It’s so entertaining watching spin spun. Bush on why Miers withdrew:
“It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House — disclosures that would undermine a president’s ability to receive candid counsel,” Bush said.
This morning, the 60 Minutes crew is in Stern’s studio taping him for an upcoming segment.
I hope they don’t miss the true significance of Stern in American media. It’s not that he farted. It’s not that he was attacked by the so-called Parents Television Council, which hounded him off our airwaves with the aid of our own damned FCC (though that, too, is a story). It’s not even that he single-handedly blew up the radio industry: His departure didn’t just cause them to find replacements but to blow up the formats of every one of his stations (though that is a story). And it’s not that he could well turn satellite into an industry (which will be a story).
No, it’s that he was honest in a media world that has become packaged and sanitized for our protection: bloodless, soulless, faked to look real. And they couldn’t take it.
I haven’t fully computed the meaning of Google’s base. But I’ll start here: If the king of the world of unstructured data — it searches everything — is now getting into the business of structuring data with such things as very formatted real-estate listings, then Google should openly publish its structure so anyone can use it anywhere and still be found by Google. If they don’t, then Google — which wants to tear down the walls around everyone else’s gardens — is only building a wall itself. And if they don’t publish their API, then folks should gang up and use microformats of our own so our stuff can be found in spite of Google on Google. But if they do publish it — and if it’s open-source and open to change — then I say fine: We have the start of standards to swarm around.
I’ll say again that the future of classifieds is not centralized — on newspaper sites or even on Craigs List or Monster — but decentralized and distributed, living anywhere and found by search engines. If that’s Google doing the finding, fine. If it’s a specialized competitor, fine.
Beltway politicos, famously slow to adopt technology, are wooing blogs – all but Trent Lott.
“Bloggers claim I was their first pelt, and I believe that. I’ll never read a blog,” says the former Senate majority leader, who forfeited that title after bloggers Joshua Micah Marshall and Glenn Reynolds picked up a racially charged remark, drawing the attention of mainstream media (MSM) and his Senate colleagues….
Last week, House Republicans convened the first ever “Capitol Hill Blog Row.” In a small committee room in the Capitol, a dozen bloggers, selected by an informal poll of GOP staff, were provided soft drinks, a high-speed Net connection, and access to top Republican figures for half a day. Issues discussed ranged from how to cut government spending to the future of the GOP.
As a follow-up, Speaker Hastert is launching his own blog. “Blogging is the new talk radio,” says Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean. “People listen to talk radio because the mainstream media is too liberal for them. It makes sense for the Speaker to get the Republican message out to them.”
The means of measurement used by advertisers for every other medium — newspaper, magazine, radio, TV, and no online — will not — will never — work in the world of citizens and distributed media. That is why we must create our own measurement standards.
To get apples-to-apples numbers for those other, older, major media, advertisers rely on allegedly representative samples.
But you can never get a sample big enough to deal with the mass of niches.
Hell, the samples aren’t big enough to deal with local online newspaper sites. The Online Publishers Association just released a study that found various means of measuring those sites disagree drastically:
Differences arose between the two primary methodologies, surveys and panels….
The paper analyzes data from five services. Firms conducting panel research include comScore Media Metrix and Nielsen//NetRatings-MegaView Local. Firms measuring local audience through a combination of online, phone and postal mail surveys include Nielsen//NetRatings @Plan (online); Scarborough Research (phone and mail); and The Media Audit (phone).
When data from the two forms of collection were analyzed, survey-based methodologies, on average, reported 70 percent higher visitor numbers than panel-based research.
An example cited in the study looked at the number of visitors to LATimes.com. Visitor data differed by one million between two services.
When I was at Advance, we found that these sampling methodologies would find no audience in some markets that we knew from our server stats were actually much bigger than other markets they did measure. They simply didn’t have enough people in Alabama.
Well, they’ll never get enough knitters to measure the knitting bloggers. They can measure a few of the biggest bloggers. But that’s not what this medium is all about. It is about, as someone said at my Web 2.0 ad panel, the “big butt” attached to the fabled long tail of passionate niches that add up to a mass far bigger than the biggest bloggers. So we need to be able to add them up.
This is why it is doubly important for us in this world to create and use our own means of measurement. I’m talking with some folks who are better at getting things done than I am — and working with Burst Media’s coincidentally named Jarvis Coffin to set up a trade group — to work on open-source collection and reporting.
This isn’t just about collecting and verifying audience and pageview numbers — and demographics and behavior — though all that is important.
This is also about collecting data that can be collected only in this medium of the people and gives us unique value: authority, influence, conversation-starting, relationships, loyalty, engagement.
And this is about additional data that cuts across sites — from the likes of Technorati, Icerocket, Blogpulse — and how all this data will be munged together by various parties doing their own analytics.
So, in the end, when an advertiser wants to reach top food influencers they’ll be able to do so through influential food bloggers … and those bloggers will be able to recognize their value as well.
But it won’t happen through the survey or panel research that have become advertisers’ crutch.
There are lots of issues unsettled around who owns what in our new online world where our whole is worth a heckuva lot more than the sum of our parts.
Who owns my actions and attention and trust… but me? Who owns the wisdom of the crowd… but the crowd? And what about those who enable the crowd to be so smart… what do they own?
And is “own” the right verb? Or is it “control?” Or is it all just “sharing?”
This is inspired by Fred Wilson’s and Brad Burnham’s event about peer production and also by my hissyfit about my Yahoo account, below. I’ll try to come down to earth from the former and rise up from the snarkiness of the latter and discuss this on three levels: the individuals, the collectives, and the enablers.
Before I start, it’s important to say that lots of people are way ahead of me here: Seth Goldstein, Marc Canter, Steve Gillmor, Mary Hodder, and many more.
On the individual level, I want to own or control my stuff, don’t you? That is a given that too many companies and institutions forget. Thus my first law of media and life: Give us control and we will use it. The corollary: Don’t give us control and you will lose us.
So I want to control the things I create: my content (this blog); my identity (my addresses); my collections of neat things (my bookmarks); my analysis (my tags); my reputation (my eBay rating), my behavior (my history, my clicks). What does control mean? I want to be assured that somebody else can’t muck with or kill it. I want to be able to use it wherever I want — and that means I need it to be portable.
I also want to control the things I consume: my content (obviously, I pick the sites, shows, words I take in); my advertising (I’d like transparent targeting… and so should advertisers, because it would be a helluva lot more effective).
Other players may try to get in the way — keeping me from my stuff, or pushing me to this page instead of that, or showing me this ad because they get paid to do so — but, again, if I ruled my world, this is what I’d want. Less interference means less friction means less inefficiency means greater value… for everybody.
That is a hard lesson for companies and institutions built on centralized control to learn. But it is a lesson of our new economic order.
Now to the collective: The thing that’s new about this new world is that we don’t just consume. In fact, the act of consumption is now an act of creation. There are so many examples. When I search on Google, I am finding stuff for me but when I click, I am adding to the wisdom of the crowd that makes Google more effective for every searcher who follows me. When I create my iTunes playlist I am also programming my personal iTunes radio station, which I can share; that’s still individual. But when my listening habits join in at LastFM, I’ve now contributed to a collective and that collective pays me back with recommendations (hear Fred on this). When I consume content and want to save it on Del.icio.us or other such services, that’s an individual act. But the tags we create together yield amazing wisdom of the crowd that can be useful in helping people discover content, in organizing the web around topics again, in improving search results, and even in improving ad performance. See also Tagyu, which takes the tagging, categorizing, organizing wisdom of the crowd to tag and organize other content. There’s a lot of value there.
So who owns that collected wisdom of the crowd? I’d say the crowd does. Others merely borrow it if they continue to have the trust of the crowd and if they pay dividends back to that crowd. And if those others try too hard to control that wisdom, to limit its use and the sharing of it, then they not only reduce the value of it — under the theory (and it’s still a theory) that a smaller crowd is less wise — but they also risk turning away the crowd that creates this value. Here’s Om Malik on this very point:
I wondered out loud, if this culture of participation was seemingly help[ing] build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset – time.
I don’t think it’s our time we’re contributing but, indeed, our wisdom: the way we think, the way we look at the world: That’s what’s really valuable, for it allows others to speak directly to us in our own language. Om continues:
We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off. While we may (or may not) gain something from the collective efforts, the odds are whatever “the collective efforts†are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will they share in their upside? Not likely!
Well, but we all get a better search engine in Google thanks to Google collecting our wisdom, no? Google then creates value on top of that in the form of highly targeted advertising and we don’t share in that. In other words, besides getting better searches, do we and should we also get money? Attention Trust would say that we should get value from our attention (though I’ll admit I still haven’t fully figured out their gospel). More Om:
Take Skype as an example – it rides on our broadband pipes, for which we a hefty monthly charge. It uses our computers and pipes to replace a network that cost phone companies billions to build. In exchange we can make free phone calls to other Skype users. I have no problems with that. I had no problems with Skype charging me for SkypeIN and SkypeOUT calls as well, for this was only a premium service only to be used if and when needed.
However, now that it is part of eBay, I do cringe a little….
It’s still just economics: an exchange of value. But the value now comes in many forms, not just money.
Which brings us to the enablers: Google, Del.icio.us, Yahoo, eBay, LastFM, iTunes, CraigsList, Wikipedia, Skype, Technorati, PubSub, IceRocket, and on and on. This is the peer production we explored at the Union Square event (and if you dare, you can read the whole transcript here.) I learned a lot at that session and it’s only now sinking in.
The question is: What do the enablers deserve for enabling? And what do we as individuals and as members of the collective deserve for creating the wisdom? What do we owe each other in this exchange of value?
Or the real question is: How do we not screw this up?
There are so many ways we can screw it up. Spam, hate, stupidity, and control can do that. But if everyone behaves the right way, then we create great whole larger than the sums of their parts; every capitalized entity above proves that. But we’re still trying to figure out what the rules are, what “the right way” means.
The truth is that we’re doing nothing less than creating a new society and we’re still figuring out what the rules and economies of that society are.
A whole set of other behaviors that have grown up in the household, in friendships, in communities, the motivations that they capture, the signals that get people to explain what it is that they desire, how they desire, what they want to do, what they’re trying to do, all of these things are suddenly becoming integrated into the core economic activities of the most advanced economists, and all of the players inside of these economies need to begin to think. It’s a new set of social competition. It’s a new set of opportunities. It’s a new solution space for ways to solve production problems. And we need to start learning how to live with, use, provide platforms for, use the outputs of without undermining this new set of social cultural practices.
In short: Life is being integrated into the economies of developed nations. It’s nothing less than that.
Some more lessons from that day:
Tom Evslin said that we are proving to have a build in “urge to cooperate:”
Anthropologically we have a much greater urge to cooperate and to do cooperative things than we knew that we had as a species. [For example] the help forums that grow up around every possible service where there’s a bunch of volunteers basically providing export because they want to. I think what happened is is that we assumed that people only did things that they got paid for doing…
But, again, we get paid in other ways: In getting knowledge back, in knowing we are building something together, in feeling a sense of empowerment and ownership, in just feeling good.
Evslin also said that if you’re going to try to build a large network — a community, collective, society, whatever you want to call it — on top of this phenomenon and using the infrastructure that technology now permits, then you’re best off building the largest network possible first without regard to profit, which will limit yourself and thus limit the network you are building.
I think lesson one is don’t try to build a business and network at the same time….
Let’s forget Reed’s Law for a moment because Metcalf’s Law is steep enough, that everyone knows that Metcalf’s Law says use networks that increase value, and everybody forgets the converse, which is small networks have no value. And so what value is there to the first few users in joining a small network. Almost none. And so you can’t extract anything in return. You can’t put friction in the way of people joining a small network. You have to make it incredibly attractive and easy. That’s the secret of Skype’s success. They only had distribution experience. Then they used that, and they didn’t introduced Skype in and Skype out because it would have been a distraction until they reached critical network mass.
So if you build openly to build as big and as fast as possible, then you’ll be in the best position to figure out where the value for you is. (And, yes, that sounds like Bubble 1.0 but the difference now is that you can build with less investment; you can build as so many of the companies listed in this post have, with very little.) So… Google built a collective search engine to build an ad company. Skype built a collective phone company to sell to a commerce company. Others (I’d list Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Craig’s List here) are still trying to figure this out.
Tim O’Reilly talked about the empowerers and how they succeed under the Evslin model by not trying to hold onto too much as you build:
A defining characteristic seems to be how much is the value of the system you try to capture. You know, if you look at something like Ebay or Google, even though they’re very, very successful companies, they’re actually pretty generous in creating value for people outside the company, and you know, versus say if you look at sort of the traditional walled garden kind of company, there’s really not that opportunity for creating value. You know, Pierre likes to point out how many people make a living on Ebay and how the social goal of getting people to trust each other is intrinsic to the value of the system at creating an economic opportunity for people.
To which Mark Pincus replied that eBay created a wall around its reputation system, not allowing people to export and use their trust ratings, and that’s screwing it up.
There was much discussion about the point at which things do get screwed up: Somebody grows by being open. Then they want to stay on top so they exert control (getting greedy about trying to keep you in or about money or information). When they exert too much control, then competitors can gang up by being more open (regaining the advantage that made the big guy big) or the public the big guy serves can desert.
All of which is to say that there are values that must be shared to succeed. But we’re still not sure what those values are; we’re still scribbling down Hammurabi’s Code. Once again, we are building a new society here.
I believe we start with the notions that:
* We all want to control our contributions.
* We all want the community to benefit if we in turn benefit.
* We expect mutual trust in the forms of transparency and honesty
* And we all — individual, collective, enabler — find uncivil behavior (spam, fraud, hate) unacceptable.
But there’s one more fundamental notion that informs this new society, a notion that big companies and institutions invariably forget because they were build in the old order:
This is no longer a centralized world, a world controlled by those institutions. This is a decentralized world, a world controlled by us.
And if you try to take control away from us, you will lose. It used to be that you could take control away from us and we had nowhere to go. But in this post-scarcity world, we can always go somewhere else for content or information or service. There’s always another news story, always another email service, always another search engine. Thus my first law, once again: Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.
I want to try a new Yahoo feature. But I can’t. Because Yahoo has deactivated my third account. Why? Because I didnt’ use it. Because I didn’t give a damn about using Yahoo. Now how is that for numbnutty, stupid customer service? A customer leaves and tries to come back and you kill them. What if one of the people at the door at Walmart stopped you and said, “You haven’t been here enough, you can’t come back. Ever.” What if a car company said, “You waited too long to trade-in. Go fly a kite.” But this just indicates how little I use Yahoo… not at all. And now they remind me just how little I use them. So I look at them like I do clothes in the closet I haven’t warn for a year: Guess I don’t need them anymore. What the hell does it cost Yahoo to keep an account around? What does it cost versus telling a customer go to F himself?
: Some commenters don’t get my complaint. Here it is: Yahoo wants me to save things on its service — like RSS — but I’m far less likely to make that investment if I can suddenly lose it. I have too many other choices.
: LATER: All in all, the commenters are certainly taking me to task. I’ll confess to oversnarking. But I was frustrated. I don’t like being barred at the door. And I see no reason why it wouldn’t be smarter to give me the option right then and there to reactivate; they should be welcoming me back, not scolding and kicking me; makes me want to scold and kick back, which is just what I did. I’m just a consumer trying to consume. And note well that I’m not likely to invest in a service — with my email and stocks and bookmarks and communities — if I’m going to fear that it may be killed. I’m writing a post about the bigger issues now for later….
This morning, Howard Stern generously, I thought, had David Lee Roth on as a “mystery guest” to promote himself as one of Stern’s radio replacements in January.
He’s no Stern.
Roth was trying to do radio. He spoke with an eerie formality — eerie for a rocker — sounding like an overaged kid in a bar mitzvah suit trying to get a good check out of Aunt Sadie. Or maybe he sounded like a pretentious, sober, and boring Crazy Cabbie. Or… I don’t know what he was trying to sound like. But he didn’t sound genuine. That’s what makes Stern Stern.
“Free FM,” which Infinity is calling “a bold new FM format, ” will take root in four of the top five and seven of the top 10 U.S. radio markets, as part of its Howard Stern replacement strategy. Infinity currently broadcasts Stern’s program on 27 of its stations across the country. His last live broadcast will be on Friday, December 16.
It is now official that David Lee Roth and Adam Carolla have been named as morning drive hosts on WXRK (K-Rock)/New York and KLSX/Los Angeles, respectively, beginning on Tuesday, January 3, 2006. Additional markets to broadcast Roth include KLLI/Dallas, WYSP/Philadelphia, WBCN/Boston, WRKZ/Pittsburgh, WNCX/Cleveland and WPBZ/West Palm Beach. Carolla will be heard on KIFR/San Francisco, KPLN/San Diego, KZON/Phoenix, KUFO/Portland and KXTE/Las Vegas.
Jimmy Kimmel will serve as creative consultant for The Adam Carolla Show, as well as advisor for Infinity. He will assist in the development of new talent and show ideas, along with making guest appearances on the program.
“Infinity’s Free FM stations will feature an eclectic mix of personalities, whose distinct creativity, perspective, sense of humor, intellect and unpredictability do not fall under the guiding principals of any particular narrowcast theme or ideology,†said Infinity chairman/CEO Joel Hollander. “An entertaining hybrid of provocative, political, pop culture, news, music and lifestyle formats, our next generation of FM stations will be personified by their conviction, passion, originality, fearlessness and innovation which is not heard anywhere else on the radio.â€
Yeah, it’s not heard anywhere on Radio because the FCC got rid of Stern and ballless Viacom and the radio industry let them.
More on Infinity’s plans, as if anyone should give more than a shrug:
KIFR, WYSP and KPLN will convert to Free FM programming as of today. WXRK, the flagship station for the David Lee Roth Show, will debut Free FM on the station in conjunction with Roth’s premiere in January 2006. Current Infinity stations in Los Angeles (KLSX), Chicago (WCKG), Dallas (KLLI), Washington, D.C. (WJFK), Detroit (WKRK) and Baltimore (WHFS) have all been rebranded Free FM as of today.
Penn Jillette, one-half of the entertainment duo Penn & Teller, has also been named as host of a unique one-hour live radio program that will be featured on WXRK, WCKG, KIFR, WJFK, WKRK, KPLN, WHFS and KSFN beginning in January 2006.
Even those guys don’t take all the markets. Rover, whatever that is, and the Junkies, whatever that is, take over other markets and in San Francisco, the land of the different tattooed drummer:
KITS/San Francisco will launch the Morning Music Co-Op, an entertainment-based program featuring alternative music with unprecedented listener involvement/interaction and minimal commercial interruption. The station’s on-air programming attributes will include music-oriented town halls, sponsorship of “locals-only†concerts, monthly music and movie listener correspondents, frequent auditions for permanent positions on the show, listener advisory reports, and Q&A sessions with station executives.
Ooh, Q&A sessions with station executives. Is that what the kids call interactivity?
I’m pissed anew. Stern should not be leaving the airwaves.
Without Stern, apparently, there’s no more reason to live.
Then again, some would argue K-Rock actually died sometime around 1995, when it overnight stopped playing the classic rock that got us through high school. We got over it.
: Maybe rock is dead. David Hinkley quotes Stevie Van Zandt:
Little Steven Van Zandt, host of the syndicated Sunday night “Underground Garage,” told a Radio & Records convention this summer that radio has shortchanged rock for decades.
“In a real sense, the last big [rock] band through the door was U2, 25 years ago,” Van Zandt said. “When our generation stops touring, it’s over. Rock ‘n’ roll is a living, breathing animal that needs to be fed. With new blood.”
That new blood is out there, too, he said, but has too few outlets for exposure on broadcast radio. “Hip-hop and pop can be heard. New rock ‘n’ roll had nowhere to go. [Our show] has played more new bands in three years than anyone since the ’60s.”
Talk, talk, talk, more talk, more blabber about nothing, prank phone calls and “odd” news, bitching about the world with in a post-modern ironic kind of way, fluffy Hollywood interviews, thirty second sound bites about the top grossing movies, some Paul Harvey-esque dude giving you a humorous take on a news subject and, fuck you don’t lie to us there will be no music.
Rock radio is dead….
It’s gone. It’s happening everywhere, not just New York. Rock and roll radio is dead. I don’t care that there are alternatives. It’s still god damn sad that the best thing about FM radio is no more.
In other words, he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s going to do. He’s going to throw anything and everything against the wall and wait to see what sticks.
: On the other hand: Radio Marketing Nexus says there’s more here than we know (and, frustratingly, he’s not telling us):
The solution, my friends, is not infinite options (a la HD Radio) but a very small number of compelling ones.
I know what you’re thinking: David Lee Roth? But in my book a train wreck waiting to happen is only slightly less compelling than the actual accident scene itself.
I will not dish any secrets. But suffice it to say that Infinity’s FREE FM concept is much bigger than fixing the Howard Stern problem (although not likely to be bigger than Stern).
The other day, I was talking with my son about some things some companies are working on online — because I wanted his perspective — and I suddenly realized that I had to give him the blogger’s caveat: “You can’t blog this.” How many fathers and sons share that warning?
Early on in my career, I learned a lesson that I do not understand to this day: Computers are political. They are dull, whirring, whizzing, amoral machines and yet they inspire the most amazing organizational venom.
It is not clear how or why the company traced Mr. Krucoff’s e-mail message, but Mr. Oxfeld said that Mr. Krucoff was confronted about the episode yesterday and escorted from the building.
Note well, Nasties: They may not know what you’re thinking, but they apparently know what you’re typing. As Gawker advises: “For the love of God, remember to use your Gmail.”
Here’s my latest Guardian column. This week, it’s a rewrite of my review of Good Night, and Good Luck, the movie about Edward R Murrow: in the Guardian; on Buzzmachine.
