Infothought

Anti-Kool-Aid Roundup

The latest readings for the Wonderful Web World (or, why I've just wasted my time again, and need to stop doing it):

Failing Web 2.0 stars pray for copyright abolition (Andrew Orlowski)

Exhibit One is a deadpan report in the Financial Times, bylined to Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters. It's titled, "Web 2.0 fails to produce cash".

This could be the least-surprising headline of this (or any) year. Dog Bites Man rarely makes the news. As we predicted years ago, Web 2.0 was only ever a rhetorical bubble, designed to boost a clutch of no-hope investments into the arms of an acquirer. For a handful of others - mostly pundits - it was a lifeline from a dead-end media job into gurudom. It didn't take a genius to work that out.

Perhaps You Should Examine Your Colon! (Jeneane Sessum)

Okay. Look. I can't take it anymore.

How many times in the last 7 years have we been through the women-free TOP LISTS OF BLOGGING. Or the penis-only MOST IMPORTANT CONFERENCE IN TECHNOLOGY events?

How small stories become big news (John F. Harris)

As leaders of a new publication, Politico's senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links from other websites. ... There are probably a dozen websites with a heavy political emphasis whose links are sought by all for the traffic those links drive.

Britannica Blog Link-Baiting "Newspapers and the Net Forum"

Britannica Blog is having another link-baiting party, I mean, "Are Newspapers Doomed? (Do We Care?): Newspapers & the Net Forum". They did not quite say:

Throughout the week assorted writers, bloggers, and media scholars will [provide link fodder] discuss and debate the state of newspapers and the impact of new media on traditional avenues of publishing. We welcome your [link] input, your [links] comments and [links to] perspectives, and encourage your [linking to] participation in these discussions.

I addressed a paradox in a column a while back: "Has Britannica co-opted blogging or has it been corrupted by it?". The Britannica people definitely seem to be cognizant of a blog as an attention-getting device and Search Engine Optimization aspects. In fact, it's arguably even working for them.

I've repeatedly tried to make the point, there's no reason to assume that organizations designated as the contrast to the shiny new thing, are therefore intrinsically unable to play with the shiny new thing's toys. Britannica Blog seems to show it's in fact quite possible to adapt, or at least try.

My _Guardian_ column on Internet and political campaign counter-examples

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/14/politics.internet
Great internet campaigns don't guarantee success in politics

Internet evangelism shares a marketing technique with sellers of quack medicine, in that the promoters are eager to emphasise any successes and ignore any failures.

Internet President Howard Dean, meet Internet President John Edwards (not to mention Internet President RuPaul).

John Edwards Ending Presidential Campaign and Blog Evangelism Is Quackery

I usually don't comment on politics, but "John Edwards to Quit Presidential Race" is an opportunity to note something I've often said, where the "Web 2.0" sales-pitch uses the same mechanism as quack medicine. The Net marketing hucksters hype up the people who have taken their snake-oil and do well, but don't mention (or worse, blame) the people who drink the Kool-Aid and DON'T do well. The John Edwards campaign had the bubble-blowers, genuflected to bloggers and big Liberal political blogs, had blog A-listers on board for advice ... and none of it worked. If his campaign had caught fire, we'd be hearing from that crew again about the wonderful Internet, buy their magic, etc.

Now, the A-listers involved might say they never promised success in every case, under all circumstances. But that would be missing my point. Some of the more clever peddlers of quack medicine don't promise cures in all circumstances either - they just show testimonials of the sick who coincidentally happened to get better, and ignore those who died horrible deaths (which were sometimes worsened by the quackery). They're not interested in any objective evaluations of how well their stuff works, they want to sell it to you.

Yeah, I know, old news. Shouting to the wind again, bad habit :-( ...

Andrew Orlowski reviews Nick Carr's book "Big Switch"

Echo: Nick Carr's Big Switch

The "Web 2.0" affliction of has so far only infected the media and political classes, with isolated outbreaks in marketing and the social sciences. ... But where it strikes, it seems to take over the unfortunate victim's entire brain; and that's still a lot of people with public policy influence. The zombie symptoms of the virus we all know today: gibbering about "new democracy", "wise crowds", and the rational faculties of a three year-old.

There's a lot of themes here, about worshiping technology or technological determinism. I figured I had too many conflicts of interest to delve into it myself, but adding to the Google-power of the above seems reasonable.

My _Guardian_ column on the Writers Guild strike, and the Net

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/03/internet.digitalvideo
The writers, not the internet, will decide who wins their strike

"If anyone thought there's no money to be made from internet content, the Writers Guild of America strike refutes that idea once and for all"

The title's not too bad, but again, not quite what I was saying. The point was more that social and legal support for unions matters much more than "The Internet", and no outcome is predestined.

I've attempted to pack a lot of technology-positive social criticism into this column, basically trying to advocate against the view that the natural order of things is a multiple prisoner's dilemma game where corporations set all the rules. I'm struck by how little support there is for the strike on some A-list blogs, and I think there's an obvious business reason at work.

"Google Hijacked" debunking follow-up - guest post from ISP owner

[User Generated Content! Let's call this a guest-post, taken from the comments in the DEBUNKING "Google Hijacked" - The Sky, err, The Internet, Is NOT Falling! thread. Note the views and opinions expressed below are those of the writer, not me, though I am broadly in agreement on many points]

Brett Glass here; you may remember me as a long time columnist for magazines such as InfoWorld, BYTE, and PC World. I'm now (among other things) running an ISP, and think that people should think about what Rogers [ISP in Canada] is doing from an ISP's perspective. I've posted some of the text below to the comment sections of a few other blogs, but want to post it here too because it's relevant.

Network neutrality means not using one's control of the pipe to disadvantage competitive content or service providers. For example, if you're a cable company that offers VoIP, network neutrality means not blocking customers' use of other VoIP providers.

Network neutrality does NOT mean that a provider can't "frame" pages (as do many providers -- especially those like Juno which provide inexpensive or free service) or send them informative messages via their browser.

Let's step back and take a dispassionate look at what Rogers is really doing here. They need to get a message to a customer. Like any experienced ISP, they know that there's a good chance that e-mail won't be read in a timely way, if at all. (We, as an ISP, find that our customers constantly change their addresses -- often after revealing them online and exposing them to spammers -- without any notice, and often let the mailboxes that we give them fill up, unread, until they exceed their quotas and no more can be received.) The Windows Message Service once worked to send users messages, but only ran on Windows and is now routinely blocked because it's become an avenue for pop-up spam. Snail mail? Expensive and slow... and the whole point of the Internet is to do things faster and more efficiently than that. Give users an special program to display messages from the ISP? Users have too many things running in the background, cluttering their computers, already -- so no one could blame them if they didn't install it. (Also, many users won't install an application for fear of viruses, and alternative operating systems likely would not run the software.) Display a different page than the user requested? Perhaps, but that certainly comes much closer to "hijacking" than what Rogers is doing. Display a message in the user's browser window (where we know he or she is looking) along with the Web page, and let the user "dismiss" it as soon as it's noticed? Excellent idea. A wonderful, simple, unobtrusive, and (IMHO) elegant solution to the problem.

Now comes Lauren Weinstein -- known for drawing attention to himself by sensationalizing tempests in a teapot -- who has never run an ISP but seems to like to dictate what they do. Lauren claims that the sky will fall if ISPs use this nearly ideal way of communicating with their customers.

Contrary to the claims of Mr. Weinstein's "network neutrality squad" (who have expanded the definition of "network neutrality" to mean "ISPs not doing anything which we, as unappointed regulators, do not approve"), this means of communication does not violate copyrights. Why? First of all, the message from the ISP appears entirely above, and separate from, the content of the page in the browser window. It's not much different that displaying it in a different pane (which, by the way, the browser might also be able to do -- but this is better because it's less obtrusive and unlikely to fail for the lack of Javascript or distort the page below). The display can't be considered a derivative work, because no human is adding his own creative expression to someone else's creation. A machine -- which can't create copyrighted works or derivative ones -- is simply putting a message above the page in the same browser window.

It isn't defacement, because the original page appears exactly as it was intended -- just farther down in the window. And it isn't "hijacking," because the user is still getting the page he or she requested.

What's more, there's no way that it can be said to be "non-neutral." The proxy which inserts the message into the window doesn't know or care what content lies below. The screen capture in Weinstein's blog showed Google, but it just as easily could have been Yahoo!, or MySpace, or Slashdot. For the same reason, it can't be said to be an invasion of privacy, because the software isn't looking at the content of the page above which it is inserting the message.

In short, to complain that this practice is somehow injurious to the author of the original page is akin to an author complaining that his book has been injured by being displayed in a shop window along with another book by someone he didn't like. (Sorry, sir, but the merchant is allowed to do that.)

Nor is what Rogers is doing a violation of an ISP's "common carrier" obligations (even if they were considered to be common carriers, which under US law, at any rate, they are not). Common carriers have been injecting notices into communications streams since time immemorial ("Please deposit 50 cents for the next 3 minutes"). And television stations have been superimposing images on program content at least since the early 1960s, when (I'm dating myself here) Sandy Becker's "Max the burglar" dashed across the screen during kids' cartoon shows and the first caller to report his presence won a prize. (The game was called "Catch Max.") And in the US, Federal law -- in particular, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- protects ISPs from liability for content they retransmit whether or not they are considered to be common carriers. They do not lose this protection if there happens to be other content from a different source in the same window on the user's PC.

There are sure to be some folks -- perhaps people who are frustrated with their ISPs for other reasons -- who will take this as an opportunity to lash out at ISPs. But most customers, I think, will recognize this as a good and sensible way for a company to contact its customers. Our small ISP is looking into it. In fact, because the issue is being raised, we're adding authorization to do it to our Terms of Service, so that users will be put on notice that they might receive a message through their browsers one day. I suppose it's possible that a customer might dislike this mode of communication and go elsewhere, but I suspect that most of them will appreciate it. In the meantime, let's just say "no" to regulation of the Internet.

DEBUNKING "Google Hijacked" - The Sky, err, The Internet, Is NOT Falling!

[I wrote this for a mailing list, before the story started spreading all over the usual places. I didn't even get through there ]

Regarding Lauren Weinstein's post on "Google Hijacked -- Major ISP to Intercept and Modify Web Pages"

This is apparently not quite the danger it may appear at first glance.

The product at issue, PerfTech, seems to have been around AND USED for a while, for example:

http://www.codeamber.org/news/PR020205_2230_code_amber_perftech_press.html
Code Amber Utilizes PerfTech to Reach ISP Customers
February 2, 2005

"Code Amber (http://www.codeamber.org) and Wide Open West (WOW!) Internet and Cable last week delivered an Indiana Amber Alert to customers in the neighboring state of Ohio, enabled by a product deployed in WOW!'s network that allows the Internet provider to deliver bulletins directly to the screens of its browsing subscribers."

A look at http://www.perftech.com/press.html shows this is hardly a stealth application - they tout advertising-insertion as a *feature*, for subsidized ISP services.

Also, http://www.perftech.com/images/Press_Rls_5_26.pdf is one file with an example using *Google* ... dated March 26, *2004*.

Now, it strikes me as a very obnoxious product. But I'm so tired of the "The Sky, err, The Internet, Is Falling!" paranoia every time an ISP or teleco does something, anything, that can be twisted into service for the buzzwords of Net-you-know-what.
Again, can't we be better than that?

Debunking linkfest - Long Tail, Infringements, Comcast, etc.

A collection of proof as to why being right is no match for being popular:

A Critical Reader's Guide to The Long Tail (Tom Slee)

Debunks the "Long Tail". Never confuse someone making a bit of money off you with you making a bit of money.

Adam Curtis: The TV elite has lost the plot | The Register (Andrew Orlowski)

Debunks well, a lot of stuff. Not all of which I agree with, but thought-provoking all the same.

Fringe Infringements (Jon Garfunkel)

Debunks some claims in a legal paper that's making the rounds. The problem is that if you don't come up with some sort of attention-grabber, you won't be heard.

DOCSIS vs. BitTorrent (Richard Bennett)

Debunks some of the technical matter about the Comcast network throttling blogstorm.

Old Media May Not Be Dead, But Traffic From It Is (Jeneane Sessum)

Debunks certain mistaken readership ideas.

Debunking - Congressman Adrian Smith NOT blocking blogspot bloggers

If anyone wants to follow yet another fear-and-loathing blog story, the so-called Congressman Adrian Smith and blogspot blocking is a case-study. Quick explanation: The hosting provider for (some) House Congressional websites blocked access from referers from blogspot.com, as a spam issue. One blogger noticed this with one congressman - and we were off with the narrative that the Congressman must fear the awesome power of bloggers, rather than it being some sort of a technical glitch. Echoing and echoing, because in the bogosphere you GET ATTENTION!!! by repeating such a story, versus possible personal attack by saying it's false.

So now the unfortunate hosting company is running around chasing the various echoes, posting a technical explanation, which is both 1) not read, since it's down in the comments which are viewed by a small fraction of readers 2) being treated presumptively as a cover-up.

Remember, it's all "conversation" (link omitted for self-preservation), and the mainstream media gets things wrong too ...

My _Guardian_ column - a letter to Lessig on "corruption"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/25/comment.intellectualproperty

"A modern version of snake-oil hucksterism is invoking 'the internet' as a cheap simplistic remedy for political malaise."

This time around, I can live with the title they gave it - "We have nothing to fear, except those who have something to sell". Though the column is really more about my own fear that Lawrence Lessig's corruption studying would fall victim to the siren song of net evangelism.

Gore's Peace Prize And Hits To My Debunking Page

The Nobel Peace Prize to Gore and IPCC was sure to drive many hits to my site for my page of Al Gore "invented the Internet" - resources. So I thought I'd check the numbers:

Unique_IPs: 2259

Top five referers:

google.com - 1603 (71% !)
unknown - 177
Other googles - 194
Other search engines - 180
en.wikipedia.org - 19

It's better than zero. Still, it's not clear it actually does much good.

Navel-Gazing Traffic-Chasing Echo-Chambering Post

I'll chase today's TechMeme discussion about blog traffic (h/t Nick Carr) since it'll give me a context to make a few points (which are mostly for my meager audience ...).

One of the futilities of blogging is that the same simple ideas get brought up over and over, in an endless cycle of hype and deflation. In this case, traffic from a trade journal can be numerically inferior but demographically superior, than a broader site. A large amount of data-smog is being generated today in restating this triviality, because of the cycle of hype the trade journal for its dedicated readers, then someone else points out it's not that much in raw traffic, then others counter it's good demographics.

Of course, the problem with being a Z-lister is that you likely don't get echoed either by the trade journal or the broader sites, so BigHeads debating the merits of the two is rather beside the point for everyone else. As well as the obvious aspect that the types of appearance are not exclusive, and one can lead to the other.

Oh, then in reaction to the above, there will be the people who will pipe up and say, be happy singing in the shower, talking to the crickets, writing away unheard except for a tiny fan audience. There's a lot of these, since they're basically the largest group which remains :-(.

Search engines, reputation, and denial of harm

I find one of the most frustrating aspects of certain types of punditry is that a critic can never win. One of the common patterns of unfalsifiability is to argue the following two propositions against each other:

1) Have you heard about anyone hurt by that problem? No? So no problem.

2) Oh, you did hear about someone hurt by problem? Well, that proves there's no problem, since Action Was Taken.

It's cruel, since:

YOU DON'T HEAR ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO DON'T BECOME MEDIA CAUSE CELEBRE'S!

We have a perfect example in a follow-up to the recent story about "When Bad News Follows You", regarding how problematic search engine results can potentially affect people's reputations. One person mentioned in the story became a cause celebre, which is fine, but that was twisted into more grist for denial:

The one non-blogger I wrote, [name redacted] of Slate, kindly took notice:
"Garfunkel's success at remaking Kraus' Google image so quickly with such little effort supports my original view that the alleged problem is de minimis."

The success was all luck. ...

But nobody is going to hear the Z-list contradiction of the media pundit, or if so, he then has the option of writing a personal attack from on-high that can't be effectively responded to (unless the targets have powerful allies, in which case the denial process plays out recursively).

Of course, this post won't be heard (much) either ... :-(

My _Guardian_ column on the CNN/YouTube Debate

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/02/guardianweeklytechnologysection.comment

New media is just another way to pull the same old tricks

"We should never mistake a change in media style for any advance in citizens' power in politics."

Britannica Blog, Google PageRank, and Cites & Insights 8/2007

Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights publication issue 7:9 (August 2007) is available now, with a long article On Authority, Worth and Linkbaiting discussing the (my phrasing) Britannica Blog "link-bait" party. I want to give a slight correction to one Google aspect:

I'm focusing on the blog because of something Seth Finkelstein (and, I believe, others) have suggested: That the controversy over Michael Gorman's posts is, at least to some extent, linkbaiting -- behavior designed to increase the number of inbound links to Britannica blog, increasing its visibility on search engines. If that's true, it seems to be working: Google shows a PageRank of 7 in early July 2007, a level that usually takes a while to reach.

In fact, the time delay there is too short for a PageRank increase to show up in the public reports - the data Google usually displays for easy public consumption is typically a few months old. The Britannica blog has a PageRank 7 mostly because it's linked off the main Britannica page (which is PageRank 8) as well as article pages and similar.

In fact, the Britannica organization seems notably SEO-aware and marketing-conscious. For example, they've previously sent out a press release about "Michael Feldman blogs at Britannica site". Anyway:

Was this genuine controversy or incited controversy? ...
I will give Gorman himself the benefit of the doubt and not presume that he was setting out to incite controversy for the sake of controversy. I'm not inclined to be so generous regarding Britannica -- and, frankly, I wonder why the firm is so anxious to have a hot blog.

Well, I can't speak for them, but there's many obvious answers - e.g. to be part of the pontification (NOT "conversation" - A-listers speak down from on-high, to the audience), for the personal publicity (intellectuals are hardly immune from ego), for the product publicity (Encyclopedia Britannica is commercial product, remember), for the general awareness and promotion that comes with high Google placement, and so on.

It's actually not a bad blog on its own terms, a bit like an upscale liberal-arts type magazine. But that's not going to draw readers like taking a stick to the web-evangelist hornet's-nest will.

They do seem to read at least some blogger reactions, or so it's said :-)

# tpanelas Says: July 23rd, 2007 at 10:17 pm

Seth,

Yes, we read you. You have a lot of fans at Britannica. I hope this doesn't unnerve you.

Tom

My _Guardian_ column on the Britannica Blog Linkbaiting, err, "Web 2.0" Forum

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,2123666,00.html

Has Britannica co-opted blogging or has it been corrupted by it?

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. That's what the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica apparently decided to do ..."

Read Kent Newsome's "Declaration of Blogging Independence"

Echo: Declaration of Blogging Independence

They have refused to respond to conversational overtures, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

They have ignored posts of immediate and pressing importance, unless emailed till their Attention should be obtained; and when so emailed, they have utterly neglected to reply. ....

"Conversation" without representation is tyranny!

Mother Jones, Politics 2.0: "... conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?"

Link-love: Mother Jones - Politics 2.0

Are we entering a new era of digital democracy--or just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?

That's easy - Just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking marketers (not really geeks, with a few almost accidental exceptions, or only using the term in a very expansive sense). Next question?

It's been depressing to watch the classic bogospheric scenario play out over this. Somebody writes an article with some debunking overall. A-list reaction follows predictable themes and personal attack: Old Media, Doesn't Get It, accusations of various and sundry sins, lots of potkettleblack. The targets go around in comments trying to get people to think about what they actually wrote, rather than what was ranted against. But it's ultimately a fool's errand. Because for all the hype of the power of links and original sources, the ability of a tiny oligarchy of gatekeepers to direct attention insures that their statements dominate the discussion. I can't think of a more recursive disproof of blog-evangelism :-(.

In the actual stories (and 27 interviews with various bloggers, politicos, and digerati) we/they say there's a lot to be excited about in terms of the political applications of 2.0 technology, and the larger philosophical promise: that old school political hacks might be forced to give up on top-down messaging. However, we also say that some in the netroots have gotten a little drunk with power, and that some of the technological applications have yet to prove that they can have a real impact on electoral politics, fun as they might be.

Putting aside the big issue of "electoral politics" for the moment, try even having a real impact on so-called discussions. And no, I don't consider it thrilling to connect-with-people in comment threads or Z-list blogs that almost nobody reads, and will be ignored if doing so serves someone's interest.

Bonus link: Kent Newsome - From Creation to Abandonment: the 5 Stages of Blogging

Stage 4 Alienation

After the blogger's capacity for frustration is exceeded, he does an about face and, instead of seeking inclusion in the conversations, he rejects the entire process completely. At this point, the tailspin towards abandonment has begun. ... Some blogs exist in a near perpetual state of alienation. Eventually, the alienation gives way to abandonment.

[Any similarity to this post is completely intentional]

"People Ready"

"People Ready" means to me that bloggers with Google-juice might have a small opportunity to deflect a "markets are conversations" hype. So if you ever wondered, prompted by Microsoft "When Did You Know Your Business Was People Ready?", the answer is that you were probably being manipulated by a "spokesblogger". If I thought it would have done any good, I'd have earlier echoed Dave Rogers' post on Vendor Relationship Management:

Doc wondered if I might be willing to help or contribute somehow to the conversation about vendor relationship management. I told him I was skeptical. I think anything that facilitates commercial interactions, does so at the expense of social ones. It's not that I regard all companies as "evil," though most of them are far from "virtuous." As I explained to him, even if all companies were "good," they still must compete with one another for our time and attention. And the universe of competing commercial entities seems to grow without limit; and they are all learning organisms, so they adapt to changes in their environment, and exploit anything that can give them a commercial advantage.

In classical abuse of the terms Conversation, Community, and Credibility (Ethan Johnson:)

Unfortunately, what is hailed as "conversation" really boils down to "chum".
...
I think some of what passes for credibility online ties in with the old wheeze about prostitutes, buildings, and politicians becoming more respectable with age.

Bonus Link: Kent Newsome - Arm Farting in the Blogosphere

Scoble could write a post about arm farting and 30 or 40 people would immediately link to it, hoping he might link back.
...
In other words, all those people linking wildly to Scoble aren't doing so because they think he is the world's greatest authority on arm farting. They are simply holding out their hands eagerly and hoping Scoble will shake it (via a link) as he walks by.

Disclaimer: This post is (obviously!) not sponsored by Microsoft, or anyone else. Nobody gave me anything of value for it. In fact, it's dubious if this is anything other than a waste of time (as opposed to a source of income ...).

The Problem Of Responding To Attack Forums - Law Or Tech? (both?)

Echo: Jon Garfunkel - CommResp and AutoAdmin(t) (about a message board being sued for personal attacks, for legal details see e.g. David Lat or Eric Goldman)

Let's consider the questions that an information architect wants to solve here:

1. What social good was provided by AutoAdmit, and was it being supplied elsewhere? ...

2. How do you govern a community? ...

3. What technology do you use to build a governable community? ...

4. How do you keep a website from the prying eyes of Internet searches? ...

Not the same incident, but conceptually related: Shelley Powers - Victim is now 'out'

Britannica Blog Link-Baits from Google to Copyright/P2P to Kids Today

I must confess I'm fascinated by Britannica Blog's Link-Bait experiment. Now the topic's on about Google, copyright, plagiarism, and those rotten kids. It's like someone sat down with the A-list Blogger's Playbook, and asked the question "How do we make this gimmick work for us?"

Someone seems to have thought to themselves: "OK A-lister, you say that in order to prosper in this brave new media world, the thing to do is become a talk-radio type flamefest. There should be lots of ranting against The Enemy, and lots of stroking of the audience that they're the bestest ever. We can do that. You didn't invent snark, we had snottiness a long time ago. Except we won't do it in terms of the anti-pointy-headed-intellectual shtick that you favor, but apply it to a besieged-culturalist routine that appeals to our audience."

I still can't figure out if they've been corrupted even as they outbait the baiters, or whether they've shown the upstarts how it's really done.

See http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/06/the-siren-song-of-the-internet-part-ii/

The Britannica Blog Learns to Link-Bait

I should write about Google and log retention, but as long as I haven't quit entirely yet, the following is too good to a traffic-magnet to let pass. It seems the Britannica Blog is having a link-baiting party, I mean a "Web 2.0 forum". As Karen Schneider reported, in terms of strategy:

... elevating Gorman to the level of expert pundit on anything related to the Web suggests that Britannica isn't seeking the intelligent exchange of ideas, but is looking to build its Technorati rankings through the now-tiresome back-and-forth of Gorman-says-X, now-we-disprove-it; I am sure Britannica is now busy finding people to "respond" to their manufactured controversy, like one of those episodes on afternoon TV shows I see at the gym where after the wife tells all, the dazed cuckold is brought onto stage to stammer his chagrin.

But, but, Karen, that's the blog way. The name of the game in this brave new net world is GET ATTENTION!. The louder, the more obnoxious, the most bombastic - the better.

So many paradoxes: is the Britannica Blog hypocritically disproving its own assertions, in terms of flaming for scholarliness? Or is it cleverly outhyping the hypesters, by using the knee-jerkiness of the attention-mongers for a kind of judo-maneuvering viral publicity, pushing the buttons of the blogger mindset so as to get its ideas spread much further than otherwise? Does the (Encyclopedia) Devil cite scripture for its own purpose?

One of the posts seems to be proposing a mass movement against demagoguery, a collective response for individuality.

Before anyone suggests I should try to get in on the action, note it probably wouldn't be good idea for me to make myself such a large target. It wouldn't help anything, and the inevitable attacks would be a severe personal negative.

The Dr. Robert Lindeman / "Flea" anonymous blog outing - Blogging HARMS!

There's a dogpile over the Dr. Robert Lindeman / "Flea" story, where a pediatrician who was sued over a malpractice claim, settled immediately after being revealed to have written blog posts concerning the case.

I can say something slightly relevant here, from my own experiences in trying to work anonymously: Anonymity is difficult to maintain. Much more difficult in practice than the glib proclamations about it that are usually found in net policy punditry. Many people immediately leap and cite examples where it's been successful. But they don't give extensive weight and consideration to examples where it's failed.

Note we will NOT see this case being acknowledged by blog-evangelists as a serious downside of blogging. Of course, there's an obvious defensive line: Don't write about legal matters, no anonymity is absolute, it was stupid - so it's all his fault.

But to me, this goes back to my comparison of Blogging Effects As Quack Medicine. By the time the negative aspects have hurt someone, the snake-oil sellers are gone, looking for new suckers. And the injured person did something wrong anyway, they'll say.

But I've said this before, to no good .

Cites & Insights November, June 2007 -Blogging "Code Of Conduct"

Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights publication issue 7:6 (June 2007) has extensive coverage of the Blogger Code-Of Conduct controversy, arising from the Kathy Sierra 'death threats" story (disclaimer: I'm mentioned, favorably).

[I keep saying it needs better marketing. While "Net Media Perspective: Civility and Codes: A Blogging Morality Play" is workable, wouldn't you be more likely to read something at least with a subtitle of Creating Passionate Users - With A Vengeance (pun intended there)]

My guess is that most readers missed most or all of this. That may be a good thing but there's stuff to think about here--almost all of it in Act II. That's one reason I'm spending a whole Perspective on this instead of the 400-word summary above. I'd also like to relate this morality play to the generally politer world of liblogs and offer some conclusions, mostly along the way. Finally, Cites & Insights sometimes serves as a "periodical of record"--and I believe it will be useful to revisit this in two or four or ten years to see what (if anything) was learned.

Nothing will be learned. It's not like people haven't been dealing with this since ancient days, even Internet ancient days like when USENET newsgroup hadn't ever had spam (yes, there really was a time when spam was unknown). And O'Reilly is no newbie.

The one innovation that's been learned over the past decade is that it's kinda sorta possible, in very restricted circumstances, to build a labor-intensive data-mining system that skims off the popular stuff and keeps down the spam. But that doesn't help against A-listers, who are a power unto themselves.

The whole thing is about trying to have the moral high ground in one form or another, which I think is why it's so hard to inject any sort of rationality into the pronouncements. By which I mean not that I'm patting myself on the back that I'm right, but that my first question about these is always who is going to enforce it and how that enforcement is going to be done. And I never get much of an answer. At least, not a good answer, as shown by the fact that the subject repeats itself so predictably.

Meta-post on HD-DVD AACS Key, Digg, and the failure of blogging part N+3

I feel like I'm obligated to get in on today's pile-on regarding the topic of Digg and the HD-DVD AACS Key, but, wow, do I feel like a cricket at a rock concert. Key points - the number which is the AACS key is going to be argued to be "technology" within the meaning of the DMCA, we've been here before, with e.g. DeCSS, and being a data-miner of crowds (like Digg) sometimes means having to ride their madness. The rest is elaboration.

However, right now I look at the labor for that elaboration, and think: "Seth, you can spend unpaid hours writing a researched post on the issue, and then you get to spend even more unpaid hours trying TO BE HEARD over the noise-barrier, knowing that there's really a very small chance of getting much return (but you *could* win a prize for that attention lottery, it's *possible*) - isn't blogging great?" (and of course saying that is going to lose me readers, 'cause I'm a bad Z-lister ...)

So that's essentially all I have to say on the matter.

The Failure Of Blogging, Part N + 2

washingtonpost.com: Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers, credulously regurgitates the Kathy Sierra 'death threats" story.

There are more than 100 blog echoes, which seem to be as uncritical as the base article (this is why I don't say it's bloggers vs. journalists).

There is my blog and article, which apparently are a drop in the ocean.

Why bother?

Posting is going to be light again. Life trumps blogging.

My Kathy Sierra "death threats" accusations _Guardian_ column

My "Kathy Sierra" article: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,2059836,00.html

I talk about the firestorm where Kathy Sierra alleged receiving everything up to threats of death, making comparatively mild comments regarding the difficultly of anyone mounting a defense against an accusation of being involved:

But once the topic had been framed around the highly incendiary issues of sex and violence, any attempt to defend the reputations of those claimed to have any part in such ills risked the wrath of the mob. ...

A low-audience blogger simply cannot effectively defend himself against an attack from a high-audience blogger. To assert otherwise is cruel nonsense. A few voices trumpet from on high, while most barely squeak from below.

Elsewhere, note: Doc Searls has an epiphany:

... The teacher projected a browser tuned to Technorati on a screen, clicked on a Top Searches link, and there, at the top of the page, was a blog post that associated my name with death threats.

Since then perhaps hundreds of thousands of blog postings have dealt with the controversy; yet the ratio of opinion to fact in the case verges on the infinite. At a certain point I realized that it was impossible to shed light on a subject that had become a black hole. ...

It really is a shame, in multiple senses of the word. This isn't poetic justice, but more like poetic injustice.

Hoping to make a convert (but I'm almost certainly ill-suited for the task), I commented: What do you think that blog-evangelism critics have been saying to you for so long? The bogosphere is not flat - it's full of spikes. Several of which now (metaphorically) have heads on them.

Doc gracefully asked "Now what?". Unfortunately, I don't think I have a good answer for him.

The Failure Of Blogging, Part N+1

I wasted entirely too much time arguing with Tim O'Reilly over his Blogging Code of Conduct. I suppose it was nice that he was willing to go back-and-forth with me. But in retrospect, I think I let my frustration get the better of me, from seeing an ill-conceived idea being given much publicity due to coming from a tech celebrity and pushing a hot-button.

Ronni Bennett said some nice things about my efforts, so at least one other person read them :-).

But it was predictable that nothing was ever going to happen, since there's no way to hold the A-listers to account, and too many of them think being mean is a feature, not a bug.

And it is absurd to think I'm going to make much difference against the mob. I should know that.

Blogging Code-Of-Conduct - comments, disproof, other sides, etc.

The bogosphere is not the "Wild West". Rather, it is a collection of petty medieval fiefdoms. Whose Lords are engaged in constant squabbling with each other to control the realm's natural resource ("attention"). And the peasants are told to eat cake.

Underlinked: Jon Garfunkel, Comment Management Responsibility (CommResp)

Making the rounds: Tristan Louis, Blogger's Code of Conduct: a Dissection

Proof of the silliness of Code-Of-Conduct: An A-lister - "And I have definitely been pushed around in the blogosphere, and as I mentioned earlier, the biggest bully on my blog block is Tim O['Reilly]. So I find it pretty ironic that he's the one calling for civility."
(quote for illustrative purposes *only*, not endorsement)

"Joey", one of the supposed death-threateners, gives his side of the story ... and basically nobody cares (via McD)

"Blogging Code of Conduct" - WHO ENFORCES IT?

Sigh. Who enforces:

Just amazing. A "Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct"? An article in the New York Times?

This has gone beyond navel-gazing and into [redacted due to conduct violation]

Funny quote from Shelley Powers: "Yes, they actually created badges"

I am simply shouting to the wind here out of frustration with the failure of blogging to provide any defense whatsoever: WHO ENFORCES THE CODE-OF-CONDUCT?

Any hand-waving about "the community" means "The A-listers will freely bully and abuse anyone below them, because nobody else has the power to call an A-lister to account". Look at the incentives for all the pilot-fish and hangers-on around someone with influence to join in an attack. And the disincentives for anyone else to risk retaliation by standing up for the target (unless the target has a comparable power, where it's a case of choosing up sides).

A system which runs on attention-mongering, demagoguery, and too many infamously abusive tin-pot egotists accountable to nobody but a handful of other BigHeads, is not going to be reformed because some self-promoters got the vapors and then decided to milk the publicity for all it's worth. You can proclaim peace-and-love all you want, the people who gain by advocating war-and-hate, or are personally nasty as a character trait, won't care, except to the extent that they can posture over it.

But nobody is going to hear that either :-(.

Obligatory Kathy Sierra post, and Google "fragmentation grenades"

I have succumbed, since the bogosphere and Google and my own concerns have now all aligned:

Jeneane Sessum - A Few Words:

Regarding the Kathy Sierra fracas, after much consideration and silence on my part, I am beyond tired and beyond angry. I have been wrongly named and targeted, tied to death threats I didn't make and tasteless posts I didn't write. ...

I'm now up to 681 hits on google with my name and "death threats" combined, have received emails from people saying they've gotten comments condemning them for linking to or advertising with this blog she has been involved in making death threats against Kathy which is not true. As my family name is raked over the coals across the web and in mainstream press, I would ask those of you who decided to tie me to these threats to spend the time I just did sitting still, considering your own motives and assumptions. ...

That Google bit caught my eye. I see "about 9,610" results now for a search on ["Jeneane Sessum" "death threats"], but that's a very misleading number since it includes a huge number of duplicated bogosphere posts and sindication feeds and aggravator fodder. Still, it seems to me that in contrast to a "Google bomb" (targeting of one result), this is kind of a "Google fragmentation grenade" - lots of sharp little pieces blasted out all over the territory, and you never know when one of them will do damage.

I was severely tempted to go around to the various A-list blogs which are now pontificating about the need for better behavior, and ask:

WHERE'S THE "CODE OF CONDUCT"? [Against A-lister smears] WHO ENFORCES IT?!

But I know better

_Time_: "Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free"

They said it, I didn't: "Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free"

"That's because one of the most interesting questions in business has become how much work people will do for free."

In a way, it's very amusing, as if the writer is pitching the audience, don't think this article is about some granola crunchy flower-child dreaming about living in harmony with one another - it's really about the red-blooded capitalism of how big business can exploit all those flower-children dreamers just waiting to be fleeced with the right sales-pitch.

As usual, substantial critiques are to be found in some way off the beaten path forum marginalized comments:

Having arrived at your article, "Getting Rich Off Those Who Work for Free", from an Open Source portal, I regret (a little) to inform you the Free/Open Source software (FOSS) types are spurning your association of FOSS with anarchy. And I must say that it is a very poor comparison. Not only are the majority of FOSS developers not working for free, there is a strong hierarchical structure in most projects -- meritocritous to be sure, but strong nevertheless.

This also connects to the wager with Nick Carr on the topic. There's a certain mythology which is peddled widely, and very hard to counteract, since those myths serve the interests of the marketers.

Bonus link: Dave Rogers:

The problem with democracy is not an inherently technological one. We have all the technology we need right now. What we don't have is the self-awareness necessary to govern ourselves in a manner consistent with our stated values and ideals.

Obligatory post on Copiepresse vs. Google (Belgium)

The Copiepresse lawsuit involves "Google loses copyright case launched by Belgian newspapers". All Google, copyright, and media bloggers are required to write about this. It is expected that you denounce the sheer effrontery of any court which should rule against the Holy Google (despite being it somewhat less holy nowadays), even if you know nothing about complicated issues of foreign copyright law, except what you read in a hurried newspaper summary written by a reporter. Bonus points will be awarded for dragging in certain hobbyhorses about US telecommunications fights.

Your post will be be graded on how appealing it is to US geek mindset, as well as of course speed in opinion generation. Actual research will be penalized - it takes too long, and virtually nobody wants to read it any way.

GO!

"Local Content Harvesting" - another honest term for "Citizen Journalism"

I am not making up this headline: Tonight at 11, news by neighbors - Santa Rosa TV station fires news staff, to ask local folks to provide programming

"I have my own silly little term," Spendlove said. "Local content harvesting."

A true moment not to be in the process of hydration, for fear of ruining a keyboard.

Yes, digital sharecropping has many names.

Value-add via an uncommon echo:

http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0

The hype surrounding Web 2.0's ability to democratise content production obscures its centralisation of ownership and the means of sharing. Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick expose Web 2.0 as a venture capitalist's paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the decentralising potential of peer-to-peer production

Not the least because of this paragraph in the article:

Graham's characterisation of the "Amateur"’ reminds one of "If I Ran The Circus" by Dr. Seuss, where young Morris McGurk says of the staff of his imaginary Circus McGurkus:

My workers love work. They say,
"Work us! Please work us!
We'll work and we'll work up so many surprises
You'd never see half if you had forty eyeses!"

[Also remember Nick Carr: "Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few."]

I'd say something about the people who are cheerleading and enabling this effect (links omitted out of self-preservation), but they have far more power than I do :-(.

Pay Per Post And The Populism Pose - Or, Blue-Collar vs. White-Collar Capitalism

PayPerPost, a company which pays bloggers for posts, is an A-list topic of complaint again. I've talked about "Commodification Of Social Relationships" [Old joke: Sex for a million? Yes. Sex for ten bucks? No. We're just haggling over price.], and PageRank/Link-Buying Doesn't Care About Blogger Ethics. Lots of go-around again now, but I finally was inspired by the blatant class warfare:

In the clip below, watch the blog marketing gurus hand over $1,000 in cash to ... a Chicago mother-of-four who works as a postie to make ends meet -- after she allows them to scrawl, "I <heart> HP", on her forehead. Classy.

"Classy"? As in, it's lower-class. BLUE-COLLAR. It's not what white-collar professionals do, which is, for example, keynote conferences:

Next week it'll be announced that I'm keynoting at a conference planned and sponsored by PayPerPost. This is my first speech where I'm not only having my travel and expenses paid, but they are covering my salary too. ... Why do it then? Cause I'm a capitalist and because I think that blog advertising is something that we should talk about.

Note that phrase - "Cause I'm a capitalist" - what are all the PayPerPost sharecroppers? I'll quote a different reaction, about another A-lister's complaint:

Rule number one about guys who run around to speak at conference after conference: It's expensive and they're not doing it as a philanthropic act. ...

If the real issue is around what PPP is doing to search - which serves ads inside of the more tame advertising model Jeff makes money in - then he should say so.

If the Pay Per Post marketers are, in the words of one blog-evangelist, the "sidewalk hookers of the blogosphere", then the conference-club set are its "executive escorts" (note both sidewalk hookers and executive escorts are capitalists).

But note the language: not "classy", "sidewalk hookers", vs "I'm a capitalist". It's basically, again, they are blue-collar, we are white-collar. I think "I'm a capitalist" in this context really means: "Despite my relatively well-off status, economically I still need to convert social relationships into a commercial context" (which should be acceptable) - i.e. doing it ultimately for commercial purposes, no matter how much one may seem to to be in it for a purely social relationship. Which is of course breaking the marketing of human connections.

Ultimately, all of this is exposing the rift between the propaganda of blog-evangelism and its reality. There's a tiny, tiny elite of A-listers who do a sale-pitch of populism. YOU-YES-YOU can have the power, the status, the influences, of the "priests", the "gatekeepers", the "legacy media", who DON'T-GET-IT (and *you* do!) ... if you follow the gurus into the New Era. Their constant stock-in-trade is selling dreams to the little people, and then monetizing that delusion via services, data-mining, or corporate/Big-Media consulting gigs (one dispute, too easy dismissed as "soap opera", was in fact very revealing, since it was really about trying to sell the audience to large media companies).

But: The A-listers don't *deliver* (to the suckers). A talk-radioish schtick about a revolutionary fantasy can't compare to some cold hard cash on the barrelhead. A company actually *paying* a few bucks for a blog post is going to beat some empty Power To The People pitch all hollow - at least to those who are focused on income instead of ideology.

So A-listers are being undermined both in terms of being gatekeepers of influence, and their franchise. Their pose as populists is undercut by, ironically, "democratization" of payola, which is resulting in more spreading it around (while simultaneously centralizing in the company-as-aggregator).

Sadly, given the ability of the A-listers to direct attention, those of us with any interest in associated topics are going to be subjected to their ox-being-gored screams of outrage for a long, long, time. I just hope such Z-list shouting-to-the-wind and futile gestures as this post, do at least a little good :-(.

[Update: The keynoter above has announced he'll now not accept the honorarium.]

"Techmeme" creator Q-and-A, or - Serving The A-list For Fun And Profit

Echo: Q&A With Gabe Rivera, Creator Techmeme

Now, let's be clear, I like Techmeme too, and use it all the time. However ... I'm a little bothered by the completely uncritical reaction. Part of the discussion could use some deeper examination. As in:

Q. Why do sources get dropped? Do they fail to post new material? Fail to keep being cited?

Fail to keep being cited. Every day Techmeme performs a bit of a reset, usually around 3am Eastern, where it doesn't update for about an hour as it repeats the source discovery. So every day it tries to find the best few thousand sources. A blog can make the list one day but not the next.

And:

Q. Is Techmeme too elite with its sources?

[snip] ...For better or for worse, well-read bloggers tend to have better access to interesting news, and also tend to exercise the talent that helped establish them in the first place. I'm rather unapologetic that there are lots of less established writers who will never show up on Techmeme.

OK, as a statement of fact, this is what it is - Techmeme "serves the A-list", as I think of it. It looks to the Big Heads, sees what they're talking about (or what a group of Medium Heads is talking about), and figures that what the high attention sources are devoting attention to, is a good bet to get attention. Algorithmically, I can't fault that. However ... it does have an echo-chamber effect. And if the Big Heads are disinclined, to, say, cite women, or less established writers, but instead to link-love each other - Techmeme will merrily reflect that.

Do I have a solution? No. I'll be unapologetic about that. But I suppose someone should point out that Techmeme almost explicitly, as a design goal, with good reason, reflects exactly the social hierarchy that evangelists tell us doesn't exist online. And I think those critics who feel it's part of the exclusionary process do have a very valid point.

[Disclaimer: I met Gabe once at a conference, I liked him personally. But, as he knows, the oligarchical structure of the bogosphere has long been an issue for me]

[Update - There are competitors - Megite seems to have a broader view]

Libel Law vs. Blog Evangelism

There's a recent column in the Guardian discussing libel law and the Internet, where it's argued:

The internet brings a fundamental change to the relationship of publisher and subject: now the subject can publish, too. So Susan Crawford, a professor at New York's Cardozo Law School and a member of Icann, the board that oversees internet structure, has blogged that in this era, "libel law seems much less relevant - rather than sue, you can just write back". A commenter on my blog responded that some bloggers boast larger audiences than others, so this playing field isn't as level as it seems: "On occasion, a weak target can become a cause celebre". True. But I still argue that libel law was built for an era when few owned the press and the doctrine must be updated to account for the democratised and accelerated means of response today.

That commenter was me. The full version of my comment was:

Jeff, if you seriously want thoughts, it is my deeply-considered view, after many, many, years of observing this issue, that the discussion becomes somewhere between absurd and cruel. It is not "conversation" when one person speaks to ten, hundreds, of thousands, and the target may have some obscure response off somewhere read by a few friends and family.

Some people don't believe in libel law as a matter of principle - they say it's the province of the rich who don't need it, that the little guy who might need it can't fight back anyway, if you're smeared, just "take it" because attempting any sort of defense will only make the situation worse. That's one general point of view, and it has nothing specific to do with blogs or Internet.

Alternately, if one does believe in libel law, then we know ("Power Law Distribution") that there are vast, enormous, audience disparities, which apply to blogs and the Internet as well as other media. It's a mathematical fact, and denying that doesn't make it go away. Some "bloggers" are for all intents and purposes the same as a mainstream media syndicated columnist. How many times have you heard some boast like "I have [huge number] readers, that's more than [media outlet]!". And we can't all have a zillion readers, again, that's just a fact.

Sometimes disputes take place between relative equals. On occasion, a weak target can become a cause-celebre. But that such cases exist does not invalid that there's plenty of situations where a person who is libeled has no EFFECTIVE means to reach any sort of comparable audience. To rebut the idea that it *could* happen, individually, we all *could* win the lottery - but almost all of us won't.

Again, there's an argument that libel law is more harm than good. But for heaven's sake, don't tell the Great Unread, who make tiny mostly-unheard squeaks compared to the booming megaphones of A-listers, that they can eat cake.

Further, Z-lister saith not.

Obligatory Bubble 2.0 post on "TIME - Person of the Year: You"

In my recent post on the structure of Bubble 2.0, I ended by saying:

"That feast is starting now, and the main dish is YOU."

And now TIME - Person of the Year: You is going to spark a punditry-fest (as well as perhaps mark a "top" for the cycle).

While perhaps I should play, what more is there for me to say? I've said it all before, and what good did it do?

Bubble 2.0 is the province of a very small, extremely incestuous elite (A-list), of clever men (mostly) who run around marketing dreams. I can decry the academic cheerleading for unpaid freelancing, trying to get across my contention:

"Popularity Data-Mining Businesses Are Not A Model For Civil Society"

But there's no upside for me, and plenty of downside. The people who do well at this pander to reactionaries, and there's little market for "technology-positive" social criticism (especially compared to e.g. a goal of $100 million dollar venture capital fund).

So the hype may be "You", but the question is "Why?"

Bubble 2.0 - Another Digital Sharecropping Arrangement - Yahoo and Reuters

This is "Work" as in "free" - NYT: Yahoo and Reuters Want You to Work for Their News Service.

He said it, not me:

"This is looking out and saying, `What if everybody in the world were my stringers?'" Mr. Ahearn said.

And who's getting paid? Not you! (well, a little if your work is usable, but not much, unless you're really, really, lucky)

Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment. Mr. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events. ...

And later in the article, certain Usual Suspects appear - i.e. certain projects which aim to repackage minor writers and researchers for potential mass media syndication (though this is not how they describe themselves).

I'm tempted to ask my question again: What's so great about the outsourcing of journalism (and who thinks it's so wonderful)? What's so fantastic about unpaid freelancing? But I should know better.

Cites & Insights November, December 2006 - Wikipedia, Copyright, Blogging

Walt Crawford recently released issue 6:14 (December 2006) of his Cites & Insights, which made me worry about not being good at reciprocity since I hadn't noted issue 6:13 (November 2006) even though it mentioned me several times.

Things to read - a long discussion of "What About Wikipedia?". And to answer the question there, about why Wikipedia doesn't allow opting-out:

I must admit that, apart from politicians, Nobel Prize winners, and perhaps people with some high level of celebrity, I don't get this position at all. You can choose not to be listed in Who's Who in America. Why is it inappropriate for someone who's mildly notable but not a world-class celebrity or politician to ask to be left out of Wikipedia?

As I've said, I believe the answer is "that to allow anyone to decline to be a subject an article would be an admission that the supposed collective editing process is deeply flawed".

Long summary of Copyright Currents - Fair Use and Infringement, The RIAA and Copyright, DMCA Discussions, and more.

Blogging, and the corporatization thereof (links added):

Anybody can become an A-lister. There is no A-list. Any blog can reach a vast audience. You know the myths. Within the broad field of blogs, I no longer have any doubt that they are myths. The A-listers play by different rules and mostly draw sycophants as commenters; these days, though, many of the A-list blogs are really just new forms of old or corporate media in any case.

... Your chances of making those big bucks? Turns out that, once you take away the Hot Sites, there's not a lot left over (although the article never says that outright). And the blognates (blog magnates) are building lots of new blogs to soak up any excess revenue.

... But you have to be hot stuff to get impressions-based ad revenue, and I think The Great Unread and other articles discussed previously pretty much spell out the odds of becoming hot stuff if you're an honest-to-gosh blogger.

"The compensation is usually far less than what a employee might make ..."

At the risk of boring Censorware/Search readers, it looks like I'm on a roll about Bubble 2.0. Let me highlight this sentence from an article "Gannett to Crowdsource News":

Of all the pilot projects the company has conducted over the last few months, the most promising would seem to be the crowdsourcing of in-depth investigations into government malfeasance. Crowdsourcing involves taking functions traditionally performed by employees and using the internet to outsource them to an undefined, generally large group of people. The compensation is usually far less than what an employee might make for performing the same service. Well-known examples include Wikipedia and iStockphoto.

Now: Who thinks unpaid (or very poorly paid) easily-replaceable labor is just the greatest thing ever? Who finds that exciting and innovative? There's not a lot of discussion of that issue (and what good does it do me to rant about it :-( ...).

Anyway, take this as another note regarding why all the academic cheerleading for unpaid freelancing, bodes ill for me.

More Bubble 2.0 - The Race For Data Aggregation Search Is On

The following encapsulates the current bubble-state and times perfectly, in startup investment (my emphasis):

After a year of mostly veiled references and speculation fueled by the involvement of [Media A-lister] as an adviser and [Craigslist owner] as an investor, [news-aggregating startup] is about to see the light of day -- funded by roughly twice as many investors as it has employees.

And checking on the bellwether venture capital fund led me to this interesting action:

"The core focus moving forward is to be part of the process of RSS [really simple syndication] going mainstream in the coming years," said [venture capital partner]. "One of the areas that has been untapped is the job of the citizen to be not just a journalist but also an editor. We want to ensure that those who want to tell a narrative have the best sources to do that."

"Job"? Be wary, citizen-lunchmeats. The Bubble 2.0 social structure resembles less any sort of democracy, and more the third-world countries where there is a minuscule elite at the top, and then the rest of the population on the bottom.

Bubble 2.0 Status, Search Startups, Lottery Structure

First, a recitation of my bubble-prayer:

There's an old oil-business prayer, from years ago:

"O Lord, just give me one more oil boom - I promise not to piss it all away this time."

O Lord, just give me one more tech bubble, one more collective financial insanity where I might be able to get founder's stock and be bought-out for absurd amounts of money in a ridiculously short time. I promise not to waste it all away this time doing censorware decryption and fighting for net-freedom.

So, with the buyout of Reddit (a news popularity-mining/chat site), keeping in mind Google buying YouTube, are we there yet?

Objectively, I don't think the money is falling from the skies yet (and may never get to that point).

There was a recent interesting article examining: "Search Applications : Search Startups Are Dead, Long Live Search Startups"

While there will undoubtedly be opportunities for start-ups to extend and improve core search (which is where the vast majority of effort has been extended to date), some of the most interesting opportunities will come not from trying to improve the accuracy and context of a single query, but from looking at aggregate information about search indexes, results, and queries across time. In other words, the marriage of this search infrastructure, with persistent queries and advanced analytics will likely create an entirely new class of applications that generate insights and create value not by finding the specific piece of information someone is looking for, but by analyzing the ebb and flow of information across the web. It is here, in this new world of search applications that more than a few start-ups are likely to find a happy home.

However, there's a problem with focusing only on the lottery-winners, and it's neglecting to note how many tickets don't win. What's problematic about Bubble 2.0 is how the ratio seems to be even more lopsided. Of course, by definition, most start-ups fail, that's nothing new. But I draw a different conclusion from all the articles that seem to breathlessly proclaim how that ratio is now becoming even more extreme, and lottery tickets are cheaper than ever. They usually frame this in a positive manner, praising niches and "User-generated content" for which I'll quote a sardonic definition:

UGC
Stands for "user-generated content," a new form of online scam in which you make all the content, and we keep all the money.

Somewhere, I think there's a moral indictment to be had of the academic fashion for cheerleading this stuff as the greatest expression of "democracy". It's obvious why they do it, and far worse has been done, but it's still an abdication of the standards of critical thought.

Anyway, the sucker/winner ratio still looks outrageously high in my corner of the tech world, some big payoffs notwithstanding (remember, always, someone wins the lottery, "it could be you" - but it probably won't be).

PageRank/Link-Buying Doesn't Care About Blogger Ethics

Much discussion about "PayPerPost" (a service which pays bloggers for posting about products) has understandably focused on the social rules involved in distinguishing what's an acceptable high-class social exchange of mutual benefit, and what's a low-class tawdry selling yourself (hint: where people stand on this is very tightly correlated to where they sit, as in on conference panels vs below in the audience or worse).

However ... in terms of "Search Engine Optimization And The Commodification of Social Relationships", it doesn't matter. That is, Google PageRank does not care about "*disclosure*". I laughed about PayPerPost's latest stunt in paying bloggers to link to a page about "disclosurepolicy.org". There's something very recursively absurd about that.

I don't think PayPerPost advertisers are buying the few dozens to hundreds readers of a typical blog post. Maybe, but I just don't think it's cost-effective. Rather, they're buying more the organic-looking LINKING from the various blogs, which looks to search engines as if the page is legitimately popular. Think of it like Astroturf applied to link-campaigning rather than political campaigning.

And when a product then ranks highly on a search engine due to those paid links, the people seeing that rank are not going to have any idea whether or not the blog posts which contributed to that rank followed A-lister Approved Best Practices For Soul-Selling.

Ironically, to use a buzzword, the A-listers are being "disintermediated" for certain business purposes (and THERE IS RE-INTERMEDIATION by the advertising agency), which I suspect is part of the reason for their howls that standards are being breached. Part of the evangelism sales-pitch is that bloggers are "influencers" - so of course A-listers are the biggest influencers of all. Thus advertisers should cater to them with everything from product freebies to consulting gigs. But what happens when, through The Magic Of The Internet, advertisers bypass those "gatekeepers", and simply buy large amounts of Z-listers through blatant resellers, instead of going through the A-list as intermediaries? Well, you have A-listers obviously upset that their own business model is being undercut. But it can be misleading to see their unhappiness as the main story (though it can be an amusing sideline), rather than a reflection of the economic shifts and battles between commerce vs social, being played out in various ways.

Search Engine Optimization And The Commodification of Social Relationships

Many media A-list bloggers have been in an uproar over a service that pays bloggers for posting about products. More than just payola, Doc Searls also brought up the connection to "SEO":

Somebody said to me recently that PayPerPost and others like it are just "the latest SEO moves". SEO is "Search Engine Optimization", or the practice of doing things to raise your PageRank and get more Google advertising money, basically.

There are two approaches to SEO. One is to raise your PageRank with tricks. The other is to write useful and interesting posts about subjects you know and care about. Show me a blog with a lot of Google juice and I'll show you a blog that didn't need SEO tricks.

As all students of Search Engine Optimization know, link buying and selling is a big issue. In theory, PageRank is supposed to be developed from social relationship ("organic links"), representing the true value of human interaction. It is not supposed to be a commercial relationship, to the highest bidder.

But this is interacting really badly with commercializing social relationships. There's deep problems, especially when new variations arise in commoditizing connections between people.

Are you allowed to hire people to write useful and interesting posts? That's got to be permitted, right? I haven't seen the blogs which are basically commercial magazines online, being kicked out of the warm-'n-fuzzy backscratching A-list club for having paid staff.

Are you allowed to parcel out the hiring in little bits of cheap labor on other people's sites? Why not? You know what the blog evangelists would say if they were in favor of this, hailing it as a marvelous disintermediation of the old monolithic priesthood of the high barrier to entry media payoffs, compared to the hip new democratized PEOPLE-POWERED PAYOLA.

There's an old joke which runs:

Billionaire to woman: "Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?"
Woman: "Well ... yes"
Billionaire to woman: "Would you have sex with me for ten dollars?"
Woman: "What kind of a girl do you think I am?"
Billionaire: "We've already determined that. Now we're just arguing over the price."

There's two aspects here: Commercial, and amount. The obvious aspect of the joke is that there's two categories of interactions, commercial and social, and there's never supposed to be any overlap between them, whatever the amount. A less often remarked aspect is that there is indeed a "class" division between high-priced commercial and low-priced commercial.

I think we're seeing a real life version of that joke, roughly:

Company to blogger: "Would you write about me for advisory board membership?
Blogger: "Well ... yes"
Company to blogger: "Would you write about me for ten dollars?"
Blogger: "What kind of a flack do you think I am?"
Company: "We've already determined that. Now we're just arguing over the price."

Is a few bucks just the same as an advisory board membership? No - there's a class division, in that an advisory board membership is high-class and expensive, while a few bucks is tawdry and cheap. But there's something a bit methinks-the-lady-doth-protest-too-much when we have the equivalent of executive "escorts" venomously criticizing street prostitutes for being so crude as to be selling it.

"Wal-Marting Across America" - Did Googlewashing Work?

The "Wal-Marting Across America" story, where a Wal-Mart PR firm sponsored a "fake" blog ("walmartingacrossamerica.com") about a couple's trip involving various Walmart stores, contains this interesting Google aspect:

It was a great way to redefine the term Wal-Marting, which is mostly used pejoratively to mean, among other things, how big box retailers mow down small businesses.

I was interested if the Googlewashing, i.e. crowding out search results, worked here. So far, all it seems to have generated is very poor results (#2 hit now). And at the cost of much negative reaction .

The idea above seemed to be, in part, to use the blog and the link behavior of bloggers to get prominent placement. But - again, so far - the blog ranks very poorly on a search for "Wal-Marting", or "WalMarting". I think what's happened is that the PR people drank the blog-evangelism Kool-Aid, and were misled by hype about blogs. Blogs can in fact be obscure in Google, especially if they are new and have few links, which was the case for this "flog" (PR blog). A-lister's blogs, established and popular, tend to rank well. But that doesn't mean any blog is going to do well, which is the sales-pitch.

Amusingly, there's the inevitable trumpeting that the failure of this stunt proves how blogs are so authentic and sincere (Scott Karp: "And because blogging is not a control-based medium, Edelman couldn't make Wal-Mart appear to be something it's not. It rang false, and they got caught."). In fact, I'd say the stunt didn't work because blogging is a very control-based medium, and you usually won't get heard unless a gatekeeper high up the hierarchy directs attention to you (I know, I say this a lot, I'm proposing it as an alternative explanation for the stunt's failure - it's not that bloggers can't be fooled, but that to fool them, e.g. you have to suck up to A-listers, not just exist).

There's a certain unfalsifiability in the reaction. Exploitations which conveniently blow-up are going to be greeted with a chorus of Transparency!, Conversation!, bloggers are just so gosh darn smart and clever and real that they can't be taken. But successful exploitations which do not fit this storyline will of course not be fodder for more delusion.

Google Buys YouTube - the structure of Bubble 2.0

Did you hear? Google buys YouTube. After thinking about it, I actually have something to write about it that's a good update on the state of Bubble 2.0, and an explanation to anyone who cares as to why it won't be my fortune (or, to the handful of people reading this, why it probably won't be your fortune either).

We'll never see the likes of Bubble 1.0 again, for decades (the next one similar to that will probably be commodity-level biotechnology, but that could be 20 years away or more). But there are smaller bubbles at more frequent intervals, and Bubble 2.0 is one of those. Unfortunately, I'm close enough to see it, but the economics of it isn't favorable for me.

As a quick check, I looked at the status of the Harvard RSS investment fund, which I'm using as a bellwether. They wanted to raise 100 million dollars, but when I counted what was known about their investments, I came up with only around 6 million dollars. Seems like the party isn't in full swing yet.

Anyway, Bubble 1.0 was about people paying very high prices for assumed productively gains from the Internet. Take "Pets.com" - look, you can order pet food over the Internet! Cool - but how much would you pay for that company? The key was that it didn't cost a lot to play that game. Find some niche, make a little improvement, profit.

Bubble 2.0 is all about data-mining and getting suckers to work for free (this last is called "user-generated content" or "citizen journalism"). But that's a fairly expensive game to play (maybe not expensive from a venture capital fund standpoint, but it's not a garage operation). It also requires a huge amount of marketing. It's necessary to either somehow convince all those suckers that they should work for free, or find out what it is that they'll do that you can exploit (this is why there's a bunch of pilot-fish around the sharks, saying something like "Ecosystems are conversations. When the shark eats you, you are a *participant* in the circle of life - you are the nourishment formerly known as prey, think of yourself as a citizen-lunchmeat"). Both are tough sells, either to the little people that they really want to enrich you by doing grunt labor, or to the big people that they really don't want to pauperize you by suing about copyright infringement from all that "sharing".

There's definitely businesses here. But it's all built on becoming some sort of enormous silo filled with tiny grains, which requires a substantial capital expenditure, as well as winner-take-all contests with other silos who want to be the central place to store grains. To succeed, that requires a certain combination of rare circumstances that are unusual, though somebody wins the lottery.

Basically, Bubble 2.0 does have a model, but it's a very much a multi-level-marketing scheme model. As opposed to the Bubble 1.0 model, which was inflated expectations. The key difference is that mostly everyone can play at inflated expectations until it all crashes, while playing multi-level-marketing doesn't work if you're not already good at marketing.

Tangentially related, I was very amused to read about a online news conference kerfuffle, where a business focused bubble-blower apparently gave a typical blog-triumphalism rabble-rousing presentation, and got thoroughly chastised by other blog bubble-blowers - some of whom just happened to be in various partnerships and consulting arrangements with the "Old Media" companies which were targets of the rabble-rousing presentation. Links omitted out of self-preservation, but the reaction was hilarious in a cynical way: No, no, that's the speech for the chumps, what we feed to the rubes - don't give it in the faces of the moneybags who are hiring us, it'll just offend them.

Some of the evangelism rhetoric, when examined closely, has always been very weird. Paraphrased, "We will storm the ramparts, lay siege to the castle ... in order to be chambermaids and valets, for free!"

Nick Carr was prophetic:

One day, a blog-peasant boy found buried in the dust beside his shack a sphere of flawless crystal. When he looked into the ball he was astounded see a moving picture. It was an image of a fleet of merchant ships sailing into the harbor of the island of Blogosphere. The ships bore names that had long been hated throughout the island, names like Time-Warner and News Corp and Pearson and New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast and McGraw-Hill. The blog-peasants gathered along the shore, jeering at the ships and telling the invaders that they would soon be vanquished by the brave royals in the great castle. But when the captains of the merchant ships made their way to the gates of the castle, bearing crates of gold, they were not repelled by the royals with cannons but rather welcomed with fanfares. And all through the night the blog-peasants could hear the sounds of a great feast inside the castle walls.

That feast is starting now, and the main dish is YOU.

[Update: Tristan Louis sends an examination of prices: "No Bubble 2.0 yet"]

Pew survey - "Future of the Internet"

I'm late to the party regarding commenting on the Pew survey / "Future of the Internet". I am apparently one of the "Many top internet leaders, activists and commentators participated in the survey" (they said that, not me!). So I'm self-interested in pointing out that if one goes beyond the prefabricated punditry of the press release, and digs into the details, a lot of smart people can be found quoted in the report. Sure, there's the Usual Suspects who say we are about to enter a New Era where we'll go down a rabbit hole, err, I mean a black hole, and enter Wonderland, umm, the Singularity. But there's also another perspective to be found, such as the following:

Scenario Two: English displaces other languages

And Seth Finkelstein, anti-censorship activist and author of the Infothought blog, wrote that this scenario is "much too ambitious. There will still be plenty of people who will have no need for global communications in other languages, or who choose to communicate only within their local community."

Scenario Three: Autonomous technology is a danger

Programmer and anti-censorship activist Seth Finkelstein responded, "This is the AI bogeyman. It's always around 20 years away, whatever the year."

Scenario Four: Transparency builds a better world

"Between 'agree' and 'disagree' I'll pick 'agree,' but I think it's more accurate to say it could make the world a better place overall," wrote Seth Finkelstein, EFF Pioneer Award winner. "The difference between the Open Society and the Police State is political, not technological."

Think of it as the "balance" journalistic structure applied to futurism ("Are We Going To Live Forever? Opinions Differ.").

Adventures in Unpaid Freelancing, aka Citizen Journalism - Nonlethal Weapon Edition

[This post is dedicated to those people sincerely self-deluded or professionally delusional who think the bogosphere is democracy's (not demagoguery's) last best hope on Earth]

When I saw the Air Force / Non-lethal weapons testing story, on a mailing list, critical thought lead me to be immediately skeptical. So I started to dig around for material to write a reply (note the context is that I assume, or at least hope, members of the mailing-list will read the reply).

First problem, why blogging doesn't work: Blog references to the article are virtually all echoes or rants about it. In a hot story, there's piles and piles of these, making finding actual information difficult. I couldn't find any explanatory material. Just lots of arguing.

So I decided to do some actual work, and called the Air Force to ask them about what was really said. Note there's no incentive to do this. Just to argue.

It's really very easy. The media people just ask your name and affiliation.

Note from the field: I'd feel absolutely ludicrous replying to such a question by saying "I'm a citizen journalist". It sounds ridiculous. Worse than "I'm second-class", because even being second-class at least is in the rankings. More like "I'm a nobody pompously playing make-believe". Anyway, these days, one of the minor benefits of all the blog-hype is that saying "I'm a blogger" works well enough, not requiring involved explanations.

And I was promptly emailed a transcript. Which is sadly just the start of the effort required if I'm going to try to make much use of the material.

Now, if I want to be heard in the bogosphere, I have to pitch to gatekeepers. Which ones? Note you really have to know the "Writer's Market" here (the blog-evangelist's idea that, little Z-lister, you can make a hyperlink to the big boy's story, and some day, someone might actually search and follow it amidst all the spam and me-too and hell-in-a-handbasket, and read YOU-YES-YOU, doesn't that prospect just fill you with thrills at civic participation, come to the meConference and work for free - these people have nothing on "Let them eat cake").

The problem is that the left-wing side would not be interested in a debunking of the latest They're-Coming-To-Get-Us, and the right-wing side, well, that's a dangerous game. I suppose I could have asked some of the media A-listers for attention ("looky looky here, cit-i-zen jour-nal-ism"). But frankly, the thinker BigHeads don't send all that much traffic. Their specific power is more indirect, of nominating a person as worthy of being a junior club-member. And asking them for links also involves the backscratching relationships, where they may feel that criticism is disloyal (another aspect where personal nature tends to lead to cliquishness).

I settled for some comments, which drew a few dozen hits, and trying the Boingers (post accepted, ~ 1500 hits). All in all, it was a drop in the bucket, and arguably a lot of wasted time on my part. I know people are going to say it was worth it. But the problem there is that doesn't consider the cost to me, versus the lack of benefit to me.

Linkdump: Google U California contract, suing Wikipedia, "Where are the women?"

Cleaning out various bogosocial obligations from the last week:

New sucker in the multi-level-marketing scheme for attention, err, I mean, blogger, Karen Coyle has an extensive post analyzing the contract for Google's University of California library digitizing<