broadstuff

Readers of this blog will know that we do point out every so often that Social Media has a downside, a dark force as well as a utopian one. It does seem hard to do that sometimes, given the seemingly continual torrent of unadulterated Good News, unless of course you believe that the people shouting it out are somewhat invested in its growth (Surely not )

Which makes the following article fascinating - it is a downside article, and a pretty good one:

The idea of social technologies as a liberating force echoes the Enlightenment language and, just as with the original, there are good reasons to view this discourse with some skepticism. This knowledge about the value and meaning of social technologies comes from industry champions (Cisco’s Human Network), industry analysts and corporate consultants. This discourse is good for business - I know because I speak regularly on the topic in boardrooms and at conferences. Proponents have a personal stake in seeing the positive side of the equation (and there is a positive side) and encourage participation as a means of personal empowerment (“the customer is now in charge” “the end of command and control hierarchy” etc.).

Social media is cloaked in this language of liberation while the corporate sponsors (Facebook, Google et al ) are progressing towards ever more refined and effective means of manipulating individual behavior (behavioral targeting of ads, recommendation systems, reputation management systems etc.). As with the enlightenment the tactics of control are shielded by a rhetoric of emancipation. Let's not forget that the output of all of this social participation is massive dossiers on individual behavior (your social network profiles, photos, location, status updates, searches etc.) and social activity.

Its a good article in that it shows similar hypocrisy occurred in the Age of The Enlightenment (and many other Utopianist movements of course). In fact, we were having a discussion at Tuttle the other day and one thought was that much of Social Media, owing to its focus on passion and emotional engagement rather than rationality, was in some ways a force rolling back the Age of Reason. Discuss....

But its not saying anything that others (including us) have said before

No, what makes this post extremely fascinating is that it comes from the O'Reilly Radar, which - in my experience anyway - have tended to be on the "cup overfloweth" side of the New New Social Thing, never mind a Glass Half Full - so this Glass Half Empty article - the first, it seems, of a series, is a rather fascinating shift of tenor, methinks.

You may be interested to see that the second essay is trailed as:

The next post, Captivity of the Commons will explore the risks associated with personal data being collected at the behest of corporations whose main motivation is not in service of “customer empowerment” but on the traditional goals of manipulating behavior to grow their share of wallet.

Which rings very similar to a paper we wrote about a year ago with the title Data is Free, but everywhere in Chains.

I note a similar style of article went up on today on Business Week as well. Is this the start of the Retreat from Social Media, the Recanting of the Religion? (In other words the start of its slide into the Slough of Despond on the Hype Curve, and no doubt the decanting of it's old whine into new bottles in a few months time )

Update - really good article on this by Ian Delaney over at TwopointOuch.

There has been a lot of ink spilled, pixels pointed and hot air raised about Twitter going into TV, and no one quite knows what its all about (TechCrunch sums it all up quite well).

However, despite all this hoo-ha, one thing we have noted in the last few weeks is that twitter is being used by communities to talk about broadcast TV shows on subjects ranging from heavy politics to light entertainment. In fact, you are now getting people starting to comment on the show-as-it-happens on Twitter and getting followers because of this.

When Joost started out, they were hoping to capture this conversation in the service, but I think the flexibility and independence of Twitter has made it the more universal framework.

Now that, as they say, is interesting. For 10 years Broadcasters have been thinking about how to use the backpath to get users more engaged - from mobile phone-in numbers to interactive TV, its been a ardy perennial of the broadcast industry.

The post on the Twitterblog on the subject is quite interesting:

Twitter is very open. As a result, thousands of different applications, web sites, and mobile interfaces have been created by developers. These different approaches add variety and relevance to Twitter and in general make the ecosystem more interesting. However, Twitter's openness is not limited to the web or even to mobile phones.

During the 2008 presidential elections, Hack The Debate showed us how Twitter could make television interactive and possibly even have a democratizing effect on the medium. The power of Twitter was harnessed to create new, compelling, and engaging programming. CNN was an early innovator with Twitter too. Our openness made it all possible.

Twitter's open approach might have the power to transform television—the dominant communications receiver worldwide. We're very excited to see where these experiments take us.

The reason, as we point out in our research on the Future of Video, is that it can potentially emerge as a "Good Enough" service that allows old time broadcast to be interactive enough for most users much of the time, and thus is a bulwark against the theoretical rush for the online, interactive TV experience.

That a unified comms chat service has taken up the mantle is both concerning (for Broadcasters) and fascinating (for Industry disruption). May well be worth the TV industry inventing its own microblogging system with benefits.....

I was chatting to Caitlin Fitzsimmons and Tom de Grunwald today about whether people liked just receiving streams with only blog posts on Twitter, or preferred a stream with combined Blog post + chat. Our conclusion was that more people like the combination of post and chat.

Our own experience is that the people following the chatstream (@freecloud) outnumbers those following the blogstream (@broadstuff) by about 4:1. Both have been going for about 2 years. Sure, not all of those on the chatstream are avid Broadstuff blog readers (shame on them ) but some are and many are occasional readers, and it is indicative of the trend in my view.

I must admit I haven't looked at an RSS reader for at least a year now. In fact, on reflection, I think nearly all of the people who I used to have an RSS feed from I now followon Twitter. I far prefer seeing their posts come up, seeing the context, and maybe having a chat with them about it.

Which leads us to hypothesise that the simple RSS feed is a dying phenomenon, as Comms with Content and Context is clearly more attractive than Comms with just Content. But looking at Friendfeed's struggles to gain ground, there is an optimal amount of it - too much in the stream and its becomes unmanageable or requires filtering (hence the growth of search and filtering functions, of which more later).

Its interesting thinking about Twitter's evolution too, and where this may go:

My own experience of Twitter was that from when I joined in early 2007 to about Dec 2007 it was full of the sort of people who were telling us what they had for lunch and was roundly and justly lampooned for it. For 2007 I just used twitter to stream the @broadstuff blog feed to those who wanted to use Twitter as their RSS replacement, as "the conversation" was usually so banal I couldn't be *rsed to follow it ( I have a theory that Twitter at the time was full of the same early adopters that find throwing sheep entertaining for more than a day or so? )

But around Dec 2007 something changed - as I noted at the time, people started to realise that if you added useful stuff to the conversation, you got more out of it too and the whole tenor of the system changed. I think it was sparked by some of the more thoughtful people deserting Facebook after Beacon.

Twitter in 2008 was in its heyday in my view, heavily colonised by interesting people saying interesting things, and increasingly passing links to useful articles. At this point I started to bother using it as a comms/chat system, and started passing Broadstuff blog post links in the chatstream as well. A few people didn't like this (and some still don't), but far more did so we continued.

By early 2009 Twitter was shifting usage again, as more Slebs and their mainstream followers came on board. One could argue that this is in fact a new Context + Content mode, as fans get not just news about their favoured slebs, but deeper context about them too, fro comments and the overall stream. Sadly, they have also brought the whole Advertising/PR circus with them (monetize being the mantra). Sadly, a few early users have also gone to "pimp my XXX" mode too, as the earlier social regulation of this sort of behaviour breaks down under the weight of commercial interests.

So where now, as Twitter goes from 2m to 39m users in the space of 2009 to date? One risk is that spam so ruins the content experience that people drop back to "pure" feeds of content again, like RSS. But one of the joys of Twitter is its an asymmetric pub/sub system, so you can cull noisy and vacuous people from your stream with little overall damage. The spammers are then forced to try and @you based in comments you make which is a far more expensive transaction than email spamming. In fact the cheapest spam seems to be to spam the trending #topics, but it is a fairly trivial update to cull that.

Hypothesis therefore is that the Context + Content mode will still be a (the?) resonant mode for Twitter for some time, though how it works will change depending on message and recipient.

With respect to Search - I am aware that "Real Time Search" is a Hot Topic on Twitter just now - here it comes again but in my view this is just a component of the overall Content + Context hypothesis, its just helping the find/filter process as volumes go up.

(An interesting aside: most very early adopters used nom-de-plumes, whereas 2008/9 adopters - coming off Facebook perhaps - tend to use own-names, and in fact a few were quite vocal about everyone having to change to "be genuine" - which is b*ll*cks in a conversational chat medium as its quickly discovered if you are or not, so this had now largely died down. In fact, I wonder if we will see a rise in nom de plumes from newbies as a way of making themselves look like old hands? )

Ian Betteridge pointed me to this article in GigaOm:

Data collected by comScore shows that the number of unique visitors to Twitter.com grew from 1.6 million in April 2008 to 32.1 million in April 2009. All that growth is sucking up Twitter management’s attention, along with a big chunk of its investors’ money.

“For the entire [three-year] history of the company, most of the resources have gone to managing growth, and that is still the case,” co-founder Ev Williams tells The Wall Street Journal. The company will have about 90 employees by year’s end, many of them helping keep the (proverbial) lights on. For Twitter, that problem isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, it should look towards a future where a big portion of its resources are dedicated to its web infrastructure – just like Facebook, its perceived competitor.

It is true that Web startup setup costs are very low today, but runtime costs as it grows - especially with social media data processing or with video - mount up rapidly. (Combing Social Media and Video becoming very expensive very fast).

The article is entitled "On the Web, Growth Costs Real Money", and while to readers of this blog (especially those who followed the series on Limits to Freeconomics) this may be a real "Well, Duh" moment, it has been my experience that there is still still this myth going round that Web 2.0 companies can run on cash fumes.

Its not true of course, which is why we've been railing at the limits to Freeconomics for the best part of 18 months - but it is pernicious.

Which makes the existence of articles like this, as late as May 2009, part of a sad truth - that many Webheads would far rather believe attractive falsehoods than unpleasant facts, methinks.

This is a great piece, I wish I'd written it before Josh Young did, as I was saying much the same a few days ago in talking on Twitter (hmmm...sans Twitter would I have written a blog post - discuss) about Micropayments not working for News:

“The difficulty of distinguishing good quality from bad is inherent in the business world,” Nobel laureate George Akerlof wrote in the kicker of his most famous paper, published in 1970. “This may indeed explain many economic institutions and may in fact be one of the more important aspects of uncertainty.”

Akerlof fired an early shot in a scholarly marathon to study the effects of asymmetric information in markets. What do parties to a potential transaction do when they know different sets of facts? Maybe that seems like an obvious question, but economists in the middle of the twentieth century had been pretty busy worrying about perfecting complicated models despite their grossly simplistic assumptions.

So Akerlof set about to write about how markets can fail when some of those assumptions turn out to be bunk. The assumption he tested first, in “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” was certainty, and he showed that when sellers know more about the goods being sold than the buyers do, sellers abuse their privileged position and buyers leave the market.

Writing in the same year, the economist Phillip Nelson studied the differences between what he called “search goods” and “experience goods.” Search goods and experience goods express a certain kind of asymmetry. For search goods, consumers can overcome the asymmetry before the point of purchase by doing their homework, while for experience goods, consumers must take their time and invest.

This is extremely relevant for how to pay for news and other journalistic output as:

News articles are experience goods. Just as with an apple, you need to consume the story, reading the article or watching the video or so on, in order to judge its quality. “Stories can vary in length, accuracy, style of presentation, and focus,” writes economist James Hamilton in All the News That’s Fit to Sell. “For a given day’s events, widely divergent news products are offered to answer the questions of who, what, where, when, and why.” We can’t know which one’s best till we’ve read them all, and who’s got time for that?

Not only that, but our options have now exploded:

We have now spent about a decade Googling. We have spent years indulging in information, and they have been wonderful years. We are overawed by our ability to answer questions online. Wikipedia has helped immensely in our efforts to answer those questions, but pagerank elevated even it. Newspapers compose just one kind of Web site to have plunged into the scrum of search engine optimization. Everyone’s hungry for links and clicks.

The article I'm quoting is more concerned about the near-monopoly Google has on the aggregation on news itself, but the above passages show the problems with charging in general (mass availability of good-enough news) and micropayments (charging for experience goods)

Just saw the above twt come up on Twitter for Tweetmeme, a Twitter based news aggregator that uses popularity algorithms to grab news. The URL links to a standard "Find Sex in your City" service. And sure enough, there was the leader article in Tweetmeme (see below)



Tweetmeme calls itself as the "Hottest News on Twitter" - clearly some people decided it needed to up-temperature a bit

Points to the risks of pure Algorithm based systems, ie that:

- People will try and game them
- They are always gameable, no matter how hard one tries (cf Google)

It happened early Saturday morning when the Tweetmeme team were probably sensibly in bed (their own, we are sure - we make no allegations about such service usage here )

It is interesting in another respect - last week YouTube was hacked so that a lot of porn videos started to appear, and today I read that quite a few such videos lead users back to phishing sites. Is this the sign of a new wave of Sexspam, we wonder?

I suspect this is also why Techmeme eventually employed a curator, Megan McCarthy (though when I met her at SXSW in Austin and asked her, she scuttled away sharpish )

CBS bought Last.fm in May 2007 for $280m.

In February this year, TechCrunch broke a story that Last.fm or CBS had passed on user data to the RIAA, which both parties vehemently denied. TechCrunch has now come back at them with further evidence and essentially accuses CBS of taking Last.fm data and handing it over to the RIAA:

Now we’ve located another source for the story, someone who’s very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth when they said Erick’s story wasn’t correct.

Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too.

Here’s what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for “internal use only.” It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.

The question is why?

Given that there are social music competitors out there like Pandora, Blip.fm and Spotify, and given that users by and large prefer to deal with companies that don't hand over their data, why jeopardise ones' investment so?

(Update - Ars Tech says CBS and Last.fm have denied it all....but then (and to balance my ragging of TechCrunch above), they would, wouldn't they. But it is put up or shut up time now)

I was listening to the radio this morning when I heard one Member of Parliament, Nadine Dorries, saying that the atmosphere in Parliament was so bad that a suicide was feared. (A later article in the same program pointed out that the public at large would be fairly happy with all the MPs heads' on poles, by the way).

Anyway, they mentioned that Ms Dorries had said this in her "Internet blog" - and that seemed interesting, to see what a Blogging MP may say. So off I trotted to her blog.....

Well!

I think she may have uncovered a dastardly plot as bad as Guy Fawkes attempt to blow up Parliament. Yes, the Torygraph newspaper is deliberately setting out to destabilise Her Majesty's Government! And this has all been deliberately timed to coincide with the European Election, and by casting aspersions on our Honourable Members, a Swing to the Right can be engineered. Sez Ms Dorries:

Parliament is in chaos. The public are angry. The Telegraph has upped its circulation.
There are 650 members of Parliament. In any walk of life, in whatever profession, you will find people who are dishonest. It will always be thus as long as we are all human!

The Telegraph are uncovering a few cases of fraud, but not enough, so they are more than slightly embellishing some of the stories. I write as a case in point.

Enter the Barclay brothers, the billionaire owners of The Daily Telegraph.
Rumour is that they are fiercely Euro sceptic and do not feel that either of the main parties are Euro sceptic enough. They have set upon a deliberate course to destabilise Parliament, with the hope that the winners will be UKIP and BNP.

A quick online check of the Barclay brothers and their antics on the Island of Sark is enough to give this part of the rumour credence.

Another rumour is that the disc was never acquired and sold by an amateur, but it was in fact a long term undercover operation run by the Telegraph for some considerable time, carefully planned and executed; and that the stories of the naive disc nabber ringing the news desk in an attempt to sell the stolen information are entirely the work of gossip and fiction.

These rumours do have some credibility given that this has all erupted during the European Election Campaign and turn out is expected to be high with protest votes, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, or should I say the Barclay brothers.

So there we are - of course, it would have helped her argument somewhat if our MP's had not been caught with their snouts in the trough (Swine Flue), and had not been trying hard to prevent the information about it all coming out. But let us assume there is honour among honourable members as well as thieves, and that even in venality there is some veritas:

Ms Dorries notes that not only is there this devilish plot, but the public are being played like puppets:

...the British public are being worked like puppets by two very powerful men. Whipped up into a frenzy to achieve exactly what they want.

His very poignant words to me were “if any of this conjecture is true, Parliament will become full of racists, fantasists, and has-been celebrities. We will be rendered impotent and may never again regain the authority to withstand the pressure, opinion and whims of the overtly wealthy.”

I must admit to sharing the same concern about a horde of has-been slebs now thinking of running as MPs, but its hard to argue that the present shower are any better. And the point about resisting the overtly wealthy is interestiung, but given the feathering of nests (and duckponds) the current process clearly hasn't worked either.

Still, next time the Big Media come out and attack bloggers about their lack of valuable journalism, we can point to this to show that a dire national plot to destabilise the Government was uncovered in the blogs first.

Fellow Londonblogger James Governor masochistically challenged me to shoot down this article (as I have a reputation of being grumpy with fuzzy Greenscams), and I have rather sadistically therefore decided to praise it instead

Sez James:

I was thinking about the term business to consumer (B2C) the other day. I am not a huge fan of the term “consumer” in the digital era- we’re all content creators after all. But I just realised that my notion that we are all producers is even more true in terms of carbon footprint. Whether individuals or businesses, free agents or organisations, we are all net producers of carbon dioxide.

Aha- I thought to myself, “neat insight”, and so to twitter, where I said:

“when it comes to carbon emissions none of us are consumers. we are all producers.”

Quick as a flash Digital Signals came back and said:

“The fern on our bathroom window sill would beg to differ!”

The real insight therefore is that Business To Consumer might have an entirely different meaning this century. Businesses need to create closed loops systems with plants, the only reliable carbon consumers. Of course such an idea might sound bonkers - but why shouldn’t a polluter directly pay to halt deforestation in, say, Brazil? Lets save the planet’s lungs while we still can, before the only carbon consumers we can use are ugly crop-based monocultures.

He then challenges us all:

So what might your Sustainable Business To Consumer strategy be?

My immediate thought was that we need a call to arms personally, viz:

"A POT PLANT FOR EVERY PC"

Yup, for every PC you own, you need to offset it with a pot plant. In fact, if you put it and the PC in a little greenhosue you could have a year-round tropical climate all of your own and grow tropical fruit year all year and not jet them in (in fact, if I put my work servers together I reckon I could grow those huge South African pawpaws - 18" long and counting - all year round).

Laptop owner need to offset it by leaving a potplant at home, or maybe carry one around as a hat or something. iPhone owners can just not wash more than once a week..... (oh - they don't )

And this made me think some more - imagine the Hanging Gardens of Google - if the Google datacentre got rid of its low grade heat by being in the middle of a monster Biome like a sort of Expanded Eden Project (see photo above) so that the datacentres grew tropical fruit in the Canadian or whatever tundra and thus covered not only direct CO2 emissions but reduced air transport of pawpaws, big net win.

And it gives them an alternative revenue stream to boot. Amazon too - Dr Werner Vogels could be bouncing around the world talking about biome microclimate clouds and pawpaws, as well as system clouds. He could even hand out some pawpaw at his lectures

Now excuse me while I go and calculate what size and type of tropical fruit my PC MicroBiome has to support.....

Went along yesterday to the Media140 Conference (Schedule and speakers here), about the use of Twitter and other microblogging services in media. It turned out to be a fascinating event. I have got into the habit of taking notes on my iPhone at conferences and using those - so here they are with minor adjustment:

Pat Kane gave the keynote speech, and observed that everybody can be a journalist today, microblogging specifically allows:

- "Beat" reporting
- Early info
- Realtime content
- Traceable sources
- Q & A interaction
- Promo tool
- Folksonomy (labellable with hashtags)
- Expertise archive

Twitter can also be used to point people to longer form content - and can act as a filter/summariser of the info overload problem

But, issues were the same as for other citizen journalism:

-who verifies truth, authority - who do you trust?
-does one break out of 140 char and how
-how collaborative and distributed is this in real life when commercial benefits of secrecy are real

As to "How Media Makes Money" - he reckons its best option is to drive people to scarce stuff. What is scarce in journalism? - it's authority/quality, also weekend papers may be paper, but daily stuff is online.

Next up was a panel on the 140 character media - or 5 Old White Guys, as Bill Thompson (on the panel) noted. Still, they were fairly amusing - my big takeaways were:

- Jon Gripton from Sky noting that Twitter has changed way early news is broken, it's now just another newsfeed used for looking at breaking stories.
- Sky has a Twitter correspondent and Darren Waters noted the BBC UGC desk, now both search blogs, twitter etc for news
- Nick Halstead of TweetMeme noted that distribution was a multi-node spread now, eg retweets @, etc to move the story on
- Huge strategic issue with so much reliance being put on top of 1 platform (Twitter)

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch noted that these new media, though small today, are the cockroaches of the media's nuclear winter. This sector's future is still unclear, and that serves as the strap for this post.

To my mind the most fascinating panel was the next one with several people doing "Frontline" journalism:

Guardian's Kevin Anderson - talking about the realtime covering of events in the USA over 3 weeks, it created both time/geotagged diary and a following

Guy Degen of the Frontline club in Georgia/Azerbaijan - found Twitter, audioboo, qik very useful even in tough locations- a small twitter community so no following possible. Also covered Winnenden shooting in Germany - noted that original media hashtag was #Amoklauf (amok-walk), which had to be toned down latere
Mark Jones of Reuters told their story of how Twitter use went from disbelief to addiction - able to implement as despite some scepticism, people reckoned if they don't do it others will. They also went through the experiences and learnings from various sessions that did,

Moeed Ahmad of Al Jazeera talked about using various types of realtime data capture - it was useful picking up on lots of data on ground as it happened. There Twitterstream big when Twitter's @ev picked it up and 70,000 people following him then picked it up.

They also showed the data maps they used as they gathered it (see picture above)

There was an interesting question on handling disinformation, I got the impression that this hadn't been considered yet (probably not a big issue, but it surely will become it)

It was interesting listening to people talking about what tools they used, and what tools they would like to see:

- Version of tweetdeck that sorts wheat from chaff
- Add video to twt
- Twitter doesn't work for organising stuff when you're interacting with large numbers (can't fix that as Twitter is Pub/Sub, email is a better architecture in my view)

Last session was on Local news, main points I noted (apologies, didn't record who said what) were:

- Twitter has much the same impact on local as on other news

- till 4 years ago journos didn't have to think about distribution, or crowdsourcing of news - cf flashnews - now they do.

- be-local: people very interested in things that are local - key is to let local people connect. Once they meet in real life, get a whole new dynamic too

- How to make money? ( Local porn said one wag ). In past Newscos used to sell audience, not content - need to find new ways of selling the audience, not just Ads.

- Local and niche can do well - "Towcester news" and "Toaster news"

- I can decide what is local for me - adds value

Christian Payne (@documentally) also spoke with Geri Jackson of SW Radio Africa on how to do media when the tech is minimal eg texting to Zimbabwe - apparently people leave mobiles with relatives in Zim to get the news through.

There is also a whole Twitterstream on it over here and Adam Tinworth's more detailed feed is over there