broadstuff

So, the last resort of Advertising is getting people to pimp stuff to their followers - Mr John Chow, with 50,000 Twittwr followers:

....earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M’s with customized faces, messages and colors.

Mr. Chow is among a growing group of celebrities, bloggers and regular Internet users who are allowing advertisers to send commercial messages to their personal contacts on social networks. For the last month, he has used the services of Ad.ly, a start-up based in Los Angeles, and Izea, based in Orlando, Fla., to periodically surrender his Twitter stream to the likes of Charter Communications, the Make a Wish Foundation and an online seminar about working from home.

In October, Mr. Chow’s income from Twitter ads was around $3,000. “I get paid for pushing a button,” he said.

It is perhaps the last frontier in advertising — getting regular people to send a sentence or two of text, on behalf of paying advertisers, to their friends and admirers.

(From the New York Times)

Brilliant. Just Brilliant. And do you think the next turn of this particular game will be:

(i) Followers are delighted that you are advertising to them and sign up in droves

(ii) Followers will decide you are compromised and sign off in droves

(iii) Followers will ignore the Ads and keep on listening if the other content is good enough

Now your instinct is probably (iii) - to start with. But what will happen as a larger and larger % of people start to pimp Ads through Twitter onto your flowstream? Or as one person pimps more Ads through themself.

Advertising, like tourism, tends to kill the thing it loves over time because it suffers from tragedy of the commons effects (if no in-system mechanism exists to moderate Ads) and its usual response to the lessening impact of Ads is to increase the volume. Which upstets more people....

If I were the Twitterpeople, I'd be very careful..... in the Twitter Ecosystem these act something like parasites, and they may well damage the host if it is not careful.

Update: Useful analysis of the issues from Going Social Now (abridged below):

1. Your users can revolt with mass un-following
The twitterati who stand to gain the most, will need to test how comfortable their followers are with receiving these advertisements. Formats, frequency and content - all need to be figured out. Because these are new formats (and frankly speaking, the whole platform is still very new), we do not know what will work as yet. We all get irritated by people who tweet a bit too much as it is.

2. Lack of technological sophistication may kill the model
If a Google adwords model is put in place and we start seeing ads on twitter in droves, there will probably be a strong backlash. Unlike other platforms, you currently can't cookie a user who's seeing an advertisement on Twitter. So if I follow five twitter users who accept advertising, there's a chance that I may see the same advertisement from each of them in the span of an afternoon. That would be problematic. The networks need to be implemented with the right technology infrastructure behind it. Twitter must help here.

3. Black box ROI that makes it difficult to compare
Click thru rates cannot provide enough ROI - there will need to be CPM models in place as well. The problem is that there are few good ways to measure impressions. Sure you have the number of followers but that doesn't mean that the total number of followers actually saw the ads. The problem is compounded when you have people using twitter applications to access their streams. There's no way of finding out whether a user has actually seen a tweet. You also need to know whether the users fit your target demographics.

4. Advertisers choose not to intrude on conversations
Advertisers are savvy group of people. They're also increasingly sensitive about how their brands are perceived in the social media space. And by sensitive I don't just mean that they're worried about someone speaking ill of them but about appearing to be invading on a user's social world too. It is left to be seen how many advertisers will sign up for twitter ad networks. Many will probably take a wait and see approach. The last thing an advertiser would want is a backlash against their brand. I for one would recommend that advertisers invest in developing their own social voices first before experimenting with twitter ad formats.

5. Lack of transparency hurts the Twitter trust model
It is sometimes easy to forget that twitter is built on trust. We share more than we realize often because we trust that no one will use the information against us. Our followers reward us with their attention and the conversations that ensue. If there's no transparency in the twitter advertising, some of that trust will be broken. Before you know it, the FTC will feel obliged to institute guidelines or requirements for advertising in this space too. So there's a risk that the advertising may not be as transparent as it should be. And that's where disclosure codes like those recommended by Jon Burg will matter a lot. Maybe these twitter ad networks can build disclosure codes into their platforms?

As with popups, I'd assume that there will be an early market for plugins to kill the Ads (TwAkismet anyone?)

I was impressed with the good sense and brevity of Grame Pieterz' short essay "How To Fix Capitalism" as it seemed a good, pithy set of points that any New economic manifesto could start with. I emailed Grame to ask if I could nail it up on my door, as it were. The full essay with all its many links is on Graeme's site, along with many of his other thoughtful pieces, so go there if you want the Full Monty, but here is the paste-up:

How To Fix Capitalism

The recession and the crisis and banking are the least of the reasons for thinking that we need reforms. the crisis of capitalism goes much deeper: the influence big business has on governments (and the warped policies this leads to), increasing central control of the economy and the general move away from free markets.. I have some modest proposals on how to fix capitalism.

Break up monopolies and oligopolies

Under existing competition (anti-trust in American) laws, it is necessary to prove abuse of the monopoly. This allows a business to avoid competition, because it has not been proved to have used particular practices. Competition may be locked out (for example, by network effects) and consumers may suffer from a lack of innovation or product quality, but none of that is illegal.

The solution is to assume that monopolies are harmful and should be broken up. Either this should be an invariable rule, or it should be up to the monopolist to prove that the monopoly is somehow beneficial. An exception should be made for natural monopolies, but the price of that should be tight regulation, nationalisation, or (best of all) mutualisation.

That still leaves the problem of olgopolies. The answer is simple: break up any company with enough market share to have a noticeable influence on prices — say more than 5% nationally or 10% at a city/county level. Again, they would need to make the case of exceptions.

Doing this would also mean that there would be no “too big to fail” banks, so a financial crisis would be easier to solve: let them go bust and nationalise the assets and liabilities.

Remove barriers to entry

- Abolish patents. They have not been proven to speed progress: the evidence seems to be to the contrary. They definitely increase costs, are an inefficient way of funding R & D and allow oligopolists to block competition.
- Reduce the copyright term to the optimal length suggested by research of about 15 years. It ought to be obvious that works produced in the reign of Queen Victoria should not be in copyright in the 21st century.
- Exclude works distributed with DRM from copyright to ensure that copyright works do fall into the public domain when the copyright expires.
- Reduce the copyright term on computer software to two years, and make copyright contingent on disclosing source code (so others can alter the software when it comes out of copyright).
- Abolish region of origin rules. It should be legal to describe a Cava (when selling it) as having been made in the same way as Champagne.
- Abolish unnecessarily restrictive licensing. Many US states require people to be licensed to work as interior designers or hairdressers. I can understand requiring doctors or auditors to be licensed, but these are just barriers to entry.

Reduce bureaucracy

The best example of the problem (or opportunity from his point of view) that I have heard, is something Ted Tuppen, the founder and CEO of the huge British pub chain Enterprise Inns, said. I may not have got the wording exactly right, but, as I remember it, it was:

There will always be pubs available to buy because owners of free houses are driven out of the business by the amount of bureaucracy.

Small businesses cannot cope with tight regulation. Big businesses can hire teams of lawyers and paper-pushers. This is one of the many problems with patents. The government, far from discouraging oligopolies, is actually encouraging their formation.

Stop being “business friendly”

People seem to be thinking much less clearly about this now than they did in the 18th century. Back then, the business friendly ideology was called “mercantilism”, and it was this was the primary source of opposition to free markets. Now, governments profess to be other in favour of free markets and “business friendly”.

Of course, what businesses sometimes want free markets, for example they do not want to regulated. On the other hand they also want to minimise competition, reduce costs, receive subsidies and form cartels. Businesses are usually in favour of free markets in general, but not in the specific case of their own industry.

The new mercantilism is the root cause of the problems most of my other proposals seek to solve. It has also lead to a failure to regulate properly. The obvious examples are the clear failures in the regulation of banks (such as allowing deposit takers to have high risk investment banking operations), but there are others: the US broke up Standard Oil and AT & T, but failed to break up Microsoft, reflecting the general trend towards letting businesses do as they like.

New mercantilism has dropped the one aspect of the 18th century form that I find has some redeeming features: economic nationalism. Democracy is compromised by the economic pressure tyrants can bring in a globalised economy. I also find it extremely odd that governments will minutely examine an applicant for a holiday visa, but allow a dubious foreign tycoon to gain great influence within their country by buying influential businesses.

New mercantilism is dishonest. It does not openly oppose free markets. Instead it relies on conflating free markets with capitalism.

Financially penalise large businesses

This idea is simple. Tax big companies more. This will discourage mergers except where there are clear gains. British tax law already has lower rates for small companies, but this does not go far enough. The rates should keep increasing as companies get larger (at the moment there are no further increases on companies with profits greater than £1.5m: I would suggest bands at say £15m, £150m and £1.5bn as well). Obviously, we would need similar systems in all major economies.

The size criteria should not be based on profit. It should be based on value added: so a big company that has a bad year would not see its tax rate reduce (obviously taxes paid would do down in proportion to profit).

Give shareholders control

Shareholders are supposed to the owners of a company, but in the case of large listed companies this control is limited. This does lead to problems:

- Shareholders have to resort to expensive and disruptive means such as accepting hostile takeover bids to replace incompetent management — this also tends to encourage consolidation where there is no real economic benefit.
- Management have an incentive to focus on the short term. They can take their bonuses and leave, while accumulating problems for the future.
- Management tend to overpay themselves. As J.K. Galbraith said: “The high salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market reward for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture from an individual to himself.”
- Management indulge their egos, by engaging in exciting takeovers, and risky businesses, rather than getting on with the humdrum but reliably profitable. It is impossible to prove what people were thinking, but it is hard not to believe that this contributed to the destruction of GEC/Marconi

Reject the corrosive “greed is good” ideology

Adam Smith never intended that the idea of the “invisible hand” should be interpreted as meaning that people should pursue their own interests, and that this would lead to an optimum outcome. He wrote extensively on morality.

The reason for those troublesome bonus schemes for directors is that it is assumed that they would not run the company as well as they could unless they were “incentivised” with payments for success. This contradicts management theory: Herzberg classifies pay as a “hygiene factor”, a poor motivator compared to, for example, job satisfaction.

What is even worse is that by telling people that they are expected to be selfish, they become more selfish. Economics students become more selfish because they are repeatedly taught to expect that people are rational and selfish: the association between the two can only strengthen the effect.

Society is permeated, especially in business, politics and economics, with the idea that is people pursue their own interests, this will automatically lead to the best outcome, and that, therefore, people should be selfish. This cannot be fixed by endless incentives to align interests: life and business is too complex for that to work. A free market is not a substitute for integrity.

Break the loop

What matters most is the rejection of the new mercantilism, which will at least stop things getting worse, but we still need to undo the legislation and the structures that have been put into place at the behest of the mercantilists. The two go together: the rise of the new mercantilism is partly the result of the lobbying power of large corporations. Break them up and reduce their power and they lose their influence.

Education is also important. Most people cannot, at the moment, distinguish between capitalism and free markets, or see the parallels between the original and the new mercantilism.

Personally I would add some stuff around the need for social policies to mediate against the worst effects of economic change into this - But if you were going to write a Manifesto for a New Economy, this ain't a bad place to start.....

Looks like Second Life is on its way to join the choir invisibule. Once upon a time (in 2006) it was ubercool to put you business on Second Life. Now its not - BBC quoting Wired's Ben Hammersley being Wise in Hindsight (Wired et al hyped it to the nines at the time - restraint was not their watchword, I recall ):

"The first to go online would make the front page of the Guardian," Mr Hammersley says. "But when you're the 15th country who goes on Second Life, no magazine, no newspaper touches it."

Some businesses and users found it wasn't quite for them. The technology wasn't easily grasped and some computers couldn't handle it.

Second Life has had to temper its ambitions for the quality of graphics to extend its accessibility across varying speeds of broadband around the world, leading to complaints about the cartoony look and feel of the site.

In other words the Marketing/PR/Meedja industry is no longer interested, so it must - therefore - be dying.

What can we say - we thought - and still think - that its a great environment for Real Geeks to self express themselves, and it will carry on as such but as a model for mass market marketing we believed - correctly, clearly - that it would suck. It requires skill and dedication to use, and grockles don't have that.

A prediction - this is the "Second Life is Now At The Bottom Of the Slogh Of Despond" article, signaling the slide down the Hype Curve is complete. in about, oh, 2012 when broadband is better, the standard laptop is more powerful and navigation software is better people will "Rediscover" virtual worlds as the New New Thing. And by then it will be up for mass market commercialisation.

Watching a fascinating story unfold in real time on the blogosphere (I saw it on Twitter first). There has been a hack on one of the main Pro Global Warming group's files and it turns out that they maybe were being a little economical with the truth - NYT:

Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mails, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Not entirely surprised, it's been clear that the AGW - Anthropomorphic (Human Caused) Global Warming - industry has been an "industry" - ie has a lot of money is riding on it - for quite a few years now, so there is now a huge investment by vested interests. To be honest its always irritated me somewhat as I know enough maths* to know that most of the allegations of man made warming activity are just noise in the standard deviation of Good Old Gaia, which is in addition quite a complex system and can flip from state to state quiet fast. Also a mere smidgen of historical research makes you realise the world has been warmer than today even in recent millenia (grapes were grown in Yorkshire in Roman times and cattle grazed in a green Greenland in early medieval times for example).

But I am in favour of reducing reliance on fossil fuels and ensuring our energy consumption is optimised on purely rational "what happens when its gone" basis, so its been an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing as the sceptic lobbies are heavily populated by the Status Quo and do need quite a big push to do the right thing - and they are certainly no angels in this either.

I've long felt the risk that the populist AGW argument was too over the top and that it would eventually crash and burn and take all the good pro Global Warming science down with it. In that respect this is quite worrying.

There are also three useful internet based lessons from this:

- The truth will out, eventually - and its usually not a techy issue, its good old human intervention at the heart of the system. (i.e. when you write an email, think - would I like this read out in public?)

- Once out, its gone - this stuff has been mirrored on servers across the world.

- Once its out, hordes of people will start to spend brain cycles looking at it, and start to talk about it, and put together a more accurate analysis - and with modern social media tools they will do it fast, and people like me will read it and comment, and write about it......

The resulting broahaha should be very entertaining, at any rate. Should make the Copenhagen conference quite a bunfight.

*being a qualified engineer I've not only studied (a lot of) maths, but physics, chemistry and thermodynamics as well.... not that many pundits feel the need to be constrained by these things in this debate!

Broadstuff was one of the nominees for the BIMA Best Blog Awards 2009. We didn't win (some other no-good dun rotten b*stard did ) but it was great to be there. The champagne sparkled, the conversation sparkled, the women sparkled, the big ball on the KoKo club roof sparkled, the Compere sparkled, the men had at least changed their underwear - most excellent evening, all in all.

And a bonus - it was at Mornington Crescent tube station!

Quite a few people whose opinion I respect said Broadstuff was Quality. Congrats to the winners - and there is always next year

A very interesting snippette on TechCrunch re Techmeme:

About a year ago, tech news aggregator Techmeme hired Megan McCarthy as its first dedicated human editor. Founder Gabe Rivera clearly liked the idea; he’s now added three more, doubling the size of the staff.

Signals two things:

(i) Pure algorithm aggregation is not efficient enough, it needs an edi.... sorry, "curator" is the New Word.

(ii) This impacts the economic scalability of the electronic aggregation newspaper story (we assume this is to give them 24x7x365 curation coverage rather than just increased story covearge per se).

So, for those of you building your E-Newsheets in teh garages, take the "Edi"...sorry, "Curator" cost line and x 3 from Yr 2 onwards.

Update - 1 day later, and a report saying that Techmeme is profitable:

However, Rivera's algorithm is still the backbone. It's the secret sauce that allows small, no-name blogs to reach the top of the pile every once in a blue moon. It does so based on a formula that takes into account who's linking to a page and how influential those sources are, Rivera vaguely explained.

But rather than code in small tweaks to the system in order to fix mistakes, as he had been doing for years, Rivera went with the human touch. He realized that "the most cost-effective thing would be to hire an editor," he said.

"The algorithmic changes continue," Rivera said. "But then once we started that, we discovered new opportunities for the two to work in tandem."

Rivera has similar projects covering politics, celebrity gossip and baseball. But Techmeme is the flagship.

"Techmeme is the product that is the most valuable, that I'm most proud of, that pays bills," Rivera said. Indeed, it's profitable and has never accepted an outside investor

.

I'm sure they have done the numbers, but its still interesting that the numbers say never mind the software, get in the wetware....

danah boyd (no, its not a typo, apparently she spells her name all in lower case) delivered a paper yesterday at the NY Web 2.0 Expo which, it would seem, did not go down too well with some of the audience, which is a pity as it was quite interesting in a number of ways. I wasn't there, but parsing the Twittersteam it seems like she read it, too fast, and some people got frustrated and vented on the Twitterwall behind her, then her supporters jumped in and...well, I'm not a fan of Twitterwalls while people are speaking (see The Great Twitterwall Hijack bit here) for just this reason, and it shows total disrespect of the speaker. But then, I also think reading badly from notes is a bit disrespectful of a paying audience (and besides, a Social Media Expert should know what to expect - those who live by the twt..... ). I think danah appreciated this, as she later apologised, so kudos to her.

Anyway, the paper itself was really quite intriguing, as it is one of the first I have seen from the coterie of webpeople whom I normally consider the Evangelistii of the Social Media scene about some of its real challenges, and its worth reading carefully therefore. Given y'all are far too busy/lazy/stoned for that , we've done our normal service of expurgating, expostulating and explaining it for you. The paper starts with:

LIVING IN STREAMS

In his seminal pop-book, Csikszentmihalyi argued that people are happiest when they can reach a state of "flow." He talks about performers and athletes who are in the height of their profession, the experience they feel as time passes by and everything just clicks. People reach a state where attention appears focused and, simultaneously, not in need of focus at the same time. The world is aligned and it just feels right.

.......

Those who are most enamored with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in-tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate. This state is delicate, plagued by information overload and weighed down by frustrating tools.

"Flow" is the new Metaphor de Jour of the Web-Set. Of course, many people have written about being "in the zone", "in flow", "letting the force be with you" etc over the last 20 years or so, and it picks up Dave Winer's concept of the "River of News" - but picking the guru with the longest and most unpronounceable name is clearly de rigeur . The problem with this concept of being "In the Flow" is in the last line - "This state is delicate, plagued by information overload and weighed down by frustrating tools". Put it another way - there is too much stuff today for you to have a hope of being in The Flow without drowning, unless there is a vigorous and ruthless filtering process and a hefty use of easy to see metadata.

FROM BROADCAST TO NETWORKED

For the last few centuries, we have been living in an era of broadcast media, but we have been switching to an era of networked media. This fundamentally alters the structure by which information flows.

''''''

Internet technologies are fundamentally dismantling and reworking the structures of distribution. Distribution is a process by which content creators find channels through which they can disseminate their creation. In effect, they're pushing out the content. Sure, people have to be there to receive it, but the idea is that there are limited channels for distribution and thus getting access to this limited resource is hard. That is no longer the case.

As networked technologies proliferate around the world, we can assume that there is a channel of distribution available to everyone and between everyone. In theory, anyone could get content to anyone else. With the barriers to distribution collapsing, what matters is not the act of distribution, but the act of consumption. Thus, the power is no longer in the hands of those who control the channels of distribution, but those who control the limited resource of attention. This is precisely why YOU were the Person of the Year. Your attention is precious and valuable. It's no longer about push; it's about pull. And the law of two feet is now culturally pervasive.

I have a slightly different take on this. The Internet Is Different, but the way the medium is really restructuring the media is not around YOU, its around THEM. Voting YOU as person of the year masked An Inconvenient Truth - ie that in fact the real game is shifting from a set of Broadcasting Aggregators to a set of New Media Aggregators (Facebook, Google, Apple etc) who are all busy trying to build their own monopolistic walled gardens across the entire value chain from content creation through to proprietary user device. At least in the Olde Worlde if I bought a TV set it showed everyone's channels, and it still does on the PC whereas with a Kindle or iPhone I only get what the aggregator chooses to provide me with (AOL 2.0 anyone?). YOUR contribution is not yours either - the T&C of these sites abrogate it to themselves, which is why they can then sell themselves for squillions while YOU get nothing, even though the biggest value component in the sale is YOUR user data and potential attention to Advertising. Privacy is now a fungible good......

Now its gets very interesting, because at this point the paper changes tone significantly - the stuff above is pretty much straight from the Kool Aid 2.0 spigot, but danah's next section on 4 Challenges that need to be solved for this to work are perceptive and practical - and admit to there being problems! Which makes me wonder if the above stuff is just the liturgical form one uses before getting into the real sermon:

FOUR CORE ISSUES

1) Democratization. Switching from a model of distribution to a model of attention is disruptive, but it is not inherently democratizing. This is a mistake we often make when talking about this shift. We may be democratizing certain types of access, but we're not democratizing attention. Just because we're moving towards a state where anyone has the ability to get information into the stream does not mean that attention will be divided equally. Opening up access to the structures of distribution is not democratizing when distribution is no longer the organizing function.

Some in the room might immediately think, "Ah, but it's a meritocracy. People will give their attention to what is best!" This too is mistaken logic. What people give their attention to depends on a whole set of factors that have nothing to do with what's best. At the most simplistic level, consider the role of language. People will pay attention to content that is in their language, even if they can get access to content in any language. This means Chinese language content will soon get more attention than English content, let alone Dutch content or Hebrew content.

Absolutely, and I think it reflects the real organisation of the new media structures as owned by a new breed of aggregator, as I described above. Danah is politely vague here, but in blunt terms it means that the long tail is there for being jerked, and the jerks are more likely to follow a Celebrity on Twitter who knows f*ck-all about X, but take their opinion on X over someone more qualified. She again alludes to this when she notes:

2) Stimulation. People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the "best" or most informative content, but that which triggers a reaction.

This isn't inherently a good thing. Consider the food equivalent. Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they're rare in nature. Thus, when they come around, we should grab them. In the same way, we're biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we're not careful, we're going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We'll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.

..........

Of course, there's money here and people will try to manipulate this dynamic for their own purposes. There are folks who put out highly stimulating content or spread gossip to get attention. And often they succeed, creating a pretty unhealthy cycle. So we have to start asking ourselves what balance looks like and how we can move towards an environment where there are incentives for consuming healthy content that benefit individuals and society as a whole. Or, at the very least, how not to feed the trolls.

Social Media as the new Opiate of the Masses! Its hard to think about any supplier driven "balance" working giving the new super-aggregators are all commercial entities, and are far less regulated than the TV, Radio or even print media ever were. If I were to bet on this, I'd say that the pressure to regulate Digital Media - much as media before it - will be a growth industry in the next 10 years or so. We are already seeing very worrying trends - and emerging counter resistance - around privacy and security.

Her next point is about the risky nature of everyone getting this day their own Daily Me:

3) Homophily. In a networked world, people connect to people like themselves. What flows across the network flows through edges of similarity. The ability to connect to others like us allows us to flow information across space and time in impressively new ways, but there's also a downside.

Prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, and power are all baked into our networks. In a world of networked media, it's easy to not get access to views from people who think from a different perspective. Information can and does flow in ways that create and reinforce social divides. Democratic philosophy depends on shared informational structures, but the combination of self-segmentation and networked information flow means that we lose the common rhetorical ground through which we can converse.

Throughout my studies of social media, I have been astonished by the people who think that XYZ site is for people like them. I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men. I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that.

As danah points out, the Technology does not inherently disintegrate social divisions. In fact, more often then not, in reinforces them. We have always been able to pick our narratives,(eg you read a left or right leaning newspaper depending on your wont) but the ability to micro-configure is Internet Age. The only people up to now who have had this capability have been recluses and very powerful people with toadies surrounding them. Neither model suggests a happy outcome. "Daily Me" advocated talk of a "Serendipity Switch" - I think an "Uncomfortable News" switch may be more in order. She believes that only a small percentage of people are inclined to seek out opinions and ideas from cultures other than their own, and that these people are and should be highly valued in society. I think she is right on the former and wrong on the latter. The last thing people comfortable with their own opinions value is some outsider telling them they're wrong. Shooting messengers is a time honoured human blood sport

4) Power. When we think about centralized sources of information distribution, it's easy to understand that power is at stake. But networked structures of consumption are also configured by power and we cannot forget that or assume that access alone is power. Power is about being able to command attention, influence others' attention, and otherwise traffic in information. We give power to people when we give them our attention and people gain power when they bridge between different worlds and determine what information can and will flow across the network.

.........

In a broadcast model, those who control the distribution channels often profit more than the creators. Think: Clear Channel, record labels, TV producers, etc. Unfortunately, there's an assumption that if we get rid of limitations to distribution, the power will revert to the creators. This is not what's happening. Distribution today is making people aware that they can come and get something, but those who get access to people's attention are still a small, privileged few.

Instead, what we're seeing a new type of information broker emerge. These folks get credit for their structural position. While the monetary benefits are indirect, countless consulting gigs have arisen for folks based on their power as information brokers. The old controllers of information are losing their stature (and not happy about it). What's emerging is not inherently the power of the creators, but the power of the modern day information brokers.

This is actually quite extraordinary stuff - when one of the Evangelisti starts to talk about the totally non-meritocratic structure of social media, about the lack of balance in the interests of broker, creator and user, that a a totally self selected experience is bad and that all power corrupts, whether its from People we Hate or People We Love. its (almost) a Pauline conversion (or at least a Neo Keensian one ). What does amuse me about the Olde Guard of the 2.0 Webset is that they just...can't....bring....them...selves....to.....talk....about....what...You-Know-Hoogle et al are up to because these were held up in the original Old Testament 2.0 as Prophets of the revolution, even when its becoming increasingly clear that Net Neutrality is less of an issue than Aggregator Neutrality. Countless small time consultants is not the issue here, its a chimera for the real Information Brokers - the walled citadels over the flow of information that the New Media Aggregators are trying to build.

In her section "Making it Work" I think there are two insightful bits - Firstly:

We need technological innovations. For example, tools that allow people to more easily contextualize relevant content regardless of where they are and what they are doing and tools that allow people to slice and dice content so as to not reach information overload. This is not simply about aggregating or curating content to create personalized destination sites. Frankly, I don't think this will work. Instead, the tools that consumers need are those that allow them to get into flow, that allow them to live inside information structures wherever they are, whatever they're doing. The tools that allow them to easily grab what they need and stay peripherally aware without feeling overwhelmed.

And Secondly:

.....we need to rethink our business plans. I doubt this cultural shift will be paid for by better advertising models. Advertising is based on capturing attention, typically by interrupting the broadcast message or by being inserted into the content itself. Trying to reach information flow is not about being interrupted. Advertising does work when it's part of the flow itself. Ads are great when they provide a desirable answer to a search query or when they appear at the moment of purchase. But when the information being shared is social in nature, advertising is fundamentally a disruption.

Figuring out how to monetize sociality is a problem. And not one new to the Internet. Think about how we monetize sociality in physical spaces. Typically, it involves second-order consumption of calories. Venues provide a space for social interaction to occur and we are expected to consume to pay rent. Restaurants, bars, cafes… they all survive on this model. But we have yet to find the digital equivalent of alcohol.

Or we charge entrance fees......

All in all a very useful discussion, even the more so as it marks - in my opinion anyway - a more "official" recognition of The Dark Side of Social Media than has previously been the case. That it was combined with a live demonstration of the downsides on the Twitterwall just puts the bow on the show......

If you liked this post, don't forget to vote for Broadstuff for the British BIMAs 2009 Best Blog Award . If you hated it, vote anyway.....

Stephen Fry, as quoted on Techblorge

Like with the printing press, Twitter [has] changed the situation. People like me, Twillionaires, we can cut out the press from our PR requirements. It used to be a pact with the devil. You wanted to inform the press about a new film and they said they will interview you, but only if they are allowed to ask you around other themes about your private life.

Today, Britney Spears tells her PR manager, ‘Why should I care about this journalist of this newspaper with a big circulation? I will reach their circulation just by typing into my keyboard.’ So well, whole newspapers are on the one side filled with resentment against Twitter, on the other side they are using it and searching Twitter messages.

Twitter is about participating – by which I mean you tweet and read other people’s tweets. Then you understand it, and get its rhythm. But remember: It is about being authentic. These things are human-shaped.

It is important for all of us to understand its [Twitter’s] nature. It is human shaped, not business shaped. And the swell will move elsewhere if you try to make it all neat and attractive. The greatness and the magnitude of its energy will all move.

This was from his turn at the Exploring the State of Now 140 Conference ( didn't go, there have been so many "140" type conferences in London recently and this one was charging silly money to see the same old crowd )

I get that celebrities can disintermediate their own media circusses, but I must say I am intrigued by the notion of it being "human" shaped rather than "business" shaped (given that what he just described before seems very business shaped to me). Plays well to the Social Media kool aid drinkers I'm sure, but I'm danged if I know what he really meant - so I asked Twitter for some thoughts and here they came:

@kevinmarks - with google you type an intention into a box and expect a machine; with twitter you type an emotion and expect a human (Kevin has blogged his thoughts here)

@DT - Er.... human not business...? just submitting a support ticket....(see David's reply in teh comments below)

@hyuz - StephenFry reminded us that people tweet in chatter style . Its not 'designed' for business so biz must engage on same level.

@loudmouthman - well its made up of wibbly-wobbly peoply-weoply type stuff which might explain that better !

and...

....twitter isnt Human Shaped or Business shaped. Its Keyboard shaped.

Update - check out the very smart comments.....

I'm afraid I've probably been around too long and have hype-o-chondria but I'm on @loudmouthman's side - I can see nothing in its architecture that says its "human shaped" per se (although maybe in its flexibility its human shaped), but its full of people who believe it is (or full of business people who want peeply weoply people to believe it?) and use it for human things. I suppose its human shaped in that when I type an Intention into a box on Twitter I get a multiplicity of conflicting answers

If you liked this post, don't forget to vote for Broadstuff for the British BIMAs 2009 Best Blog Award . If you hated it, vote anyway.....

So this last weekend, finally, the first and most famous bonkblogger Belle de Jour outed herself as Dr Brooke Magnanti, PhD (or was possibly neo-outed, as Paul Carr suggests)

At SXSW earler this year there was a panel on Scandals in Social Networks, hosted by Techmeme's (nee Valleywag's) Megan McCarthy. Girl with a One Track Mind's Zoe Margolis was telling her post-outing story. So now, with Belle’s ringing in my ears I realised there may be a pattern here, and started to get interested in the underlying Game Theory of what makes up a Scandal.

The payoff table seems fairly clear - a racy blog gets lots of readers but little money, a book gets paying readers but there are limits to what marketing (and thus sales) can be achieved if you are anonymous - no book tours, signings, lectures etc. But an outed, scandal grade celebrity - now that really shifts sales into another dimension.

In other words, its a fairly predictable, repeatable process, with differing outcomes based on the decisions made on how far to push it, and thus it can be modelled as a rational Game. This is fairly easy to do as a decision tree flowchart (pro/am, blog/don't blog, book/not book etc), with varying payoffs and costs at each decision point, and you can even put optimal timings in. (How long should one wait before getting outed, for example, to optimise revenues?).

(Fascinating update here - Belle pretty much confirms this in an interview with New Scientist)

So far so good - but it doesn't take long going down this line of thought before the bigger question emerges - why should anyone even find it even vaguely scandalous that a woman indulges herself with multiple males, even for cash? Its hardly news that women have wandering appetites, after all. Scratch any suburban street, biography or sociology study and you are likely to find many Dangerous Liaisons. And there is a time honoured tradition of students putting out to put themselves through college – besides, cash for services is the cornerstone of our capitalist system (and most others) anyhow, and this particular stock has been traded since the beginning of time.

Well, one traditional adage is to Follow The Money - or in this case, the Social Capital - or Makin' Whuffie by Makin Whoopee

I read something implying modern Celebrity culture - is driving changes to what constitutes "fame" - aka Whuffie - in medialand:

Welcome to the twenty-first century where the days of celebrity status are assessed by breast size, amount of marriages/divorces, and the number of tabloid covers appeared on. Long gone are the legitimate celebrities. The best of luck to you if you're trying to find a famous Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, or Lucille Ball in today's world, as it is a much-desired rarity. What has society morphed minds into? Has the media really lost control of what is deemed as newsworthy? What about global warming? The Bird Flu? When did these lose priority to Lindsay Lohan's alcohol addiction and Pamela Anderson's latest divorce?

There is something interesting in this, I'd argue that we are looking at the emergence of new definitions of what "winning" means, in that you can now make a decent income from being famous for being famous. Money comes from media attention, regardless of how its attained.

But then – I hear you ask – if its all about Whuffie, why are there so few bonkbloggers, and not so many?. Why are all those other Dangerous (ly Liaising) Housewives not blogging it all like billy-o if its such a good Whuffie generator? The answer, clearly, is that it is still considered very rational game theory not to yell to the rafters that they've been swinging from them. So, the really interesting bit about The Scandal comes from the fact that only a very small % do write about it publically.

So Scandal is therefore not a Whuffie game, Whuffie is more a result of Scandal and most players of this game still choose not to take the Whuffie. Why?

Its worth looking at that other favourite, the game theory of male vs female procreation. Sociobiologists explain the breeding game theory between our sexes as something like this:

- The optimal male strategy is to impregnate as many females as possible, and then motivate the females to bring up those offspring with as little of that male's input as possible.

- The optimal female strategy is to optimise the male gene input, and to then ensure there is sufficient (traditionally male - but watch this space) resource to bring up the offspring.

In both cases above, the male inputting the genes and the one bringing up the offspring need not be the same male. Unfortunately other bits of reproductive game theory also says that males are not particularly motivated to bring up other males' kids (most child homicide is by male partners of females with other males' children, for example - and that's true across many species, not just ours) as there is no payoff, genetically speaking, for their investment.

So the female traditionally, to ensure male resource has to either (i) stay faithful or (ii) hide the activity of her optimal gene selection activity. (Stable, Open relationships being very rare in all species)

And if option (ii) is the game being played (which is the case, statistically, in between c 20 and 30% of all relationships apparently), then a key part of option (ii) - hiding the activity - is to keep quiet about it. Hence the army of Mommybloggers out there are by and large keeping schtum on any extra-curricular schtupping.

This is Nature’s Old Game – but there are two very important modern shifts to this:

Firstly, reproductive independence - today human females can still catch and match, but – thanks to the Pill etc - not necessarily hatch. Biologically speaking this is a huge gamechange as no longer does male male input define female output.

Secondly, economic independence - in the past females required male assistance to bring up offspring safely, but this is less and less so today as more women achieve economic independence – either via work or state support.

So, looking at this emerging game board layout, I would thus hypothesize that most of the bonkbloggers do not have kids - or if they do, are single and either do not require economic aid or wish to get it independently, as that reduces the self-censorship requirements considerably. But I'd also hypothesise that even then most women would also find this strategy risky, as:

- if they are in a relationship but are also otherwise elsewhere engaged, then broadcasting it essentially removes the connection between having cake and eating it, and will in most cases guarantee loss of

- if they are not in a relationship, then publically signalling one's unwillingness to Stand By Your Man is a fairly strong tell for males - it’s a beacon for the Kiwis (eats, roots and leaves), a turnoff for the Marryin' Kind, and a no-no for any guy who suspects his one night stand will stand up, fully rated, for posterity on Posterous or Twitter etc.

In fact, listening to Zoe Margolis at SXSW both these issues came up post outing, and I suspect that - going back to the Payoff Table mentioned waaay up top - the true costs of bonkblogging are only seen way down the line and are thus not properly costed in by these particular (smalll set of) bloggers. Thus it is likely that this strategy of public disclosure will never be undertaken by more than a small % of women, though many more are engaging in it under covers, as it were.

But even so, why is it a Scandal? Why the prurient fascination with some girls writing about who comes naturally, given that they are just the tip of an iceberg? It's quite interesting looking at what makes a Scandal in sociological theory:

1. (Alleged) behaviour breaches the rules of conduct in a given community.
2. The breach becomes known and discussed beyond the limited circle of actors involved.
3. The breach cannot be ‘managed’ within existing mechanisms for redress.
4. Often, the breach calls into question existing rules of conduct OR structures of authority.

In other words a Scandal is not just about What, but is also about How The Game is Played. I would hypothesize that, in Game Theory terms, the dynamics of a Scandal can be re-written as:

1. Behaviours breach the Game Rules in a given gameboard
2. The Game Rules become known outside the community playing that game
3. Once out the box, they can't be put back, and this changes the old payoffs to the original community
4. The Game itself then starts to be questioned, which resets the payoff benefits and hurts the original players who succeeded most

To this I'd add two further hypotheses from observation, that for it to be a Really Good Scandal, then The Game in question must:

- belong to a Higher Whuffie in-crowd and give them some real advantage over the out-crowd (ie evokes a sense of being cheated in The Rest (thus firing up all our anti-cheating social adaptations* ).

- be seen as a non-optimal strategy (ie excite the rubbernecking fascination of watching a potential trainwreck)

So far so good - we know How this could be seen as potentially scandalous stuff, so Why is this particular issue so resonant. One thought is that the process of a good scandal is quite predictable, and thus it also gives us that thing all humans love - a Narrative structure that allows us to set things into context and retell it. A good Scandalous Narrative must have a:

1. Breach - 'a social drama first manifests itself as the breach of a norm, the infraction of a rule of morality, law, custom, or etiquette, in some public arena’ [Aka Game Defection]

2. Crisis - ‘… a mounting crisis follows, a momentous juncture or turning point in the relations between components of a social field. … Sides are taken, factions are formed, and … there is a tendency for the breach to widen and spread until it coincides with some dominant cleavage in … relevant social relations’.[Existing Game payoff structures are disturbed]

3. Redress - ‘certain adjustive and redressive mechanisms’ are introduced to limit the contagious spread of the breach. These range from personal advice and informal arbitration to formal legal machinery and sometimes the performance of a public ritual - victim as scapegoat. [Resetting of Game Payoff - or the promise of resetting (this may be a game in itself of course)]

4. Reintegration or schism. - ‘The final phase consists either in the reintegration of the disturbed social group … or the social recognition of irreparable breach between the contesting parties’ [New Game Rules agreed]

Fascinating how the rules of a good story and that of Scandal have strong parallels. A very good point made about a Really Good Scandal is that the Rules of the Original Game (ie the "values and norms") should not be clear initially:

values and norms are often contested features of social life, adhered to by some individuals and groups and rejected (or simply ignored) by others. Hence scandals are often rather messy affairs, involving the alleged transgression of values and norms which are themselves subject to contestation.’ (Taylor, Scandal and Social Theory)

Echoing this, on the way back from SXSW I read a fascinating book called "The Bolter", about the life of the "Between the Wars" 1920's Scandal Girl Lady Idina Sackville, who married 5 men and had scores of part time partners etc. But the thing that fascinated me was the reason why she was scandalous. Consider the scandal of her first marriage:

To set the scene, upper class Edwardian society marriages were, like M&A deals, mainly to secure todays assets tomorrow. True Lurve was a nice to have, but not essential component. Consequently it was considered quite normal that there was infidelity, so long as the heir and spare belonged to the correct husband. After that it was anybody's game, but the risk was by and large shared among the in-crowd by ensuring all further offspring were hatched within the married upper class set - ie all offspring (official, that is - there was a whole 'nother ruleset for unofficial ones) were in the extended familial system.

Idina's scandalous behaviour was essentially to actually marry for love and demand fidelity, a very new-fangled idea in that set. So when hubby started playing Edwardian away games, she eventually wanted out and divorced (via elopement- the only real way of a woman getting a quickie divorce then) said hubby when he was not prepared to only play the home fixtures.

We immediately now know why this was a Scandal

- She breached the rules by not condoning the existing cosy Edwardian (im)morality play.
- She did in it such a way as to make it very public to other lower status social groups
- Her strategy cut her off from the economic wellspring, as the elopement target was not as wealthy as said husband - not an optimal game outcome at the time at all.

She also did it at a time when the underlying "values and norms" were under great pressure. Due to the First World War, women were having to compete for far fewer men (so many men having been killed). In these situations, game theory predicts that women will have to be more competitive to win men and men will be less likely to marry them, and a win will be a fleeting win at best - so the woman will now more likely remain unmarried or frequently dumped. Today's Trophy Wives (many women chasing small numbers of very rich men) and The Underclass (many of the men are in prison / on drugs / etc so not ideal partners) are in similar Game situations.

In other words, to stand above the crowd, women had to resort to "more outrageous than thou" behaviour (hence the Roaring 20's). Also, the general shortage of men meant, for the new and unmarried debutantes in the Edwardian Upper Echelons finding a shortage of beaus, other people's husbands were increasingly fair game (and boy were they game), rattling the foundations of the previous order which pretty much demanded a wedding band as an entry stake to play the hand.

However, at the same time women had tasted economic and social independence from working during the War, so had emerged far more self confident and prepared to go for what they want. Thus Idina and her ilk are hardly unpredictable - the husbands see more candy, the wives are less prepared to let them taste it and also increasingly believe they can do better for themselves anyway, some kick the trend off – and bingo, someone has to be first starter bolting out the gate and you get Idina.

The other thing Idina did was to do it all extremely openly, necessary for The Scandal - she was a typical Celebrity of her day, so her every doing was reported in the toff red tops of the era - Tatler etc. If blogs were invented then.....

The rest of the book is fascinating as what it really describes is the trajectory of a woman just a few years ahead of a general trend curve (divorcing, remarrying, wanting independence for herself in all things including going after what and who she wanted). In other words, she was a Scandal mainly because she was an early adopter, as it were - behind her came a wave of social changes which blew away the Old Order completely.

Summing it all up, a good sex Scandal – when all is said and done – can be seen as a marker of early adoption of new social mores in the larger culture. So – are Belle de Jour, Girl with a One Track Mind etc just the early swallows in an increasing migration? It seems fairly predictable that as women's economic emancipation increases so will the frankness of their blogging and general honesty about their real feelings - but will it be perfectly normal for girls to work at being working girls for a few years in future too?

Update - I got interested in the payoff economics when a friend pointed me to the Sunday Times article which gave £200 ARPB (work it out...) and her operating 2-3 x a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, over 14 months. A quick calculation, rounding up to 200 events at £200 a go is c £40k. Thats how much you make without going public, and thats not a particular high, um, utilisation - you can see that its probably not too hard to reach 6 figures. The blog generated a column in the Telegraph, so economically probably nowher near the original activity. The next step is The Book, which allegedly had a "six figure advance" - can't get total sales, but its sold c 150,000 in 2007 alone so - assuming c £1 for the writer and several years running - its an order of magnitude above the original activity (and pays back for considerably longer). But you don't get that book selling that sort of number without the blog, I suspect.

*The game theory of cheating for humans is fascinating - we as a species really, really don't like it - numerous behavioural studies have shown we will take "irrational" actions (ones that make us poorer / get hurt / are long term destructive ) if we feel we've been cheated by someone. We prefer to cut off our nose to spite our face rather than have our noses rubbed in it. In other words, the risk of a poor (and probably unpredictable) payoff of being outed for infidelity tend to be more negative than the game player necessarily wants to face. Another reason for keeping schtum!

If you liked this post, don't forget to vote for Broadstuff for the British BIMAs 2009 Best Blog Award

Good article by Tim O'Reilly on the strong trends by various players to try and re-wall the Web - firstly by players with monopolies :

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

He also covers the Google/News International spat:

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

In fact, we've been arguing for a while that the hoo-hah over Net Neutrality is overdone, and the real emerging monopolists are upstream at the aggregation level (Google Neutrailty anyone?) and downstream at the device level. News International can be seen as a Content player trying to fight free of Aggregator monopoly (and form its own little power base, of course). Now to an extent this has all happened before.

To explain, if I may - at the top of this post is a good old 4-market model. In the 1990's the Internet came out tops over a bunch of walled Online Service Providers (OSPs) who were trying to be monopolists (or at least warring oligopolists) at the Aggregation Layer. But it won only because of some strong forces helping it.

Firstly the distributors - Telcos (those people everyone accuses of Net Un-neutrality now) were totally neutral in allowing anyone with a modem to connect to anyone. Secondly, at the time the main consumer device players (Apple, Microsoft) were provider-neutral in that they allowed you to connect to AOL or Prodigy or the 'Net. Thirdly, content was neutral in that AOL et al - despite trying - could not lock up the content online.

The issue now is that the monopolist forces are operating at the aggregation layer again, but also trying to build end to end walled gardens, from content to device. (Think Apple i-Series, Google's various forays from content to mobile phone)

Now Tim thinks that Microsoft will play the role of Open champion, when he says:

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

He also mentions IBM - they too would probably be better off with the Open web. In fact, the Distribution players - those guys the Net Neutralists love to hate - may well prove to be part of the Good Guys in this scenario as their interests align more with those who want to keep the device and aggregation levels open.

But I suspect that strong legislation - and a lot of user campaigning the like of which would make the Net Neutrality debate look like a coffee morning - is also required. But forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.