Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

The scourge of Net video: letting no pol hide from his words

by

Today I caught up with a very peculiar Times Week in Review piece by Ryan Lizza that perhaps was meant as a covert satire of some kind. How else to explain the thesis of “The YouTube Election” — that the rise of populist Web video might harm the Republic, because more voters will get the chance to see their elected representatives in unguarded moments?

I’m not making this up. Lizza, and the consultant pundits he quotes, seems to think that the problem with George Allen’s “macaca” incident wasn’t that a sitting U.S. senator used a racist epithet on the public stump but rather that technology has empowered the public to witness such revealing incidents.

If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it?…

Letting voters see and hear what candidates say will strip them of their last shreds of authenticity! We must fight for their right to keep their off-color remarks under wraps! Note that Lizza is suddenly talking about “any moment of a candidate’s life” being exposed — but all the examples he cites from the campaigns of Allen and Joe Lieberman are of public statements in public forums.

“Politicians can’t experiment with messages,” Mr. Dowd said. “They can’t get voter response. Seventy or 80 years ago, a politician could go give a speech in Des Moines and road-test some ideas and then refine it and then test it again in Milwaukee.”

Horrors — now politicians will have a harder time saying different things to different constituencies! They might have to be (gasp) consistent!

Wait, this is the kicker:

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not known for her spontaneity, agrees. “It is a continuation of a trend in which politicians have to assume they are on live TV all the time,” Mr. Wolfson said. “You can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark and assume it won’t get out.”

All right, it’s time to pack up and emigrate. What good is American democracy if politicians can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark? Isn’t there some sort of Bill of Rights codicil granting them that right? If there isn’t, can’t President Bush add one via a signing statement?
[tags]george allen, youtube, new york times[/tags]

David Brooks: Muslims’ “search for meaning” means we’re doomed

by

New York Times columnist David Brooks often produces fuzzily incoherent and self-contradictory commentary, but his piece this past Sunday (Times Select firewall there, sorry) deserves special note: It takes a bizarre last-paragraph leap from fatuity into boneheaded fatalism, and it suggests that Brooks needs either a tough editor, a long vacation, or both.

Most of the piece represents Brooks’ familiar argument about culture: culture shapes people, and cultures take a long time to change. Apparently this is stop-press news in Brooks’ circle. After an uncharacteristic foray into an idea that conservatives usually consider hogwash relativism — “All cultures have value because they provide coherence” — Brooks finally gets to his point. He cites the work of Lawrence E. Harrison to note that “cultural change can’t be imposed from the outside….cultural change is measured in centuries, not decades… cultures are separated from one another by veils of complexity and difference.”

Might’ve been worth knowing all this before we invaded Iraq. But never mind. This is simply a “duh” moment; the “huh?” comes next:

If Harrison is right, it is no wonder that young Muslim men in Britain might decide to renounce freedom and prosperity for midair martyrdom. They are driven by a deep cultural need for meaning. But it is also foolish to think we can address the root causes of their toxic desires. We’ll just have to fight the symptoms of a disease we can neither cure nor understand.

There are probably too many layers of lunacy here to grasp in one pass. I think Brooks is saying: Muslims are “driven by a deep cultural need for meaning,” and that need for meaning cannot be changed very quickly — we can’t turn them into non-meaning-seekers without centuries of effort! Which would be fine, except apparently their “need for meaning” is also the “root cause” of their “toxic desire” to blow up airplanes. Since we can’t change them, we must — what? “Fight them” as a sympton of a “disease we can neither cure nor understand”? That sounds pretty hopeless.

Brooks here is shooting himself so far into the stratosphere beyond earthly events and social cause-and-effect that I think his brain has shut down from oxygen lack. Absent from his picture is the possibility that the would-be midair-martyr Muslims, however criminal their intent, might actually be motivated by real-world factors that lie somewhat within our control — like the occupation of Iraq, or the festering of the Palestinian problem, or the indefinite detention and occasional torture of prisoners in American custody. No, the problem is so huge and intractable that we don’t need to bother thinking about the messes on the ground that we’ve helped make; all we can do is “fight the symptoms.”

It is worth pointing out that this analysis is not only detached from reality; it represents a sort of despair. It assumes there is nothing Americans can do to stem the tide of would-be terrorists and make our nation safer. That might require hard, slow work (like the painstaking labors of British intelligence in identifying the bomb plot), whereas Brooks, and the Bush supporters he is channeling, are much happier to cast themselves in a titanic global fight between good and evil — even if the good guys are, as Brooks would have it, likely to lose.

At a moment when Republicans are tossing around labels like “Defeatocrats” to denigrate anyone who dares to suggest we not throw more lives down the Iraqi rabbit-hole, this sort of reasoning is the real defeatism. Why does it appeal to Brooks? One hesitates to stride too far into the thickets of his unreason, but perhaps the “we can’t change them, only fight them” rationale is a way of excusing the manifold failures of Bush’s war-on-terror policy: To Brooks, it’s not that Bush picked the wrong strategic framework and tactics, it’s simply that the foe is too strong.
[tags]David Brooks, war on terror, new york times[/tags]

Size of the blogosphere: 50 million or bust

by

Kevin Burton questioned the logic behind Dave Sifry’s latest report on the size of the blogosphere based on Technorati’s feed index, and now there’s a fascinating discussion going on based on his post. Burton questions Sifry’s claim that there are 50 million blogs. But look over at Sifry’s report and you see that he’s careful enough to write, “On July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog.”

So we’re back in 1997 or so when search sites would report on the exploding number of Web sites they had in their indexes and those of us in the industry actually building large sites would think, hmmm, things are growing like gangbusters, but are we really going to count every abandoned Geocities page as a bona fide Web site?

There’s no right or wrong here. What you count depends on why you’re counting it. As Kevin Marks points out to Burton, an “abandoned blog” — one that’s no longer being updated — isn’t necessarily a worthless blog. Sometimes, for instance, people post for a discrete period of time to record an event, then move on. On the other hand, that 50 million number probably includes the test blog I set up one day over on Blogger just to learn how the system works, and, you know, there’s nothing to see there. I assume that despite Technorati’s best efforts some significant portion of that 50 million number also includes spamblogs (“splogs”) and the like. Sifry discusses this at length (he says that over 70% of the pings his service receives are from “known spam sources” — sheesh!).

What I find interesting is the sense I get that people are crestfallen at the notion that, gee, there might be only, say, a couple million really active bloggers, and maybe twice that number of occasional active bloggers. In the history of media and human expression, a couple million people regularly and actively publishing their writing to a globally accessible network is extraordinary, unprecedented and likely to have vast consequences we can’t foresee.

In other words, if Burton is right and the growth in the actual, active, committed blogosphere is linear rather than exponential, it doesn’t really matter. There’s still a revolution going on.

Lanny Davis, bile, and the distinction between “blog” and “comments”

by

As I write this, I don’t know whether Ned Lamont has beaten Joe Lieberman. From where I sit, Lieberman let down his party on the most important issue of our time and behaved as though voters owed him his office. He deserves to lose. I’d like to see him replaced by a Democrat who won’t hedge his bets and who will send a message to the Bush administration that its days are numbered.

But if he does lose — and whether he then petulantly runs as an independent, courts a Bush administration appointment of some kind, or graciously retires — you can bet we’re going to hear all about the bloggers. You know, those nasty ultraliberal disrespectful divisive bloggers who failed to let Lieberman’s support for the president’s miserable war pass, and who churned up anger and fanned Lamont’s primary challenge in its earliest and most fragile stages. We’ll hear about them from entrenched powerbrokers of all stripes, Democratic and Republican — about how they are a dark and dangerous force that can only bring us to woe. The outcry will be far louder than today’s tempest-in-a-server-room about whether Lieberman’s Web site was actually hacked or he just had a lousy hosting plan.

This incumbents’ backlash has in fact already begun. On today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page comes Bill Clinton’s old lawyer, Lanny Davis, complaining about how those bloggers have treated Lieberman, for whom Davis campaigned in recent months. Conservatives aren’t the only hotheads out there, Davis discovered in his forays on Lieberman’s behalf; liberals, he is horrified to learn, can also be nasty. “The far right,” he says, “does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony.”

Davis has apparently been living offline for the last decade. So when he pokes his head out from hiding and scans the Internet’s tubes for political discourse, he discovers that many people on liberal sites are saying intemperate, even hateful things.

It may be regrettable that the leftward side of the spectrum has its own share of creeps, but, given the distribution of human traits across the political spectrum, it seems inevitable. Still, there’s a bigger problem with Davis’s argument: he cites a list of five examples of “the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman” — “emotional outbursts by these usually anonymous bloggers.”

However, every single one of his examples is actually a comment on someone’s blog (in fact, they’re all comments posted either on Huffington Post or Daily Kos). They’re not “things” the “liberal blog sites” have been “posting”; they’re things various random passersby have posted.

The simple distinction between the proprietor of a site — the “blogger” — and the poster of comments is being forgotten or deliberately ignored here to score a political point. It’s a low blow, similar to what happened in 2004 when conservative critics of MoveOn behaved as though the organization was responsible for the content of every single submission to a “make your own ad” contest.

In open online environments, it simply makes no sense to hold the publisher/blogger/site owner responsible for every opinion, attitude and flame that visitors post. If that’s where we’re headed, we might as well just shut down the Net and go home.

In tarring the bloggers with the sins of their commenters, Davis is doing what I worried would happen, way back during the Dean campaign days: political campaigns that embrace openness online might find themselves bludgeoned by opponents who’d turn dumb comments posted by random jerks into lethal soundbites. It’s sad to see that happen anywhere, sadder to see one Democrat doing it to another.
[tags]Joe Lieberman, politics, blogging[/tags]

Business Week followup: Valuing assets

by

Following up on Business Week’s bubble-logic cover story on Digg, Techdirt offers a good roundup, suggesting that the $60 million figure was the last-minute work of “higher-up” editors, and noting that it does not appear in the text of the print edition, only on the Web (suggesting a late edit).

That’s certainly possible. When I was Salon’s technology editor I had to do my share of reality-checking the direction that “higher-up” editors wanted to take when promoting my stories on the cover. If this is what happened at Business Week, though, it’s really no defense; it’s a sign of organizational dysfunction. Either the “not-so-higher-up” editor of the piece didn’t object to the misleading headline, in which case he is complicit, or he did object and was overruled by “higher-ups” who showed they don’t trust their own people. Neither scenario is to the publication’s credit.

Then there’s a half-hearted effort on the part of Business Week blogger Stephen Baker to defend the $60-million-out-of-a-hat headline itself. My mistaken idea, Baker writes, “shared by many, is that money is not ‘made’ until an asset is sold in one marketplace or another. But if you look at the rankings of everything from executive compensation to individual wealth, they’re based on valuations of diverse assets. Many are open to question and just as tenuous as the valuation of this New Jersey bubble-inflated split-level I’m typing in at this very moment.”

By that logic, then, Business Week is abandoning any attempt at mooring valuation to the reality of market exchange. Companies are worth whatever anyone says they’re worth so long as there is some fig-leaf of math involved. I can say that every visitor to my site is worth X, multiply X by my traffic, and — hooray! — I’ve “made” that amount of money. Why? Because I — excuse me, the phrase from the BW article is “people in the know” — said so. This is how the original Web bubble got blown up, and that’s why so many people who lived through it are appalled at Business Week’s gaffe.

Sober-minded businesspeople, analysts and journalists rely on more stringent standards of valuation. Baker and I might each own a “diverse” asset in our homes, but the bank will give us a loan based on that ownership, because there is a reasonable market for homes, even though it may greatly fluctuate. Stock options vary in actual value depending on the ups and downs of a stock price, and executives’ opportunity to exercise them is constrained in various ways, but they bear some relationship to an active equity market, so they’re not entirely vaporous. But an ownership stake in a small private company that’s had great success building Web traffic but little or no record of profitability doesn’t meet the “collateral” test; it’s certainly not something you can count on to buy a house or send kids to college (I don’t think Rose is worrying about that one yet).

Digg is a great site and a great service, and someday it may be worth a big pile of actual dollars, and many of those dollars may end up in Kevin Rose’s pocket. But until then he has simply not “made” millions of dollars. Until then, his share of the company is an asset, certainly, but not one anyone should hang a dollar figure on, and Business Week should never have tried, or taken a wild speculative guess and turned it into a sure-thing headline.

Now the magazine can either publish a correction, which I doubt it will ever do, or live with the diminished credibility it deserves. Ed Cone agrees: “BusinessWeek’s best bet is to say, ‘We goofed. We wrote an interesting article about an interesting subject, but we made a pretty bad mistake in the way we headlined the story.’ ” Let’s see if they really understand anything about “Web 2.0.”

UPDATE: At a different Business Week blog, Rob Hof takes a more nuanced stance: “Now, reasonable minds can disagree on the meaning of ‘made.’ …But unlike my colleague Steve Baker and some others on the magazine, I think the fact that a lot of intelligent people read ‘made’ to mean something different [from] what the magazine intended to convey is prima facie evidence that the cover language didn’t hit the mark… We hear the criticisms, even if not everyone here agrees with them. I also know that, contrary to the beliefs of some critics, the words on the cover are something that folks here take very seriously and debate vociferously.” Hof’s entry is a good example of how someone blogging from within an institution can tactfully criticize it without getting (figuratively) beheaded.
[tags]Digg, Web 2.0, bubble, businessweek[/tags]

Business Week on Digg: Smells like bubble spirit

by

Kevin Rose on Business Week cover

Late last night I clicked on a link to the new Business Week cover story about Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose, and read the cover’s headline: “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.” Gee, I thought, bleary-eyed, I guess I missed the story about how they sold the company. Good for them.

This morning I started reading the piece, and, after scanning quickly through it hunting for the graph about how Digg had sold out and to whom, realized that the $60 million figure was not the proceeds from a sale, and not even a valuation that a prospective buyer had offered, but an almost entirely fictional number.

Was it something that some irresponsible coverline writer had slapped on the piece, that the responsible writer was horrified to see? I don’t think so. The second paragraph of the article, referring to a recent redesign of the Digg site, reads: “At 29, Rose was on his way either to a cool $60 million or to total failure.”

The $60 million number is never explained in the piece; the only real numbers are contained in this sentence: “So far, Digg is breaking even on an estimated $3 million annually in revenues. Nonetheless, people in the know say Digg is easily worth $200 million.” Elsewhere the article says Rose owns 30 to 40 percent of the company. Hence, $60 million.

There is a word for this kind of business journalism, and it is: awful. The reader has no idea who these “people in the know” are; they could easily be people associated with the company who have an interest in inflating its worth.

There’s no question that Digg is a successful site that might be on its way to building a real business. It might be worth more than $200 million someday. I’m not slighting them in any way; I’ve been visiting the site almost since it started. But plastering imaginary dollar figures on its forehead is not the way to help Rose and his colleagues build a real business. “On paper” means just that. “People in the know” can say whatever they want, but your business, like your house, is only worth what someone is actually willing to pay for it.

The Business Week piece itself acknowledges this in places: “This time around, the entrepreneurs worry that, within a moment, the money — and their projects — could vanish… it’s still only paper wealth, which [Rose] and many others have learned can evaporate.”

Right. So why is Business Week insisting that Rose has made $60 million? If this callow 29-year-old understand that it’s “only paper,” why are the editors of one of our best-known business journals being so stupid about it?

Techdirt calls the article “the ultimate Web 2.0 hype piece,” but I think it’s not even that up to date; it’s the same old dotcom-bubble piece dragged from the attic and retrofitted for today’s Web. It is just as mindless about the nature and meaning of company valuations as the dumbest purchaser of TheGlobe.com IPO shares was.

POSTSCRIPT: Jason Fried of 37Signals comes at Business Week from the perspective of a successful entrepreneur who is also a member of the tech industry’s reality-based community.
[tags]digg, web2.0, bubble[/tags]

Rosen on NewAssignment.net: It’s made of editors

by

In his second Q&A about his new venture in collaborative journalism online, Jay Rosen responds cogently to my suggestion here that when readers become sponsors of investigative journalism they sometimes end up unhappy with the outcome:

Guidelines at New Assignment will make it clear what is and is not kosher in accepting donations. But mostly it would be common sense. If you take money from someone who knows what the story is—before the reporting—and who only wants validation… expect problems….

For New Assignment to work, donors can’t have an editorial say greater than anyone else’s. They explicitly sign it away as a condition of giving the money. Those who expect outsized influence will be disappointed after one experience. Would they return for more? Besides, management has a policy: no refunds.

I think Jay has a pretty good grasp of what he’s after here when he talks about “good editors” being the heart of the answer to the problem. And I agree. But note that in this new world being a “good editor” involves some significantly greater political leadership, by which I don’t mean “involvement in parties and elections” but the more generic, abstract kind of politics — the mustering and deployment of power through the creation of consensus among competing interests and diverse people. Jay quotes one of his correspondents, Daniel Conover:

In a system like what Jay proposes, a NewAssignment editor would be in constant communication with the participants. Rather than being neutered by an opaque hierarchy, this editor would be empowered by the broad base of integrity-seeking NewAssignment participants. How are those participants going to react if the editor reports a pressuring phone call from a wealthy donor?

The trick is, for the editor to draw power from that base, the editor has to stay in constant contact with its interests. Assuming that the larger NewAssignment community will often be in various levels of conflict and competition, we’re talking about some very heady relationships, being acted out in the Great Wide Open.

In other words, the editor’s job at NewAssignment is going to be as much about managing online community as about assigning stories, editing copy and mentoring reporters. That’s a demanding, but certainly not impossible, pile of responsibilities. Rosen cites the formidable example of Josh Marshall’s work at Talking Points Memo as a sign that it can indeed be done.

Newassignment.net: new-model journalism

by

Jay Rosen has posted a detailed sketch of a new, non-profit venture in the “citizens’ media” (or “networked media”) realm that he is calling NewAssignment.Net. The idea is to create an institution online where people can contribute dollars to fund reporting projects they’re interested in. These projects will in turn be pursued by paid reporters and editors working creatively with information and contributions flowing back to them from the Net. Foundation seed money gets the thing off the ground; money from the crowd keeps it going. Old-fashioned editorial processes mesh with newfangled feedback loops and reputation systems to produce something new and unique.

Jay is one of the bright lights in this area, and I’m looking forward to what he comes up with — especially since some of the issues and problems he’s exploring are similar to the ones I’m working on at Salon these days.

Rosen’s description makes it clear that he’s seeking to create an institution where many traditional journalistic values persist and shape the work being done in a novel mode. In particular, there’s the idea that the reporters are going to go out and ask questions and consider all the information flooding back to them from the Net and determine the truth as best as they can — even if that truth is not what the people ponying up the cash wanted to hear.

This, to me, is likely to be a major friction point for NewAssignment — which will doubtless be avowedly nonpartisan but which will not be able to insulate itself from the fierce political divisions that shape so much online discourse today.

At Salon, we don’t make any claims to nonpartisanship but do maintain our own tradition of journalistic pride, and a commitment to fairness and giving the “other side” a say, and a belief in telling the story as you find it, not as your political preferences might dictate it. This has regularly placed us at odds with at least some of the readers who are funding our stories with their subscription dollars. (The relationship is not quite the direct quid pro quo that Rosen envisions, where individual site visitors put their chips on specific stories, but emotionally it seems similar.)

So, for instance, in the wake of stolen-election charges in Ohio in 2004 we had Farhad Manjoo — one of the most talented, hardest-working and open-minded reporters I’ve ever worked with — devote a lot of time to exploring the story. He’d done significant reporting on the topic in the past. His conclusion — as our headline put it, “The system is clearly broken. But there is no evidence that Bush won because of voter fraud” — was well-documented and carefully delineated. But it wasn’t what many of our readers wanted to hear.

Ever since, Salon has had a steady trickle of disgruntled subscribers cancel on us, citing these stories as a factor. It’s never been enough to make any difference to our business, and it certainly won’t stop us from doing further reporting on the subject, and presenting our findings accurately. But it’s disheartening. And I think that NewAssignment may face some similar tensions if it ends up reporting on topics that people have strong feelings about, which it must if it is to matter.

The sample story Rosen walks us through to explain his new idea is one about wild variations in drug prices from one place to another. The assumption is that some people who are upset by what they perceive as unfair, rigged drug pricing might be willing to help fund such an investigation. But what happens if the reporters come back and say, gee, it turns out that the drug companies are innocent here, the fluctuations are actually the result of [some other factor]? (I’m not saying I love drug companies. This is just an example.) Will these citizen-journalism sponsors want their cash back?

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis’s post about NewAssignment provides some tidbits of interest about the new media venture he’s been dropping hints about for a while, named Daylife. But I wonder about his comment: “We must explore new business models to support coverage of news and this is one of them.” It strikes me that the not-for-profit, institutionally-supported model Rosen has picked — perfectly reasonably — is good for many things, but maybe not so good for exploring new business models. Yes, there are sustainable nonprofit models, and maybe NewAssignment will turn out to be one of them; but it seems to me that Rosen’s plan is more about delivering a proof-of-concept for important new ideas about networked journalism than it is about building a business. If I’m wrong, I’m sure he’ll let me know!

[tags]Jay Rosen, citizens media, newassignment.net, Salon.com[/tags]

Dabble launches

by

Dabble, the new service for sharing Web videos that Mary Hodder has been developing, just launched. Think Flickr for video, but without the hosting of content and a more sophisticated focus on sharing “finds” than Youtube offers. I’m looking forward to experimenting with it.

[tags]dabble, video[/tags]

Dean

by

This link is for Dean! Congratulations to Steven Johnson on the birth of his third boy.