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Facebook, AOL, and crumbling walled gardens

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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.
[tags]social networking, facebook, world of ends, walled gardens, aol[/tags]

Dogs, cats and Times blogs

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Professional journalists, even those who do a solid job of covering the Net industry, can’t help occasionally spraying droplets of disdain at the explosion of blogging, self-publishing and uploaded photos and videos that marks the Web’s current phase. Consider this passage from a piece by Brad Stone in today’s Times about MySpace’s new video service:

The company’s plan underscores its particular emphasis on professional video, as opposed to the homemade depictions of wrestling dogs and cats — the genre known as user-generated content — that are more prominent on most video sites.

There you have the dichotomy: video is either professional stuff, or it’s “wrestling dogs and cats.”

If you’ve spent any time on YouTube — or with any other popular “user-generated content” service — you know how narrow and inadequate that description is. Sure, you got your wrestling dogs and cats. But they no more devalue the wide spectrum of material on YouTube than, say, the daily crossword puzzle in the Times reduces the rest of the paper to mere pastime. The reality of “user-generated content” (itself a reductive media-biz term for a phenomenon that is bigger and richer than the media-biz understands) does not justify the dismissive hand-wave this passage signifies.

It’s particularly ironic to read this on the very same day that the Times unveils its new group tech blog, Bits. The newspaper’s senior Valley correspondent, John Markoff, has long made a practice of telling people who ask why he doesn’t start a blog that he already has one — “it’s called the New York Times.” So of course the first thing I did was to find his byline on the blog.

In a post introducing the new feature, Saul Hansell was smart enough to include that anecdote as his lead — inoculating Bits from any mockery on that basis from the peanut gallery (mine or any one else’s). So far it looks like a good effort: the reporters are linking out and writing a little informally and beginning to get into the spirit. (There’s no point in blogging if the prose reads like wire-service copy.) I still think they need to let their hair down a bit more. But it’s a start.
[tags]new york times, john markoff, user generated content[/tags]

How does the Web feel?

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I loved this article about information designer Jonathan Harris — even if it did use for its headline the same phrase that is the title of my book.

Several years ago, Harris created the 10×10 Web site — a snapshot of the moment’s hot news presented in the form of an image collage. He now he works as design director at Daylife. He’s a specialist in creating visualizations of Web-based pools of information — like his current project, We Feel Fine, which scours the Web for statements by bloggers and others that take the form “I feel [X]” and presents them in a novel interface that you can explore and also filter according to multiple criteria.

But these sites are best explored rather than explained. Have a look. Perhaps you will feel, as I did, happy to see such creative reuse of the Web’s expressive bounty.

UPDATE: I meant to highlight this quote from the end of the piece, with its perspective on digital storytelling:

Trying to depict everything is a fool’s game, and ultimately not that interesting — because it’s just as confusing and complicated as life. So then the task becomes limiting your scope, and within a limited scope providing amazing complexity and depth. That’s this process of ‘lens making’: coming up with a lens that you can point at all of reality but that only lets through certain things. That process is digital storytelling. It’s a process of exclusion — not a process of mimicry.

Lessig contra corruption

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Lawrence Lessig recently announced that he is changing the focus of his work from the copyright and intellectual-property realm, in which he has made such a mark over the past decade, to a new area: corruption. Having directly encountered the dysfunctionality of our system of government in his battles with the copyright lobby, the law professor and activist has decided to tackle the problem at the root:

I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

I will certainly look forward to seeing how Lessig — who has both a sharp legal mind and a stirring, impassioned presentation style — takes on “corruption”: what does he take aim at? What can he accomplish?

But corruption per se has been around forever (go read Suetonius!). It’s hard to see what headway any individual effort can make against the tide of human greed.

On the other hand, there is, it seems to me, one very specific aspect of the corruption of our politics that is both massive in its impact and tractable to reform efforts.

The money that drives American politics today isn’t, for the most part, money that ends up in pockets as crude bribes. The sums involved even in less obvious payoffs in the form of revolving-door regulators and the like are similarly not that huge. The vast bulk of the money that U.S. politicians ceaselessly seek is raised for one single purpose: to purchase TV ads.

There is an iron triangle of cash at the heart of our political system. Candidates scramble for dollars from contributors so they can hand them to TV stations. Sickeningly, our political candidates have become a valuable source of revenue for the broadcast and cable networks whose job is to cover their candidacies. The pols beg us for our money, and it goes straight to media corporations’ bottom lines.

Anything we do to break this chain will provide immediate relief to our political system. We could try to regulate the total volume of political TV advertising (difficult for First Amendment reasons). Or we could simply reduce the centrality of television itself so the ads cease to be a useful way for politicians to broadcast messages.

One way or another, the answer to cleaning up politics lies in reducing the cost of a successful candidacy by cutting TV as far out of the equation as possible. Accomplish that, and a lot of other things will take care of themselves.
[tags]lawrence lessig, political corruption, television, campaign ads[/tags]

TV, phone, or computer?

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I was catching up on old Times Business sections over the weekend and this chart, accompanying an article about video for mobile devices, jumped out at me. It shows Forrester research that asked people in different age groups, “Which device do you most feel you could not live without?” The devices in question were computer, TV and cellphone.

Easy enough for me to answer: I watch almost no TV. (I know people have a hard time accepting this, but it’s true.) I have a cellphone but it’s a clunky old thing and I use it only for utilitarian things — parent/child coordination, business details. My computer, on the other hand, is my lifeline: Source of information, social networking tool, information store, creative device, and more.

So I just had another birthday — I’ve moved into that zone of the ’40s that can’t be considered anything but “late” — and I figured that this particular set of gadget-preferences must mark me as an incipient codger. Kids these days live for their cell-phones and think e-mail is something to use when they want to communicate with those over 30, right?

Hah! Turns out I have the techno-preferences of a teen. My profile matches that of an 18-26 “Generation Y” type: they’re the only ones to rank computer first, cellphone second and TV last. My own generational cadre (“younger boomers”) puts TV at the top of its list. The accompanying article is all about how ESPN wants to put video on phone screens. It quotes one exec of a “cellphone video network” saying: “For the younger generation, the mobile phone is their most relevant device.”

But that’s not what the chart shows! Isn’t the news here that, for the consumers of tomorrow, as for me, the computer, far from being a stodgy old thing, is the desert-island device?

PC World: Feel the love

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Many thanks to the kind editors at PC World for naming this humble blog as one of its “100 Blogs We Love.”

PC World recently made headlines when its editor, Harry McCracken, resigned to protest ad-sales meddling in the publication’s editorial side. He was later reinstated and the CEO he tangled with got kicked upstairs. It was one of those perennial showdowns between editorial and business that have always marked the magazine world — and now appear to be beginning to infiltrate the blogosphere as well. (In fact, here’s McCracken’s take on the FM “People Ready” controversy: “Journalists shouldn’t write ad copy.” Of course, there are bloggers who think of themselves as journalists, and many others who don’t.)

The PC World blurb said that my “take on tech, politics, culture, and the intersections thereof is often unexpected, and always worth reading.” I’ll try to keep living up to that description.
[tags]pc world, harry mccracken, blogging[/tags]

Conversations with corporations

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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.

[tags]people ready, federated media, ethics, blogging[/tags]

Are advertorials “blog-ready”?

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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.

[tags]federated media, advertorial, microsoft, people powered, blogging[/tags]

The blog-dimmed tide is loosed!

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The backlash against Web 2.0 in all its manifestations — blogging, Wikipedia, “user-generated content,” citizen journalism and so on — seems to be hitting full tilt.

At the front of this parade, debating anyone he can persuade to share a podium, is Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Keen’s critique has already raised mountains of ire, from people including Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, and Terry Heaton (who calls it “a whining, outrageous and defensive fantasy based on sweeping generalizations, falsehoods, paranoia and a form of condescension so pissy that it blinds the author to anything resembling reality”). I’m still planning to read the book soon and I’ll let you know whether I agree.

Next comes Nick Carr, who’s got a new book heading our way titled The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny. Carr is a contrarian by nature who often takes a cynical view of Web 2.0 phenomena a la Keen, but from what I can tell his book intends a more high-altitude portrait of the transformation of computing from a desktop-centric world to the Web-based universe.

Then there is Michael Gorman, the American Library Association honcho known for his broadsides against “the Blog People.” Gorman turns up this week in a “Web 2.0 Forum” organized by the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has been wrestling with the challenges it faces — intellectual, financial and institutional — in the wake of Wikipedia’s success. Gorman sees the rise of Web 2.0-style interaction ushering in a new dark ages, a “Sleep of Reason” –which, Goya fans know, “begets monsters.”

Keen and Carr are both participating in this forum as well. It couldn’t be that Britannica is stacking its expert deck, now, could it? Perhaps they should invite Kevin Kelly, whose civil but devastating retorts to Keen in this dialogue deserve wider currency. (Clay Shirky is in there, at any rate, handily dismantling Gorman’s self-contradictions.)

In any case, this is an important debate, worth mulling over — however crude some of the original contributions may be — and it’s not going to end any time soon. Early next year, for instance, we’ll get a new book on a similar theme from my Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo (now blogging as Salon’s Machinist). Farhad’s book examines similar questions of authority, trust and credibility in new media as Keen, but he does so less as a culture critic than through the lens of social science and psychology. (I’ve had the pleasure of reading an early manuscript, and though I don’t agree with everything in it, it’s a wonderful read, full of insight and valuable nuggets of research.)

Regardless of how you feel about all these issues, it’s hard to miss one meta-elephant in the room: The members of this phalanx of Web 2.0 cynics have all chosen to deliver their critiques via the very form that their rhetoric detests. Keen promotes his book from his blog. Carr weaves his ideas on his blog. Gorman explains what’s wrong with the “Blog People,” where? On a blog hosted by Britannica.

What’s the thinking here: First join them, then beat them?

However dangerous to the polity the tools of Web 2.0 may be, it seems that they are perfectly well-suited to providing a platform for assaults upon themselves. Which tells me that they may be considerably more resilient, and socially salutary, than their critics allow.
[tags]web 2.0, andrew keen, cult of the amateur, nicholas carr, michael gorman, encyclopedia britannica[/tags]

Should journalists learn to code?

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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.
[tags]journalism, media, programming[/tags]