I'm going out on a limb here. All the initial punditry I see is of the type What Does This All Mean? I wish there was more Why Should We Believe This?

Supposedly:

"I couldn't find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn't have my PhD yet. I didn't have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would."

Unable to pay her rent, Magnanti's mind turned to other things. She told the Sunday Times she wanted to start doing something straight away, "that doesn't require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that's cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in". Her solution was prostitution.

I DISBELIEVE.

To be specific - I have no trouble imagining someone turning to high-class prostitution to make ends meet. I have enormous trouble swallowing the idea that someone who finds herself doing it out of financial need immediately starts up a blog presenting it as a funny and amusing adventure. No way.

You can even see her covering what would be obvious the holes in the story:

"Some sex workers have terrible experiences. I didn't. I was unbelievably fortunate in every respect. The people at the agency looked after us appropriately and instructed us appropriately and weren't going to put us in harm's way if they could possibly avoid it."

It's not about "harm's way". What has thoroughly convinced me of the fakery is that just about every single blog I have ever seen which was written by someone in a service industry, whether a waiter, bouncer, comic-book store clerk, whatever - has had a strong component of hating moronic customers. In retrospect, "Belle de Jour" reeks of someone making it up.

And I'm not the only or the first person to think along those lines. See this old article "Belle doesn't ring true"

One of the things that makes me most suspicious about Belle de Jour is that I've never met a working girl who has kept a diary. The girls I knew were not proud of it. Most were unmarried young mums struggling through life, and they certainly didn't advertise what they did - it was their terrible secret. I think the only person who would write a diary like this about prostitution is somebody who intended to have it published, and in all likelihood somebody who had this published wouldn't be on the game. ...

A while back someone asked me why I was so critical of "Belle de Jour". I tried to convey how it was the worst sort of faked sincerity. Blogging was sold as authenticity, but fabrication was the reality (a different sort of high-class prostitution). C'mon folks, let's try to exercise a little critical thought, instead of being manipulated all over again.

A recent _Wired_ Twitter article, quoting Twitter's CEO:

Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there’s obviously a huge business.

Microsoft Bing search:

Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now).

Google blog:

In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Me: (a while back, for which I was much flamed)

People aren't being connected by the 'real-time messaging service', they're being bundled up and sold.

Once more - I refuse to be a sucker again. I will not play the latest rigged game where the house makes a fortune, the touts get their commission, while the players are fodder for it all.

People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude.

See also The Rise of the Professional Blogger

The blogosphere was supposed to democratize publishing and empower the little guy. Turns out, the big blogs are all run by The Man.

There's a predicatable reaction to articles like these - reading it absurdly as saying nobody would ever post again, redefining the word blogger to mean low/unpaid corporate writer who rants, discounting the article because of the author, and so on. But it's quite measurable. Not by text string searching an index, which is going to be full of spam and echoing, but examining various indicators.

One strong indicator is to look at what the professional attention-sellers are doing. Remember, these people have as their careers figuring out what's the top manipulation tool, what trend they should promote. That's their job - and if they don't do it with reasonable skill, they don't succeed. So while they're hardly infallible (any trend-hyping is going to invove many duds), they are evidence. It's not canary in a coal mine, but more at if you see a pack of predators cluster in a particular territory, it's likely they think that's the best place to find prey (which, remember, is YOU!).

It's no secret much of the A-list has gone a-twitter That's an objective measurement. Another data-point comes from Shelley Powers noting blog reader-program development has ceased

I finally installed the Gregarius feed aggregator, even though it is no longer actively supported. I only need a web-based feed aggregator, and so far I've not been able to find a single one that is still actively being supported. Not a single one.

In fact, most of the feed related software seems to have been discontinued in Fall of 2008 - just about the time when Twitter use exploded. I knew that Twitter was popular, but I hadn't realized what an adverse impact it is having on how we find, and read, information on the web.

And it's been generally noted that the bubbly blog money has disappeared.

So, hypesters, developers, investors - all basically have now abandoned the former gold-rush. Stick a fork in it, it's done.

Coda: One marketing A-lister recently sent out a Twitter message about my article regarding why I refuse to be a sucker again, commenting "[Seth Finkelstein] is not happy about Twitter, for the same reason he wasn't happy about blogs".
I wanted to respond "Well, wasn't I right both times?". But of course, for either blogs or Twitter, A-listers reach orders of magnitude more people than me, so being right is something of a pyrrhic victory.

But the peHUB site ("A Public Forum for Private Equity") now has a short article on it: RSS Is Dead, So Is The RSS Fund. Key points:

The firm launched with a press release touting "the creation of a $100 million fund," but that was basically a PR stunt. ... [they] wanted to raise $100 million, but had only $20 million from a cornerstone

The firm made a series of investments, in companies like Attensa, KnowNow (defunct) and Edgeio (assets sold to Vast.com). But new deals stopped when RSS Investors ran out of cash, and the decision was made to close up shop.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is, beyond the obvious that the attempt to make 100 million dollars justifies every cynical thought I've ever had or written regarding blog-evangelism and the huckstering which drives it. I suppose a more politically astute person than me could have sold them some snake-oil and cheerleaded all the way to the bank ("Oh yes, RSS is a world-changer, people can write *blogs*, so buy my data-mining start-up ..."). But as we see, that game doesn't work well even for the players (though still much better for them than all the digital-sharecroppers).

As put in a statement:

Why did WikiFur move?

Our current host, Wikia, is a for-profit company funded by venture capital. They have been able to expand rapidly as a result, and provide both technical and community support. This has usually been beneficial to WikiFur.

However, there comes a time when every business has to start making money. To increase revenue, Wikia applied new adverts which intrude into the content area, pushing aside existing content. We believe this significantly detracts from the design of these pages. To date, WikiFur readers have been spared the worst of these - see Wookieepedia (without an ad-blocker) for an example of what it would be like.

Wikia also imposed major changes to the user interfaces of hosted wikis, in a deliberate trend towards a branded look. They wish to be seen as an integral part of the site, rather than the providers of a hosting service to separate communities.

The changes mean that Wikia's service no longer met our needs, so we decided to part company.

Hat tip: Fan History’s Blog, which has this interesting additional aspect:

Since the move, we've seen a drop in traffic (Google was our number-one referrer), but editing has remained active, so we're happy. From our past experience with other language projects, we know they'll find our new location soon enough.

Good luck, folks. Let's see how Google treats you in the future.

One of several mysteries to me has been why the Internet Archive's opposition to the Google Books Settlement has recently been getting so much attention from professional law/policy types. Don't misunderstand my point regarding that attention, I'm all for it. But, in my experience, those kinds of public spirited projects are the type of thing that typically get obscure mentions in journal articles that nobody reads, usually trotted-out to justify the writer's visionary hobbyhorse. Proof - has anyone heard of Project Gutenberg recently?

So, when I read BBC - Tech giants unite against Google:

Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library.

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive.

They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.

"Google is trying to monopolise the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle told BBC News.

A-ha! Mystery solved. Moneybags. Indeed, very large moneybags. If it were just librarians and civil-libertarians and free-culture people, nobody else would care. They'd just be kicked, at best. But big corporations are different matter. Their concerns are taken seriously.

Now, I'm not saying anything about the causality, or pawns, or making any statement about the morality of such a coalition. An enemy-of-my-enemy strategy can be good politics, even necessary against a behemoth like Google.

However, I suspect if before this was announced, I had speculated that all the attention to the project was a sign that something like this was potentially in the works (remember, these sorts of arrangements don't happen overnight, they can require months of negotiation) - I would have been roundly denounced as cynical in the extreme.

Again, I wish the endeavor well. I just find it darkly amusing to note the various forces at work here.

Bonus: Group-groom to/from Doc Searls - Unsettling books

1) Tom Slee - "Googling Barbie Again". He said it, not me:

"[Law Intellectual BigHead] made a big deal of the Google search results for Barbie in his book ... where he claimed that, whereas other search engines gave you only sales-related Barbie sites in the top ten, Google's "radically decentralized" algorithm revealed an entirely different picture of Barbie. ...

The one big change in the last 18 months is that the remaining countercultural site from 2008 has now been pushed over the edge to page 2 of the search results, displaced by two Google-owned collections of links (News and Videos). ...

... It should be no surprise that as the web has become mainstream, and as corporations realise the necessity of investing in their web presence, the web begins to look more like other mainstream media. Perhaps more evidence that the Web's counter-cultural moment is over.

2) I should have noted a while back Walt Crawford's long Cites & Insights discussing Perspective: The Google Books Search Settlement.

The agreement could be a lot worse. The outcome could also be a lot better. I'm sure Google would agree with both statements, as it finds itself in businesses where it has neither expertise nor much chance of advertising-level profits. At the same time, the copyright maximalists didn't quite win this round. We'll almost certainly get somewhat better access to several million OP books—and will have to hope (and work to see) that the price (monetary and otherwise) isn't too high.

I was reminded of it today given that the Harvard Berkman Center is running a workshop on "Alternative Approaches to Open Digital Libraries in the Shadow of the Google Book Search Settlement"

3) David Weinberger inadvertently[Updated] provides a small lesson in how PageRank isn't everything in terms of Google ranking, in noting Britannica: #1 at Google

Today, for the very first time in my experience, The Encyclopedia Britannica was the #1 result at Google for a query ... It's good to see the EB making progress with its online offering, but I'm actually puzzled in this case. The query was "horizontal hold" (without quotes), and the EB page that's #1 is pretty much worthless. ... So, how did Google’s special sauce float this especially unhelpful page to the surface? ...

(I see it as #2 now, under a wiki.answers.com). I keep trying to tell various people that Google's ranking has multiple variables, but the simplistic model seems very difficult to displace.

[Update: David Weinberger commented: Seth, it was[n't] an "inadvertent" lesson. It was totally advertent. My reference to "secret sauce" intended to imply that Google's algorithm is complex and proprietary. And in the case I mentioned, those algorithms seem to have failed, for the top listing is unlikely to help anyone interested in the search terms ("horizontal hold").]

Oh, how far the mighty imagined Google-fighter ("killer" was overhype) has fallen. The late, only slightly lamented, Wikia Search project (Wikipedia-style search) shut down months ago. The URL was redirected to another site of Wikia Inc, a question-and-answers wiki. But there was at least a paragraph on the front page indicating Wikia Search had existed. However, on June 17, even that paragraph was removed. All that remains about Wikia Search on that page now is a tiny icon, a virtual puff of smoke, into which it has vanished.

Speaking of "Wiki answers" sites, in the name dispute between Answers.com's "WikiAnswers" site and Wikia's "Wikianswers" site, Answers.com has recently gotten a trademark registration on "WIKIANSWERS". Though the argument may possibly turn out to be academic. Even many months after launch, Wikia's site is getting less than 1% of the traffic of Answers.com's site.

Consider this statement:

JIMMY WALES: No, it's not one that we had encountered in quite this way before, but because The New York Times was very successful in having their media blackout, it was pretty easy for our volunteers to look at it and say, well, really under the rules of Wikipedia we've never considered ourselves a wide open free speech forum where people can post speculative things. We just look at it and we say, well yes, there was one report here and a couple of blogs, but really it's not being reported anywhere else, so who knows.

Now, of course, I knew that it was true because The New York Times contacted me to ask what could be done about it, but it's not my obligation to report everything I know, just as it wouldn't be for anybody.

Note the first edit to add the information about David Rohde's kidnapping sourced it to an Afghan news report.

Compare the following message on a Wikipedia discussion list:

... When we want to protect a non-reporter, we are told that since Wikipedia is just republishing information that is already out there and causing damage anyway, the person will probably have been hurt just as much without the Wikipedia article. And of course, Wikipedia is not censored, and that the five pillars of Wikipedia require the free flow of information and can never be compromised.

Certainly, someone who tried to suppress information in the same way, but was not Jimmy Wales or otherwise important on Wikipedia, even if they did it to save a life, would be accused of edit warring, told that they are abusing the rules, and taken to Arbcom and banned. Of course, in the process they would be told that their idea that they are saving a life is speculative and can't be proven. If one such person were to justify their actions by claiming that terrorists can't use the Internet well, we would reply "nice idea, but you really have no proof for that. You're just speculating. You don't know that that's true. Now stop the edit warring and the rules abuse-- we can certainly prove *that*."

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

"The suppression of news about a reporter's disappearance saw the New York Times and Wikipedia work together – but raises issues about control of information"

Note this title was written by an editor. I didn't suggest a title of my own. It's not really wrong, but as a title, I'd say it doesn't quite sum up what I was trying to examine in that column. I was attempting to consider a broad moral question, and then use Wikipedia as a worked example because the issues are so visible there (due to all the public arguing which goes on it, and how much internal deliberations tend to get leaked). Not that Wikipedia has any special status - in fact, I was writing against any idea of Wikipedia exceptionalism.

As I think of it, the column is trying to look at two topics:

1) Why did this hiding of information succeed overall, and what are the implications? (remember, we're constantly told it can't happen - but obviously, gatekeepers remain)

2) Who gets to keep out information, and why?

Of course, there's only so much of this that can be covered in the space available. But that was my attempt at saying something which would be worth reading, amidst all the other punditry on this topic.

[For all columns, see the page Seth Finkelstein | guardian.co.uk.]

I've sat out the whole "Green Dam" China censorware story. There's many prominent organizations doing reports, and an abundance of punditry. There's zero point in at best my duplicating the effort of those with far more resources and reach, and at worst wasting my time (as well as quite possibly hurting my life).

I do want to comment on just one specific aspect, the whine:

This isn't the first time Solid Oak's code has been stolen, Milburn said. In the late 1990s, hackers reverse-engineered CyberSitter, which prevents underage children from accessing pornography or other adult content, to allow users to access such content.

The hackers, as well as other detractors, have previously accused Solid Oak and CyberSitter of censoring the Internet. "That's why we don't want to be associated with it," Milburn said of Green Dam.

I don't think they mean "hackers" in the positive sense of the word. I think a more relevant term is "civil-libertarian software engineer activists" Note reverse-engineering Cybersitter[update: is should be] legal. And Solid Oak had the "CYBERsitter Partners Program"

The new CYBERsitter Partners Program allows concerned organizations to create and maintain their own lists of objectionable Internet sites for either private or public distribution. This gives CYBERsitter users several blocking lists to choose from, selecting ones that more accurately reflect their needs.

Third party blocking lists can be used in addition to the default CYBERsitter lists or as a replacement. Each time users update their files on-line, the index of available lists is updated. Users need only click on the lists they desire to use and they are maintained automatically.

As I've said, from a technical standpoint:

"if parents can limit what teenagers can see, then governments will be able to limit what citizens can see. And the other side is if citizen governments, teenagers will be able to circumvent parents."

For quite a while, that post was the most popular item on my entire site, since it ended up being highly ranked for a Google search on the words [Michael Jackson Nose].

There's a lesson there.

Now, obviously, people are going to say "What did you expect? Of course writing about celebrities draws in the hits. But did you want to be a gossip-blogger? It's not useful traffic anyway".

Which is all true. But I think it misses the point about incentives, and what's rewarded in blogging. Anyway, I've said it before. But I'll confess curiosity at how this post will fare in terms of traffic.

"Check your serving of online news for factual accuracy before you give it a taste"

I sadly suspect I'm going to get grief for that title, it was done by an editor. It'll likely set off people's bloggers-versus-journalists reflex. In my column, I specifically wrote "This isn't about bloggers v journalists". But ironically, knee-jerking about that is what's going to bring in the page-views.

What I was trying to illuminate in this column was how the idea of "self-correcting bogosphere" was utter bunk. And, critically, the hucksters who peddle it should have no credibility by now. I'm hardly the first to say that, but there's some value here in a simple case study (that's also not a political firestorm).

It doesn't mean professional journalists were always right (I can see the Attack Of The Strawmen coming on). We knew that already. It means these issues are serious matters that shouldn't be waved away with technomarketingbabble.

On the bright side, I finally got to use a joke I've been wanting to tell for a while.

Blog bonus, here's part of my email to the inventor, talking about the energy issues. He indicates he couldn't discuss the technology in detail, due to various

I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation for the energy involved:

1 calorie = raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius
1 calorie = 4.184 joules
Snap Pots = 200g of water, as an approximation

200g water * raise 50 C = 10000 calories = 10^4 calories = 4.184 x 10^4 joules
1 watt-hour = 3.6 x 10^3 joules
So 4.184 x 10^4 joules =~ 11.6 watt-hours

Laptop batteries are around 60 watt-hours or so. So while this doesn't break the laws of physics, discharging 11.6 watt-hours from a laptop-type battery in 60 seconds seems problematic. I'd *joke* the microwave part may not work, rather it's in fact the heat from shorting the battery, making this a battery-powered electric oven.

Assuming the battery is in the base, there does seem to be an energy capacity problem.

[For all columns, see the page Seth Finkelstein | guardian.co.uk.]

A UK tabloid story has set off a round of uncritical echoing of a ludicrous claim:

It is the world's smallest, portable microwave and can be powered via a link to the USB port on a laptop computer.

The turquoise device - called the Beanzawave - has been created in partnership with Heinz to allow workers tied to their desks to create a warm snack, or hot drink, to see them through the day.

I realize I am expecting too much for anyone in the echoing chain to say "But how is that possible?", as popularity wins over accuracy. But it's still a sad result.

For non-technical people, here's a short description of the problem:

Water takes a relatively large amount of energy to heat up (Microwave ovens typically use many hundred of Watts of power, 1100 Watts is common). USB ports supply very little energy (2.5 Watts of power). Without needing to do any complicated calculations, the scales just don't match.

So I mailed the company and asked them about this:

Dear Sirs

I am a blogger who has read the articles about the "Beanzawave", where supposedly a USB port powered device can heat a small food portion.

"Apart from its size, the key breakthrough is the use of a combination of mobile phone radio frequencies to create the heat to cook both on the outside and within in under a minute."

I don't understand what is meant by this. Even at 100% transfer efficiency, the total energy drawable in a minute from a USB port (which can supply around 2.5 Watts) is not enough to significantly heat even a small food portion.

Assuming that the news reports garbled whatever you were trying to say, would you be kind enough to clarify the idea?

[I received a prompt response]

The USB port is used for control purposes only. Oven is powered by appropriate sized Lithium-ion batteries, which can be mains supplied and/or recharged. It is the mobile phone frequencies that utilise prior long-term existing 900MHz (industrial) and 2450MHz (consumer) ISM approved microwave oven frequencies. I assure you we have sufficient power to effectively heat small type hand-snack food products.

Thanks your concern and interest ... Gordon Andrews

[end reply]

So, there you have it. With some big batteries and high efficiency, maybe they can make it work. But it's sure not going to be using just the power of the USB port.

Tell me again about how expert's blogs are going to rule the media world :-( (as opposed to the reality of "Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest")

They said it, not me:

"This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network."

The article in parts says (my very loose paraphrase) that Twitter is used by BigHeads to pontificate - they write and the audience reads. The authors seem somewhat surprised at a gender imbalance, but I suspect that's an artifact from most of the BigHeads being male.

My column brought me a lot of grief, and I see some of the same reactions starting in to this piece. Most notably, the you-can-CHAT! chorus. And one answer to that is perhaps in this column by Bobbie Johnson: How much is it worth to be one of Twitter's suggested users?

Plus, some of the resentment is driven - even if they don't admit it - by the fact that a lot of people really consider Twitter as a competition to gain the biggest audience. It's professionally useful to them to have more followers than other people - and, in many cases, they believe that they are being cheated out of their rightful position inside the social network. ... [snip]

And some have too much of their personal or professional reputation staked on being successful in these sorts of arenas. Hard to sell yourself as a social media guru if any old celebrity can get more Twitter followers than you without even trying.

A few days ago, I did a brief appearance on a talk-radio program (the Angie Coiro show), being critical of Twitter. She wondered if I'd feel the same way about Twitter in a year. I replied approximately that I almost certainly would, as I'd gone though the delusions of blogging, and I wasn't going to get fooled again.