I’ve been thinking about that in relation to Google’s new program to sell advertising into print magazines. Rather than choosing and dealing directly with a print brand, advertisers can now go to Google, which buys pages in certain magazines and resells ads on those pages over a Google logo. So in the process, Google supercedes the print brand. I’m surprised that any magazines are going along with this. The big, slick publishers I’ve worked with are loath to allow anyone else to sell — or certainly undersell — their space. And they are very protective of the value of their brands because, well, that’s the only value they really have (otherwise, they’re just pages with words). Clearly, some publishers want the money.
What Google is really doing is commodifying those magazines and their brands: Their pages are just space, their audiences just eyeballs.
Google certainly has done the same thing with online advertising. It’s doing that on this very page (half the time; the other half, Yahoo’s doing it) and it’s doing that with the big guys, too. And we all take it because, yes, we want the money. With AdSense, Google has commodified the content and brands of online content. It turns our pages into opportunities to play its advertising Match Game, placing ads on pages not on the basis of brand, context, content, environment, engagement, or trust — all the things advertisers supposedly care about and pay a premium for — but on the basis of the simple and perhaps coincidental occurrence of a word.
In that sense, Google also commodifies the audience. We’re not seeing these ads on the basis of our demographics or behavior or interests or relationships — also things advertisers value and pay for — but only because we have eyes. Everybody’s like everybody else. We’re just users. Might as well be pork belllies. We are a commodity.
Advertisers, too, are commodified, all presented in the same little boxes. You’d think they’d object; they are, after all, the foremost creators and defenders of brands. But they want the money, too.
Google commodifies news now. Though without transparency into its algorithms, it’s hard to say whether the use of one news brand or another is a value judgment or a roll of the dice.
And, of course, Google commodifies the world’s content by making it all available on a level playing field in its search.
Google hopes to do the same with books, letting an obscure, out-of-print, hard-to-find tome as easy to find as a Stephen King or a Charles Dickens. I support that.
Mind you, I’m not saying any or all of that is bad. Quite the contrary: The leveling that the internet and Google enable is what makes it possible for a mere blogger to swim alongside Big Old Media.
But in that process, let’s note that the unique identities, brands, qualifications, interests, relationships, and values we have as publishers, citizens, users, or marketers — the very values the internet enables! — are lost. We’re commodified.
The real conclusion one should come to with this is that we are presented with new opportunities to find new definitions of brands and new ways to bring them to the surface and highlight them and find value in them.
I believe, for example, that there will be a need to put together trusted networks of distributed content for advertising (how to put them together, measure them, serve ads on them, and verify them, and how to define trust are the things we’ll be talking about at my ad panel at Web 2.0).
I think that people will need to use microformats, tags, and other means to better identify themselves and stand out in the endless level playing field and to find each other and stick together.
I already see new, specialized searches — e.g., Indeed and Simply Hired in jobs — that find things in a subset of the world.
I fear that we’ll all end up with flacks as we try to find ways to get noticed: In a commodified world where every pig is just another pork belly, we sometimes need Charlotte and her web to make us stand out (and survive).
And I think that things created by humans — content, connections, relationships, meantingful metadata — vs. things created by machines — Google and so much else — will come into new demand and have new value.
: On a related note: I like the level playing field. But in some cases, the levelness is an illusion; someone has an advantage of someone else and that’s based on an algorithm we can’t see but that some try to discover and manipulate (that’s what led to the new industry called search-engine optimization). And it’s another hall in the house of mirrors when the algorithim is rigged to alter our behavior.
Robert Cringely writes [via Battelle] that Google’s AdSense seems to play commercial Skinner by rewarding advertisers who increase what they’re willling to spend but punishing those who try to decrease. It’s not so level after all.
: ALSO: Tim O’Reilly writes an op-ed in today’s Times supporting Google’s Library Project and I wholeheartedly agree. I can’t imagine writing and publishing a book and then directing that it should be hidden in the bookstore so no one can find it and destroyed as soon as it’s no longer current so no one can find it. That’s in essence what the authors are trying to do. But then again, that’s what content sites also do when they hide their stuff in data bases and behind pay walls making it unsearchable. Today, if you’re not searchable, you don’t exist.
Boy, I’m unimpressed with Commander in Chief: speeches that make Bush sound profound, silly and anachronistic gender-role-reversal gags, cheesy plotting, cardboard characters. C-
The Times-Picayune posted a roundup of the exaggerations and rumors that got press and play during the flood but that now turn out to be untrue or unsubstantiated. It’s a good story; the only thing that would have made it better would have been for the paper to have posted direct links to its own reports of these exaggerations (see the prime example of such a story here; see my link to it here; see my correction here). As David Carr said in his column here, exaggerations are inevitable in such huge stories; it’s the fog of war made only foggier by the rush of time in this age of instant media. The odd thing is that this usually happens in awful stories — wars, disasters, 9/11 — where there is no need to amplify the horror. But it happens. And when the heat of the moment cools, these mistakes and their corrections have an equally inevitable impact on our perceptions.
That’s one of the points I was trying to get to in the post below on the correction of one mistaken story out of New Orleans. I clearly didn’t express myself well enough and stirred the hornets, so let me make the damned fool mistake of trying again:
Should mistakes and exaggerations be corrected? Absolutely. Do facts matter? Well, of course.
But the problem with those exaggerations and with our addiction to big numbers, which I wrote about here, is that we too often lose perspective. Look at it in generic terms:
You think the story is this big (10,000 dead) or this bad (7-year-old girl raped at Convention Center) and when those dire reports, rumors, and predictions turn out to be wrong, that doesn’t mean the story is no longer bad and big. But instead of measuring the reality of the situation, we’re beginning to measure the change in perceptions about it — especially as various sides try to manage those perception. So I’ll say it again: Just because the situation isn’t as bad as we were led to believe doesn’t mean it wasn’t bad… or certainly, in the converse, doesn’t make the situation good. And to look at it from another side, just because it was bad (thugs threaten people), that doesn’t mean it was all bad (most people stayed civilized and helped each other).
New Orleans was bad. It was bad in many ways we don’t even know. It always was good in ways we haven’t heard yet as tales of heroism and communities at work come out. But the bottom line remains: It sure as hell could and should have been better. So I am loath to let anyone off the hook at any level, from any party, until we make serious efforts to find out what was wrong and fix it and do it better the next time. Is it about blame? I actually wish it weren’t (and that’s what I said in relation to the 9/11 commission). It should be about finding the problems and then implementing the solutions so more are not neglected or lost in the next tragedy, man- or nature-made.
So now to Russert v. Broussard. I had two problems. First was the implication of the Russert’s sound-biting: that if Broussard was wrong about certain facts and chronololgies of his story of the nursing home death, for whatever reason, then his criticism of the relief effort was less valid, less — in Russert’s word — “fair.” But that’s simplistic; after getting past the correction of the facts and times, which is necessary, it’s also necessary to stay on the story and to continue to investigate the larger story of response in New Orleans. It’s not about Broussard the reporter. It’s about government protecting citizens and Broussard is every bit as much in the focus of that magnifying glass as is Bush. Second, I found Russert’s attack on Broussard unseemly, all the worse because it was over the dead body of an old woman and because Russert himself should know that he makes mistakes and people accuse him of doing it with an agenda and so he should think twice before he accuses others of that.
In the end, what is the real value of journalism? I hope it is perspective and experience. I hope it is the ability to keep focused on the real story as others get knickers in knots about misplaced facts or political spins or hidden agendas. It was Russert’s job not to pillory Broussard over a fact but to hold Broussard and all government accountable for their response — their clearly inadequate response — to this tragedy.
: Now I’ve been taken to task by a few for saying that facts can be a commodity. Notably, Dick Meyers got all hot and bothered about this. He should cool his jets. Once a fact is reported and known it is, of course, a commodity: Everybody knows it, nobody owns it. The fact isn’t the story. The story is the story. The real story in New Orleans is not that one tragic old lady. The story in New Orleans is much larger: all about what government’s responsibilities are and whether government met those responsibilties and whether we can learn from the mistakes that government and others made and whether we will all be safer the next time… or whether we’ll be too damned busy pissing on each other. Are we a society or a debating society?
We need to put our country’s best brains and experience to the question of what to do with New Orleans.
We should see a cooperative effort — or perhaps a competition — among the country’s best urban studies programs, architecture schools, economics departments, MBA programs, engineering and environmental programs and their counterparts in industry, with a few (the few) competent politicians thrown in (read: Rudy).
This is not as simple as pumping out, digging up, and moving back in, of course. There are complex engineering and enviromental issues: Can this city be made safe from the water and the pollutants that took it over and at what cost? There are blunt economic questions that must be asked: How many people can this place support when it had no industry aside from tourism before the storm and when residents will stay away in droves after the storm? There are social issues we’ve not begun to grapple with: How can we improve the prospects of minorities trapped in the poverty, crime, and injustice that took over this city? What is appropriate public spending and what is merely the product of cynical political ass-covering? How do we make sure that money reaches its goals? What is the appropriate and fair public policy for this and future disasters? What is a new vision for the city?
This could start at a grandiose level: a foundation brings together the best and brightest.
Or this could start at our level: someone starts a weblog or a wiki with an idea and a challenge to share better ideas. Big thinking can come from small starts, from anyone anywhere.
And we need big thinking that is unafraid to ask the hard questions and come up with imaginative answers. Perhaps New Orleans should be a new planned community. Or it should be all but abandoned and its residents helped with relocation elsewhere. Or it should finally go all the way and become the Vegas of the South with entertainment, food, gambling, and conventions at its core. Or turned into an economic development zone that creates opportunities where so few existed. Or what?
Recovering from Katrina needs more than water bottles and helicopters and buses. It needs strategy, imagination, the intelligent use of capital, real and political. We can’t leave this to the governments that made such a mess of the city — at every level, yes, every level. We need to need to help our fellow citizens in New Orleans find a better future. For tomorrow, it could be our town.
: This is about the positive: building the appropriate future. But it also about preventing the negative: corruption, patronage, pork. Glenn Reynolds spotted this scathing criticism of Louisiana’s pols in today’s Post:
The state’s representatives have come up with a request for $250 billion in federal reconstruction funds for Louisiana alone — more than $50,000 per person in the state. This money would come on top of payouts from businesses, national charities and insurers. And it would come on top of the $62.3 billion that Congress has already appropriated for emergency relief.
Like looters who seize six televisions when their homes have room for only two, the Louisiana legislators are out to grab more federal cash than they could possibly spend usefully. For example, their bill demands $7 billion for rebuilding evacuation and energy supply routes, but it also demands a separate $5 billion for road building and makes no mention of the $3.1 billion already awarded to the state in the recent transportation legislation. …
The Louisiana delegation has apparently devoted little thought to the root causes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. New Orleans was flooded not because the Army Corps of Engineers had insufficient money to build flood protections, but because its money was allocated by a system of political patronage. The smart response would be to insist that, in the future, no Corps money be wasted on unworthy projects, but the Louisiana bill instead creates a mechanism by which cost-benefit analysis can be avoided….
…Congress should ignore the Louisiana bill and force itself to think seriously about the sort of reconstruction that makes sense. Katrina has exposed mistakes of policy: water-infrastructure programs that made flooding more likely, and levees and insurance schemes that encouraged human settlement in dangerous places. Now that Congress is getting ready to spend tens of billions on reconstruction, it must seize the opportunity to correct those past errors.
Do we trust Congress more than the legislators of Louisiana? Barely, perhaps. Mark Tapscott urged that the entire process of reconstruction be thick with FOIAs. He’s right. We have to watch these people.
: Note that I’m not saying I have any experience to contribute to reimagining New Orleans or accounting for the money; I’m just a gadfly journalist. But I know there are brilliant people in this country who can set the agenda that government does not have. I’m eager to see them help.
: Note also that I’ll be posting what I hope is a simple agenda for next month’s Recovery 2.0 meeting. I hadn’t intended to raise anything so grandiose as this but who knows what people will want to bring in.
Well, it’d be cool that Google is streaming the first episode of Everybody Hates Chris… if it worked. I’m getting one frame every 10 seconds. And it’s not my connection; CNN video is working just fine.
I’m a supporter of copyright (and we can quibble till the bar closes about how much and how long). But I believe that government should not be allowed to own copyright; the people own its copyright and should be able to use material created at public expense however the people damned well choose. That’s why it’s appalling that transit officials are suing over the copyright of subway maps. What the hell do they think their job is? And who do they think owns the subways and the maps? We do.
“They should change the whole concept and scrap those plans and start from the beginning and focus it on Sept. 11,” Giuliani said. “I think it’s a mistake the way it’s become too complicated.”
In my latest Guardian column, I argue that the big, old networks won’t die but they won’t grow and in business, isn’t that as good as dying? Here it is on The Guardian (and here it is on Buzzmachine). I go over some of the same turf longtime readers/sufferers will find familiar: How the netework that no one owns, the internet, is more powerful than the network the big guys own. And then I compare the businesses of CNN and every media commentator’s new-age darling, Rocketboom. I point out all the things Rocketboom doesn’t have: expensive studios, equipment, staffs, lawyers, deals, marketing budgets.
But they do have audience. Rocketboom serves at least 60,000 downloads a day. Compare that with Crossfire’s audience on CNN: 150,000. So Rocketboom has more than a third of the big network show’s audience at a fraction of the cost. And, by the way, CNN’s audience is near retirement age while Rocketboom’s fans (excluding me) are young enough to be CNN viewers’ grandchildren.
Rocketboom itself won’t kill CNN. But a thousand Rocketbooms will explode television.
Last week, Paul Farhi at The Washington Post explored the same thicket and came out with different burrs. He still believes that the networks have “some unrivaled competitive advantage.” And that’s true, if being big is the goal, if blockbusters remain the basis of your economics. But in this new small-is-the-new-big you no longer have to be No. 1 (or 2 or 3) to survive. You can be No. 3000 or 30,000 and be big enough to succeed. And so the networks will find themselves with 30,000 or 30 million new competitors nipping at them.
Three weeks ago, I linked to Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard’s outburst on Meet the Press about the mother of a colleague who died, abandoned, in a flooded nursing home. Two weeks later, I said it was my responsibility to link to a correction about details of that story. And now I’ll link to Tim Russert’s ambush (David Weinberger’s quite appropriate word) on Broussard and Brian Oberkirch’s wise and blunt perspective about all this.
This turned into a game of factual gotcha and in the process some lost sight of the real story and the real tragedy and that is by far the greater failure.
On this week’s Meet the Press, Russert replays Broussard’s emotional appearance for him and then goes after him on the facts. The woman who died was in a nursing home where the owners have been indicted for neglecting and not evacuating their residents. So, Russert says, that’s not the feds’ fault, huh? Russert gets up on a factual high-horse but Broussard puts him right back in his place, explaining that he learned what he said from his staff and that he certainly did not cross-examine his colleague about the mother he could not rescue, who had just died. That does not make the story of neglect of the entire city of New Orleans by government at all — all — levels any less vital. And Broussard says so:
Sir, that woman is the epitome of abandonment. She was left in that nursing home. She died in that nursing home. Tommy will tell you that he tried to rescue her and could not get her rescued….
Listen, sir, somebody wants to nitpick a man’s tragic loss of a mother because she was abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man’s mother’s death? They just buried Eva last week… It will be the saddest tale you ever heard, a man who was responsible for safekeeping of a half a million people, mother’s died in the next parish because she was abandoned there and he can’t get to her and he tried to get to her through EOC. He tried to get through the sheriff’s office. He tries every way he can to get there. Somebody wants to debate those things? My God, what sick-minded person wants to do that?
What kind of agenda is going on here? … Somebody better wake up. You want to come and live in this community and see the tragedy we’re living in? Are you sitting there having your coffee, you’re in a place where toilets flush and lights go on and everything’s a dream and you pick up your paper and you want to battle ideology and political chess games? Man, get out of my face. Whoever wants to do that, get out of my face.
Russert keeps riding his horse. He wants Broussard to somehow say that by getting facts of this story wrong, his criticism of the feds was thus invalidated, was not “fair” (and what a schoolyard word that is in this context). Broussard won’t bite.
Were we abandoned by the federal government? Absolutely we were. Were there more people that abandoned us? Make the list. The list can go on for miles. That’s for history to document. That’s what Congress does best, burn witches. Let Congress do their hearings. Let them find the witches. Let them burn them. The media burns witches better than anybody. Let the media go find the witches and burn them. But as I stood on the ground, sir, for day after day after day after day, nobody came here, sir. Nobody came. The federal government didn’t come. The Red Cross didn’t come. I’ll give you a list of people that didn’t come here, sir, and I was here….
Did inefficiencies, did bureaucracy commit murder here? Absolutely, it did. And Congress and the media will flush it out and find it out and those people will be held accountable. You’ve already given an example. These people in the nursing home in St. Bernard, they’re getting indicted. Good. They ought to be indicted. They ought to get good old-fashioned Western justice. They ought to be taken out and administered to like they did in the old West.
Yes, there’s a lot of people that they’re going to find that are going to be villains in this situation, but they’re also going to find for the most part that the Peter Principle was squared. The Peter Principle is you promote somebody to the level of incompetency, but when you promote somebody to the level of incompetency in a life or death department, then those people should be ousted. Those people should be strung up. Those people should be burned at the stake. And I’m sure Congress and the press is going to do that.
Mr. Russert: At the local, state and federal level.
Mr. Broussard: Sir, at every level. Are you kidding? This is a jigsaw puzzle. This is a mosaic. The blame will be shared by everybody….
David Weinberger sums up the journalistic sin of losing the forest for the trees, the story for the facts:
It was an attempt to discredit the story’s teller in order to deny the story’s meaning. It was contemptible.
Too much of journalism is turning this way today: If we nitpick the facts and follow some rules some committee wrote up, we’ll be safe; we’re doing our jobs. No, sir, our job is to get more than the facts. Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity. The truth is harder to find. Justice is harder to fight for. Lessons are what we’re after.
Tim Russert lost sight of the story because he was embarrassed that bloggers caught a guest on his show with facts that were wrong. Russert’s proper response should have been to fix those facts quickly and clear but still pursue the real story. Instead, he chose to shoot the messenger who embarrassed him with the bloggers. He lost sight of his real mission.
I was offended by how quickly the whole discussion went meta. Bodies yet to be retrieved & buried, folks hanging from their own rafters holding onto life, literally, by their fingertips — and pundits, bloggers and media types were already well on their way to converting the storm into a object lesson for their own rhetorical strategies. Hijacked our suffering for their own stories….
Here’s a new way to think about blogging and all forms of consumer generated media: forget fact checking [your] ass. That’s a parlor game for grad students and professional cynics. Yes, you caught some high-profile folks screwing up. Good on you. We’re frying bigger fish now, and you can’t play with us if you haven’t got the emotional heft. I’ve seen do-it-yourself media help us reconnect as human beings. Help one another as individuals in need. Answer a calling to the better parts of ourselves. That’s where I’m putting my energy.
You see, the reason jouranlists were getting praise for their coverage of Katrina and New Orleans was not because they got blown over by winds or soaked in sludge or spewed and fixed facts (many of which go unfixed). The reason people sat up and listened again was that they heard human beings stripped of their dispassionate institutionalism who tried to tell the real story again.
There’s quite a trend in books springing from blogs lately.
: I’m already enjoying Tom Evslin’s Hackoff, the online novel playing itself out on a blog. It uses the faux-reality of online to let us dig through the tale, the clues, the personalities, and the process. Unlike other fiction — just plain words on pages — this is inventive not only in the story but also in the form. Go enjoy. I am. (I’m meeting Tom for lunch today; I’ll make him promise not to tell me whodunit, no matter how much I beg.)
: I started reading my copy of John Battelle’s The Search\ and particularly enjoyed the humble beginning, in which Battelle confesses that he blew up and blew up with the bubble and here he is writing about the next one, the Gooble. John was similarly transparent in the process of writing his book, revealing and talking through and listening about the facts and findings of his research. It makes us all feel more involved in the book that results.
: Also just got a copy of Julie and Julia, the book born of a blog about following Julia Child’s footsteps and recreating her work in her seminal work. Can’t wait to tuck in.
: And I got a galley of Blog! by Dan Burstein and David Kline. Among other things, it compiles interviews with a host of bloggers (me included), among them: Scoble, Shirky, Cox, Huffington, Denton, Wheaton, Curry, Ito, Trippi, Kos, Rosen, Simon, MacKinnon, Calacanis, Lee (the agent), Teachout, and more. If only it were a podcast!
And there are others out there. The point is obvious: Blogs are a new source of proven talent, ideas (and promotion) in words-on-pages publishing. Other media should view them similarly.
Quick question, Macheads: I’m trying to use a simple microphone into the line-in jack and I’m getting nothing. Yes, I changed the device in the system preferences. The internal mic works fine, as does the iSight mike. And I did get an amplified mic to work in the line in jack. Could it be that a simple mic or headset won’t work? How are people doing podcasts? How are people doing Skype? I just want to use a basic mic for video chats and other recording. Any advice?
