Dreaming in Code has sold particularly well on Amazon.com, which does not surprise me. Given the subject matter, the book was bound to appeal to buyers who shop online, and Amazon is the dominant player in the online bookstore market.

I’ve also been pleased to see the profusion of customer reviews on Amazon. As of about three weeks ago, we had 33 reviews posted. Most were positive, a handful were negative; either way, each one meant that some reader cared enough to take the time to post their reactions, and that meant a lot to me.

Then something weird happened about ten days ago. Suddenly, Amazon showed only 10 reviews. Two dozen reviews posted between mid-February and the end of June had simply disappeared. In the time since then, a couple of new reviews have joined the total, but the missing reviews have not reappeared.

I’ve been building Web sites long enough, and worked with software long enough, to imagine a variety of different scenarios for what might be causing this. Whatever happened, this is something that Amazon ought to be concerned about — these glitches are rarely limited to a single page; there’s likely sporadic data loss in multiple places. Amazon runs a gigantic Web service that a lot of people depend on. It has even recently gotten into the business of offering back-end data storage services (Amazon S3) to other Web companies and individuals. So I trust they’ll be pursuing this issue. They ought to have this data somewhere from which it can be restored.

I’ve asked my publisher to look into the matter. I also contacted Amazon through their bottom-of-the-page feedback mechanism. The good news is, I actually got a response; the bad news is, it was feeble — I think the customer-service rep. simply looked up the page, saw there were a dozen reviews, and reported such back to me. I could do that from the comfort of my home, thank you!

Amazon was one of the very first businesses to understand the value of what the Net industry now calls “user-generated content.” Customer reviews are the heart of its operation. The most basic compact between a Web service and its users is, “If you contribute something of value, we promise not to lose it.”

UPDATE Mid-afternoon Wednesday: The reviews appear to be back. Thanks, Amazon.

In a phrase that will deservedly pass almost instantaneously to meme-hood, Jason Kottke says “Facebook is the new AOL.” Facebook has persuaded lots of Web services and sites to build applications on its platform, but the proprietary, walled-garden approach will ultimately grow tiresome:

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet…

Kottke points his post back to an observation by Meetup’s Scott Heiferman about the AOL/Facebook parallel. But I also caught echoes of Jon Udell’s post back in February about “social network fatigue”:

Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”

Dave Winer has been writing lately as well about social-network overload and the usefulness of arriving at a single, interoperable standard for identity:

Marc Canter and many other people think I’m full of it when I say the right number of identity systems for each user is 1. But I am right. And I know it…Here’s a hint. How many email systems do you use? RSS systems? Web systems? The correct answers are 1, 1, and 1.

This is a hugely important topic — subset of a larger one that I expect to devote some energy to writing about in the future. The common theme here is the centripetal force of the Internet. We start with services that help people do something important but simple (like: use email, build a web page, start a blog); those services fight for share by walling themselves off; eventually, the service that gets in the way least wins the most users, and those users are able to conduct their activities on the open Net.

From Rolling Stone’s obituary for the music industry, June 19, 2007:

Even worse, the record companies waited almost two years after Napster’s July 2nd, 2001, shutdown before licensing a user-friendly legal alternative to unauthorized file-sharing services: Apple’s iTunes Music Store… Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. “That’s when we lost the users,” Rosen says. “Peer-to-peer took hold. That’s when we went from music having real value in people’s minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value.”

From my column in Salon, July 27, 2000:

What will be the impact of the court-ordered shutdown of Napster? These projects — small, underground efforts that grew unnoticed in the shadow of Napster the company — will be flooded with energy… From the recording industry’s point of view, it is slaying one enemy only to seed the field with a thousand new opponents — opponents who are, not incidentally, its own best customers…

The recording industry is in for a long, fruitless siege if it sets out to shut down each little Napster clone or slap a writ on every individual who uses Gnutella. Ultimately, if it wants to stop people from engaging in Napster-like behavior, the only thing that could work would be to shut down the Internet itself. Good luck.

Instead of going to court, of course, the music industry could be figuring out ways to use Napster to sell more music. After all, here’s a piece of software that cultivates people’s taste for new music and that appeals to the most dedicated fans. What a sales opportunity!

But by treating Napster as the copyright antichrist, the industry is simply insuring that the vector of Internet technological development will move rapidly toward a lawsuit-proof, free-for-all distributed network of file-sharing…

This is getting interesting!

John Battelle has posted a reasonable defense of the Federated Media “conversational ad” scheme that I discussed earlier. (And it strikes a healthily non-defensive tone, too, which is awfully hard in such a situation.) He argues that he views “commercial publications” as conversations between three parties: authors, audiences and advertisers.

Well, OK. You know who the authors are; they sign their writing. You know who you are, as a member of the audience. But who, exactly, is the advertiser? That is the problem with Battelle’s formulation, as I see it.

Blogging presupposes a notion of direct communication between writer and reader, where there is no editor or intermediary bureaucracy between the two, and where the reader, as often as not, is also a blogger, ready to respond — to participate in the “conversation.”

But this advertiser-as-conversationalist thing, I’m still having a hard time with it. If you look at the “People Ready” conversation page that FM and Microsoft created, where, exactly, is Microsoft joining the conversation? I see lots of names here, but no name representing Microsoft. If you click through to the “About People Ready” page, you can read stuff like, “Microsoft sees a better way to unlock the potential of every person.” But, er, who exactly is Microsoft?

In a comment posted on Jeff Jarvis’s blog, Battelle elaborates:

Is it somehow illegal for companies to be part of a conversation? I really find that presumption offensive. Why can’t companies, which as the Cluetrain reminds us are just made up of people, be part of a conversation, and invite leader into that conversation?

I have only one problem with this argument: A corporation is not (pace the late 19th-century legal doctrine that held corporations to have the same rights as individuals) a person. There are plenty of individual people who work for corporations. (I do, too.) And when they post in online forums or start blogs or do anything that they sign their name to, I’m very happy to have a conversation with them. But that’s different from “companies being part of a conversation.” I don’t know how to do that. And I really don’t see that happening with the “People Ready” campaign.

A deep irony here is that Microsoft, of all the big tech companies, has a long and proud record of promoting blogging among its engineers and executives. I’ve learned a vast amount by reading them, and their presence online — including the famous Robert Scoble (who weighs in on this controversy here, and who of course has long since moved on from Microsoft) but extending far beyond him — has changed my understanding of the company and the people who work for it. Microsoft is already part of a panoply of real conversations on the Web. That makes this “People Ready” construct look all the more artificial.

UPDATE: More from Matthew Ingram:

If I’m talking to a bunch of people in a bar, and an advertising guy working for Coke comes up and tries to change the subject to the idea of “refreshment,” and says that he plans to tape-record my comments and use them on a billboard, then I am going to react pretty negatively to that idea. That’s not a “conversation” the way I would define it.

In the murky annals of “advertorial” — the blurring of clear lines between independent editorial matter and advertising — the dustup over Federated Media’s campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “People Ready” slogan will rank as a minor affair. But it’s a useful flashpoint for looking at a central divergence in perspectives on blogging.

Federated Media, John Battelle’s ad network for high-traffic blogs, gathered a constellation of star tech-and-biz pundits who are part of its network, got them to offer comments on the theme of Microsoft’s campaign, and assembled those quotes on a Web site. Valleywag cried foul. FM refers to the technique as a “conversational marketing campaign”; the approach is really the Web equivalent of a magazine advertorial. Advertorials — including advertorials that involve a publication’s editorial staff — have been around a long time, and while they can be abused, they are hardly cause for deep moral indignation, as long as they are clearly labeled (FM’s is) and not trying to confuse readers.

On the other hand, if you run advertorials, I think you make it much harder to present yourself as the leader of any kind of business revolution. When advertisers ask for an advertorial, they typically want to confuse readers; they’re admitting that traditional ads aren’t working for them, and they’re asking for the editors or bloggers to lend an ad a bit of the content producers’ credibility — or at least ability to attract readers’ attention. This is fundamentally an old-media game.

FM and others working at the edge of new-media business models argue that they’re helping advertisers and marketers “join a conversation.” Maybe so. But the best conversations aren’t plotted by ad buyers; they’re spontaneous.

Ironically, of course, it’s the conversation about this ad campaign (Mike Arrington defends the ad, Om Malik retreats from it, Dave Winer says the bloggers may be “clouding their integrity”) that is attracting multiple posts –including, yeah, this one — and landing the controversy at the top of sites like Techmeme. So maybe FM and Microsoft knew exactly what they were doing. Maybe Nick Denton and Valleywag are in on the deal, too! (No, no, of course not: joke.)

What I find interesting in this debate is that there remains, nearly a decade into the history of blogging, a philosophical divide: Some see blogging as simply a young format for media business — and, like Federated Media or Valleywag’s owner Gawker Media, building ad-based publications on blogging platforms. Others stubbornly continue to see blogging as a uniquely new creative endeavor that puts bloggers in direct touch with readers, cutting out media-biz middle-manning. Anyone in the latter camp is going to squawk at the arrival of the blog-advertorial — not only because it’s corrupt to them, but because it’s old hat.

The people at Federated Media are smart, and I’ll give them credit for trying out new ad approaches in a not-obviously-corrupt way. If this one doesn’t work, I’m sure they’ll keep trying. But I’m skeptical of the introduction of what are, essentially, magazine-biz norms into the blogosphere. Because eventually that road ends with blogs becoming independent online magazines, and I’ve been at that game long enough to know how hard it is.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis — whose blog is repped by Federated Media — weighs in at length, concluding:

It’s the bloggers who must make these calls. That’s because advertisers will be advertisers; they will try to push for more integration with us (and we should beware taking that as flattery). And sales people will be sales people; they will try hard to get the sale. So we bloggers are left, inevitably, with the need to say no.

I have little to add to the flurry of coverage of Terry Semel’s departure (or should we say semi-departure) from Yahoo but this bit of historical perspective. (Apologies in advance for a certain amount of over-simplification! I’m writing today in between family events…)

Semel took over Yahoo during the worst of the dotcom downturn, an era largely forgotten in today’s Web 2.0 euphoria. His hiring there needs to be understood in parallel with the AOL/Time Warner saga. During the same time that Semel was retooling Yahoo in Hollywood’s direction, the Time Warner brass were conducting their counter-revolution against the AOL upstarts who’d seemed to have snookered their shareholders.

At that moment in industry history, everyone was making the same bet: the Web as a technology platform was a money-loser. Cash was king. You had to charge for services if you could, and keep selling ads if you could; if you could do either, you’d be OK, and if you could do both, you could prosper. The future, in other words, lay with those who bet on media, not on technology.

For Time Warner, it was patently clear that, as the dotcom debris gathered and the Web seemed to be something that could be blissfully forgotten, media represented the only future that mattered. (Since AOL was never a great technology company — its triumph was marketing — it would be hard to quarrel with that call.)

For Yahoo, born of the Web, the choice was tougher: Yahoo’s was always an ad business, but the company was justly proud of its technology, too. Semel’s background and focus sent the message that the Web was calming down into an online version of broadcast: gather eyeballs and sell them. That worked, up to a point; Semel did help rescue Yahoo from the bubble-bust, and the company survived to become one of the industry’s leaders.

On the other hand, it also missed the boat on the biggest change that was incubating throughout that era. Google’s extraordinary new business was entirely technology-based. The bet Semel failed to make on the technology side proved to be the one that mattered most. And the smart but relatively small moves Yahoo would later make to try to catch up — investments in Flickr and so on — couldn’t make up for that big miscall.

The boom-bust cycle that governs the Net world enforces a short-term amnesia: When a bubble is on, everyone thinks technology is all that matters, and when a bust is on, everyone thinks cash is all that matters. As in any market, the best returns are captured by those who make smart (and smartly timed) counter-cyclic bets.

To this outsider, Semel doesn’t appear to have been the Hollywood idiot some now see. But he steered Yahoo with the cycle. And that just wasn’t unconventional enough to produce the biggest sort of win.

I loved the excerpt from Robert Frank’s new book Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich that ran in the Wall Street Journal last week, focusing on the rise of the butler trade among newly minted Bush-era plutocrats. It seems that the new rich want butlers, but the traditional ethos of the profession doesn’t always mesh well with the wishes and self-images of their employers. It’s like Upstairs, Downstairs transposed to the business-casual era:

Bob quickly discovered that managing a house staff has its own headaches. “Suddenly there’s all this funky politics going on in your house. Like the housekeeper might be nice to us, but she’s threatening to the other employees. So we had to get rid of that housekeeper.”

His first household manager was a nightmare. An exacting woman who specialized in formal entertainment, she aspired to throw lavish parties for prominent guests. Instead, she got Bob and his family, whose idea of a big Friday night is a mountain-bike ride followed by a big salad. The household manager was deeply disappointed. “We weren’t the rich, famous people she was hoping for,” Bob says.

I realized my own utter innocence of this trend toward ultra-pampering among the ultra-rich when I read the phrase “professional organizer” in another recent article in the Journal.

To me that term has always meant someone who earns a living organizing workers or tenants or political movements. But no, this is a person whose organizational skills are targeted at other people’s closets.

David Cohn is a smart young journalist who I met through my association with NewAssignment.Net. Today he has posted an argument for supporting the teaching of programming to journalists (this comes in the wake of a scholarship fund set up for programmers to learn journalism).

This discussion comes against the backdrop of massive business disruption in the newspaper industry, most recently with the announcement that 100 editorial employees of the San Francisco Chronicle are losing their jobs. A dozen managers got the boot this week (also here), including several I knew from my decade at the SF Examiner — the staff of which ended up working at the Chron when Hearst essentially combined the two papers in 2000.

The fear, plainly, is that print journalists are becoming the hand-loom weavers of the 21st century. But it’s not the craft of journalism that is in danger today; that remains a reasonably valuable skill. It’s the business structure of the newspaper industry (along with broadcast TV, magazines, and more) that is in trouble. Journalists are largely the drive-by victims of a media-industry transition that started to unfold in the early 90s and that could take another 25 years to play out. Society still needs their work, but for the moment, at least, its system for paying their rent is broken.

Cohn writes: “I am convinced the only thing holding me back from organizing the type of web based network journalism I want to do is my lack of coding skills.” He might be right, if his vision goes far beyond what existing software can do. But is it really going to be easier for him to thoroughly learn programming than to learn just what he needs to communicate his ideas to a pro?

In fact, I don’t think most journalists trying to find their way across the new media landscape need to acquire deep programming skills — any more than most programmers trying to write new-media applications need to master the fine art of headline writing or the arcana of copy editing. Sure, it’s great that occasionally a cross-disciplinary polymath turns up to shake things up — and if that’s what Cohn aspires to be, more power to him.

But the pressing need is not for people who can write code with one hand and stories with the other. What journalists do need is working digital literacy. They need to understand something about how the technology that’s reshaping media works, how it’s built, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and how to harness it. Journalists don’t need to study object-oriented PHP in order to do that; yet it’s helpful for them to be able to mess with a Wordpress template without running in terror.

When an entrepreneur starts a company and decides to rent an office, she might need to learn about the commercial real estate market and become familiar with what’s available and what it might take to remodel a space and even how to read a floorplan or blueprint. But she doesn’t need to master all the building trades herself.

I think Cohn is on the right track in advocating more support for the retraining of a population of displaced professional journalists. I just think they can contribute in all sorts of ways without having to feel they must add programming to their resumes.

Jimmy Guterman’s post (also here) about the Gates/Jobs show at D is worth reading. I like his thinking out loud here:

They do have so much in common. When Gates said, “Neither of us have anything to complain about” and “We’re two of the luckiest guys on the planet,” and Jobs quoted The Beatles’ “Two Of Us” to express his affection for Gates, it didn’t seem like a put-on. Indeed, one can think of Gates and Jobs (as opposed to Gates and Allen, or Jobs and Wozniak) as the Lennon and McCartney of the PC era. They worked together for a long time and they fought for a long time, but the two of them experienced extremes that no one else in their business ever faced. For all their differences, they’re two of a kind, unlike anyone else anywhere.

Nicely put. But I think the Lennon/McCartney comparison goes too far, because, after all, these guys are and always have been primarily rivals, not collaborators, and they have done their best work apart, not together — which was not really the John-and-Paul story at all.

Perhaps — as someone else pointed out this week (can’t remember now where I read this!) — a Beatles/Stones comparison would be more apt? Elvis/Dylan? Clash/Sex Pistols?