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Real names

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This week one could read in the Wall Street Journal that the Chinese government has had second thoughts about a plan to require bloggers to use their real names:

The Chinese government, which sees the online world as a conduit for slander, pornography and antigovernment views, believes the real-name system would force the Internet community to watch their words and actions. But the policy received sharp protests from the technology industry.

Now, the Ministry of Information Industry, the agency responsible for the policy, has abandoned plans for a law requiring all Chinese blog service providers to ask their users for verifiable personal details before they can start blogging….

Analysts say the Chinese government is quickly discovering that compliance by fiat doesn’t work, especially now that it also is increasingly aware of the need to balance politics with the business interests….

The government decided to backtrack on the real-name system after industry players argued that it would be impossible to implement.

Then one could read, in the Washington Post, a column by Tom Grubisch arguing that the big problem with online conversation is that we don’t require people to use their real names:

These days we want “transparency” in all institutions, even private ones. There’s one massive exception — the Internet. It is, we are told, a giant town hall. Indeed, it has millions of people speaking out in millions of online forums. But most of them are wearing the equivalent of paper bags over their heads. We know them only by their Internet “handles” — gotalife, runningwithscissors, stoptheplanet and myriad other inventive names….

If Web sites required posters to use their real names, while giving the shield of pseudonymity when it’s merited, spirited online debate would continue unimpeded. It might even be enhanced by attracting contributors who are turned off today by name calling and worse. Except for the hate-mongers, who wouldn’t want that?

It’s tempting just to leave these two articles in pregnant juxtaposition. But I can’t resist adding a few pontificatory wrinkles.

I got my first taste of online conversation on the Well, a paid service on whose private boards every user’s real name is a click or two away. I found that the availability of those names helped dampen the worst flames and enforce some accountability. So in that sense, I actually share Grubisch’s perspective.

But that was 15 years ago. The open Internet and the cross-linked Web have evolved on a different model. When we started Salon’s Table Talk in 1995 we practically begged participants to use their real names. But unless we were willing to demand credit cards and hire customer-support people to phone users and so on, we couldn’t make them — and besides, we were trying to grow fast, and didn’t want to erect too high a barrier to newcomers.

That’s pretty much what every online community — and every newspaper that opens up discussion boards — faces: Practically speaking, demanding that people use their real names online is nearly impossible today, and if you try, you risk strangling the participation you sought, for both editorial and business reasons. Hey, even the Chinese government can’t seem to figure out how to do it!

Over the past decade, one further reason has arisen for many people’s reluctance to sign their postings: They understand that Google reassembles every breadcrumb that bears their name into a permanent dossier. And they’re reluctant to put all those opinions and bantering jokes into the clickstream for future employers or other busybodies. There’s a lot of talk about the Web 2.0 generation’s willingness to splay every embarrassing detail of their lives onto MySpace and Facebook without fear. But I don’t think our need for privacy is dead; I think it just slumbers until after graduation, and rudely awakens upon entry into the workforce.

Real names are powerful; they add credibility. I’m still amazed at the number of blogs I land upon, following some link, that lack a prominent credit — not because they’re anonymous (if you click around you eventually find the bloggers’ names), but because the authors somehow haven’t thought their monikers matter. Using your name is a way of claiming words and authority. But there needs to be plenty of room on the Net for people who have reasons for preferring pseudonyms.

What about Grubisch’s “hate-mongers”? We’ll just have to keep working on our moderation skills and refining our community-based filters. That’s a lot more promising than the real-name “fiat,” anyway.
[tags]china, identity[/tags]

Howard Rheingold — call for questions

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I’ve been doing some advising to Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net “citizen journalism” lab and its Assignment Zero project — an experiment in harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers to explore the complex questions surrounding harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers.

Recursive? You bet. But interesting enough for me to want to participate in — which I’m doing by taking on one modest assignment for the project.

Next week I’ll be interviewing Howard Rheingold as my contribution to Assignment Zero. I interviewed Howard way back in January of 1994, about his then-recent book The Virtual Community. In those days people were using the phrase “information superhighway” without (too much) irony. The Virtual Community described a looming decision point in the development of the online world. From my piece:

In particular, what’s up to us is whether the network turns out to be an open public space, like a town square or a civic forum, or a commercial enclosure, like a mall. To analogize, and doubtless oversimplify, the question is whether the network emerges as something like a souped-up telephone that we can all communicate with (known as the “many-to-many” model) or something like a jazzed-up cable TV (“one-to-many”) that provides us with more choices but not more power.

And Rheingold emphasizes that it’s up to us right now — during a brief window of opportunity, as the government bargains with the telephone companies, cable TV networks and other corporations to lay down new rules for the new roads.

We know how that turned out — then: the Internet trounced its “walled garden” rivals and became the global standard for electronic communication. Is that conflict a closed issue, or will we keep facing it in new forms? I’ll be following up with Howard about this and more.

NewAssignment.Net aims to channel “many-to-many” energies in its own way, so if you have topics you think we should explore, questions you want me to pose to Howard, or information you think is relevant to our talk, please post over at Assignment Zero (or right here, if you like!).
[tags]newassignment.net, howard rheingold, assignment zero, crowdsourcing[/tags]

More on email vs. phone

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There’s a great comment from John below in the email vs. phone discussion that I want to respond to.

Of course phone conversations (and even better, in-person interviews) have advantages that e-mail or blog communication can’t match. If you’re writing a lengthy profile of someone, you want to sit down with your subject, for all the reasons John cites. But most stories involve lassoing lots of comment from lots of people. Vogelstein is profiling Mike Arrington; he wants thoughts, no doubt, from a long list of bloggers. He’s looking for quotes, not trying to capture an interviewee’s soul. And he’s saying, I don’t do email interviews. That, to me, is crazy, because, as I said, some portion of the people you want to talk to don’t want to talk to you — they’ve been burned. You can say, too bad, forget it, or you can adapt, and work with the strengths and weaknesses of an e-mail or on-blog interview.

Sure, sometimes you’ll get stiff responses or prefabricated spin. I just don’t see that it’s so much easier to provide the prefab response in email than it is on the phone. The well-trained guarded interviewee will know what to say and when to shut up whether he’s talking or typing; the loose cannon will blow whatever the medium.

John concludes with this:

I rely on great reporters to not only accurately convey what they have been told, but to filter out the noise and present me with the most important things, and often to analyze that and/or give me their interpretation. You write about filtering parts of the conversation as if such efforts are part of a conspiracy to keep the reader in the dark. Rather, it’s a way to focus the light on what is truly important.

I agree, but there’s one word that renders the whole statement largely irrelevant. “Great” reporters are rare — this is, as they say in the software world, an “edge case.” When one gets a random phone call from a random reporter, am I going to assume I’m in the presence of greatness? Or am I going to assume that, like each of the last half-dozen people who’ve written about me or my company, they’re likely to get something important wrong?

Filtering is part of the journalist’s job, of course. The bit about transparency that Winer and Jarvis and others keep harping on is this: If you write your story, but also expose the source material — either by posting full interview transcripts yourself or because the dialogue happened on public blogs — then the interested reader can go back and review your filtering. (Just as anyone reading this can look at John’s comment, or follow all the previous links in this story, and see if I’m fairly representing the issues.) Any good reporter should welcome that.

That’s the value here. It’s something you gain when you move from phone interview mode to email/blog mode. Does that gain outweigh the loss of color and immediacy and so on? Not always — but, I think, a lot more often than the newsroom gospel would have it.
[tags]journalism, interviews, fred vogelstein, dave winer, jason calacanis[/tags]

The phone, email, blog interview flap

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This week saw a fascinating dustup as some of the blogosphere’s notables tussled with some journalists over how to conduct an interview. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein wanted a phoner; the bloggers, Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer, wanted either to answer questions by email (in Calacanis’s case) or (in Winer’s case) to receive questions by email and answer, publicly, on his blog. There was considerable snit on the part of several Wired writers in defense of their colleague once the bloggers went public with their disagreement.

If you want the full details, you can read about it on Calacanis’s blog and on Winer’s, and you can read Jeff Jarvis’s impassioned explication of the “empowered interviewee.” Vogelstein tells his side here.

It’s undeniable that pros prefer phoners. Partly it’s because the phone is fast, and most senior-level reporters today learned their craft when the phone was really the only channel available. Also, it’s because a good reporter can capture an extra bit of color by listening to an interviewee’s voice and tone. But mostly, it’s because reporters hope to use the conversational environment as a space in which to prod, wheedle, cajole and possibly trip up their interviewee.

Any reporter who doesn’t admit this is lying, either to his listener or to himself. Phone conversations have the additional advantage of (usually) leaving no record, giving journalism’s more malicious practitioners a chance to distort without exposure, and its lazier representatives an opportunity to goof without fear. (I have no reason to believe Vogelstein is either. But in his email to Calacanis, which the reporter later posted himself, Vogelstein explained his preference by saying, “Email leaves too much room for misinterpretation. You can’t hear the tone in someone’s voice.” And that just sounds disingenuous coming from someone who earns his living writing text — unless Vogelstein has reinvented himself as a podcaster while I wasn’t looking.)

Why are we hearing about more interviewees shunning the phone? As Winer argued and Dan Gillmor argued and I agree, too many journalists get too much stuff wrong, and self-defense is a reasonable concern, given the likelihood of misquotation, out-of-context quotation and factual error.

The pros are going to keep lining up to explain why the phone interview is superior, but I haven’t yet seen a persuasive argument. On a BusinessWeek blog, Heather Green says she prefers reporting by phone or in person because “a conversation allows me to do followup questions.” Gee, I’ve done tons of email interviews, and nearly all of them involved followup questions. But what’s most revealing here is the misunderstanding (Green isn’t unique here, it’s widespread) of how blogging works.

Blogging is a conversation. That’s not a metaphor — it’s a simple fact that this story itself illustrates: Calacanis and Winer and Vogelstein and Gillmor and Green and many others have been having one such exchange (and now I’m chiming in too). To argue that the amongst-blog conversation doesn’t allow followups is ridiculous; if anything, our blog conversations have too many followups — and they have a hard time finding a graceful ending (though that optimist David Weinberger finds positive value in this lack of closure).

But in the online conversation, the reporter doesn’t get the last word. And the reporter doesn’t get to filter which parts of the conversation are available to the public. No wonder journalists want to stick with the phone. But I think it’s going to keep getting harder for them to get their sources to take the calls.
[tags]journalism, interviews, dave winer, jason calacanis, fred vogelstein[/tags]

Everyone needs help with the new system

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Recently you may have found yourself watching this amusing video known variously as “Medieval Help Desk” and “Introducing the Book,” in which a befuddled monk seeks technical support assistance figuring out how to use the newfangled text-delivery platform called the book. (“I ‘turn the page’?”)

First we laugh at the missteps and worries of the monastic protagonist, who fears he’ll “lose text” if he turns the page; then we realize the joke cuts both ways, and that the monk’s trials are no different from our own struggles with unfamiliar new interfaces. Sooner or later, we’re all newbies in relation to something, and our confusion will be laughed at by those in the future (perhaps ourselves) for whom the novelty we once scratched our heads over has become second nature.

I thought about that video as I read Jon Udell’s recent post titled Online Incunabula. I’d always thought “incunabulum” meant anything that was in embryonic form, but Udell explained that the word has a more specific meaning: it applies to books printed before 1501, in the earliest days of printing, when the conventions of book publishing hadn’t yet coalesced into a set of common practices. Udell’s post refers to a podcast interview with Geoffrey Bilder, an executive with CrossRef, which develops a system for making scholarly citations work online. Udell excerpts this passage by Bilder:

People were clearly uncomfortable moving from manuscripts to printed books. They’d print these books, and then they’d decorate them by hand. They’d add red capitals to the beginnings of paragraphs, and illuminate the margins, because they didn’t entirely trust this printed thing. It somehow felt of less quality, less formal, less official, less authoritative. And here we are, trying to make our online stuff more like printed stuff. This is the incunabula of the digital age that we’re creating at the moment. And it’s going to change.

So much of the apparatus that we take for granted when we look at a book — the table of contents, page numbers, running heads, footnotes — that wasn’t common currency. It got developed. Page numbers didn’t make much sense if there was only one edition of something. This kind of stuff got developed and adopted over a fairly long period of time.

If you treat Vannevar Bush as Gutenberg, we haven’t even gotten to Martin Luther yet, we haven’t even gotten to 1525. In fact, whereas people stopped trying to decorate manuscripts by 1501, we’re still trying to replicate print online. So in some ways they were way ahead of us in building new mechanisms for communicating, and new apparatus for the stuff they were dealing with.

I love this quote’s reminder of how early the online game’s innings remain. One of the things I’ve always valued about blogs is that their features — reverse chronology, permalinked posts, time-stamps, comments and so forth — represent the first bundle of conventions for the online medium that is truly native to it. The format evolved to meet the unique needs of a publishing environment in which anything can be changed at any time and yet everything ought to have a permanent address. (This is a point that both Rebecca Blood and I have been making for a long time now.)

It helps to think that what we’ve been doing here on the Web for several years is slowly, by trial error, inventing the online equivalents to “the apparatus that we take for granted when we look at a book.” And we’ve only just begun.
[tags]blogging, jon udell[/tags]

Michael Wesch’s “Machine” video

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Before the opening talk at the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this week, the conference organizers played Michael Wesch’s video-ode to the participatory Web, “The Machine is Us/ing Us”. Given the insider-y nature of the crowd, I have to assume that most of the attendees had already seen it — it had rocketed to blogospheric celebrity in early February. But I didn’t realize the guy who made the video, a professor of cultural anthropology from Kansas State University, was at the conference.

On Tuesday afternoon I literally stumbled upon his talk in the hallway (on a tip from my neighbor Tim Bishop); it was a part of the free, informal “Web2Open” parallel conference. Across the hall, a hubbub made it hard to hear Wesch — the Justin.tv people had set up camp there and needed to be asked to pipe down.

Wesch turns out to be a rare combination of ingenuous Web enthusiast and smart cultural critic. In my experience, the cultural critics are usually pickled in cynicism and the Web enthusiasts are often blinded to their technology’s drawbacks. Maybe the discipline of cultural anthropology has helped Wesch maintain some balance; or maybe his sheer distance from Silicon Valley-mania — whether in the flatlands of Kansas or the mountains of Papua New Guinea — has helped him find a fresh perspective.

The came-out-of-nowhere saga of Wesch’s video neatly serves to mirror its message about the generated-from-the-bottom-up nature of the Web. Wesch originally made the video, he explained, because he was writing a paper about Web 2.0 for anthropologists, trying to explain how new Web tools can transform the academic conversation. He created it “on the fly” using low-end tools. Its grammar, with its write-then-delete-and-rewrite rhythms, emerged as he made goofs and fixed them: “The mistakes were real, at first. Then I thought they were cool, and started to plan them.” The music was a track by a musician from the Ivory Coast that he found via Creative Commons. (Once the video became a hit, Wesch says, he got a moving e-mail from the musician, who said that he’d been about to give up his dreams of a life in music, but was now finding new opportunities thanks to the attention the video was sending his way.)

The video’s viral success took Wesch by surprise. He’d forwarded it to some colleagues in the IT department to make sure that he hadn’t erred in his definition of XML. They sent it around. It took a week to go ballistic.

At one point someone in the small audience asked Wesch a question about his field research in Papua New Guinea. He paused for a second, asking, “There’s about a two-hour lecture there, I’m not sure I can compress that into a five-minute answer — should I try?” I couldn’t help myself; I blurted, “Hey, you did the entire history of the Web in four minutes — go ahead!”
[tags]web 2.0, web 2.0 expo, michael wesch, the machine is us/ing us, viral video[/tags]

Schmidt on scaling Google

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The first time I heard Eric Schmidt speak was in June 1995. I’d flown to Honolulu to cover the annual INET conference for the newspaper I then worked for. The Internet Society’s conclave was a sort of victory lap for the wizards and graybeards who’d designed the open network decades before and were finally witnessing its come-from-behind triumph over the proprietary online services. It was plain, at that point in time, that the Internet was going to be the foundation of future digital communications.

But it wasn’t necessarily clear how big it was going to get. In fact, at that event Schmidt predicted that the Internet would grow to 187 million hosts within 5 years. If I understand this chart at Netcraft properly, we actually reached that number only recently. (Netcraft tracks web hosts, so maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges).

I thought of this today at the Web 2.0 Expo, where Eric Schmidt, now Google’s CEO, talked on stage with John Battelle. (Dan Farber has a good summary.) He discussed Google’s new lightweight Web-based presentation app (the PowerPoint entry in Google’s app suite), the recent deal to acquire DoubleClick, and of Microsoft’s hilarious antitrust gripe about it, and of Google’s commitment to letting its users pack up their data and take it elsewhere (a commitment that remains theoretical — not a simple thing to deliver, but if anyone has the brainpower resources to make it happen, Google does).

But what struck me was a more philosophical point near the end. Battelle asked Schmidt what he thinks about when he first wakes up in the morning (I suppose this is a variant of the old “what keeps you up at night”). After joshing about doing his e-mail, Schmidt launched into a discourse on what he worries about these days: “scaling.”

It surprised me to hear this, since Google has been so successful at keeping up with the demands on its infrastructure — successful at building it smartly, and at funding it, too. Schmidt was also, of course, talking about “scaling” the company itself.

“When the Internet really took off in the mid 90s, a lot of people talked about the scale, of how big it would be,” Schmidt said. It was obvious at the time there’d be a handful of defining Net companies, and each would need a “scaling strategy.”

Mostly, though, he was remarking on “how early we are in the scaling of the Internet” itself: “We’re just at the beginning of getting all the information that has been kept in small networks and groups onto these platforms.”

Tim O’Reilly made a similar point at the conference kick-off: In the era of Web-based computing, he said, we’re still at the VisiCalc stage.

Google famously defines its mission as “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But the work of getting the universe of individual and small-group knowledge onto the Net is something Google can only aid. Ultimately, this work belongs to the millions of bloggers and photographers and YouTubers and users of services yet to be imagined who provide the grist for Google’s algorithmic mills.

I find it bracing and helpful to recall all this at a show like the Web 2.0 Expo — which, while rewarding in many ways, gives off a lot of mid-to-late dotcom-bubble fumes. Froth will come and go. The vast project of building, and scaling, a global information network to absorb everything we can throw into it — that remains essential. And for all the impressive dimensions of Google, and the oodles of Wikipedia pages, and the zillions of blogs, we’ve only just begun to post.

[tags]google, eric schmidt, internet growth, web 2.0, web 2.0 expo[/tags]

Kathy Sierra and the werewolves

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I attended the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, or ETech, once again this year, and, distracted by other projects, did a very poor job of blogging about it. (You can read about the excellent EFF-sponsored debate between Mark Cuban and Fred von Lohmann, on the YouTube/Viacom lawsuit, here and here; Raph Koster spoke about magic as the underlying structure of game-play; and Danah Boyd gave a wonderful talk titled “Incantations for Muggles,” about the relationship between technologist-wizards and the rest of the human race — Koster took notes on it.)

The conference, as you may have heard, was abuzz with discussion of the Kathy Sierra saga — she’d been booked as a kickoff keynote speaker, but cancelled at the last minute, understandably spooked by threatening comments posted on her site and a couple of other blogs.

Sierra’s plight set off an immediate and vast blogstorm. There was much introspection and self-questioning about the onslaught of invective, nastiness, vicious taunts and obscene threats that sometimes emerges online, and seems especially targeted at women; there was also something of a rush to judgment to point fingers at particular bloggers whose sites and posts might (or might not) have encouraged the posts that caused Sierra such grief.

A prodigious number of people seemed to feel they had to weigh in immediately on this ugly situation, though virtually no one (yes, including myself) seemed willing or able to take the time needed to explore, in detail, what had actually happened and who had done what. I still haven’t seen any fully reported-out piece on the events — the coverage in the S.F. Chronicle seemed creditable, but it didn’t unravel the toughest questions: who was stalking Sierra, and was there in fact any relationship at all between said stalker(s) and the well-known bloggers she called out in her wounded post?

Sitting in a conference without the time or resources to do any reporting of my own, I thought, shoot, there’s no way I can know enough about what happened to add anything to the conversation. Of course comments like those Sierra encountered are, and should be considered, beyond the pale; Sierra deserved sympathy and support. But the storm of anger and the rush to judgment her post sparked represented, I thought, a failure of forethought. Running a blog provides the constant temptation to shoot off at the mouth. Sometimes, though, when you just don’t know all the facts, considered silence is golden.

The irony here is that this was supposed to be ETech’s year of fun and games.
[Read more…]

Assignment Zero

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Jay Rosen and his team at NewAssignment.net, a sort of citizen-journalism or “open source reporting” lab, have unveiled their first project: Assignment Zero, a coproduction between Rosen’s group and Wired News. The focus of the work is an attempt to create a comprehensive study of the phenomenon known variously as “crowdsourcing” or distributed peer-production. This is precisely the form NewAssignment.net’s journalism takes. So, depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or -empty type, there’s either a lovely form-follows-function dynamic happening, or the whole undertaking is hopelessly involuted and self-referential.

I’m betting that Jay’s idea is worth pursuing. There’s stuff to be learned here. Eventually this technique needs to be cut loose from introspection and trained on topics that are less “meta.” That, of course, is already taking place informally — most vigorously and impressively, to me, over at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. But I can see the value for NewAssignment to get its feet wet with one immersive overview of the field before it takes a deeper plunge.

I’ve been on the site’s advisory board from early on, and now I’ve volunteered to take on one of the literally hundreds of assignments the project has been broken down into — manageable morsels of reporting that will eventually be assembled into a tapestry of information. There’s lots of work for NewAssignment still in making its site easier to use; that will come in time. In the meantime, Rosen’s looking for more volunteers — pros and amateurs, people who want to do reporting and people who want to help organize the project.

Bloggers, Edwards, and transparency

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Back when blogging was young, one idea its early enthusiasts shared was that blogs would cut through the fog of corporatespeak and give the players in business and politics and other hierarchically organized fields a chance to communicate honestly, openly and directly. Blogs were a means to route around the PR pros and the media intermediaries.

And they do still sometimes achieve that: Look at how Steve Jobs issued his challenge to the music companies to drop their counter-productive stance on “digital rights management.” (It wasn’t a blog posting, but same principle.) As Dave Winer points out, Jobs didn’t hand this as a scoop to a New York Times or Wall Street Journal reporter; he just posted it on his Web site.

All this makes it exceedingly strange to be reading, today in 2007, about the little dustup in the Edwards campaign, where, as you may have heard, two bloggers who’d been hired by the campaign found themselves targeted by the right-wing media for stuff they’d written on their own blogs. Salon reported they’d been fired, but now it seems (see the Salon follow-up) that, after a day of turmoil, the campaign is keeping them on.

What’s strange is that we’re talking about two bloggers here and a campaign that has its own blog; and yet, as far as I can tell, none of their blogs actually tells much of the story of what’s actually happened. There’s a couple of ritual apologies from the two bloggers whose opening paragraphs read like they were written by committee, and an official statement from Edwards that’s similarly impersonal. Were they actually fired? No? What really happened between them and Edwards? Isn’t this precisely the sort of thing a blogger might tell us?

I don’t spend a lot of time in the political blogosphere that Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan hail from. I don’t doubt that they’re basically victims of a witch-hunt. I just find it strange to be reading stories like those in Salon, full of quotes from unnamed “sources close to the campaign” telling us of an apparent inside story about a firing and then rehiring, while the bloggers at the center of the tale — who are, presumably, torchbearers of transparency — don’t give their own readers the scoop on what’s happened.

I suppose some of this is inevitable when the practice of blogging meets the crucible of presidential campaigns. I just wonder what the point of bringing bloggers into the political machinery is unless you let them be bloggers. (This is a variation on the old debate about blogging from inside big companies, which I was pessimistic about several years ago, because I figured it would face similar hurdles.)

No doubt we’re entering a long period of time in which people are going to be forced to ritually abase themselves and disown anything controversial they’ve written on a blog or elsewhere online before they are allowed to participate in the councils of power. And then, down the line — just as we now have presidential candidates who freely admit that, once upon a time, they inhaled — all of this will become somewhat quaint.