Buzzmachine

Facebook goes public: Zuckerberg in Public Parts & WWGD?

Buzzmachine - Wed, 02/01/2012 - 22:12

Relevant to the expected Facebook IPO announcement, here are excerpts from my interview with Mark Zuckerberg for Public Parts.

* * *

“I’m in the first generation of people who really grew up with the internet,” Zuckerberg tells me. “Google came out when I was in middle school. Then there was Amazon and Wikipedia and iTunes and Napster. Each year, there were new ways to access information. Now you can look up anything you want. Now you can get cool reference material. Now you can download any song you want. Now you can get directions to anything. The world kept on getting better and better.”

In his words, we hear the inherent optimism that fuels the likes of him: that with the right tools and power in the right hands, the world will keep getting better. “On balance, making the world more open is good,” Zuckerberg says. “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.” The optimist has to believe in his fellow man, in empowering him more than protecting against him. Zuckerberg believes he is helping us share, which will make the world more public and lead to greater transparency and trust, accountability and integrity. That, he says, is why he started Facebook—not, as The Social Network would have us believe, to get a girlfriend (he already had one, the same woman he still dates, Priscilla Chan) and not, as others say, because he is trying to force us into the public. He contends he is creating the tools that help people do what they naturally want to do but couldn’t do before. In his view, he’s not changing human nature. He’s enabling it.

“In the world before the internet and things like Facebook,” he says, “there was a huge amount of privacy through obscurity.” We didn’t have the choice and power we have now: “We had this culture where you were either a producer or a consumer.?.?.?.??It was a very bifurcated society—kind of unnatural.” That is, the tools of publicness, including the media, had been in the hands of the few; now they are in the hands of all. “So now the question isn’t, ‘Are you completely private?’ It’s, ‘Which things do you want to share and which things do you not?’?”

Zuckerberg says he wants to give his users control over what’s public and private. If that’s true, why does he keep getting in trouble regarding privacy? A few reasons: Some people complain that there aren’t enough privacy controls on Facebook. So the company adds controls. But then the complaint becomes that the controls are too complicated. When they are so complicated, users tend not to bother to adjust them and instead rely on Facebook’s default settings. Facebook has surprised its users with changes to those defaults, making them ever-more public—thus making its users more public, often whether they know it or not. And Facebook hasn’t been good at communicating with its users. When I tell Zuckerberg my thesis for this book about the benefits of sharing, he admits, “I hope you have better luck than we’ve had making that argument. I think we’re good at building products that hit the desire people have, not necessarily at expressing in English what the desire is.” Some would call that understatement. . . . .

In their efforts to motivate us to share, Facebook, Google, and other net services have a common, technohuman goal: to intuit our intent. They want to gather signals about us so they can tailor their content, services, and advertising to us. These services compete to find more ways to get us to generate signals—our locations, needs, tastes, relationships, ­histories—so they can recommend, say, the perfect restaurant for each of us, knowing where we are right now and what we like and who our friends are and what they like (and making money by giving us a well-targeted coupon for the establishment). These services come into conflict with privacy advocates because capturing and analyzing our signals to predict our desires can look to some like spying or mind reading. “How did you know I was going to France?” the skittish user wonders of Google. Likely because you searched for Paris, sir.

Zuckerberg believes that by giving you back information about your own life—your friends and what you and they like and do—you’ll get “a much clearer sense of what’s going on around you, allowing you to learn things you couldn’t otherwise—and just be better at being human.” The hubris is impressive: making better humans. Google merely wants to organize our information. Zuckerberg sees Facebook as a next step in the net’s evolutionary scale toward humanity. “They crawl the web,” he says. “But there’s nothing you can crawl to get information about people. It’s all in our minds. So in order to have that service, you need to build the tools that let people share.” He identifies what he contends is another difference between Facebook and its predecessors: “All the information that’s about you on Facebook, you chose to put there. The last wave of sites before that do not work that way.” Ad networks collect information about you from your behavior—in most cases anonymously—so they can target ads, but the process is opaque. “On Facebook, you get an ad about Green Day because you said you like Green Day.?.?.?.??I think these models where people have more control over stuff are going to be so much more powerful and expressive.” As he talks, I come to think of Google as the third-person web; it’s about others—them. Facebook endeavors to be the first-person web; it’s about me and us.

Zuckerberg has created an asset worth billions of dollars. Wall Street laughed—but the Valley didn’t—when Microsoft invested in Facebook in 2007 at a reported $15 billion valuation. By 2011, pundits pegged the value at $20 billion, $50 billion, even $100 billion. I believe he’s building something even bigger, with data as a new currency: We trade information about ourselves for information about what we want. Our reward is relevance. Zuckerberg disagrees with me, saying my thinking is not “the right frame.?.?.?.??I really think it’s more interaction-for-interaction than data-for-data.” Keeping users’ motives in mind is critical. Early location services—Google Latitude and Loopt—asked you to broadcast your location to the world without much reason to do so (and with some good reasons not to). Later services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places let you alert friends where you are so you can meet up. You interact with Facebook, telling it what you are up to, and in return you interact with friends. Interactions-for-interactions.

Zuckerberg contends that Facebook is not just a technology company but also a sociology company. I find that revealing. He’s not so much an engineer—he majored in both computer science and psychology—as he is a social engineer, building systems for humans, helping us do what we want to do?.?.?.??and what he wants us to do. Take Facebook friend lists. No one wants to sit down and make a list of friends. People say they want to—in Zuckerberg’s words—“subgroup their friends.” But in practice, who wants to bother? I have tried to subgroup contacts in my address book—fellow geeks here, journalism colleagues there, family here—but it’s tedious and I quickly give up. When you friend someone on Facebook and they friend you back, you end up with a list of your friends as a by?product. The reason you do it, Zuckerberg says, is because “it’s like a cool handshake. And then it’s the sum of 10 billion of those.” Once unlocked from their privacy, these small acts of publicness add up. “Some people just assume that being private is good,” Zuckerberg says, “whereas we’ve always come out saying no, no, people want to share some things and keep some things private and that’ll always be true. And as time goes on and more people find that it’s valuable to share things, they might share more things.” That is how he designs his systems, to make it fun and beneficial to share more and more.

Zuckerberg has his own, social version of Moore’s law—I call it Zuck’s law, though he doesn’t. It decrees: This year, people will share twice as much information as they did last year, and next year, they will share twice as much again. Facebook will expand to more users—from 750 million today to a billion soon?—and users will expand their sharing. Meanwhile, one Facebook investor, Yuri Milner, tells me that advances in artificial intelligence will get better and better at understanding and making use of all the service’s data. It has only just begun. “The default in society today still is, OK, I should not share it. The by?far default today is that everything’s anonymous,” Zuckerberg laments. “In the future, things should be tied to your identity, and they’ll be more valuable that way.” There is the master plan.

* * *

And here is a snippet from What Would Google Do? about Zuckerberg:

I sat, dumbfounded, in an audience of executives at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum International Media Council in Davos, Switzerland, as the head of a powerful news organization begged young Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, for his secret. Please, the publisher beseeched him, how can my publication start a community like yours? We should own a community, shouldn’t we? Tell us how.
Zuckerberg, 22 at the time, is a geek of few words. Some assume his laconicism is a sign of arrogance—that and his habit of wearing sandals at big business conferences. But it’s not. He’s shy. He’s direct. He’s a geek, and this is how geeks are. Better get used to it. When the geeks take over the world—and they will—a few blunt words and then a silent stare will become a societal norm. But Zuckerberg is brilliant and accomplished, and so his few words are worth waiting for.

After this publishing titan pleaded for advice about how to build his own community, Zuckerberg’s reply was, in full: “You can’t.”

Full stop. Hard stare.

He later offered more advice. He told the assembled media moguls that they were asking the wrong question. You don’t start communities, he said. Communities already exist. They’re already doing what they want to do. The question you should ask is how you can help them do that better.

His prescription: Bring them “elegant organization.”

Let that sip of rhetorical cabernet roll around on the palate for a minute. Elegant organization. When you think about it, that is precisely what Zuckerberg brought to Harvard—then other universities, then the rest of the world—with his social platform. Harvard’s community had been doing what it wanted to do for more than three centuries before Zuckerberg came along. He just helped them do it better. Facebook enabled people to organize their social networks—the social graph, he calls it: who they are, what they do, who they know, and, not unimportantly, what they look like. It was an instant hit because it met a need. It organized social life at Harvard.

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Efficiency over growth (and jobs)

Buzzmachine - Thu, 01/26/2012 - 10:29

The hook to every song sung at Davos is “jobs, jobs, jobs.” The chorus of machers on stages here operate under an article of faith that growth can come back, that they can stimulate it, that that will create jobs, and then that all will be eventually well.

What if that’s not the case? I am coming to believe, more and more, that technology is leading to efficiency over growth. I’ve written about that here.This notion is obviously true in some sectors of society: see news and media, retail, travel sales, and other arenas. But how many more sectors will this rule strike: universities? government? banking? delivery? even manufacturing?

As I write this, I’m watching a WEF panel moderated by Reuters’ editor, Steve Adler, with Larry Summers and government and business leaders. They’re discussing growth strategies and so far we’re hearing the same notions we hear elsewhere in Davos, the complete trick bag: spend money on infrastructure, be nice to business, regulate less, reform taxes, reform immigration. OK and OK.

“The problems of job creation are more complicated than that. They are more complicated than wealth creation,” says one of the panelists (operating under Chatham House Rule, so I won’t attribute*). “This is a group that understands wealth creation better than job creation.” He says “there are inherent limits” to the number of people employed in various sectors.

I haven’t heard any strategy yet that reverses the trends underway in the transition from the industrial economy to the digital economy. What will offset the shrinking of vast industries? New industries? Well, we have new, digital industries, but they are even more efficient than restructured old industries. Compare Google’s staff size to GM’s, even now. Facebook serves almost a billion people with the staff the size of a large newspaper. Amazon employes far fewer people than the bookstores it put out of business did. So those new industries will bring growth, profit, and wealth, but not many jobs.

“There are fewer jobs for regular people because those innovations happened than there would have been if those innovations hadn’t happened,” the panelist says. It would be “a delusion” to think that encouraging this innovation will increase jobs.

So what if the key business strategy of the near-term future becomes efficiency over growth? Productivity will improve. Companies will be more profitable. Wealth will be created. But employment will suffer.

I’m hearing no strategies focused on this larger transition in a gathering about the transition. I think that’s because the institutions’ trick bags are empty. They ran an industrial society. That’s over. And the entrepreneurs who will create new companies but also new efficiency aren’t yet in power to solve the problem they create.

I ask the panel whether all this talk of jobs, jobs, jobs is so much empty rhetoric. I ask whether there are other tricks in the bag.

The panelist I’ve been quoting says that there are two sets of economic issues: In the short term, for the next five years, we are dealing with demand and macroeconomic policy. “Employment today has nothing to do with the Kindle,” he says. “It has everything to do with the financial system, deleveraging, and macroeconomic policy.”

It’s in the long term that the issues I’m addressing here come to bear. “For the longer term, we don’t have nearly as good answers as we would like to,” he says. “We are going to have to embrace the idea that we are going to have growing numbers of people involved in the provision of fundamental services to other people, services like health care and education. We’re going to need to make that work for society.”

That is to say, health and education don’t directly create wealth; they are services funded in great measure by taxes of one sort or another. Employing people in those sectors amounts to a redistribution of wealth with the fringe benefit of providing helpful services. Is a service-sector economy the secret to growth? Who pays for that when fewer people have jobs in the productive economy? I still don’t see an answer. This is not an economic policy so much as it is a social policy.

Another panelist says that we will have fewer people and we will need to retrain people throughout their lives for new jobs. I agree. But that doesn’t create jobs (except in schools); it just helps fill the ones we have.

One more panelist, from Europe, suggests that nations here will end up making stuff for the growing economies and consuming middle classes of China, India, Brazil, etc. In a globalized world with maximum price competition, I’m not so sure that’s a strategy for growth, only survival. I’d hate to place my strategic bets on continuing — or returning to — the industrial economy. And at some point, that strategy bumps up against the question of sustainability: is there enough stuff to go around?

Indeed, in a globalized society, we need to look at total jobs, the sum of work and productivity and demand, not country-by-country. The question is: Will jobs on the whole increase in this digital economy?

If instead efficiency increases — and with it, again, productivity and profit — then great wealth can be created: see Google, and the technology economy. But that means the disparity of income and capital will only widen yet more. And it’s just wide enough today to cause unrest around the world. That’s much of what #Occupy_WEF et al is about. That’s what is causing such tsuris and uncertainty on the stages of the world (Economic Forum). That’s what is causing the institutions represented here to fear, resist, and regulate technology in the hopes of forestalling the change it is bringing. There is the root of the disruption we’re witnessing now even in Davos.

* I saw Summers later and he gave me permission to quote him by name. He is the quotable panelist.

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Davos, disrupted

Buzzmachine - Wed, 01/25/2012 - 09:53

I’m among the disrupted of Davos. Outside, there’s an #OccupyDavos encampment in igloos (really). Down the road, someone will be giving out an award to the worst company of the world. But the disruption is no longer outside. That’s what I sensed in past years; that’s what they wanted to believe here. Now the disruption is inside. Every institution is challenged. Every.

The World Economic Forum issued a list of global risks (though Google’s Eric Schmidt countered on his Google+ page that he’s optimistic; that’s because he’s a disruptor). I’m sitting in a room here with a debate on capitalism about to begin. Even the sacred science is disrupted. I’m having conversations and sessions about disrupted banking and retail and education and media, of course.

I began this trip to Europe with my pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz (blogged earlier). I recall Jon Naughton’s Observer column in which he asked us to imagine that we are pollsters in Mainz in 1472 asking whether we thought this invention of Gutenberg’s would disrupt the Catholic church, fuel the Reformation, spark the Scientific Revolution, change our view of education and thus childhood, and change our view of societies and nations and cultures. Pshaw, they must have said.

Ask those questions today. How likely do you think it is that every major institution of society–every industry, all of education, all of government–will be disrupted; that we will rethink our idea of nations and cultures; that we will reimagine education; that we will again alter even economics? Pshaw?

Welcome to Davos 1472.

LATER: Thanks to Andy Sternberg, here is a Storify of my tweets from an opening session at Davos, a Time debate on the future of capitalism (sorry for the long link; having trouble with the WordPress app on my iPad; also can’t get the embed code from Storify on the iPad; will fix it later): http://storify.com/andysternberg/jeff-jarvis-tweets-from-davos?awesm=sfy.co_W6q&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter&utm_source=direct-sfy.co&utm_content=storify-pingback

Categories: Buzzmachine

Public Parts on Reding’s four pillars

Buzzmachine - Tue, 01/24/2012 - 00:34

Since European Commission VP Viviane Reding’s proposal for internet regulation — under her four pillars — are the topic of discussion this week at DLD in Munich and in Europe, here is what I wrote about them in Public Parts:

* * *

I fear the unintended consequences that may come from regulation. Take, for example, European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding’s four pillars of data protection, which she proposed in 2011. I have no argument with one of them: transparency. Companies that collect data should be open about when that is done and how information will be used.

Another pillar sounds attractive: “the right to be forgotten.” But how far does that go? If I post something about you on my blog or write about you in a news story—a quote I heard, the fact that I saw you somewhere, the fact that you did something in the open—can I be forced to erase—to forget—that? What then of my freedom of speech?

Another pillar is rhetorically appealing: “privacy by default.” But is that how we wish society to operate—closing in by reflex when we have so many new ways to open up? Flickr became a success, as I said earlier, because it was set to public by default. On a service designed for ­sharing—Facebook—what does complete privacy mean? Isn’t completely closed communication just email?

Reding’s last pillar would require EU-level protection no matter where a service operates or where data are held. That sets a dangerous precedent. It could mean that we would all be ruled by the most stringent controls in place anywhere in the world—the high-water mark of control. Can we bear China claiming the same right as the EU? We see a related problem today with so-called libel tourism in the U.K. Because its libel laws are unfriendly to defendants, targets of published criticism go there to file suit against writers and publishers. In a global internet, the EU’s effort to become privacy’s sanctum could affect us all.

On the one hand, I argue against regulation. On the other hand, I argue that the government should enforce net neutrality, and that is a form of regulation. Am I hypocritical? At South by Southwest in 2011, Senator Al Franken delivered a ringing endorsement of net neutrality. He argued that proponents of net neutrality are not trying to change the internet but to keep corporations from changing it, from making the net less free than it has been since its birth. “This is a First Amendment issue,” he said. “The internet is small-d democratic. Everyone has the same say.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, too, delivered a rousing defense of internet freedom in two speeches in 2010 and 2011. “In the last year, we’ve seen a spike in threats to the free flow of information. China, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan have stepped up their censorship of the internet,” she said in Washington just as the Tunisian revolt was brewing. “On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas…. The internet is a network that magnifies the power and potential of all others. And that’s why we believe it’s critical that its users are assured certain basic freedoms. Freedom of expression is first among them.”

The following year, in 2011, she delivered another speech extolling transparency and attacking censorship. But in the same speech, she also condemned WikiLeaks for its release of cables from her agency. “Let’s be clear,” she said, “this disclosure is not just an attack on America—it’s an attack on the international community.” The leaks “tear at the fabric” of government, she argued. Indeed, they soon tore at the fabric of Tunisia’s corrupt government.

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#DLD12: Viviane Reding on privacy

Buzzmachine - Sun, 01/22/2012 - 15:00

I’m at the DLD conference in Munich. Haven’t live-blogged in ages. But the European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding is speaking and I disagreed with her rather a lot in Public Parts, arguing that her four pillars for internet governance — privacy by default, demanding European standards for storage of data, the right to be forgotten, and transparency — bring unintended consequences.

Reding says that in “Europe, we have too many rules, too many conflicting rules.” So she wants to take over the rules for all Europe. Look at SOPA, too: There is a competition among governments to regulate the internet, to consolidate power.

“Persosnal data is the currency of today’s digital market. And like any currency, it needs stability and trust,” Reding says. Yes, but is government — which can most abuse our data — its best protector?

“Can we be sure that the rules we make today will fit tomorrow?” she asks. She says one cannot build rules that are too rigid; they need to be “futureproof.” But then, they also become very broad and that, too, has consequences.

She argues that following 27 separate sets of regulations costs 2.3 billion euros a year. Again, she justifies taking over local authority. But that is the EU.

She also calls for a smoother exchange of data among police authorities in the EU members to fight terrorism. Well, that sounds like the greatest threat to privacy I can imagine: all governments pooling what they know about you.

Reding says companies will be required to appoint data protection (privacy) officers. Thus the regulatory-industrial complex of the new privacy industry grows.

She says data-protection authorities need to be “independent” of politics. Does that mean they are above government by the people and representation?

Now to her “right to be forgotten.” It is a right, she says, to “withdraw permission” for data held by companies. I fear the implications for free speech. And on a practical level, how can one as a principle to tell people to no longer know what they know?

She says it is not an absolute right. “There are no absolute rights,” she says. She says it’s not a right to erase history or impact media. So this shows the problem with this notion, when one starts making exceptions for a principles.

Now she speaks about the debate about the freedom of the internet. She says the freedom of information and expression is a basic right and “this is directly linked to the freedom of internet, which has thus to be preserved. But those are not the only freedoms…. Sometimes one must balance freedom.” She claims the right of the creator (read: copyright) is “equally important.” Really? Higher than speech? But she says that Europe will never pass blocking legislation (read: SOPA).

No opportunity to question Reding. Shame.

Now a Microsoft guy is giving a talk and I cannot figure out what he’s trying to say. Otherwise, I’d blog it.

Next up, Andrew Keen. Polemic time. He reads a quote from Sheryl Sandberg about deeper portraits online. “I’m here as someone who is raising my voice in defense of lost privacy,” he says. But he doubts that Reding and government are the protectors.

He calls me a spokesman for “the cult of the social.” AKA society, I’d say.

He says we need to learn to live alone. Funny, but the internet was last accused of making us antisocial and now it’s accused of making us too social. It makes us neither. We make it.

Now Nick Bilton leads a panel asking the premise of his book: is privacy dead. Garg.

Odd how the topic of privacy has turned an internet conference into an anti-internet conference.

Nick asks 4Chan’s Chris Poole whether we “should allow anonymity on the net.” That’s how the net is built, Nick. It already is allowed. It is part and parcel of free speech.

I have no tongue left. I bit it off.

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Where Gutenberg worked

Buzzmachine - Sat, 01/21/2012 - 18:08

I took a detour on a trip to Europe so I could visit Mainz and the Gutenberg Museum, having become obsessed with the great man and his magnificent disruption as both an inventor and an entrepreneur.

It was awe-inspiring to stand before the first known page of his printing (a snippet from the Sibylline prophesy, found in the binding of another book). It’s not beautiful; betas rarely are. But next to it is the culmination of Gutenberg’s art in three of his his Bibles, his masterpieces.

Another case captured my imagination. In it were the indulgences the Catholic Church could make and sell at scale, thanks to printing. Next to them were three of Martin Luther’s pamphlets, which he could also print at scale and it is that scale that enabled him to so disrupt the Church.

Also in that case were political broadsides printed by Gutenberg’s successors–his funder, Johann Fust, who called the startup’s debt and took over the business–in a battle between two bishops in Mainz. I write in Public Parts:

The press quickly made an impact on the political structure of society. According to Albert Kapr’s definitive biography, Johann Gutenberg: The Man and his Invention, among the earliest nonreligious publications produced in the great man’s shop by his successors—Johann Fust and his son-in-law Peter Schöffer—were political pamphlets. A series of broadsides from each side of a church fight to control the city of Mainz were published on the same presses in 1461, demonstrating from the start that this tool of publicness, like most to follow, was neutral and agnostic. “All these pamphlets were aimed at gaining public support for the respective protagonists and defaming their opponents,” Kapr writes. “To the matériel of warfare—halberds, rapiers, swords, harquebuses and cannon—psychological weapons had been added, which could be delivered by means of the printing press.” Here we see publishing’s nascent role in the birth of media, propaganda and the public sphere they would influence.

On another floor was an exhibit about newspapers and their predecessors, including small publications called posts. Pardon my blog-centric view of that, but I quite like that on blogs, we also have posts. I was struck by the continuum of media on display there and the reminder that neither print nor newspapers were forever; they were each invented. Each may be replaced. Soon, I’ll post a piece I’ve been working on about Gutenberg as probably the first technology entrepreneur. In it, I note that printing by impressing ink on paper may be seeing its twilight, replaced by ink-jet technologies just as photography on paper has been replaced by digital.

Mind you, books and printing will not disappear. After my visit to the museum, I had the great privilege of having lunch with Bertram Schmidt-Friderichs, thanks to a connection made via Twitter by his wife and partner, Karin Schmidt-Friderichs. They run a wonderful small press, Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz, publishing and printing beautiful small books about art and typography. Where better in the world to do that? Bertram said that books will continue but as special, premium products. I agree. In that, they recapture Gutenberg’s original vision of print as beauty.

At the museum, I was lucky to be around as a TV crew was filming a demonstration of the technologies in Gutenberg’s pressroom. The press already existed for olives, grapes, and paper; Gutenberg had to adapt it for printing. Ink already existed, of course, but Gutenberg had to adapt that, too, to his needs. But his critical and unsung invention was the hand-held mold that enabled Gutenberg to make fonts–thousands of letters needed for the Bible–quickly and consistently. It required ingenious design and no small expertise in metallurgy and I was delighted to finally see one in action, below.

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We are the lobbyists

Buzzmachine - Thu, 01/19/2012 - 15:00

The internet has helped untold publics to form. Yesterday, the internet became a public.

Or rather, millions of people who care about internet freedom used the net to organize and defend it against efforts to control and harm it.

The SOPA-PIPA blackout got attention in media that previously all but ignored the issue, whether out of conflict of interest or negligence. More important, it got political action as legislators — especially Republicans — tripped over themselves to back away from the Hollywood bailout.

In the discussion about the movement yesterday, I heard someone in Washington quoted, saying that these geeks should hire lobbyists like everyone else.

No, we’re all lobbyists now, and that’s just as it should be. This movement didn’t need influence peddlers. It didn’t need political commercials. It didn’t need media. It needed only citizens who give a shit. Democracy.

I’m delighted that the discussion rose to the level of principles, a discussion I’ve argued has to take place if we, the internet public, are to protect our tool of publicness.

There’s much more going on under this battle: the disruption of media business models, a fundamental change in our view of the value of content, the undercutting of institutions’ power, the lowering of national boundaries. But for now, nevermind that and concentrate on what was born yesterday: a political movement, a movement whose cause is freedom.

What else can this movement do? Can it elect candidates? Should it? Or should it continue to hold politicians’ feet to the fire? I don’t think I want to see the formation of an internet party. I don’t want this movement to mimic the way power used to be traded. I don’t want it to become an institution. I also don’t think it’s possible. I prefer to see it continuing to mimic #OccupyWallStreet, organizing without organizations (pace Shirky), discerning through interaction its principles and goals.

After yesterday, the powerful are on warning that a public can rise up out of nowhere to protest and pressure, to fight and win. Dell Hell taught companies to behave, to respect and listen to their customers, and better yet to collaborate with them. The SOPA blackout taught politicians to hear citizens directly, without mediators. Now we’ll see whether they can learn to collaborate as well.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Network knowledge

Buzzmachine - Mon, 01/16/2012 - 22:49

I’m a bit late in blogging about and urging you to read David Weinberger’s new book, Too Big to Know. That’s because I couldn’t find my oft-underlined, much-dogeared galley, which I soaked in as soon as I got it.

David is an intellectual hero of mine. He is a coauthor of the seminal work of net culture, The Cluetrain Manifesto. His subsequent books, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined and Everything is Miscellaneous taught me to look at the world differently (yes, it’s partly his fault) and to understand the changing architecture of relationships, information, and now knowledge. He is generous with his thoughts. He challenges me (when I presented Public Parts at Harvard, where David moderated, he pushed me to consider what I was saying about the relationship of ethics and norms and he likely influenced me to consider that as a next project … his fault, again). He is open and curious. He does this with charm and unwarranted but sincere self-deprecation. All that comes across in his books.

Knowledge is an awfully big topic, the biggest. As he started this project, I heard David fret over that. But he succeeded in bringing new perspective even to this. The nut of it:

As knowledge becomes networked, the smartest person in the room isn’t the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn’t the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it. It’s not that the network is becoming a conscious super-brain. Rather, knowledge is becoming inextricable from — literally unthinkable witout — the network that enables it. Our task is to learn how to build smart rooms — that is, how to build networks that make us smarter, especially since, when done badly, networks can make us distressingly stupider.

I interpreted that through one of my favorite (and, sorry, oft-repeated) memes these days: the Gutenberg parenthesis. Among other things, it argues that before Gutenberg, knowledge was about preserving the wisdom of the ancients. In the Gutenberg parenthesis, knowledge sprung from contemporary authors, experts, and institutions. After the parenthesis, as I see Weinberger’s thesis, knowledge becomes province of the network. It isn’t resident only in single facts or artifacts (that is, books) but is a much more complex prism that can be seen from many angles and changes its appearance across them. Knowledge becomes less static, more living. David says it better:

Knowledge now lives not just in the skulls of individuals. Our skulls and our institutions are simply not big enough to contain knowledge. Knowledge is now a property of the network, and the network embraces businesses, governments, media, museums, curated collections, and minds in communication.

Knowledge until now was about creating and controlling scarcity. Up to now, says David, “[w]e’ve managed the fire hose by reducing the flow. We’ve done this through an elaborate system of editorial filters that have prevented most of what’s written from being published . . . Knowledge has been about reducing what we need to know.” But now, of course, information is abundant and only growing — multiplying — as we invent more ways to create and discover and capture and analyze and question. That’s what freaks the old — pardon my choice of word — sphincters of information, the controllers and owners of it. This conflict erupted when Gutenberg invented the printed book and scholars feared we’d end up with too many of them. It emerges again now that Berners-Lee has invented the web.

David grapples with the history of our perception of facts, then wrestles with the idea that we “are losing knowledge’s body: a comprehensible, masterable collection of ideas and works that together reflect the truth about the world. . . . We’ll still have facts. We’ll still have experts. We’ll still have academic journals. We’ll have everything except knowledge as a body. That is, we’ll have everything except what we’ve thought of as knowledge.”

Knowledge, he says, “has been an accident of paper.” We convinced ourselves that a set and knowable worldview was possible because the media into which we put our information created that comforting expectation. Same goes for news: “All the news that’s fit to print” is the greatest conceit imaginable: that everything that matters happens to fit in what we can afford to produce. We know so much better now.

These are profoundly disruptive ideas about ideas. It helps that they come from someone who presents them via doubt rather than dogma. David is, like me, essentially an optimist, but he sees the choices we have and the dangers that present themselves if we chose the wrong paths.

At the end, he examines the characteristics of the net and its knowledge: abundance (“The new abundance makes the old abundance look like scarcity”); links (“Links are subverting not just knowledge as a system of stopping points but also the credentialing mechanism that supported that system”); no need to get permission (“Let anyone publish whatever they want … and the Knowledge Club loses its value”); publicness (somebody ought to write a book about that); and the unresolved nature of questions (“The old enlightenment ideal was far more plausible when what we saw of the nattering world came through filters that hid the vast, disagreeable bulk of disagreement”). “What we have in common,” he concludes, “is not knowledge about which we agree but a shared world about which we will always disagree.”

So the idea that things will settle down and opinions will coalesce around shared facts once we get through this maelstrom of change is a fantasy born of experience but blown apart by the network. So will the future sound like the Fox-News-and-comment-snark present? It needn’t if we adapt our norms to a new reality and if, as David says, we build our networks well. That means building them around new opportunities, for example: “The solution to the information overload problem is to create more information: metadata.” We don’t need more filters, more gatekeepers, more mediators. We need smarter, bigger brains digging through more and better information. Don’t recreate old models. Disrupt them.

David concludes: “We thought that knowledge was scarce, when in fact it was just our shelves that were small. Our new knowledge is not even a set of works. It is an infrastructure of connection.”

Chew on those wires for a while.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Murdoch doesn’t understand links

Buzzmachine - Sun, 01/15/2012 - 21:58

[View the story "Murdoch doesn't understand links...." on Storify]

Categories: Buzzmachine

Shifting the discussion to principles

Buzzmachine - Sun, 01/15/2012 - 00:12

The good news about the White House’s response to an anti-SOPA petition is that it raised the discussion to the level of principles, arguing against “disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.” That is where it needs to be.

The bad news, as Tim O’Reilly eloquently explores, is that the White House makes a gross and unsubstantiated assumption:
Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.

O’Reilly responds:
In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. . . . In my experience at O’Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O’Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway. . . .

As I wrote in What Would Google Do, novelist Paulo Coelho found that piracy spread his name and reputation and found him new readers in new lands …. so he pirated himself and sold more books. The man has sold more than 100 million.

This part of the discussion — the justification for SOPA and PIPA in whatever form — needs to be based on principles and on facts.

The question of fact is difficult to answer as it is an attempt to prove a negative: How do we know how many copies of a work pirates would have bought if they hadn’t pirated? How do we know how many more people discovered and bought a work because it was pirated? How do we differentiate between shrinking industry sales caused by piracy or by a new abundance of competition?

The matter of principles is this: Where will the White House and government put their priorities: in protecting the interests of a shrinking industry or in protecting the interests of innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic expansion? Will they favor protecting the interests of a closed industry or the freedom of speech?

That is why we must raise this discussion to the level of principles. That is why I wrote Public Parts, to help spark a discussion of principles. These, once more, are the principles of publicness and an open society I propose in the book:

I. We have the right to connect.
If we cannot connect, we cannot speak. That is a new and necessary preamble to our First Amendment. Finland has declared internet access—high-speed at that—as a right of citizens. Whether countries should subsidize and provide access is a separate question. But once access is established, cutting it off should be seen as a violation of human rights. That’s what a 2011 United Nations report said. “It’s now a basic human right to have internet,” [former] Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer told media executives in the Middle East. “Systematic denial of freedom of accessing information will lead to a revolution.”

II. We have the right to speak.
Freedom of speech is our cultural and legal default in the United States. That First Amendment protection should extend not just to information and opinions delivered by text but also to information delivered by applications and data. Yes, there need to be ­limitations—on child pornography online, for example. But beware the unintended consequences of attacking a specific problem with an overly broad response. To fight child porn, Australia proposed mandatory filters to block content—filters that could be used against any content. We cannot manage everything to the worst case, to that which might offend someone, to that which could happen. We must not live by the lowest common denominator of fear and offense and the highest watermark of regulation, diminishing our most precious right of speech in the process.

III. We have the right to assemble and to act.
It is not enough to speak. Our tools of publicness enable us to organize, to gather together—virtually or physically—and to act as a group to demonstrate or to build.

IV. Privacy is an ethic of knowing.
We need protection of privacy. We also need to adapt our norms of privacy to new social tools and behaviors so we can better understand when something is said in confidence, when information should not be used without consent, what the harm is of spreading information, and how to give people more control of their information.

V. Publicness is an ethic of sharing.
The foundation of a more public society is the principle of sharing: recognizing the benefits of generosity, building tools that facilitate it, and protecting the product of it.

VI. Our institutions’ information should be public by default, secret by necessity.
Openness is a better way to govern and a smarter way to do business.

VII. What is public is a public good.
When public information or the public space is diminished, the public loses. Secrecy too often serves the corrupt and tyrannical.

VIII. All bits are created equal.
When anyone gains the power to decide which bits, words, images, or ideas can or cannot pass freely through our network, it is no longer free.

IX. The internet must stay open and distributed.
“Let’s give credit to the people who foresaw the internet, opened it up, designed it so it would not have significant choke points, and made it possible for random people including twenty-four-year-olds in a dorm to enter and create,” says Eric Schmidt.

Most relevant to the discussion of SOPA are the last two. If anyone restricts any bit — whether that is China restricting searches or India restricting what it says is offensive content or the U.S. restricting what someone calls piracy — then no bits can be assured to be free. If the architecture of the net is altered to enable the U.S. government to block alleged pirates, then any government can use that power to block anything.

My response to the White House’s response is to ask what is more important: protectionism for a fading industry or the future of speech?

Categories: Buzzmachine

Journalism via jokes

Buzzmachine - Thu, 01/12/2012 - 05:12

Tonight I redeemed the greatest Christmas present from my son, Jake: tickets to see The Daily Show taping with him. It was fun and funny. But even better, it inspired me as a journalist.

I left the studio determined to teach a course in journalism via jokes. (I’d call it Truth Through Humor, but that sounds like an Orwellian sitcom [starring John Goodman as Big Brother]).

Jon Stewart regularly demurs when we journalists try to drag him into our sad fraternity. Well, bullshit. His interview tonight with Republican Sen. Jim DeMint was journalism at its best.

Stewart has a worldview. He’s in favor of civil discourse. He’s in favor of America. He’s in favor of government when it adds value and security to citizens’ lives. He does his homework. He knows his facts. He asks hard questions and won’t accept easy answers. He pressed DeMint — civilly and smartly and comically and again and again — on the senator’s divisive rhetoric in the book he was there to plug. He pressed the studio audience to be civil to DeMint. He left trying to find common ground for a discussion about better government and a better nation.

The interview went on 20 minutes or maybe even 30 minutes to fill a seven-minute slot. Stewart wasn’t filling time; he was asking questions. The remainder, Stewart said, will end up on the net (I’ll link when it’s up) and I urge you — or at least my journalism students — to watch it as an object lesson in interview that try to get somewhere (most don’t).

There’s a larger lesson here about jokes as journalism. So next, I urge you to listen to Ethan Zuckerman’s lecture on cute cats and revolution on the wonderful CBC series Ideas. Ethan talks about humor as a means to get around censorship. I listened to his talk a day after hearing Richard Gingras, now head of Google News, talking at a symposium on entrepreneurial journalism organized by Dan Gillmor at Arizona State about how difficult it is for algorithms to recognize humor.

I hope algorithms never understand humor. If algorithms succeed, then censors and tyrants will use them to find it and quash humor. If algorithms succeed at creating jokes, then Hollywood will hire geeks to build virtual Stewarts, Sterns, and Lettermen: plastic action figures. Then humor will lose its humanity and credibility. No, humor is hard. May it ever stay so.

At the end of a meeting about trying to scale fact-checking that we held with Craig Newmark at CUNY, we decided that as a followup, we should hold an event on facts as entertainment: fact-checking as a game and truth a la Stewart at amusement. When did truth become boring and dutiful and dull in journalists’ hands? In Stewart’s hands, comedy is truth, truth is journalism, ergo comedy can be journalism. His is.

Want a class in that? If only it could be taught by Prof. Stewart.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Jon Stewart & SOPA (please)

Buzzmachine - Thu, 01/12/2012 - 03:57

Got to see The Daily Show taping tonight (more on that in a minute) and in the pre-show conversation with Jon Stewart, an audience member said he was sent by The Internet to ask about SOPA. Stewart professed (not feigned, I think) ignorance, asking whether that was net neutrality, and excusing himself, what with their “heads being up their asses” in the election and all. But he said he’d do his homework and he looked at writer Steve Bodow when he said that. Let’s hope he comes out loud.

Confidential to Mr. Stewart: The problem here is that [cough] your industry, entertainment, is trying to give power the power to blacklist and turn off sites if they’re so much as accused of “pirating” (their word, not ours) content. This changes the fundamental architecture of the net, giving *government* the power and means to kill sites for this and then other reasons. That threatens to destroy this, our greatest tool of publicness (book plug). So please, sir we need your force of virtue to beat down this, another evil. On behalf of The Internet, thank you.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Bring back the busy signal

Buzzmachine - Wed, 01/11/2012 - 17:51

Email and communication are badly broken and the solution isn’t so much new technology as new norms. We need to redefine “rude.”

The problem is clear: If you’re like me, you get so much email that you can’t possibly answer it promptly if it all, and messages that do matter get lost under mountains of rubbish. Under old norms — from the era of letters and phone calls and knocks on doors — ignoring a message would be considered rude.

Perhaps what should be considered rude today is expecting you to immediately answer a message you didn’t ask for. And shouldn’t it be presumptuous for people to say they want “only 20 minutes” of your time, with no knowledge of how busy you are and how those many 20 minutes add up? Don’t we need new signals to let people know that we won’t answer every message, that some just aren’t important enough? Shouldn’t the person asking for our attention feel obliged to explain how the contact is relevant to our needs and desires? And shouldn’t we have a right to tell people that we can’t or don’t want to talk right now? Bring back the busy signal!

We are in a process of negotiating new norms for new circumstances. That is what we are also doing in the realm of privacy as we parry for a consensus about what’s OK to share with and about friends and what’s OK for a company to know about us. In public, we’re trying to settle on proper behaviors relating to talking on a mobile phone on the street or a train. Many of us are testing the line of old rudeness when we pull out a smart phone to read it when in the company of another person (e.g., if the other person answers a phone call, it’s fair game for me to check my email, right?) or when someone in person interrupts the conversation we’re having on our smartphone. And most of us wish for norms that would manage the problem of trolls and assholes and their bad behavior online.

Norms. Technology is causing change and our behaviors lag that until we settle on new norms. We start by trying to enforce old rules until we figure out that they are irrelevant. Then we operate without rules.

Then we lie. In the early digital days, when we missed an email, we’d say, “My email must be broken.” We’d throw AOL under the bus. But then Outlook and Google came along and email got better. So next came, “You must have been caught in my spam filter.” Then spam filters got better. Now, we can shrug and say, “Oh, sorry, Gmail must not have thought you were a priority.” VC Fred Wilson told his readers that if Gmail sends a missive to his “everything else” list then “I most likely won’t see it.” Same for me. We’re just blaming technology and technology can improve, robbing us of excuses.

danah boyd takes the occasional email sabbatical, letting would-be correspondents know that she simply will not see, open, or respond to any email sent between two dates and challenging them to find her if really necessary. I needed to reach her recently and succeeded (but I’ll do her the favor of keeping my path secret). Though danah’s method is tempting, it’s no solution, for we would miss communication we do, in fact, need.

The real problem is that we don’t have control. Bob Wyman, a brilliant technologist at Google (founder of PubSub and other startups), sat me down recently and explained the original sin of email: that the sender controls when the recipient should. It took me a while to understand that. Sender-control opens the door for people you know to make demands on you without you wanting them to. It opens the door for people you don’t know to bother you. And, of course, it opens the door to spam.

Google+, on the other hand, gives the recipient control: I decide whom to circle or follow and whom I wish to read. Soon after it started, Google+ had a spam problem: anyone could send you notifications. So G+ gave you control over that, limiting notifications to people you follow. Sadly, that cuts off the serendipitous ability of anyone out there to reach you. But it was a necessary change, else G+ would have become spammed to death. The other area that can be spammed is comments and G+ is having to add more and more controls. Bottom line: Recipient must control. Bob’s right.

None of that solves the social problem, though. We still need to be able to tell some people that we are too busy for them, that they don’t matter to us, that we don’t want to do what they are asking us to do, that we are not interested in what they have to say, that they are bothering us, that we aren’t friends, that we aren’t going to read what they send us, unbidden … without being considered rude. One way or another, we need to make such unpleasant communication part of our new norm. We need to learn how to say “no.”

We see the beginnings of that negotiation in Twitter: Anyone can follow me (unless I block them) but no one can send me a direct message until I follow them. So people ask: If you follow me I can send you a message. Is it rude not to? We’re figuring that out. If I do follow this person and he abuses the privilege, spamming my feed or sending me too many DMs, then I’ll unfollow him. Is that rude?

I needed to reach Fred Wilson, whom I know, not long ago. I know Fred is a very busy man with no end of people begging for attention (and money). So I don’t bug him unless I need to. But when I needed to, he didn’t answer me and I figured my message was likely being relegated to “everything else” by Gmail because I’m not a regular correspondent with Fred. I pinged Fred on Twitter; he responded immediately. Bugs in the system.

Leo Laporte has confessed that for some communication, he waits until the person sending a message sends it a few times. If it’s that important, goes the thinking, then they’ll try again and that will make it bubble up. I’ll confess to having done that, too. Rude? Perhaps. But it’s one way to get others to prioritize your mail.

Leave it to Europeans to try to regulate email behavior: VW is deactivating mobile messages to employees in off hours. But that’s not very satisfying: What if there is an emergency? What if you want to meet a colleague for a drink on a trip? What defines regular off hours in an international corporation?

We keep looking for solutions for recipients, coping with the increasing tide of irrelevance overtaking us. But that only makes it worse for legitimate senders and increases the risk that someone you want to get through can’t. What if you need to reach someone you don’t know? There needs to be an airlock someone can enter and knock, asking you to open the door and telling you why it would be worth your while. LinkedIn is rather like that, trying to use social connections to reach others through degrees of separation. Problem is: it creates one more way to send beseeching requests to people along the way: “Will you introduce me to so-and-so? Will you use your social capital with her on my behalf?” What if I don’t want to? Is that rude?

I face this problem with students in schools other than my own who come asking for interviews. I feel awful saying no — especially because I work at a journalism school that sends students out to interview others. But I get so many of these requests — “I just need 20 minutes” — that if I tried to be a nice guy and responded to them all, I’d have no time for my own students and my own work. The rare student who asks a cogent, well-thought-out, well-researched, and brief question will get a response so long as I have time. Too many of these requests are wildly broad: “What is the future of journalism?” Honest to God, I get that one often. I don’t bother; they seem to be thoughtless shotgun queries. If the student asks a question I’ve written about and I have time, I’ll send instructions about how to use Google’s “site:” search and find it on my blog. But most times, I have to say no and I feel like a shmuck being put in the position where I feel guilty doing so. I don’t like circumstances to make me feel rude.

I have no solutions. The technology will improve. Maybe Google+ and Facebook with their recipient controls become primary means of communication with people we know and email becomes an everybody-else channel with smarter and smarter Gmail filters to bubble up the ever-rarer relevant message. But that won’t solve the social problem. We need to settle on new norms that redefine what’s polite and appropriate and what’s not: what’s rude.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Demo

Buzzmachine - Tue, 01/03/2012 - 16:44

This is a demo post. I will kill it momentarily. I am showing how to blog to an unnamed strategic genius.

Categories: Buzzmachine

So much for the penny press

Buzzmachine - Mon, 01/02/2012 - 18:06

The New York Times raised its daily price to $2.50 today. I thought back to the penny press at the turn of the last century and wondered what such a paper would cost today, inflation adjusted. Answer: a quarter.

So, in inflation-adjusted current pennies, The New York Times today costs 10 times more than a newspaper in 1890. Granted, Today’s Times is better than a product of the penny press. But is it worth 10x? Should it cost 10x?

In the meantime, labor rates have risen (a Timesman today lives better than a Timesman then) but production technology has become far more automated and efficient (no more typesetters, proofreaders, compositors, engravers, stereographers, mailrooms, or “rubber rooms” filled with unneeded pressmen). And the advertising value of newspapers has increased exponentially.

On the one hand, there’s less competition today. The New York Times is essentially a national newspaper monopoly (the Wall Street Journal and USA Today are different beasts). That should enable it to raise its price to such a premium. On the other hand, what’s really at work, of course, is that there’s much more competition today: the entire web. That would drive the paper to lower its price.

Instead, today it raises its price — by a whopping 25% over its old daily price of $2. That’s because it is trying to support an outmoded economic model. The myth of legacy media — rich while it lasted — was that every reader saw every ad so the paper charged every advertiser for every reader. That’s how scale paid off. Those are the economics that led to the rise of the penny press.

Online, that myth has been punctured: (a) every reader does not see every ad, and (b) advertisers pay only for the ads readers see (or in Google click on), and (c) there’s abundant competition. That’s what confounds legacy media folks: “If I get more audience and have more effective advertising, why am I not being paid more?” Because you’re operating by media laws that are now outmoded. You’re still operating under an industrial economy built on scarcity. That’s what makes you think you still have pricing power.

You need to find opportunity in entirely new models, in the new scale, in abundance. Google finds value in scale by taking on risk for the advertiser (who pays only for clicks) and by increasing relevance by putting ads everywhere. Facebook finds value in relationships and data about them and it doesn’t sell content but does use content as a tool to generate more data about users and their interests.

In their day — a century ago — newspapers found new ways to exploit scale. Today, net companies exploit scale in new ways. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are the penny press of today. Only they cost even less.

BTW, thanks to the very good Times Machine, we can see that The Times started life at a penny, which rose to four cents and then back down to a penny by 1900 — because it wanted scale.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Very public health

Buzzmachine - Sat, 12/31/2011 - 00:23

Watching the remarkable Xeni Jardin tweet her mammogram and cancer diagnosis, then blog eloquently about it, then crowdsource opening up her own MRI data makes me ask: Why are we so secretive about sickness and health? And what do we lose because we are?

The answers to the first questions are fairly obvious. First, we keep our sicknesses secret, we say, because we fear we could lose insurance. Except insurance companies force us to reveal our medical histories anyway. And let’s hope that Obamacare — may it survive the Supreme Court — succeeds in outlawing the denial of health coverage due to preexisting conditions. Next, we fear that we could lose jobs. Except in cases where a condition would affect job safety, shouldn’t employers be told that they cannot discriminate on the basis of health? Whether or not society chooses to address these issues through legislation, my point is that it’s possible to do so.

The other reason we keep sickness secret — the bigger reason — is stigma. We don’t want people to know we’re ill. But in this day and age, why should anyone be ashamed of being sick? To be clear, I am not saying that anyone should ever be forced to reveal health information. But why should our norms, stigmas, and economic considerations force us not to reveal it?

Imagine if we didn’t feel compelled to hide our illnesses. Imagine if we could be open about our health. What good could come of that?

We could learn more about correlations, which could yield information about causation and even cures. Given large data sets, we could find out that people who get a disease share common behaviors or characteristics. We might gain the opportunity to discover an environmental cause to a local outbreak of, say, breast cancer, enabling a community to fix the condition and prevent more cases.

Of course, I want to emphasize the conditional: correlation *could* help. One data point is never meaningful: That I’ve contracted one heart condition and two cancers since being at the World Trade Center on 9/11 is meaningless — unless there are many others in the same boat, and even then, one mustn’t jump to conclusions about causation. Still, more data is always better than less.

With openness about health, we could do a better job connecting people who share conditions to get information and support and each other. I am on the board of Learning Ally, formerly Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, and at our last meeting, I was struck by the barriers that stigmas put in the way of young people getting the organization’s help. I heard how getting our software on iPods has helped more kids use the service because they no longer have to carry around a special device that marks them as different — stigma. I heard a mother say that school officials warned her that her child would be labeled — stigma — if she got him appropriate services, but she said she’d eagerly embrace the label if it got her son the help he needed.

On my blog, I’ve been in a debate about the recommendation by a government panel that men shouldn’t be given the blood test for prostate cancer anymore because, statistically, it hasn’t been shown to save lives. That’s because medical science can’t yet distinguish between fast- and slow-growing prostate cancer. I say men should get the test. I say we should be talking openly about our prostates as women have fought to talk about breast cancer. More information and communication is always better than less.

The real question is what men choose to do when they find out — through a biopsy following the blood test — that they have cancer. Perhaps more men should choose what the doctors call watchful waiting over surgery. But, you see, the problem is that we don’t have *enough* data to make a good decision. I want to know, based on the largest possible population, how long it took prostate cancer to spread after it was found. Then I could decide how long to watch and wait. But I don’t have that information. So I chose to get the cancer out of me. I could make that choice only because I had the test. I had my own data. If I had the data of millions more men, I could make wiser decisions.

How could get get more data?

Step one is to encourage men to talk about their prostates — and, yes, sorry, their penises — so we disarm the stigma about it and get more men to be aware and get tested and share their experience.

Step two is to create the means to open up and share as much health information as possible so researchers, doctors, and hackers can dig into it and find correlations and patterns and questions worth pursuing, perhaps leading to answers.

When I talk about the principles of an open society in Public Parts, this is what I mean. Rather than reflexively declaring that sharing information about ourselves — our bodies as well as our thoughts and actions — is dangerous, we must stand back and ask what benefit could come from such data, now that we have better technological means to open it up, gather it, and analyze it.

Only then can we balance the benefits and risks and decide, as a society, how open we want to be, how open we should and need to be — and why. That is the kind of discussion about privacy and our changing norms I’d like to hear. Let’s not just talk about what can go wrong now but also what could go right.

: LATER: Some added links:
* Larry Smarr quantifying his own health.
* On being a medical data donor.
* Give us access to our own health data, online.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Something for that new ebook reader….

Buzzmachine - Sun, 12/25/2011 - 16:28

If I may be so bold and greedy to suggest something to fill that new Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPod…..

* Public Parts on Kindle
* Public Parts on Nook
* Public Parts on Google ebooks
* Public Parts on Audible
* Public Parts is not yet available on *Kobo* (until I have a hissy fit).
* Public Parts on Apple iBook
* Public Parts on Sony
* * * * *
* What Would Google Do? on Kindle
* What Would Google Do? on Nook
* What Would Google Do? on Google ebooks
* What Would Google Do? on Audible
* What Would Google Do? on Kobo
* What Would Google Do? on iBook
* What Would Google Do? on Sony

Categories: Buzzmachine

A new M.A. in entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY

Buzzmachine - Fri, 12/23/2011 - 16:17

We got some big news at CUNY this week: We are approved to offer what we believe is the first MA in entrepreneurial journalism.

Last spring, we already taught our first class of full-time entrepreneurial journalism students, awarding certificates. But now we also have the ability to award MA degrees to students who complete the CUNY J-school program plus a fourth entrepreneurial semester. This comes under the auspices of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY.

My colleague Jeremy Caplan and I teach four courses: MBA in a box in the media context (Jeremy’s qualified to teach that; I’m not); a course in disruption in media (that’s what I teach); the incubator as a course (the core of the curriculum is the students’ development of their own businesses and for that we the faculty and mentors meet individually with them and meet as a group to compare issues, problems, and solutions); and a technology course (this semester, we plan to work closely with General Assembly for some of that curriculum and are bringing in Nancy Wang and Jeff Mignon to work with students). In addition, the students do a project as an apprenticeship with a New York startup.

We are about to admit our 15+ students for the spring term, most of them professionals seeking the certificate (and in some cases a second career) with some students from our regular journalism program (they’ll be the first to earn the MA in entrepreneurial journalism).

This comes right after the fifth annual jurying for our regular entrepreneurial course, offered in the MA in journalism, in which a dozen students created their own business plans and a jury awarded seed funding from a Tow-Knight grant.

At CUNY, we are constantly changing our curriculum, updating it as reality in media shifts, as we learn new lessons, and as we see what works and doesn’t work in helping students reach their goals. That can be unsettling for both students and faculty but there’s no choice about change.

This week, coincidentally, I was contacted by two searches for journalism school deans (it appears to be open season on the species as there are even more of these jobs open). I’m not going for and certainly doubt I would be offered either, but I did offer recommendations to one of them and that caused me to take a look at the curricula for various journalism programs in the nation. There are some neat new courses and methods (e.g., via @underoak, UNC’s master’s in technology and communication). But what struck me about journalism curricula is how little some of the courses appeared to have changed, even now. What does it mean to teach magazines these days?

Jeremy and our colleagues Peter Hauck and Jennifer McFadden sat down last week and played the game of 52-card-pickup we regularly play at CUNY, rethinking what we’re teaching and how. For example, we are going to emphasize prototyping and project management more than we had. In the admissions process for this spring, we not only wanted a diverse group of students and perspectives but also of businesses, from hyperlocal content businesses to disruptive platforms. In the other arms of the Tow-Knight center, we are supporting research in new opportunities and needs in journalism to help guide students and the industry as they propose new ideas to fit new needs. And with our growing incubator, we are bringing in new services to help both students’ and outside entrepreneurial ventures.

Of course, elsewhere at CUNY, change continues apace. For example, my interactive colleague Sandeep Junnarkar and others have been shepherding into the curriculum new courses on data visualization and a modular course in coding for journalism. We find ourselves constantly managing tension between journalism and tools (always fighting to make sure the former is not overcome by the latter).

Getting a new degree in entrepreneurial journalism is just one milepost in a constant process of trying to stay an inch ahead of the snowball. I’m proud and grateful to work with an administration — Deans Steve Shepard, Judy Watson, and Steve Dougherty — and with a faculty who support this endless creative tsuris.

We teach change.

Categories: Buzzmachine

FTC Fines Santa Claus Over COPPA Violations

Buzzmachine - Mon, 12/19/2011 - 17:15

WASHINGTON–Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz today announced a record fine against Santa Claus for violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

“Mr. Claus has flagrantly violated children’s privacy, collecting their consumer preferences for toys and also tracking their behavior so as to judge and maintain a data base of naughtiness and niceness,” Leibowitz said. “Worse, he has tied this data to personally identifiable information, including any child’s name, address, and age. He has solicited this information online, in some cases passing data to third parties so they may fulfill children’s wishes. According to unconfirmed reports, he has gone so far as to invade children’s homes in the dead of night. He has done this on a broad scale, unchallenged by government authorities for too long.”

Claus was fined $2 million and ordered to end any contact with children. Prior COPPA fines include $1 million against now-virtually-unknown social site Xanga, $400,000 against UMG Recordings, and $35,000 against notorious toymaker Etch-a-Sketch.

The FTC action follows similar complaints against Claus brought by European privacy authorities. European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding has complained about Claus holding data on children outside of EU data-protection standards in North Pole server farms. German head of consumer protection Ilse Aigner has called for an investigation of Claus’ use of Google Street View in navigating his Christmas Eve visits. German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Peter Schaar has demanded that Claus give children, naughty or nice, the right to be forgotten in his data base. And Thilo Weichert, head of the privacy protection office in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, demanded that German web sites take down any Facebook “Like” button referring to Claus.

Meanwhile, Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has attempted to bring together an international coalition of privacy officers opposed to Claus’ practices. In California, Claus has been threatened with severe penalties for nonpayment of the state sales tax. And the UK has vowed that Claus will be detained and could face extradition should he set foot in any English chimneys on Christmas Eve.

Reaction to the FTC decision was mixed in Washington. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry vowed to kill the Federal Trade Commission, relieved that he had finally recalled the final agency he had marked for death. Rival Newt Gingrich suggested that Claus apply for U.S. citizenship, “having contributed much to U.S. industry by stimulating greed at all ages; we need more Clauses and more spending to fix this Democrat-ruined economy.” Ron Paul suggested that Claus set up a Liberatarian nation at the North Pole and offered to run for office there. Herman Cain, whose candidacy remains on hold after allegations of sexual improprieties, said that he “always wondered why the old coot didn’t get in hot water for plopping kiddies on his lap; seemed a lot creepier than anything I ever did.” President Barack Obama refused comment.

From his North Pole headquarters, Claus said through a spokesman that he endeavored only to fulfill children’s dreams. “I regret that the world has come to this: treating any adult who wants to make a child happy as a dangerous stranger,” he said. “The problem with our modern world is not technology but fear, suspicion, and cynicism.” He vowed to continue his Christmas mission of joy. “What’s the worst they can do to me?” he asked, “cookie me?”

Contact: Elfelman Public Relations
Photo via Dreadcentral

Categories: Buzzmachine

Why not a reverse meter?

Buzzmachine - Mon, 12/19/2011 - 16:28

As I ponder the future of The New York Times, it occurred to me that its pay meter could be exactly reversed. I’ll also tell you why this wouldn’t work in a minute. But in any case, this is a way to illustate how how media are valuing our readers/users/customers opposite how we should, rewarding the freeriders and taxing — and perhaps turning away — the valuable users.

So try this on for size: Imagine that you pay to get access to The Times. Everyone does. You pay for one article. Or you pay $20 as a deposit so you’re not bothered every time you come. But whenever you add value to The Times, you earn a credit that delays the next bill.
* You see ads, you get credit.
* You click: more credit.
* You come back often and read many pages: credit.
* You promote The Times on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or your blog: credit. The more folks share what you’ve shared, the more credit you get.
* You buy merchandise via Times e-commerce: credit.
* You buy tickets to a Times event: credit.
* You hand over data that makes you more valuable to The Times and its advertisers (e.g., revealing where you’re going on your next trip): credit.
* You add pithy comment to articles that other readers appreciate: credit.
* You take on tasks in crowdsourced journalistic endeavors: credit.
* You answer a reporter’s question on Twitter and the reporter uses your information: credit.
* You correct an error in a story: credit.
* You give a news tip or an idea for an article The Times publishes: credit.
Maybe you never pay for The Times again because The Times has gained more value out of its relationship with you. If, on the other hand, you hardly do any of those things, then you have to pay for using The Times.

I’ve been thinking about this, too, in light of a few other trends I’ve seen with newspapers online. First, some that are trying meters are finding that very, very few readers ever hit the wall (which papers are setting at anywhere from 1 to 20 pages). That so few hit the wall is frightening. It means that most readers don’t use these sites much. That’s nothing to brag about. Engagement is criminally low. Second, I’ve seen many sites that get a surprising proportion of their traffic from out of their markets — traffic that is valueless (or even costly, in terms of bandwidth) to sites that sell only local ads. This comes from following a goal of pageviews, pageviews, pageviews — brought in with search-engine optimization — rather than valued relationships.

After hearing a few such stories, I suggested that a site with a meter might want to reward local readers by giving them more free content and charge out-of-market readers by charging them sooner.

You see, that values the local reader over the remote reader. My idea for the reverse meter values the engaged reader over the occasional reader — and even rewards greater engagement. And therein lies, I think, the key strategic skill for news businesses online: understanding that all readers are not equal; knowing who your more valuable readers are; getting more of them; and making them more valuable.

Now I’ll tell you why my reverse meter won’t work: When I spoke with all our journalism students at CUNY about their business ideas on Friday, I asked how many had hit the Times pay wall — many — and how many had paid — few. Abundance remains the enemy of payment. There’s always someplace else to get the news. The Times can make its present meter work because (a) it’s that good [the Steve Jobs exception that proves the rule], (b) it’s still sponsoring — that is, giving a free ride — to its most valuable readers, though that is supposed to end soon, and (c) its engagement is still too low and thus many readers don’t even confront the wall (that needs to change).

So never mind the idea of the reverse meter, but retain the lesson of it: Value should be encouraged, not taxed. Readers bring value to sites if the sites are smart enough to have the mechanisms to recognize, exploit, and reward that value, which comes in many forms: responding to (highly targeted and relevant) ads; buying merchandise; contributing information, content, and ideas; promoting the site…..

The key strategic opportunity for news sites is relationships — deeper, more valuable relationships with more (but not too many) people. Engagement.

Categories: Buzzmachine