Digg's Social Networking Blossoms: Tipping Point or Second Phase?

UpdateChief Digger Kevin Rose posts (finally!) about the changes (with video.)

BusinessWeek seems to have got the scoop on Digg's new social networking features--before they were posted on Digg's blog...but aside from that factor, Digg's new stuff looks to make it more MySpaceable, or perhaps turn it into an alterna-Facebook:

Digg's new emphasis on user profile pages is also designed to let users better define their presence on the site by posting multiple photos, personal interests, biographical information, and even links to a member's personal blog, social network profile, or Web page. With the addition of these features, it will also be possible to control whether that content can be viewed by all Digg users or just designated friends.

As before, the profile pages will still feature those stories that an individual user has submitted to Digg as well as the site's overall tally of how many users also "dug" that story. But in addition, readers will be able to view a history of an individual user's comments on stories. The new features are "going to give everyone a bit of an identity on the site," says Rose.

Now, we can all sit around and speculate/prognosticate about what all this means, but perhaps the best commentary (and the most important) comes from the Digg community itself. Follow this thread:

Dumb idea.. I don't want digg to turn into fucking myspace. Keep it the way it is and instead of adding these dumb ass features, add a fucking pictures section....

(response#1)It's all the "new" Diggers who brought the plague of stupid inbox images and wacky jokes to the front page. The next wave of Diggers could render Digg more useless and unrecognizable from its formerly great self.

(response#2)Well, at least we still will have Reddit, and I really mean it.

In all of this, I'm reminded of the communities I was involved with over the years, that either were hacked by trolls (thus causing new security features that hindered discourse) or had new features added that were, to me, kind of confusing (as in when I kept getting invites to parties Washington D.C because someone I didn't know found his way into my "friends" list...)

So, I really empathize with the Diggers who built this community. They helped create the space, and it more than likely feels like they're losing control of their space. In the early days of a community it's like you're picking your friends as much as they are picking you. When things get bigger, and more features to encourage "openness" are added, it can feel like someone else--Big Mother?--is somehow picking your friends *for* you by giving you entire dossiers on them...

what happened to the joy of discovery?

Which leads me to think that some network developers often forget one big thing about community spaces--sure, they put up the architecture, but it's the people who make the community sing. They're the ones who add value to the community, make it popular....

Make it popular *enough* so that advertisers want to put their messages there...

Which may be part of Rose and Adelson's rationale for adding all the community-revealing bells and whistles:

For Digg, more registered users mean more people whose interests the company knows enough about to show them targeted advertising. In July, Digg announced that Microsoft (MSFT) will be the site's exclusive provider of targeted ads for three years (BusinessWeek.com, 7/25/07). The deal came after a year of talks with various ad providers, says Adelson

Mathew Ingram comments that the new features will help Digg "to grow and deepen its relationship with its members and users, this [putting in more features] is one of the ways to do that..." but I'm thinking the relationship it really wants to deepen is with Microsoft.... Also see Eric Berlin (often insightful)offers some sanguine commentary ...

I think, though, that the upbeat views of the new features miss a few points about online communities of affinity like Digg: sometimes there's a strong professional or even personal reason for not having a huge profile (or any *traceable* profile) on a particular social networking site...first, there's the "retaliation from employers" fear--a very real one at that. Then there the new annoying, nagging fear of being pounced on by intrusive "targeted ad" programs (esp. those nasty flashing things, or that stupid dancing guy offers low-cost mortgages to anyone over 40.)

Stephen O'Hear puts hammer to nail (I think) with this:

The result is that the site’s content becomes even more relevant and social to its users, while at the same time providing even more hooks for advertisers.. .The isn’t conspiracy theory stuff, it’s just the way any ad-funded site works which feeds off its users’ social graphs. MySpace is refining its data mining and ad-targeting, Facebook has plans to the do the same. We’re now really starting to see phase two of the social networking phenomenon kick-in. Monetization.

So, yes, these new happy-social features will make Digg stand out among the pack of any of the new social networking sites out there, and might even make it a go-to place for different kinds of news (that all depends on who feels comfortable there--there is no guarantee this will happen) but the bottom line of it all is the whole monetization thing. Facebook's been pushing the widget-thing. Digg decided to push the expanded profile thing. Both are ways of bringing in more money by finding out more information about community members...

Whether or not the new features will succeed (either community-wise or monitarily)remains to be seen, but there's one sure thing that will happen: the new features will indeed change the Digg "neighborhood." New folks will come in and some of the old folks who built the place might feel a bit itchy and move on. The site may indeed grow with new people, and new social connections may form, but it will never be the same, and, in light of this, Digg's value as a "social news" site *may* change.

Another thing that might happen: some of the core members may go off and form their own community. This happened with the core group of socialble movie buffs I met at the New York Times Film Forum in '98--who, after driven crazy by trolls and lots of other features that made the old forum really uncomfortable, went off and founded the Third Eye Film Society.

So...original Diggers...if you don't like the changes, create your own space! It's in your power!

I wonder, though, how the social features are working for Mashable!...and if Cashmore's thinking of getting into the "rate the news" game...

Also see: the comments are great at Duncan Riley's post about Digg-book-space a

Further reading: Dan Kennedy looks at Digg and Reddit in light of the PEJ survey, and reminds us about NewsTrust--where you can rate the news *and* be social. NewsTrust is a different kind of news community--one focused on what many would call "hard news", and has a totally different demographic than Digg. So, if Digg's looking to capture a "hard news" crowd (and I'll say it again) making things more open-social might not pull in that those folks...

MySpace mines its user profiles for targeted "data-driven" ads

and on what could go wrong with widgets Cory Treffiletti points out the eerie similarity between all the widgets-as-marketing tools hoo-ha and "buzz that surrounded desktop applications in the late '90's." How many of our new young-gun social networking widgetmisters remember these days? Sometimes looking back can help prevent disaster ahead.

PEJ issues new study on "user-news" sites

The latest look at the ever-changing world of newsgathering was issued today by Journalism.org/Project for Excellence in Journalism. "The Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts" is an attempt to understand the emerging church of user-rated social news sites--and, like a middle-aged guy trying to hit on a 22-year old, completely misses reality...

First, PEJ starts by asking the questions:

If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people?

Curious hypotheticals indeed. Kind of like "what would the world be like without religion?" or "what if I'd never been born?" Even Dan Gillmor notes that these might be the wrong questions...

Dan also notes

We are not heading to a world with no editors. A portion of the editorial role, at least the part of the editorial role that involves picking stories, is moving to community-driven sites. Digg, Reddit and others in the PEJ survey are crude approximations, however, of what is coming.

Rather, a better characterization might be that these are online socializing experiments revolving around the gathering and sharing of news stories that are relevant to a particular group of people in a particular period in time

All are relative to a time and place because all are linking together a particular demographic around social interaction. Social mores change and blow the bejebus out of social networks. Can anyone say Friendster??

James Robertson said in his criticism of Nick Carr's blistering commentary that Carr "misses the point on social sites like Digg, Reddit..." Yet I would venture that it's not Carr that misses the point, but the PEJ study that misses--and misinterprets--the point of these sites. And for the same reason that Robertson points out: these social news sites aren't meant to point people to the stories of the moment. People can find those already. People who use social news are often looking for something different--and what that is relates to their particular interests (mostly tech-oriented.)

If someone managed to put together a social news site based on the latest in celebrity gossip, you'd find not just a vastly different community than on Digg and Reddit, but you'd also find that the #1 stories of the day are vastly different (hmmm..maybe this is something we can demonstrate w/ Technorati's Topics feature???)

All in all, the PEJ study should be taken with a hefty grain of salt: its focuses on a small snapshot in time (June 24 to June 29, 2007) and on a culturally and socially relative phenomenon and uses the wrong terminology to describe the phenomenon. Sites like Digg, Reddit,etc. are not "user-news" sites. The "users" aren't creating content on those sites, but are pointing to content in other places. The more accurate term is "social news" sites. And because they are "social," their communities revolve around a particular affinity, not on geography or general news--hence their narrow focus. Further, assumptions should not be made about people who use these sites, since the amount and types of news consumed by any individual who frequents these sites in all probability varies from participant to participant.

If you project too much, you can get in trouble

Perahps the better lessons on the phenomenon--ones that are relavent right now--can be found in the changes coming to Netscape's Digg-like social news experiment....at least Netscape can admit when something didn't work quite so well, and shift strategies. I'm not sure if most other corporate owned news outlets could do the same.

update Scott Karp makes a similar point only with graphs!

Technorati's Topics and the Changing Value of Blog Rank in an RSS World

Today, Technorati announced its new Technorati Topics feature. In its own inimitable way, Technorati is indeed responding to what blog readers want--giving them a continuous "river of news" (as Harrison Hoffman describes it--even though some couldn't figure out how to make it stop long enough to click a link...)

And of course there's been lots and lots of feedback on this--but something I'm noticing in all the feedback, is how things have changed out here in the blogosphere regarding how we view authority--and even rank--of blogs...some of this may have to do with RSS readers and trackbacks, as much as it has to do with keeping the non-blogger blog readers happy.

Now I'd been thinking quite a bit about this since Dave Sifry's resignation and all the talk about Technorati's "irrelevance"--because when I came into blogging (almost 3 years ago now--with my personal blog which is no longer viewable) Technorati was pretty much the gold standard for figuring out where *you* were in relation to all the other bloggers out there...we talked about things like "linklove" and "link whoring" and that sort of stuff because it was through linking to one another that many of us even got readers.

These were the days before RSS readers became popular and before Google launched its blogsearch.

Blog readers were mostly other bloggers, and it was other bloggers who helped the news consumers find good stuff by pointing to the good stuff via blogroll permalinks and post links. This was how you, the lowly blogger, built influence and authority--esp. if you could get in an A-lister's blogroll....

So, how did Technorati figure out your rank? And why was the A-list so important? I'll state right out that I don't know all the machinations of the algorithm that does this, but let's go back to both permalinks, posts links and "linklove" for a moment. Permalinks occurred when someone put you in his/her blogroll in their sidebar (now, we have widgets and stuff that do this.) A-listers were always getting bugged for blogroll permalinks because those links could send major traffic to a new blog and build reputation (one of my first big A-lister blogroll links was from Halley Suitt, which did indeed help--see this discussion)

Because many A-listers got so many requests for permalinks, many stopped keeping blogrolls (including Jeff Jarvis--wish I could find his 2005 post on it--was a good explanation.)

Blogroll permalinks never "aged out" of Technorati's calculation of rank--because this particular link was always present whenever blogs were scraped...

Enter the post link--which was a link in someone's blog to one of your posts. This could also bring in reader traffic, but it "aged out" of Technorati's rank calculation after a period of time.

And "linklove"--well, that was a concept that I'm not sure we really care about anymore...now that some blogs are more about advertising and making money from advertising than they are about building friendships, community, and thought-influence...

Ways of measuring and reading blogs have dramatically changed since 2005--with the popularity of Trackbacks, RSS Readers, Tags, and other social news sites like Digg and Reddit and a plethora of other ways to find blogs beyond Technorati...

But the strange thing is, the traffic and links and popularity generated by these new services are very, very hard to pull together. Technorati's ranking system (as long as it was pulling in all your links on a timely basis) was really the best for figuring out your importance...

This raises the question of why was Technorati rank so darned important that we'd bug the bejebus out of someone for a permalink? Well, as I recall, part of this had something to do with discussions at the time about advertising on blogs. Before Google Ad-Stuff became ubiquitous (notice I did not say good) ads got to blogs only if blogs had big traffic. And still, blogs that make anything beyond what might be considered "pin money" have to have really, really big traffic. But back then, the chance of even getting, say, Henry Copeland's BlogAds to look at you, you had to be a high-traffic blog--and those were only the A-list...

Now, though, the idea of the A-list is even a bit strange. Who constitutes the A-list nowadays? Does it even matter when there are so many different ways and devices for people to keep track of one particular blog? Will A-list status one day depend on how many subscriptions one has through Feedburner, Netvibes, Bloglines, MyYahoo, and GoogleReader, linked with how many trackbacks and comments occur on a post on a particular day (yes, even popular blogs don't get comments *every* day, so this is a specious measure.) And what about pageviews? Well, maybe that's irrelevant, if we consider time spent reading a blog vs. clickthroughs (which can easily be gamed--sometimes just by adding "sex" somewhere in your blog)--a change in thinking about metrics that was recently proposed...

Or will the A-list go away totally--and one's "authority" or "popularity" or whatever you want to call it become contingent on the influence one has in a particular community or with a particular group of people? Is it now more about the readers and newshounds--folks we used to call "lurkers"--and not about what goes on *just* among the bloggerati?

The landscape is changing quickly, folks. No dobut about that....and maybe in the end it won't matter about the community of bloggers as much as about meeting the needs of the "customer."

one quick note: as a compulsive stat and rank watcher, I've noticed that Technorati hasn't kept up with gathering up my post links in the past week or so, some of which have come from great places like Dennis Howlett at ZDNet and Richi Jennings at Computerworld's IT Blogwatch (who may, for all I know, have found me via Techmeme.) So, my rank has stayed the same. Does it matter? To me, in some ways yes--because folks still look at that. In others, it's being acknowledged by Dennis and Richi that means, perhaps, a bit more. I am, though, waiting for all those links to catch up...please...

The Perils of Social Networking Part 3: Lifestreams, Reputations, and Potential Destruction

This a.m., I started taking another look at subsequent conversations regarding the gathering-up of all the various bits of our online information (our reputations)by services like Rapleaf.com (as well as UpScoop and Trustfuse.) And this has renewed my unease with services that gather up all those bits and bytes about me that are out there...

Some of it has to do with Steven Hodson's post on "lifestreams" --who's promoting the idea, and a dangerous, dark side to all of it:

At first this idea of lifestreams might seem to be nothing more than ego puffery and a legitimate way to keep track of what you are doing around the web but what happens when some-one other than you creates your lifestream. After all who else could care enough to know what you are doing all over the web.

Steven points out in his post, that there are lots of people who might be interested in this information, not just you and your ego. Nefarious marketers and identity thieves are the most obvious. Paranoid potential employers (for whom a legal background check might not be enough) are another. And then there's the FBI and those kinds of folks who are looking for "terrorists" under every rock...(even though they've probably had their own ways of making our information talk for longer than we're aware.)

and what could happen if something--like a mixup in identity--happens (think Brazil)

Because there are no guarantees with search and the gathering up of personal intelligence--even Google's supposed timeliness of the entries in its index can't be guaranteed...

A couple of weeks ago, I got an invitation to Spock and I started the registration, but something kept me from completing it. I enjoy following my "profile" online, but I'm also starting to worry about the aggregation of me....

The majority of us might not be ready to have so much of our information--so much of our selves--searchable by anyone for any purpose. Yet it's not just that we're not ready, it's also that we don't fully know or understand what's going on. We are bombarded, daily, with all sorts of requests for our information, so many requests to register for this or that site in order to just leave a comment or have our voices heard. We are bombarded with hype(esp. if you're in certain industries) how we must be doing this or that with our online selves.

We are even told that, in this incredibly competitive job-world, that we *must* be online, lest we miss out on potential employment.

Eventually, the transparency many of us believe is an important aspect of our blogging and our reputations online, may suffer...because none of us is perfect, and sometimes that imperfection bleeds out... Can we trust others not to hold that untowardly information against us in some way? I'm not sure...

On Friday, danah boyd wrote an important post on controlling your public appearance:

Carefully crafting and cautiously managing one's public image is a critical aspect of living in a mediated public world. Every advice column I've read warns people of the dangers of living online. I think that this is idiotic. People need to embrace the world we live in and learn to work within its framework. Don't panic about being public - embrace it and handle it with elegance.

She's very right--yet this somehow echoes what adults of past offline generations had to do, if they were going to climb both the corporate and social ladders that were/are part and parcel to achiveing what is considered the American Success Dream. I remember some advice from the last century about never going to a psychiatrist, lest your employer or others find out and thus believe you to be "mentally unstable." While in many realms this is no longer such a big deal (good mental health being almost like good oral hygene) we are now confronted with the necessity of monitoring our online lives and creating an identity/self/personna that is socially acceptable.

That is, if we want to be accepted socially....

So I am brought back to the idea of online civility--and perhaps all these reputation management things are a way of forcing online civility. From my own experiments with my online identity, I've found that to express one's mind in criticism of others can end up branding one as "unable to play nicely with others" (as well as other untowardly euphemisms) as much as it can bring one attention....

And I've found a curious irony--how some folks with very high reputations, and very carefully crafted online personnas, may use anonymity to level criticisms (whether on blogs or in comments on blogs or other places online.)

Because the pressure to be nice is, perhaps, quite a bit stronger out here than we are be lead to believe by all the hew and cry an hype, hype, hype...and for someone who's personna is one of nice might not want a verbal nasty to get out from under that joucular veneer...

All is often not what it appears to be.

So, I am left with the decision about what to do about my online reputation. My Google results are very good--and I'm happy with that. Yet I'm not sure I want one-stop-shopping by some entity other than Google. I don't know if I want a "lifestream" of me out there--even if that "lifestream" might keep me from getting invited into some secret society of kewl kidz.

Maybe in some ways it's not worth it.

We are not all Paris Hilton or Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs. Clara Bow was never totally forgiven....and Chaplin ended up leaving the country...

Maybe we all need to think about very, very carefully and very, very seriously about online reputation aggregators....maybe we need to be more pro-active and dam up the lifestreams out there before they become raging torrents that threaten social destruction....maybe the "opt out" choice is the most important one we can do for our Selves...

maybe so...

Update There's lots and lots of discussion going on re all of this, but I'm reminded of something I found out about (and wrote about) in December: marketing intelligence company Umbria's Umbria Connect program that sifts through blogs for customers, gathers up urls, and sells them in lots of 25. I was bothered by this--esp. about the selling of my url. But there were others who said that the urls are "public information" that anyone can get anyway. So what if a company was gathering them and selling them? Perhaps what we're seeing with Rapleaf and others is a step above--the next step--of information gathering-up that may have been spurred on by ideas like Umbria Connect. I don't really know for sure. Just something to think about.

Rapleaf Mea Culpas, Explains Its Existence

Every morning, like a good (curious, ego-maniacal) blogger, I check my stats. I want to know who's reading, for what length of time, and who's linking. Sometimes stats are the best way to find out who's linked to you on a particular day--and today, I found a link back to the Rapleaf corporate blog....

I thought, oh, geeze...another entity that's peeved that I said something un-cool about them... but that wasn't the case at all.

Rapleaf's entry Startups, privacy, and being wrong is a mea culpa for some of their aggressive marketing mistakes as well as an explanation of what they're up to (which really isn't all that "nefarious"...) Here's part of the explanation:

Rapleaf searches the Internet on people much like some of the more well-publicized services such as ZoomInfo, Wink, and Spock. Rapleaf is a giant system that evaluates billions of pieces of information on over 50 million people, growing by a few hundred thousand people a day. This is a lot of information.

People are sometimes taken aback because of the breadth and depth of Rapleaf’s search. Unlike some of the other services that search on name, our search is based on email address. We are essentially the largest, deepest, and fastest email search engine.

But we do more…

We gather this information to allow users to control it...

Auren Hoffman, Rapleaf's CEO, goes on to explain more about what they do and how they do it--which makes the post a very good read about their business. He goes on to explain where they found all the information about us (quite frankly, that's what's scary) and explains where and how they went wrong. From the "you've been searched" emails to the multiple privacy policies on their various products, Auren ownes up to them.

Honestly, I'm really proud of him for doing just this. It took a lot of guts to eat this particular bowl of crow-laden sheep intestines, but, hey, the guy believes in his product, knows he's not doing anything shifty, and is willing to put all the particular out there to explain it to us.

And it's ok. Rapleaf, you're forgiven :-)

Also see: A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, authored by Jospeh Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Mike Arrington--and supported by a number of great people, including Auren (I support this measure, too...) Jospeh Smarr's post about this is quite wonderful.

DoJ deals blow to Net Neutrality: Pay up or Shut Up

Make no mistake--the U.S. Dept of Justice is acting like the muscle for the Telco Dons....check out what the DoJ believes is fair in these comments on the issue of Net Neutrality

The Department of Justice cautioned against imposing regulations that could hamper the development of the Internet and related services in response to a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Notice of Inquiry regarding broadband practices. In its filing the Department said that some regulatory proposals offered by various companies and organizations in the name of “net neutrality” could deter broadband Internet providers from upgrading and expanding their networks to reach more Americans.

The term “net neutrality” encompasses a variety of proposals that seek to regulate how broadband Internet providers transmit and deliver Internet traffic over their networks. The Department stated that precluding broadband providers from charging content and application providers directly for faster or more reliable service “could shift the entire burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto consumers.” If the average consumer is unwilling or unable to pay more for broadband Internet access, the result could be to reduce or delay critical network expansion and improvement.

The Department said in its filing that it may make economic sense for content providers who want a higher quality of service to pay for the Internet upgrades necessary to provide such service, arguing that “any regulation that prohibits this type of pricing may leave broadband providers unable to raise the capital necessary to fund these investments

Check out this from Russell Shaw at ZDNet and the AP distillation of the DoJ opinon in WaPo...

Excuse me...um, but, what about all that money we're paying *right now* for broadband access? And what about all those regions where the telcos won't go and wire-up? The bit above about "unwilling or unable to pay" is an absolute joke when companies like Verizon have not just refused to wire places, but are actively seeking to sell lines in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine...

Another joke is the line about content providers. All content providers want people to find them--large or small. Right now, content providers can get with SEO and get their stuff up in search and easy to find. If it downloads too slow maybe it's got something to do with the way the site is built (like, maybe it's garbage-laden crap??) and that the idea of some getting better access because they pay for speedier connecting isn't going to make a site any better.

And get this:

The Department also noted that differentiating service levels and pricing is a common and often efficient way of allocating scarce resources and satisfying consumer demand. The U.S. Postal Service, for example, allows consumers to send packages with a variety of different delivery guarantees and speeds, from bulk mail to overnight delivery. These differentiated services respond to market demand and expand consumer choice.

This speaks to a complete inability to understand how content is delivered over the Internet. It's not like some little magic gremlins are zipping content around out here. We may call the Internet the "Information Super Highway" but it ain't like driving on the Turnpike! (where you *do* have to watch for those high-speeding postal trucks...)

And what about the impact of having to pay for access on citizen-powered sites? Bob Niles at OJR starts the conversation on that issue:

The industry's plan, however, would charge individual publishers different rates for bandwidth based on negotiated deals. AT&T, for example, could cut a deal with Fox News, serving its content to subscribers at a faster rate than that of the New York Times. And people-powered sites from DailyKos to Free Republic would be left with the digital scraps, their readers waiting while AT&T gives higher priority to requests for webpages from its corporate partners.

We have to stop squabbling about "gatekeepers" amongst our own ranks and look at who *really* could become the official, pay-for-play gatekeepers in this mess.

Guess that's one way to shut up those pesky bloggers and citizen journalists....

Let's face it, folks--the telcos want to have control not just over who's allowed to have service (which they already do with their feigned inability to wire rural areas) but what those who do have service are allowed to access. In an odd way, it can also be seen as some bizarre form of parentalism--as if they're saying to various sites "When you grow up enough (make enough money to pay us), you can have access to all those people out there. Otherwise, we can't allow them to see you..."

Yet the DoJ ironically concludes:

"While cautioning against premature regulation of the Internet, the Department noted its authority to enforce the antitrust laws. “Anticompetitive conduct about which the proponents of regulation are concerned will remain subject to the antitrust laws and enforcement actions by government as well as private plaintiffs, and the Department will continue to monitor developments, taking enforcement action where appropriate to ensure a competitive broadband Internet access market,” the Department stated."

So, we should allow the Telcos to do what they want, and wait till anti-trust suits are filed against them?

huh?

Therefore, we should let the telcos do what they want, *then* bring it to court and *then* figure out through long, costly legal battles if they are engaging in anti-competitive conduct.

Doesn't this seem kind of counter-intuitive? And won't this put the U.S. further back with broadband access than it already is, not move us forward? And why does the control of where and what gets wired in this country have to be in the hands of the telcos anyway??

Perhaps because we're spending too much money fighting some other country's civil war? (oops! got a bit political there....)

Meanwhile Terry Heaton looks over Accenture’s new Global Content Study 2007 (which interviewed over 100 "leaders and decision-makers in the media and entertainment sectors" and finds this telling tidbit:

Asked what they believed was a top threat to the business, over half of the executives (57%) identified “consumer-based competition” or “user-generated” content

yow! Really does make you wonder if there's some sort of collusion between the telcos and the media and entertainment big-wigs. Now, if we could only get proof before we have to file those anti-trust suits...

The Perils of Social Networking, Pt. 2: Facebook opens up, Quechup stains, fighting Rapleaf's enfolding

It's not just what's going on with Quechup and Rapleaf and old news stories from the NYTimes archives following us around that we have to worry about: tonight Facebook will open up to public search...thus making many of us a bit more antsy about our privacy...

Danny Sullivan though reminds us that the idea of this really isn't new--that when most of us signed up, we were given the option whether or not we wanted to be searched. Sullivan notes, however, that the default used to be that profiles NOT enter searched--and "Today's announcement is probably an heads-up that the default is being changed to on for all Facebook users without actually explicitly saying that." with the default now being that your profile will be in search unless you opt out of search.

I double checked my Facebook profile this morning when the message about the change came up, and opted out of search. It's one thing for employers or others whom I might do business with to find my LinkedIn profile. This morning, I created a custom url for that. But Facebook is my private space. I don't want search there--and not just because I don't want business contacts there. I don't want curious marketers who'd like to spam me, or other (what I would consider)nefarious types finding out about me.

Ross Mayfield also wrote yesterday about some of the perils of social networking...specifically the invasion of privacy aspect on some of these networks that are now offering financial incentives:

If Bob signs up for it, he is opting into the graph, but he doesn't opt in to spamming Sally. Sally is included in the graph, whether she opts in to register or not. Over time, even if Sally resists, she is modeled as a node in the graph.

At first, this doesn't seem to matter. But if Bob adds relationship details like they are dating, and then her husband John opts into the graph and adds the detail they are married, you get the idea. But it is far worse, when the value of the network isn't the relationships, but simply the contact information. This is the case with enterprise social networking, particularly for sales. Many don't realize that Jigsaw actually pays people for submitting business cards of people they have met. Yes, there are financial incentives for people to register you into graphs without your knowledge.

Yesterday, I knew there was something bothering me about all those invites I keep getting for various social networks, and now I know--that in this brave new world where tons of people are looking to mine our information and monetize whatever they can get their hands on, we stand to become nothing more than "contact information" rather than good business connections or friends.

Ross, however, raises the notion of trademarking himself/his identity. Which got me to thinking: if we are to consider our online images as our "personal brand," then perhaps we will have to institute some sort of trademarking in order to protect that "brand" from people who want to exploit it for their own gain.

What a weird, weird world we're creating...

More about online privacy (or lack thereof): Om Malik alsodoesn't like where this is going ...Mike Masnick discusses the Trades Union Congress in the UK recommend that corporations not block employees from using Facebook during work hours--but I'm not sure that encouraging them to use social networking sites in light of the "new" policy at Facebook is such a great thing either...and Mark Glaser writes about some other ways people can find out about you without Facebook (quite disturbing.)

also see: Doc Searls says

FaceBook is unilaterally deciding to expose its members to who-knows-what, in addition to friends looking for friends. Giving members opt-out is lame, retro and and a breach of faith.

What we call “online social networks” mostly are not. They are private walled gardens that exist for reasons that are far more commercial than social. We need to remember that.

Yes, we certainly do need to remember that about this space. No one's going to give us private space out here--well, at least maybe not for free. And then that changes the whole idea of social networking anyway.

Thinking of using Twitter in your business? Don't even know what the heck Twiter is? Jeremiah Owyang's written possibly the best article on Twitter and its potential use in social media strategies: Web Strategy: What the Web Strategist should know about Twitter

Who uses Twitter?

Without access to demographic information, Twitter is for the highly engaged, early-adopter, pro-technology user. This is the ‘influence’ community, meaning they will shape the direction of others in each of their respective lives. It’s highly likely that these users participate in other forms of online publishing and communication like blogging, Facebook, or use mobile activity. In short, it’s the ‘coolkids’ of the webspace, and yes, that includes John Edwards.

....

So, now I know why all my cool kid friends were telling me to get on Twitter. Man, I hate when they're right ;-)

The Perils of Social Networking Part 1: Where in the World am I?

Like a latter day Carmen Sandiego in the social media landscape, I often wonder "where in the world am I today?" This hit me last night as I was filling out my new profile on Mashable which I think I got, quite accidentally one day, by leaving a comment on one of Pete Cashmore's posts...

which I discovered last night around 1 a.m. (ok, early morning then) while googl'ing myself, and then felt some odd compulsion to keep filling out the forms...although I didn't customize my profile all that much. Just didn't have the intestinal fortitude to tinker with the MySpace-like interface...

Yet, just the other day, I was going through my card catalogue and looking up various social networking sites that had sent me pitches over the past year and I signed up for. This nostalgia came upon me after getting two requests to join from Quechup (and then this a.m. a notification that "someone" had been searching for me at Rapleaf--(will someone *please* tell me who that "someone" was??)

In my 4x6 index card catalogue, where I keep all my registration information in basic alphabetical categories, I discovered logins for stuff like:

Bloggoggle

and

the Speaker's Wiki (not nec. a social networking site--but I did update my profile a couple of months ago)

a number of logins to wikis or other kinds of sites for conferences

a whole host of newspaper website logins

Bloglines, Digg, reddit del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, and my never-updated MyBlogLog and Flickr accounts....

and the list goes on...and on...and on....

on any particular day I could be more places online than I'd have time to visit if my entire day was dedicated to f2f social interaction.

So, the question comes down to what do I really need out here? What can't I live without and why can't I live without it?....

Currently, I make time for LinkedIn and Facebook--for lots of different reasons. I'm learning to like LinkedIn for that professional stuff. Some folks have found me on LinkedIn who haven't found me on Facebook (perhaps it's because they don't see a need for a Facebook profile?) And even though there are overlaps in my network, I wonder if the folks I know on Facebook are linked mostly because they like me, while the LinkedIn folks like me but also might see an advantage to having me as a professional connection (and not just someone who occasionally makes them laugh or pisses them off--dual nature, you know.)

When things are professional, you don't necessarily care about the last book someone read or the music they're listening to right now. Maybe for some folks that's a consideration for hiring (really funny that Dave Weinberger and I have similar movie tastes, that is, according to the Facebook Flixster app...) but for many it's not as important as what someone's marketing or writing creds might be...

Yes, I know...I can hear y'all saying that it might be a happier place if we were hired mostly on our hobbies and social habits rather than where we worked and how we got along there--but maybe we're asking far too much from our jobs and have far too little time for in our personal lives.

And maybe that's what's all behind all this mad dash for the best new social networking tool--some strange need to combine our work lives and our personal lives into one seamless ball of constant phone calls and emails and questions about this or that thing that needs to get done yesterday...

When maybe what we need is to learn appropriate boundaries between the work and the social that consist of more than just a week or two out of the year when we (try to) walk away from it all.

Honestly, I love to socialize online--but it's important for me to keep track of where I am and I must have a reason (a why) for being there. I can't be in every single social network because "someone" was checking my online reputation, or there's some remote possibility that someone will find me there and hire me for something...

In a sense, that reminds me of when I was young and figured if I hung out at the right New York nightclubs, somebody would "discover" me. Well, that obviously didn't work :-)

So, it comes down to personal time and personal resources. I have limited amounts of both--which might become even more limited if I were working full-time at something unrelated to life online. So, it's important for me to carefully pick where my profile lands, and to perhaps Just Say No to some of these social networking sites.

Further, there might even be a very good reason for Just Say No--that I don't want too much of me scattered and then abandoned across the vast landscape of the Internet. Mostly because I don't really know what might happen to Me if the site goes under. Sure, I've read the Terms of Service on each site--but do you think I have the capacity to remember them all? Yikes! I'm good with names and faces but Terms of Service are a bit of a stretch....

So, it may come down to going in and deleting a number of superfluous social networking accounts, and not signing up for other social networking accounts if they appear to be superfluous. I'm not the Paris Hilton of the Internet and a totally full social networking dance card might actually keep me from doing the kinds of stuff that may create meaningful cash flow (which, right now, is rather low.)

With social networking sites, there can certainly be too much of a good thing...and we will have to eventually decide for ourselves which of these things is the good one for us in our current social and career situations. If we let others tell us, we could end up not even knowing where--or who--we are on any given day.

just my $.02....
Update Chris Heuer notes and apologizes for any Quechup-related spam that may have got sent out under his name. Makes a very important point about ruining trust. Also see this on Quechup spam from Dwight Silverman.

Fantastic Friday Links! 8/31/07

Labor Day weekend--the traditional End of Summer--is upon us. And for your consideration: hyperlocal in Australia, more on private space as public space, the possible end of MuniWiFi and more on the ethical connundrums at the NYTimes and CBS's odious Kid Nation and an independent filmmaker has probably lost the copyright on his work to Viacom:

from Australia:
Hyperlocal highlights some of the hyperlocal/placeblog/citizen journalism sites in Melborne (from the Fitzroyalty blog.) Blogger Brian Wilson says: We may usually think that virtual social networks exist to bring together people from opposite ends of the country or other sides of the world, but they are as effective in connecting people who may live only a street away but who may never otherwise meet. how true!

Very Bad News for muni wifi:
S.F. citywide Wi-Fi plan fizzles as provider backs off a serious blow to the MuniWiFi movement as Earthlink reveals its plans to slash 900 jobs and close offices in SF, Orlando, Knoxville (TN) and Harrisburg (PA). Also see GigaOm for important follow-up on this.

Dr. Magic -- or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Starbucks From Mike Ho, post from '06 that kind of predicts we'd be having that conversation about the relavence/importance of private spaces to troubled neighborhoods. From the comments on this post

Fixing Old News: Business Opp as well as Obligation? Amy Gahran follows the comments trail on the issue of how to "fix" old news stories that keep popping up on Google search--a particularly sticky problem for the NYTimes (pardon the pun).

'Kid Nation' Plays in the Adult Nation from Mediapost's Wayne Friedman a great post on some of the (many) problems with CBS'Kid Nation If you haven't seen the commercials, Kid Nation is something like a cross between Survivor and Lord of the Flies. I'm sorry, but this was an ethically specious concept from the very beginning, and all the crap I'm hearing from CBS about it (oh, it's just like summer camp!) has nauseated me. Luckily, I'm not the only one who's nauseated. Freidman raises the questions of whether or not the children are actors or game show contestants:"It all goes to the issue about whether those on reality shows are really "cast members." Right now, reality show producers already openly use the word "casting" when talking about their programs. So why not take the next step - and pay "cast members"? Freidman also looks at advertiser's reactions to this--who aren't reconsidering their upfront for the show, even with question of whether or not the show will be pulled before it airs.

There's just something wrong when we sign up kids for a "summer camp" experiment, promise the winner $20,000, and then film it for the spectacle of broadcast TV. How this thing got this far only shows how low television is now willing to go. If it airs, I'll be waiting for the "post-traumatic stress disorder" lawsuits in 15 years.

And then there's independent filmmaker Chris Knight..Viacom hits me with copyright infringement for posting on YouTube a video that Viacom made by infringing on my own copyright! Yep, this is what can happen with all those hinky Terms of Service agreements that are floating around for "user generated content." I hope Chris can sue the pants off Viacom, VH1's WebJunk 2.0 and we all learn to stop freely giving big coporations our Independent-Produced Content. Follow the comments on Chris' blog for an excellet discussion of this problem and the fact that Chris *may not* have any legal recourse due to the Terms of Service.



Have a great Labor Day...if you can. . .

Google Blogger under attack--beware of malicious links.

According to a BBC report since Aug. 27, a gang has been hijacking Blogger blogs and boobytrapping them with links that either mine computers for "saleable data" or use them to attack other computers.

Security researcher Alex Eckelberry from Sunbelt Software first noticed the booby-trapped links turning up on Blogger on 27 August.

Now many hundreds of blogs on the site have been updated with a short entry containing the link.

Mr Eckelberry said it was not yet clear how the links were posted to blogs. The bogus entries could have exploited a Blogger feature that lets users e-mail entries to their journal.

The blogs themselves could also be fake and set up solely to act as hosts for spam.

The latter part of this could mean trouble for folks who use particular templates that sploggers also like to use. Google blogger doesn't have the greatest reputation for the "personal touch" and to deal with a problem of this magnitude, may simply narrow down the template search and zap whomever. We'll see...

The Beeb report goes on to comment that the text of the entries echoes some spam emails that the same gang started sending out in January--the virus became known as the "storm worm":


(courtesy of the BBC site...)

A quick note on spammy email--as in how to tell if you've got spammy email, even if the url after the "@" looks legit. Since I don't use Outlook, I don't have that hinky view window that gives me the preview. This Outlook feature has actually triggered viruses/worms before, hence my reluctance with Outlook. Usually, anything that comes in my email with what looks like a European url is, for me, spam and is directly deleted. This past weekend, however, I got something from what looked like a non-european website with one of the subject lines listed in the box above--I believe it was the "I can't believe you did this" subject line. Since the addy looked legit (and I've received some email nasties in the past with subject lines of that sort) the thought crossed my mind to open it--that is until I checked the url associated with the email addy. I'll do this just to check out the sender. The url lead to the blog of a gamer guy--a legit blog with legit entries. Because there's nothing on my blog that would necessarily piss off a gamer, I decided something had got to his computer and I deleted his email. I'll admit this is not the best way of dealing with these things (and you're probably thinking I'm not the brightets bulb in the ceiling on this particular issue), but sometimes unknown email has lead to interesting speaking opportunities, so I don't like to delete everything (esp. when not everything makes it to the bulk email.)

With security experts expecting the virus to have infected over a million Windows PCs, I'm going to be paying careful attention to what's coming into my "In" box.

The Beeb report also mentions that the infected blogs were ones that were either set up to accept email postings or were intentional splogs. I wonder, too, if the infected blogs are ones that have been abandoned. From my cruising of Blogger blogs, I've found some interesting anomalies: (1)sometimes if a blog is deleted, the title will be ursuped by a splogger and (2)abandoned blogs that are not taken out of search are ripe for sploggers and possibly also for this kind of attack. So, if blogging's gotten to be too much for ya, deleting the blog and the account might be the best for everyone. It's pretty easy and can save all of us some serious headaches.

Besides, you can easily open up another blog when you get the "bug" again...

A quick shout-out to....

the Thursday Meetings at Berkman blogger group--for making me feel really welcome and for all the great questions they asked about "crowdsourced" journalism! It was great fun and I hope to get out there again soon (this time to hear what some of y'all are up to).

SXSW Panel Picker helps set 2008 agenda

It's panel picking time at SXSW Interactive 2008!! and my friend Bill Anderson's got a panel up there that sounds pretty interesting for anyone interested in the ways social media. Go check out Web Presence Management: Business Need or Passing Fad and cast a vote.

If you think about it, with all the hoopla re using Facebook for business networking, how blurry is the line getting between the professional and the personal? and is this making doing business (or even getting a job) more difficult? I don't know--but I kind of like keeping a certain healthy space between my business life and my personal life...like dating, some things come out in time...

There are a number of other really cool and interesting panels to vote for, too. So, take a minute, read thru, and pick a few.

Bookstores Not Obsolete, Just Repurposed for Social Media

Repurposing the local bookstore...Scott Karp bemoans the local bookstore's slow descent into obsolescence but it seems more to me that Scott simply doesn't see that most people don't use the bookstore to buy stuff like Dave Weinberger's new book. Rather, bookstores--from small locals to big chains--are doing things to make their space social. Look around at the folks sitting in the cafe. Cafes are great places to meet friends or have first dates (they're quite safe.) Many bookstores also have book signings, discussions with the authors, host book groups, knitting circles, poetry readings--lots of social stuff.

Get it--SOCIAL. As in real social, f2f, not virtual through IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc....

But nobody in Scott's comments seemed to mention these factors (except maybe me)...considering the commenters were mostly men who spend a lot of time in front of their computers (sorry to the guys there who I actually like), and are married, I'm not surprised to see them neglect the simple social things that are going around them in the local bookstores...

Takes a woman to know this stuff. Many of us value both the Social and the Media--and in ways that many Web 2.0 dudes just might not understand. :-)

another note on why chain bookstores with cafes are great first date spots Okay...so you met a guy online and he seems all right. Nothing that makes you think he's an axe murderer or something like that. But, a girl can never be too sure (esp. as she gets older.) Because they're so huge, and usually full of people, chain bookstores with cafes are great "let's met for coffee" venues--and, if you're really paranoid, you can have a friend circling the store while you're meeting your date. The date never has to know at all...and you don't have to compare notes with your friend until *after* you've both left. Heck, the friend can even be a trusted guy friend (if you're *really* paranoid.) Then again, if you feel you need the guy friend, chances are you shouldn't be meeting the dude in the first place.

U-Students No-Question Google Rank--Bad News for Old News

PC World today reports on a study conducted at Cornell University that found that a group 0f 22 student with various majors didn't question where and how Google ranked a story in its search.

When participants selected a link from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position, even if that content was less relevant to the search query," states the report.

Okay--so it's only 22 students at Cornell...but what about when the SEO meant to get articles first in search, and first in front of the eyeballs of students, is leading them to old, outdated information? Well, for The New York Times, this is proving to be a problem: as in the case of Allen Kraus, a former deputy commissioner in the New York City Human Resources Administration. Kraus found that an old NYTimes article about his resignation from the department--an article that did not give his side of the story from 16 years ago--was coming up first in search for his name.

Nick Carr looks at the Times SEO dilemma, noting that Clark Hoyt (who wrote the Times article) makes this interesting argument for bad info "ageing out" of search:

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, ... thinks newspapers, including The Times, should program their archives to “forget” some information, just as humans do. Through the ages, humans have generally remembered the important stuff and forgotten the trivial, he said. The computer age has turned that upside down. Now, everything lasts forever, whether it is insignificant or important, ancient or recent, complete or overtaken by events. Following Mayer-Schönberger’s logic, The Times could program some items, like news briefs, which generate a surprising number of the complaints, to expire, at least for wide public access, in a relatively short time. Articles of larger significance could be assigned longer lives, or last forever.

Meanwhile, JD Lasica suggests

I have a better suggestion than trying to manipulate search engine results to "sunset" negative pieces of information (which will never happen). Start a blog. Post photos on Flickr. Join a social network. There are only 476 results in Google for everyone in the world named Allen Kraus. Within a few months, your blog home page will be the top result in Google, some of your blog posts will also be at the top, perhaps your photos will be up there as well, eventually knocking that 16-year-old story down to the second or third page. Google loves blogs that are frequently updated and part of a larger conversation.

I like JD's thinking--which could lead to just about everyone hiring a p.r. person to go in and commence with the Googl'ing to fix stuff up.

But it beats going in and deleting the paper of record--which really IS what happened in the days of Mao, Lenin, and Stalin....(as the Times notes with the quote ""like airbrushing Trotsky out of the Kremlin picture." yes, it happened, folks...)

But what might be fair and ethical would be to list updates at the tops of articles with links to the updated information--thus letting know readers that an article supersedes the one they're reading at the moment, and to go to that article first. You really can't miss it when UPDATE is posted at the top of an article and there's a big ole horkin' link you can actually click to see another story.

Oh, but this might *require* hiring people to do this work. It might take way too many man-and-woman hours to complete. There's a better solution out there beyond going in and fixing things with social media--but at this moment in a world where money is tight, it might be the only thing to do....

Hmmm...maybe *this* is what Google's thinking with its new "comments" feature--and then this would make Google, with the better and corrected information, the real "paper of record."

Very creepy indeed....

ABC Network's new iCaught: a lot like Jackass (without the Knoxville charm)

Normally, I don't watch the ABC Network. Around these parts, they come thru on a Sinclair-owned affiliate and are pretty much famous for their right-wing rhetoric. But it was hard to click away when i saw the bold logo of iCaught, ABC's latest entry in the news-magazine genre (as it's very loosely defined...)

The Hollywood Reporter describes iCaught this way: It's mostly innocuous and fluffy. And it would be perfectly harmless as well except that it adds to the popular notion that news is just another way of delivering entertainment.

If you call the old guy-getting-cannonball-in-the-groin entertainment. Yeah, it's amusing, but without the guy wearing leopard-print speedos, the entertainment value is dubious....;-)

Hosted by the cutely helmet-headded, sometime Good Morning America anchor (another term used loosely) Bill Weir (hmmm...could we convince him to take the cannonball in the groin??) , iCaught was described by ABC exec David Sloan (in Varitey)as taking on "a wide breadth of potential stories, including breaking news; celebrity journalism; investigations; and stories of politics, crime, Internet hoaxes or just the moments of everyday life."

Um, do we really need a major network to reprocess and give us the stuff we can find on YouTube? And doesn't that make a show that's basically cannibalizing YouTube clips and then giving 15 minutes of fame to the clip via backstory kinda like "news" the way that yesterday's papers can be used as fishwrap and bircage liners?

Given that one of my biggest pet peeves is big networks (or even small networks) that take all rights to user-generated content, I checked the Walt Disney Internet Group's Terms of Use for iCaught and found the following:

If there exists any doubt or ambiguity about whether any User-Generated Content constitutes a Submission, such User-Generated Content shall be conclusively deemed to be a Submission. No Submission shall be subject to any obligation of confidentiality on our part and we shall not be liable for any use or disclosure of any Submission. Without limiting the foregoing, you hereby grant us (and our licensees, distributors, agents, representatives and other authorized users), without the requirement of any permission from or payment to you or to any other person or entity, a perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, fully-paid, royalty-free, sub-licensable and transferable worldwide license to use, re-use, reproduce, transmit, print, publish, display, exhibit, distribute, re-distribute, copy, host, store, cache, archive, index, categorize, comment on, broadcast, stream, edit, alter, modify (including, without limitation, removing lyrics and music from any Submission or substituting the lyrics and music in any Submission with music and lyrics selected by us), adapt, translate, create derivative works based upon and publicly perform such Submissions, in whole or in part, in all media formats and channels now known or hereafter devised (including, without limitation, on WDIG Sites, on third party web sites, on our broadcast and cable networks and stations, and on our broadband and wireless platforms, products and services) for any and all purposes including, without limitation, news, advertising, promotional, marketing, publicity, trade or commercial purposes, all without further notice to you and with or without attribution (the "Submissions License").

so, essentially, you give big media the rights to make money from your stuff....


They are also quite particular as rights pertain to music:

To the extent that any Submissions submitted by you contain original songs or recordings, you hereby represent that you are a member of ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or any other applicable performing rights society and that all musical compositions (including lyrics) contained in such Submissions are available for licensing to us (and our licensees, distributors, agents, representatives and other authorized users) directly from such societies. Notwithstanding the foregoing, regardless of whether you are a member of any performing rights society, you hereby grant us (and our licensees, distributors, agents, representatives and other authorized users) a perpetual, non-exclusive and irrevocable license to publicly perform each and every musical composition (including lyrics) contained in such Submissions

So you can lose your music too....

iCaught (also please note the "i"-ness of it. wonder if they've got a deal with Apple) is only supposed to last 6 weeks, and we're in about the third or fourth week of it, and it *did* replace The Batchelor....does anybody even watch The Batchelor any more? I'd hedge a bet though that there's more to iCaught--that it's a bit like exploratory surgery...that networks are looking at this as a viable method for more cheap programming. If people like iCaught, what's to stop other networks from developing more cannonball-in-the-groin user-generated content shows? And what's to stop them from insisting that we like them--the same way they keep insisting we like reality tv shows (even after The Sopranos kicked realty tv butt.)

But, then again, what can we do with video fishwrap other than try to, like Frankenstein's monster, re-animate it in some way?

makes my head hurt just thinking about it...

Newmark Still #1 Customer Service Guy at Craigslist

After a "rumormonger" post on ValleyWag hinted that he was gone, Craig Newmark, in the SJMerc, clarified that he's still with craigslist....

Craig also mentioned to the Merc that he's joined the advisory board for FactcheckED.org a new project out of the Annenberg Public Policy Center that will help teachers and students "cut through the fog of misinformation and deception" on the Internet.

If schools aren't going to do anything about media literacy (most of the time they can't), then there has to be some sort of program developed somewhere that *will* help them. Having heard Craig at a number of conferences (and talked to him at some of those), I've got the impression that he's very concerned about media literacy and how we discern the facts on an Internet full of disinformation (or where the public record can be easily altered--see this in Wired.com on who's altering their Wikipedia profiles) as much as good information.

And if you don't live here, it's hard to jump on and know, right off the bat, what's what. Guides are needed--

So, it's great that Craig's on the advisory board for this new venture--and that he's still at craigslist after all...

Almost forgot...Lisa Williams and I will be at the Thursday Berkman Blog group giving presentations on Placeblogger and Assignment Zero (respectively.) So, if you're hanging out in Cambridge, and you've got nothing to do, stop in--even if it's just to ask us silly questions :-)

Old-School meets New-School as YouTube Ads P.O's Vid Makers, Viewers

So, YouTube has started experimenting with those nasty little flash ads in the corner of some of their most popular video....and guys like Matt Harding, who has one of said popular videos, is, According to CNet none too happy with the idea "As a viewer, I don't like this at all," said Harding, whose video has been viewed more than 7 million times since it was posted a year ago. "As someone who makes videos, I would object to allowing them to put an ad on the screen. Put it on the margins, above the player but not on the screen itself."

Indeed. And, 10-seconds or not, these little ads are bloody well annoying! We already see ads like this on "commercial" TV stations--the most egregious ones on Turner stations TBS and TNT, where the ads take up far more than a small 20% corner of the screen (which is the amount of video real estate YouTube is saying its 10-seconders will take up)(BTW, the ads do start w/cable tv--more on this below...)

Thing is, so far, YouTube's expressed no intention to share any profits from these ads with any of the people who are producing the videos where the ads are placed. So, essentially, YouTube will be making money off of someone else's work. Or, depending on where they place the ads, they might even be making money off of pirated works. (nothing new to anyone looking to generate income off their own "user-generated content.")

It's not just viewers and video producers who've been squabbling over these ads--it's other video upload networks that claim they came up with this first (including VideoEgg's Troy Young in Wired.com) But wait guys! if my memory serves me, we've been seeing these kinds of ads on video for awhile now--they're ubiquitous on the TNT and TBS content, and have been way before YouTube or even online video came about.

And, indeed, Om Malik recalls old-fashioned broadcast TV....using these types of ads...and so do I!

Now, the technology for putting these sorts of ads within online content may be different (as Om notes), but the idea isn't any different from the annoying ads at the bottom of most TBS/TNT shows (I believe other networks like Bravo, USA, etc. are also now using those types of ads) This ad idea, however, came about as a way to halt piracy--unfortunately, it came about before the Internet, so finding a link to a news story about it is impossible. But, let me explain what I recall: Turner decided to put in these ads as ways to halt piracy of its first-run movies and of its shows. It also stopped the 5 second "dark" break between shows and commercials. Both the ads and the breaks were meant to try to halt piracy--as video pirates, using old VHS technology, were taking shows, skillfully editing out commercials (the 5-second jumps gave enough wiggle-room so the edits wouldn't affect content) and selling/broadcasting them as first run (usually in bars and such) This was also a problem with sports programing on TNT, so it also helped the MLBA make good on their prohibition on the re-broadcasting of games.

So, oddly, what was to broadcast TV a means of trying to stop piracy, may help a new media concern to possibly make money from "pirated" video. But if we take pirated videos out of the equation, what becomes disturbing is that YouTube currently has no plans to share its ad income with the producers of videos, then it's doing what many companies want to do with user-generated content: make money from it for themselves.

This was different than the goal of broadcast--which was to prevent piracy and keep money in the pockets of those who produced the product.

My, how we've taken an odd detour in all this....

The copyright fights that are hinted at by companies like VideoEgg might prove to be very interesting...

More: Lost Remote notes that the ads only appear when clips are run on YouTube. The photo above is courtesy of LR. Thanks!

Update: Gavin O'Malley at mediapost: 'OMG Advertising!' YouTubers React To In-Video Ads jha!

Freakonomics Guys Answer Question on Partial Feed

Check this out: Stephen Dubner has answered the question that's been driving Freakonomics fans crazy: Why only a partial feed?

As much as people like to say that “information wants to be free,” content does not like to be created for free. In order to pay all the writers, editors, photographers, graphic artists, technologists, and the few dozen other kinds of folks who create and curate the Times’s content, most of which is free on the web (and perhaps all of which soon will be), the Times sells ads on its site. But can’t they sell ads on a full feed, so that feed readers can still get all the content they want delivered to their computers for free without having to visit a single web site? The short answer is yes, they can, and our friends at FeedBurner, who have been distributing our feed, created a great business by doing so. But the Times and its advertisers aren’t crazy about this option. (Nor are they alone, apparently.) Why? This is the fundamental point: many advertisers do not value feed readers as much as they value site readers, since they believe that feed readers are far harder to measure and track. (The folks at FeedBurner have a different view, of course.)

In my response to Max Kalehoff's 8/10/07 post in Online Spin I said: The move to only post a partial feed could have a lot to do with wanting to drive traffic back to the NYT site–it obviously doesn’t have anything to do with reader preference. Since the Times is planning to do away with Times Select, and the Freakonomics content would have been prime for Times Select, I’m sure management is looking for another way to drive traffic and stimulate income. I’m not sure of the current state of ads on feeds, but if there’s still trouble with income gained from ads on feeds, that’s another angle to the Times doing a partial feed.

Another angle is that it makes it easier to track traffic. One can indeed count feed subscriptions, but if people have to actually click over to the article, it will display as traffic. So, depending on what’s valued more–subscriptions or traffic–I’d hedge a bet that traffic’s more important. Thus, only a partial feed. (Note: the Times has not confirmed doing away with Times Select just yet--that is, for now, a rumor in the Daily News)

Mathew Ingram in his post on the matter also acknowledged my supposition. Big Thanks and hug to Mat!

Back to the issue at hand: the partial feed argument is what lots of us thought was simple Blogging 101--but the really odd thing is that full feeds also drive traffic to blogs, as Mike Masnick noted in an 8/13/07 Techdirt post....and, from my own experiments with my own meager traffic, I'm finding some credence in this, just like Techdirt.

For this blog, I find some regular readers will come over from full feeds at their Bloglines, Google, and Yahoo RSS readers. Sometimes they leave me comments, sometimes they just want to see the full post, maybe checking up on comments. I'm not sure if I "lose" anyone to RSS or not. How can one really know unless one counts *all* RSS reader subscriptions across as many RSS readers that are out there, and then knows everyone's particular reading habits.

Still, one could start with aggregating all of a blog's subscriptions from all various RSS readers to start. I don't know how difficult it is to collect *all* RSS reader subscriptions to get a full subscription count. Once we had this, we might then be able to calculate some data on the numbers RSS full-feed subscribers who also click through to a blog....

But this is a piece of data that doesn't exist at the moment. It then makes total sense for both the NYTimes and its advertisers to think what most of us thought was Blogging 101--that partial feeds drive traffic back to blogs, thus getting more ads in front of more eyeballs. Even while disappointing many a loyal Freakonomics reader.

It would be great to generate this kind of data to have a better idea whether full or partial feed is better. It would be invaluable to newspapers and to their advertisers.

Gad, I'd *love* to do this research! For now, nobody really knows what's what--and the default position of "partial feeds drive traffic" wins out.

Where's the Diversity in the Blogosphere?

Is Jane Hamsher right?: Perhaps there is no "cabal of straight white males who sit around a table and decide who does and does not get linked to"....**

and yeah, Jane's right about the political blogosphere. Even if we look beyond the examples given in her post, since the '04 election season, there's been an increase in diversity in the political blogosphere. There's some good representation on the state level in gender diversity--as with Connecticut and Massachusetts, where there are women bloggers with significant voices (I'm thinking of Left in Lowell and CT News Junkie for instance...)Not to mention the fair number of minority and women bloggers on the Right...

But what about diversity in the rest of the blogosphere?

In the recent AdAge Power 150 only 13% of the bloggers are women--as calculated by Kami Huyse...which precipitated The W List (Toby Bloomber's iteration here) Sure, 13% ain't a huge portion of 150--but there's been small progress over the past two years (I'm not sure of the participation of minority bloggers in the marketing blogosphere--the percentage may even be fewer than women. theres an interesting conversation re the W list at Lewis Green's blog--the issue's raised a good, solid conversation in the marketing 'sphere.)

And women in the tech blogosphere??? Well, when we're pretty under-represented in so many of the bastions where link-love occurs..

But there were two things that happened last week that demonstrate there's some troble with both gender and race diversity in the tech blogosphere: Kara Swisher wrote The Men and (No) Women Facebook of Facebook Management and the Feldman ignorance/subsequent debacle at PodTech. In these post, it became a bit clearer that there are plenty of places where women aren't, as there are places where those who are quite visible are unaware there are indeed blacks their 'sphere...

So, yeah--there may not be a cabal of white guys sitting around a table deciding who does/doesn't get linked to.Maybe that whole idea is out (and maybe the A-list idea is out, too) But maybe women could link to one another more often and help one another out. Maybe it's a matter that we don't support one another as much as we should--and maybe in certain corners of the blogosphere it's still a bitch for women to get a link in edgewise among the boys...

And I do wonder if Feldman was, in some weird way, channelling the way *some* tech bloggers see their world....which means they might need to get out more and look around at their world.

Still, there's been some progress. Incrementally. But let's also not forget that the blogosphere's still got a long way to go...


**Jane also notes the preponderance of white males attending Yearly Kos--well, no real surprise there. Most of the conferences I've attended, including some of the better ones, are still attended by predominantly white males. But that's a socio-economic/free time thing as much as any other factor. Women may not have the free time, and lots of people across all gender and race lines don't have the requisite funds to attend pricey blog-related conferences. Holding more un-conference style events on a regional basis may help this--but can we get important names to these events? Perhaps.

Could a Blogger's Union Help Us Negotiate Fair Wages?

On the issue of bloggers getting paid...Marshall Kirkpatrick suggested that bloggers should be paid between $5K - $8K per month for their work. This is about right, if you consider the time and research that has to go into creating relavent content; writing and editing that content; pinging search; and monitoring any comments and buzz emanating from daily posts.

But are we being paid anything near that amount? In most instances--no. And sometimes bloggers are asked to do a bit more than just blog...

Tom Abate at MiniMediaGuy wrote about the bloggers-starting-a-union thing, which raised the question of blogger compensation. What isn't widely known is that freelance writers have a number of different resources for comparing rates at various publications--and bloggers, at the moment don't (freelancers are also asked to do far less than probloggers.) I commented extensively on Tom's post, which he then turned into this post revealing a bit more about writer's unions and how bloggers don't have anything to really help them figure out whether or not their getting paid a fair rate for the amount of work they're being asked to perform.

So, when it comes to freelance article writing and problogging, problogging has the potential to be more time-consuming than freelance article writing, and have more legal responsibility (filtering for libelous comments *and* making sure your own posts go in without anything specious). Yet probloggers are in many instances being paid much, much less than the average freelancer.

If we think of blogging for a publication or organization as having more responsibility--and I don't mean responsibility for designing and implementing the back end--in the way in which they research and develop their own post content and how communication is maintained with commenters and other bloggers, then probloggers should probably be paid more for their work than most freelance article writers are paid. Marshall's figures are far closer to what reality should be than what's currently being paid out by most concerns looking to hire probloggers.

And maybe this is where a union might help...but is it possible to be part of already established writer's unions? or would bloggers be stepping on too many toes if that were to happen?

Just a thought....

The Common Ground Between Bad Dates and Bad Terms of Service

What's the biggest thing we risk when we go out on a date or when we make a pitch to a publication?

We risk REJECTION. And we all universally hate rejection...esp. when it comes to our attractiveness or our creative abilities...

But rejection's part of the whole dating and publishing scenes. There's no avoiding it. Yet, after awhile, some of us end up a bit bruised, and we settle for whatever comes down the pike...

With publishing, we may want to be validated so much that we might be willing to settle for Terms of Service or licencing/right agreements that don't quite have our best interest at heart. And, in the long run, could end up like that really bad relationship...

This all kinda hit me today after seeing Mark Hamilton's comment on this Techcrunch post, and then his post on Helium.com's licensing--and something that made both of us a tad uncomfortable. Now, there have been others sites with hinky ToS or licensing or rights agreements, so I'm emphatically stating that Helium is NOT the only one and will elaborate further down...Mark, however, quotes the following from Helium's licencing agreement:

By submitting your content to Helium, you grant Helium (and any Helium successors-in-interest, subsidiaries, or parent companies), a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, non-exclusive, sub-licensable right and license to, in whole or in part, with or without attribution to you, use, copy, modify, edit, adapt, publish, publicly display/perform, translate, display, create derivative works from and/or license (or sell with your authorization) and/or distribute content posted to the Site. Helium’s rights to content you submit include the right to make editorial revisions to your content; to use in any way the materials you submit on the Helium website or in other Helium media, whether now or hereafter created; to use for our own internal business purposes; and/or to reproduce and distribute the materials for Helium’s marketing and publicity purposes.

My emphasis on what I personally would not agree to in any desperate attempt to get my content published.

Now, as I stated, I am not singling out Helium--many companies that are offering to publish with the remote possibility of paying for UGC have strange Terms or other licence agreements. Associated Content.com has a number of different content licencing/Terms of Service agreements. So many so that they can make one's head spin--but it behooves anyone who wants to publish there to read all of them and decide how much content one wants to give up. Also see this post from 3/2/07 where I compare two citizen journalism sites with NBC's "First Person" initiatives. From the NBC ToS:

All materials submitted to MSNBC (the “Submissions”) become the property of MSNBC and will not be returned. Without affecting any of your ownership rights to the Submission, by submitting your Submission, you grant MSNBC an irrevocable royalty-free, worldwide right, in all media (now known or later developed) to use, publish, alter or otherwise exploit your Submission and to sublicense such rights to a licensee at MSNBC’s discretion

But the whole scheme of little or non-existent pay and loss of rights is very similar to another time period and another industry. Mark and I had a quick email conversation this a.m. about these various requests by both New Media and Old Media for UGC in many ways reflects what happened in the record industry in the 1950's and 1960's. That particular industry made similar requests of various artists--some of whom would become one-or-more hit wonders. Many artists lost control--and income--from there work, while third parties and big corporations reaped the rewards.

This has also been the case with models. In most recent memory, Jane Bainter, the inspiration for Jane's Addiction, has claimed that she was never compensated for the profits made on numerous re-prints of her iconic image...

So, there are many ways, and many instances, in which one is only thinking of the moment--that it's great to give over one's articles, or one's short stories, or songs or even images of oneself--to another entity, thinking that it's either a cool thing to do, or it will help get one's foot in the door, or for a myriad of other reasons.

But, on some level, these reasons, IMO, just don't add up when it looks like someone else might either make a good profit, or might re-purpose my content to eventually make some money from it.

As for disclosure: yes, I do occasionally give free content to Poynter.org's E-Media TidBits column. Poynter, for me, is a good way to get my name and thoughts out to a particular audience. I'm not pressured to feeling like I *must* contribute there--it's when I feel I want to contribute. I also get some editorial oversight. Clips on Poynter carry a bit of "weight"--and can be viewed as publishing creds. Poynter is also a 501(c)3, so payment isn't necessarily expected.

So, there are indeed instance where giving free content to particular outlets can be beneficial. But whether or not one's going to benefit should be weighed against what one may, potentially, be giving up.

Lest one wake up in the morning and find oneself not just hungover, but also feeling a tad cheated...

Super Sunday Links 8/19/07

I'm about to go out and have A Life (whatever that means--it's relative) but before I head out, here's some things to check out....

Web Users Reading More, Saying Less, Study Says According to Nielsen, we're watching a lot of video, but don't have much to say about it. Video isn't that easy to interact with anyway. But we're also using all kinds of other means to communicate--and we've had an explosion of those things in less than two years. So, who really knows how much we're saying because some of the ways in which we're using to say them aren't easily traced.

Stephen Colbert v. Andrew Keen, online troll extraordinaire Andrew Keen media whore's it up with Stephen Colbert.





BarcampBlock Shows the True Promise of Web 2.0 and BarCampBlock Day 1: An Amazing Day! BarCampBlock (the 2-year anniversary of BarCamp) is going on right now, and sitting over here on the Other Coast, all I can think of is how so much of the world of tech/blogging/tech business and so many of the discussions on that are centered on the West Coast. I wish we could do something like this out in Western Mass--these conversations are important and should be spread out across the country just a bit more. But does anyone out here really even care? I wonder.

Tagged on a Meme: Four Things....

Just found out I was tagged by tech/business journalist and travel blogger WriterJax on a really fun meme on four things....

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:
Dietary Aide (the kid who serves you food in the hospital)
Secretary for a general contractor
Assistant to the Treasurer of a non profit
Professional Blogger (yes, they paid me for doing this...not alot, but they paid me)

(Rather boring jobs, eh? yes, my life was always more fun than my work...that happens for some of us women though....)

Four places I have lived
Edison, NJ
New Brunswick, NJ
Northampton, MA
Easthamtpon, MA
(hmmm...I've travelled a lot, but keep living in the same places. wonder what that's about?)

Four of my favorite foods
Creme Brullee
Steak w/ chimichurri sauce
Chicken Curry
Spinach (go ahead, make all the Popeye jokes you want)


Four Places I'd rather be right now


Down the Shore (it's not "the beach," if you know what I mean)

New York City
Austin, TX (because it's Saturday, and they got lots of music there)
Bar Harbor, ME (where I don't ever think about the Internet)





And now I have to tag Four people (she tagged mutual friend Morriss, so he's out...) So I'll tag...

Celeste at Average Jane (got to add you to the blogroll!)
Mike at Concrete (just because)
Jason at Webomatica (because we share a love of really weird, bad cinema)
and Terry at I See Invisible People because out of all the bloggers, I've know her the longest :-)

Oh, and I know I was tagged lo these many months ago on two memes on my other blog, which is now offline, but now that I have one "home" out here, I'll just transfer those memes to this blog.

Stay Tuned....

Photo courtesy of Belmar, NJ