Some people refer to it as the politics of protectionism.... And key for future development in China: applications, content, engineering and design. And the internet.

Panels on Internet Development in China and Regulation and Control of the Internet. Here are some notes from the second panel this afternoon:

Cindy Cohen, EFF: every time there is a new tool, a free speech mechanism, it has to fight for it's survival...
regarding privacy, the record of the internet has been more mixed... on balance. Architecture as policy - Mitch Kapor. That is an important observation, because the architecture will determine people's rights. In China we see the worst story around, where greatly accelerated internet use, 78 million users in China and 4 million broadband users.
Original strategy was filtering content. But the strategies to get around those are easy to implement and widespread. So now the reaction is not so much content filtering, but a distributed system of surveillance, with systems installed on users computers and used by ISPs -- often made by US companies and government who are trying to use those things here. And the US government has started this with Kalia, and forced it onto foreign governments through standards. China has taken the lead on doing voice recognition software for the purposes of surveillance and for doing video with almost instantaneous high speed transfer.

Bill Xia, pres of Dynamic Internet Projects -- and makes technologies that can get around the surveillance systems: He says the biggest challenge in China today is not technology, but the social issues. In China, surveillance occurs during the routing of packets where the to and from are watched. Also, the government claims that they are blocking things like porn sites, but in fact when you look at the blacklists, this is not true. There is severe overblocking of all sorts of things, including sites like 3dweb.com. Fear: truth or illusion? People say they don't worry because they have nothing to hide. But it occupies people's minds. And destroys traditions, as well as changes language: traditional Chinese characters have been filtered out of the culture. He thinks that there are cracks in the Chinese control system, and the fact that there are 500k users in China of his company's system to get around the control (out of 78 million users in China).

John Battelle (moderator) asked if users feel it's dangerous to use the product. And Xia responded no for regular users, but yes for some others, but then got cut off on the next presentation.

Jonathan Zittrain: Gave a chilling effects example where a DMCA C&D letter caused Google to remove a site, where on the supply side, the links then went to the original info at chilling effects. But on the other hand, other sites are deleted entirely from French and German search sites.

On the demand side, if you go to Google.com in China, you are redirected to the University of Beijing search site. Also, some testing of sites showed they were blocked by China, as well as many key word searches like "std" or "revolution." Found a few thousand sites that were blocked, including news sites, UC Courts, British Courts, porn, etc.

Tracking filtering is becoming more difficult, because there are new forms of filtering including the client side stuff. Also, if you do the wrong search, you are blocked from Google for about 20 minutes. Including searches that are not subversive at all. Comparatively, in Saudia Arabia, it's more bark than bite, verses China, which is the opposite.

Opennet Initiative is Zittrain's latest project examining filtering, along with folks from other universities. Examples of filtering they've found: the word "ass" in any domain gets blocked, which ends up filtering the "US Embassy" site. He clearly relishes giving this example, as with the rest of the presentation. He's having a lot of fun here.

He also challenges the NYTimes to get involved, so that when things open up, they have established their brand, since they are now totally blocked in China.

Jie Cheng, associate professor at Tsinghua University Law School: talked about how the filtering standards need to be revised. The social norms are more important than what the normative law. Later at the cocktain party, she talked about how China needs to be better with filtering, so that they don't block so many harmless sites. Obviously she has a hard job, coming here to explain her country's actions and policies to this audience but she and the audience were cordial in explaining questions and positions. It's a difficult position she's in.

.........................................................................................................
Best quote of the day: Tom Vest, Packet Clearing House: "ruling a great nation is like hooking a small fish, a light touch might be best."

Dan Gillmor: Linking to Your Competitors is a Source of Your Own Authority

The second panel today at UC Berkeley's Journalism school, some loose notes (not comprehensive):

Dan Gillmor: love the idea that everyone in here can be a global publisher.

Neil Chase: CBS Marketwatch -- we are a scrappy little news room -- somebody in this room said to me a few weeks ago, why don't you just get rid of all the reporters and instead have bloggers, and you just edit.. but people like reporters and our reporters are still important hiring 40 people through journalism.jobs.com and craigslist.org.

We do take political ads, and it's great, but also get a lot of hate mail.. went to candidates and said you need to be online, but only Kerry took them up on it,
serving a wide audience...

Bob Magnuson: If things are going well, why do you need pearson and viacom?

Ken: Why is the guy from Spokane talking about this? not a lot of innovation in this area, get invited to a lot of these things. He suggests that news sites do any one of the ten new things they are trying all the time, and the guys at those news sites say you don't understand, there's a bureaucracy, we don't even have access to our own servers... so he asks, why is really interactive on news sites online? those stupid forums at the NYT aren't even interesting. Dan's book is good, interesting. But trying to get people to participate online, so that when there is an issue of journalistic credibility or news, they can get info from readers

Vin: News biz in trouble, more shovelware than ever.

Dan: eBay and Google don't do journalism, ebay wouldn't do it because it would be ridiculous.

Neil: Numbers don't say journalism or media is dead. Nnumbers say big media companies have done a bad job of doing journalism and media.

Dan: What people say to each other is most interesting to people.

Neil: blogs do two things, share opinion and point to stories -- both very important.

Dan: Missing the point here: linking is the most important thing.

Vin: Traditional news companies have to pick stories for the most wide demographic with limited paper real estate, but online those constraints don't exist....

Ken: Example, media companies, think about how they operate now and how they can adapt, but they don't think enough about the needs of the users, want to find everything you need to know online.

Dan: Linking to you competitors is a source of your own authority -- we become more authoriative by showing the best stuff now matter where it comes from.

Susan Mernit from the audience: making conversation - short discussions, across news sites to blogs, to commenters on blogs and news sites, make conversations... thinking about your readers instead of yourselves as a news site is really important.

Vin: Bloggers aren't making money. We're hardpressed to find bloggers who are.

Dan: we've trained the world to think newspapers are free anyway...

Neil: it's always been valuable to know journalism skills, and to know about areas of the world, so that you can write about it.

Dan: I don't know if the general interest reporting skill will be valuable in the future. The most valuable course, though, that I took in HS was typing. Blogs are a big step over hand coding

Vin: used to be that Asia and Europe had to come here, but now we are five or six years behind here in the US, and we have to go there to see the latest in technology and social development, and the internet.

Dan: Recommendation: Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold. Absolutely essential.

Revisiting Virtual Communities

This panel just finished, and here are a few noteworthy remarks:

Susan Mernit was live blogging from the panel, during the panel. Markos Moulitsas (Kos), Craig Newmark (there is a new documentary about craigslist called "24 hours on craigslist.org" and Fortune just did a story on them) and Mark Pincus of Tribe.

Mernit: Tools and technology adoption are key to what's happening with people and technology. Online communities are about people and people in turn drive technology development to support themselves and their communities.

Newmark: We've collectively managed to reach a few million people between social networks, blogs etc. but how do you get past that echo chamber.... When you grow up as a nerd, you learn what it feels like to feel left out, and when you gow up, you think about it and figure out how to include people, which is what craigslist is working on now.

Pincus: All leads aren't the same -- just like search results were too much on alta vista in the beginning, as we deal with each other now on social networking sites, we need filters and ways to qualify information so that we get better info. We also choose to expose ourselves to each other and we want to get good things back, not bad. The network is the database -- tell the network who we are and then automagically, the network will help us find a group that we could be a part of... the genesis of tribe was political - though I have no interest in public interest job. The process is the platform.

Kos: There is no fair and balanced media -- I think everyone has bias and it seeps into coverage. Fox has viewers for a reason, ABC, NBC and CBS are boring -- and newspapers lose readers for a reason, but newspapers in England are a lot more lively.

Pincus: Google has proven that if you put things in context, and clearly identify things people like it. They did tests, and people said they liked craigslist because it had no ads, but actually it's all ads, but the ads are content and they are where people expect the ads to be. If I see an ad before a movie, I'm annoyed, but I want to see them in the right categories on craigslist. We are in an age of "utility media" that moves away from "entertainment media", where it's like a free cab ride in Mexico to the time share, but then you have to listen to this ad.... Craig has proven that it's sustainable, Tribe hasn't proven it yet, but there is no reason to have it be an adversarial relationship.

Blogging and Social Networking on Ebay

By now, 2 hours and 24 minutes before the close of horseplaypublishing's auction, and 4.8 million page views later, this wedding dress has a bid price of $15,100.00 (pdf or htm). Yesterday at noon there were about 683k page views and the price was $690. The guy selling it (he's also modeling it) has written commentary as well as additional information about the auction responses, including media interviews and tons of email, after the initial post on the dress itself. His motivations for selling? His wife left him and he found the dress in the move, and he wants to get money for Mariner's tickets as well as some beer -- noble goals for any eBay seller.

I'm waiting for eBay to set up comments, trackback, and of course, links to this post from other bloggers. Actual online social networking here. And his website will be coming soon. Hopefully he does a blog himself because the writing is so funny. Though horseplaypublishing does report that, "EBay has graciously allowed me to update this page once more. So I will keep it brief." EBay has something on their hands that they may not understand the extent of, or if they do, it's not reflected on their site, but it's incredibly cool. Let users play and they'll come up with something really interesting.

Blog Outsourcing

Today, instead of blogging myself, I've decided to leave comments on other blogs. Some on grade information and inflation at Freedom to Tinker and some with Jeff Jarvis on representation of the public by the press and some with JD on the DMCA and search engine C&D's. It's just easier than figuring out what I think here, right now, in a state of anxiety.

Trying to finish up school, everything that isn't about finishing (working out, spending time with a couple of people, and sleeping are excepted as big stress relievers) just leaves me racked with guilt. This includes blogging. I've got two major papers and a system due by May 13 at 5pm. Every piece of extraneous paper or any dirt in the house is driving me nuts. I just want this to be over, and yet I don't because I also enjoy the people I work with at Berkeley, and my experience there. But I can't sit in this spot for very much longer. I need it to be over soon.

News panels and then The Internet and China Conf Events next Thursday, Friday and Saturday at UCB JSchool

Xiao Qiang's conference looks to be very good, with a cool list of participants and focus on Asia and the Internet in ways that I haven't seen at any of the conferences I've been to in the last year or two.

Revisiting Virtual Communities: The Internet's Impact on Society and Politics Friday, April 30, 2004, 9:00 am -- 10:15 am in the Library. Criag Newmark, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos Weblog, Mark Pincus of Tribe Networks and Susan Mernit.

Disruption the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism next Friday the 29th at the JSchool at UCB: 10:30 am -- 12:00 pm at in the Library, Berkeley. 5 solid people on the panel: Neil Chase, Vin Crosbie, Dan Gillmor, Ken Sands and Bob Magnuson, who is moderating.

China's Digital Future: Advancing The Understanding of China's Information Revolution bet 1:00 pm -- 5:00 pm, and Saturday. Keynote: Larry Lessig, with these speakers...

Panelists include:
Duncan Clark, BDA China Ltd.;
Stella Xi Jin, Vantone International Group;
AnnaLee Saxenian, UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems;
Cindy Cohn, Electronic Frontier Foundation;
John Gage, Sun Microsystems;
Andrew McLaughlin, Google Inc.;
Haibo Lu, Sohu.com;
Chunyuan Liang, Sina.com;
Xiao Qiang, UC Berkeley China Internet Project;
Susan Shirk, UC San Diego's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation;
Andrew Lih, University of Hong Kong;
Richard Baum, UC Los Angeles Center for Chinese Studies;
Benjamin Liebman, Columbia University Law School;
Bu Wei, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Also, Thursday night there is this:

Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery Thursday night the 29th, 2004 7:00 pm -- 9:00 pm at Pimentel Hall, UC Berkeley with Denise Caruso, founder and executive director of the Hybrid Vigor Institute with Ray Kurzweil (By videoconference), founder of Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, Howard Rheingold, Richard Rhodes, Mark Schapiro. Moderated by Christina Desser, co-editor of Living With the Genie, and Introduced by Michael Pollan.

Bloggercon Notes

I wrote this up Sunday morning after Bloggercon, but then had trouble finding wifi in Cambridge (wifinder only showed Starbucks which requires a TMobile account which I don't have) and forgot my cable for using pdanet (d'oh) and no Cingular www access for some reason on my phone, so I'm posting this upon returning.

Like a lot of conferences, there are interesting talks, but I go for the people, a certain subset of the communities I'm in, and Bloggercon was this way too. I loved meeting a bunch of bloggers I hadn't known in person before, and reconnecting with the ones I do know. Betsy DeVine waxed sweetly about Kevin Mark's helpfulness at the last Bloggercon and lamented his absence, and Micah Sifry, Dave Winer (our host) among others.

Dinner Friday night was a lot of fun. Sitting near to Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen, Henry Copeland walked past near the end, looked at me and said, "Oh, you're part of the blogging journalism mafia." I had no idea. But I guess so. I have sort of been actively keeping my picture off the internet for a while, at least associated with my name, but Dan Gillmor posted it, so here it is, kind of cinema verite. I actually kind of like it (I usually don't like photos of myself). I was thoroughly enjoying talking with Halley Suitt and Werner Vogels there.

Saturday morning, lots and lots of bloggers in the rooms. So many, it's hot hot hot. We are wondering about whether they have the weekend settings for airconditioning on, because so little air is coming out. But Wendy and Dave and others have done a nice job of putting on a (free!) conference on a limited budget so you really can't complain, can you. Spend much of the day IM-ing with people who couldn't get on the IRC, but were listening though the audio webcast which was dropping people regularly. Just ended up typing the dialog in the room to them. Later as the IRC was on the wall in sessions, Loic LeMuir got on, sending me a "hello mary" to hoder, who responded that he was not me (two d's in my name verses hoder's one d) and this flashed behind the speaker and sat there on the wall for a while. Then someone in the room put the IRC on notice that they were projected on the wall of the room, for the benefit of those outsides the room (Loic was in Spain yesterday). Lot's of smiles on the IRC.

So Jay Rosen's session was my first, followed his essay Friday where he said it was his most misunderstood post ever; that everyone fixated on one line, "Blogging is not journalism, but bloggers now filter and edit journalists, and journalists read blogs.
". He turned those thoughts right around positively as the basis of the most interesting discussion of what happens when blogs move toward journalism and journalism moves toward blogs without descending into the either/or problem. Great audience participation discussing these issues, with journalists, bloggers and heavy readers there giving perspectives, and Jay channeling us toward more constructive thoughts on this than many recent conferences. We talked later and agreed that with an audience that spends so much time online and on blogs, maybe a critical mass has witnessed and discussed and hashed enough previously online that we could quickly move right to the good stuff in discussion. Jay is so masterful. If I could ever lead and speak half as well I would be happy.

David Weinberger's session was on the use of blogs in business settings, and blog ROI, both the internal knowledge management kind and the external sorts including marketing, pr, conversing with your customers, Scobelizer-transparency as well as the Raging Cow debacle and Rick Bunner suggesting that like media training there should be blog training. My thought on the internal sort of blogs is that the same problems that hit knowledge management systems in the 90's may affect internal blogs. (link to examples) where people in various sorts of businesses would reject them because they were afraid of losing control over their biz contacts as well as their most important business information and the context it is associated with, refused to use them, especially in partnership types of businesses, or where competition amongst the staff was part of the culture. Most useful was a thought at the end of the session that if any of the external business blogs are to work, people in companies have to stop thinking of their communications as one-way, and start sniffing around the internet for the cultures and conversations that matter to their business and marketplace. And then, their blogs may turn out to be little conversations, with 25 people at a time, as specific issues and perspectives are addressed. Microclimate markets.

Nice lunch at Casablanca, which I recommend for the Salade Nicoise, which turns out to be really terrific, with Vin Crosby and the always lovely Susan Crawford, who is working hard on mapping legal issues to the practical and social interactions we engage in online, for the purpose of finding ways to self-regulate things like spam. She's iterated further since she presented her work-in-progress at the Yale talk two months ago.

Rebecca MacKinnon talked about international blogging communities and communications. Great discussion. Ethan Zuckerman talked about his visualization of blogger coverage vs. Google news coverage of different places.

The red areas are places that blogs talk about more than traditional news, the blue areas are places they speak less about and the white areas are places with equal frequency of discussion (Ethan admitted in the session that he has a visualization problem with the colors he chose and the way they represent the information and so will work on this problem further"). But the discussion nicely outlined the issues where often the focus of blogs is American or Western, and international issues are left out. Jeff Jarvis pointed out the idea of adopting a country, and conversing with and highlighting bloggers is a start. And thoughts about blog software available in other languages (why isn't Google making a localized Blogger?), when we focus on the international (Jay Rosen notes the compelling nature of traditional media coverage of international events and how the bloggosphere often follows that lead, as well as his desire to be a more international blogger but for the translation hurdles), and Jeff noting how in the bloggosphere, its still an American-centric situation where things become important when American bloggers talk about it. We agreed that better tools for translation, connection, seeing conversations and more attention to this issue are key. Finally, it was noted that "international" was a word he heard once come up once at Bloggercon I, and so having this session, getting this issue out explicitly, was really a great leap. But then again, there is so much to improve still.

Last session was with Jeff Jarvis on business models for blogs. Jeff is hilarious, starting us off a little like a real estate seminar, asking who wants to make money, and yet he's very serious about making blogging more sustainable for bloggers. He's working of his wiki, and going through ad models and interaction models and uses of blogs to get other work. In the end, we voted on 7 or 8 different things, choosing what was most important to address in the bloggosphere. It came down to a vote between two things: stats on blogs and traffic, and a trade association for blogs. Doc (in Santa Barbara) voted for stats, as did I, and the final count was for good reporting and stats. Then Tristan Louis asked Oliver Willis what he would do if the Kerry campaign offered him $100k to place ads on his site, with the condition that he not criticize or embarrass the campaign. Oliver thought a bit, smiled, said he might consider it, but quickly decided that he would lose readers and cred if he did that. So it wouldn't be worth it. Debra Galant noted in the end that things are transparent online, that eventually disingenuous behavior is found out, and people don't trust it, so there is incentive to stay honest or no one will interact with you, link to you, read you. And so it's self-policing.

This session had so many people pouring in, I was on the floor (and damned lucky to get a step to sit on) and still more came, and it was so hot, eventually my trackpad froze. Then, there was a power surge on my side of the room and about 15 of us crashed, though I didn't completely. But my system froze more still, unable to save after the surge, I lost IM and all my session notes in the last 5 minutes, so I might as well of crashed.

The last event was Dave's Fat Man Sings, but approaching the door, the room was totally packed, a wall of heat, so I sat down on the window seat outside, an airvent under my feet, next to Betsy DeVine, who was watching a webcast of Dave, and recommended restaurants and very kindly offered me a ride back to the house where I'm staying. Scott Johnson was there as well, and Kerry Campaign rep. And Hylton Jolliffe of Corante fame, Seth Finkelstein whom I've been wanting to meet for the longest time who is very interesting, and Jay McCarthy. And Chris Lydon, Tom Biro, Renee Blodgett. And Rick Heller who is making an open source novel.

Had a lovely dinner at Legal Seafood, and one of the best lobster bisques (better than the lobster cappuccino at Le Bernardin, more lobster and nicer flavor). But now it's back to work. I have a month to go of school and getting to a certain stage in my projects, CFP next week, another blogging and China conference the following week at the JSchool at UCB, and so much work to get done. However, it was completely worth coming to Boston for the weekend. I came for the people, and they did not disappoint. Reminds me a little of the end of Lily Tomlin's one woman show "Search for Signs..." where the aliens are talking with the homeless lady, whom she has been schooling in human behavior and culture, and she asks how their trip to the theater was, and they say they spent the whole time watching the audience. She is surprised, and asks why, and they tell her that like the comparison of a soup can to Andy Warhol "Soup Can", the play was soup, the audience was art. In this case there was less play, some very good moderating, with mostly audience participation, so really I'm not discounting the sessions. Just that I really enjoyed the participatory nature of the discussions and the wide range of comments from lots of different very interesting people with the desire to figure out the best possibilities for moving forward with blogging.

Tara has a great list of blog posts on Bloggercon II.

Wired reports on Bloggercon. Jeff Jarvis corrects.
The Register.
NYTimes.

On Sunday afternoon, I was walking with my friend in Cambridge, and surprise! bumped into Werner Vogels, who most helpfully told me about the MIT Hotel two blocks away with wifi. The MIT Hotel is really cool inside with displays of interesting art/sci projects (what else). Alas, it was only for guests....

The Practice and/or The Tool: Journalism and Blogging

Usted habla español

Update on News and Use of Headlines and Snippets by Bloggers

TechLawAdvisor points to Reuters policy:

Infringements of our copyright does not include where bloggers quote from and link back to our original story, or where sites display a headline and link back to reuters.com.

Nice to know they see this kind of blogging of news stories as fair use.

Technorati Hits 2 Million Blogs

Exciting news. (I'm working with Technorati on two projects; I love playing with this stuff!)

Why News and Technical DRM Don't Mix: Linking and Linking Expression are Key

Nonfiction media, the news, has 24 hours of high value, and then the content turns into something else. It's a swift transition news content makes into the status of history, an archive of facts and information, a social accounting, that has a different meaning and use after it stops being news. The production of it relies on various institutions and practices, as well as political, social and economic forces that change over time and shift it's place in society. The press is privileged, as it has constitutional protections for freedom of the press, libel protections, and other legal protections, not to mention access to governments, records and situations that the rest of the public doesn't have. There is a reason why we don't force the press to be licensed or pay a tax, and grant some level of immunity for search and subpoena or prior restraint. These privileges are there in exchange for certain responsibilities the press accepts in a kind of social agreement with users to serve the public with useful, trustworthy information, or find itself irrelevant and disdained.

At the Mediamorphosis (API) conference two weeks ago, one of the three workgroups of participants proposed using Digital Rights Management tools (DRM) to help insure secure content. These weren't technologists but I don't think they meant a firewall to make their content secure in archives, but rather DRM that would prevent the content from being opened by anyone anywhere outside their firewall that they didn't authorize. The subject then came up in the blog where it was noted that Michael Silberman (MSNBC) said: I think DRM could be used to keep people from stealing, and get them to pay for content. And it could be used to facilitate the making of content.

I think some of this desire for DRM on the part of creators of news content has to do with thinking that when users access free news content online, it means to creators that users don't value the content because they don't pay for it. Under the old model, paying for a newspaper meant to user