BuzzMachine

Just happened across the letter from the editor at Epicurious.com with this amusing perspective on blogs. Tanya Wenman Steel writes:

This is a bittersweet moment-—my last monthly Letter from the Editor. Starting in March, this will become a Blog from the Editor, filled with news on people I meet, places I go, things I learn, and the foods I eat and love.

That sounds just like a letter from the editor.

The rest of media is exploding. I’ve been arguing that the advertising business is next. And, in fact, the lack of courageous innovation in advertising is holding back development in the rest of media. For example, advertisers still feel safer buying print even though all the audience growth is online, which means they’re still paying too much for too little. It’s a painful syncopation.

But some in the ad biz get it and one who does is Rishad Tobaccowala of Publicis, who was the company’s chief innovation officer and today announced he’s starting a new company inside the ad giant to seek out and jumpstart innovation, to consult to advertisers and media companies, and even to invest — with advice capital – in startups like Brightcove. Here’s a Journal story about the company, called Denuo, and here’s a Rishad interview. (Full disclosures: I’ve become personal friends with one of the media thinkers in Rishad’s tank, Tom Tercek, and I’ve made blogboy spiels and business introductions for them — without financial gain, silly me.)

Here’s what I think this means from the outside: Rishad has always been a great thinker and a great talker but it’s not easy making change happen just by cajoling within an organization. You have to do it. I hope they manage to make change. We need it.

Having been sent into podcast orbit by the Guardian, Ricky Gervais is now planning to charge for his show via Audible. Hmmm. I enjoyed it but I’m not sure I’d buy.

The newspaper industry is spending $50 million to convince advertisers that it’s not dying, trumping the $40 million the magazine industry is spending to the same end. I agree with Rafat: If they took a fraction of that money and invested in experimentation and development of new ideas, it would pay off a lot more than this.

It’s not hard to agree that Holocaust denier David Irving is an ass. But by jailing him for three years because of the assanine things he said, Austria sets a difficult precedent that affects other debates about speech today:

If they will jail Irving because of what he said about the Holocaust, will they jail the cartoonists and editors who published the now-infamous Mohammed cartoons because half the world thinks they are offensively assanine? If they do it for the Jews, why not the Muslims? And if an exhibit of dung-and-urine-covered Mary and Jesus art comes to town, will they do the same for the Christians? Where does this stop?

And if they jail Irving because of what he said, will they justify the Chinese jailing journalists for what they say that is offensive to the Chinese regime?

If Austria does this, then why don’t other nations? If you can be jailed for being stupidly offensive enough to deny the Holocaust, then should you be jailed for violating American law and saying “fuck” on TV? Where does this stop?

I am troubled at government regulation of speech for the chill it creates.

And even in the case of Irving, I believe it is wholly unnecessary. Doesn’t most of the sane world know he is an ass and what he says is wrong? Do we need to be protected from him? Should the Austrian government be his editor?

Ah, but you may argue that his fascist intellectual forefathers incited the worst imaginable crimes and so isn’t such hateful speech worth banning? No, I’d argue that the problem in Nazi Germany was not so much that the haters could speak but that they could ban their opponents from speaking. The cold of the chill is more dangerous than the heat of the hate. I believe that a free marketplace of speech will succeed where a closed and controlled public square will fail.

Everybody’s favorite hyperlocal blogger, Debbie Galant, wrote a novel about McMansions in the hyperlocal ‘burbs and she got a review I’d take in today’s Times.

Stowe Boyd has a smashing post today suggesting a shift form venture capital to advice capital. As VCs find themselves unable to throw big buckets o’ money at ever-smaller, nimbler, quicker startups, it becomes impossible for them to manage their real assets: time, distraction, and knowledge. I think that this provides opportunties for strategic investors who have more than money to offer and also for smart, independent people (such as bloggers, Boyd suggests) who can offer advice, connections, and questions. The challenge is to make this more than a show advisory board but a real relationship and a longer-term commitment for both than old-style consulting (thanks to payoffs in long-term equity). I’ve started down that path with a few companies myself.

I got a preview of Michael Arrington’s Edgeio — the classified system for the distributed future — and I think it is more important than it looks.

Edgeio as it stands is pretty simple: You tag a post on your blog “listing” and Edgeio will spot it and add it to its data base. You add more tags (e.g., “for rent” and “vacation”) and your post/ad will appear in the appropriate categories. Edgeio will allow you to come in and claim your blog to be able to get direct communication from respondents and, eventually, to upgrade your ad via typography and graphics and preference (I hope I got that right). This is just a start but it is a proof of concept of a new world. I’ve been waiting for someone to do this. Arrington has.

I’ve been writing for a long time that the future of classified advertising — and more of media — is distributed. That is, you won’t need to go to a centralized marketplace — the newspaper or even Craigslist or Monster — to let the world know you want to sell or buy or find something. Instead, you’ll be able to put your listing up anywhere with proper tags and then specialized search engines, like Edgeio and Oodle, will find them so buyer and seller can find each other in a distributed marketplace with far less friction and far more control at the edges.

Note well that Arrington is also setting the early standards for tagging ads so they can be found. I believe that he also needs to concentrate on putting data within ads, not just on top of them (e.g., “languages spoken = German, C++”) so more effective searches and matches can take place. Google Base may do this, but for it to be effective, the tags need to be open. What we’re really headed for is microformats and a structure in which people swarm around tags with efficiency so they and their stuff can be found. It works in Flickr and Del.icio.us and will certainly work in marketplaces where money matters.

As friction is taken out of the marketplace — as newspapers, Realtors, car dealers, eBay, and others who have controlled our information are undercut by free and open standards — there is a need to add value back into transactions. Craig Donato of Oodle — the other Craig, the one who will cause more change in the newspaper industry than the first one — is eloquent on this, pointing out that the marketplace still wants such things as anonymity to enable transactions and authority to vet ads and promotion to market them. Edgeio and Oodle — not to mention Indeed and Simply Hired and even eBay and many other comers — will try to add back some of these functions. I argued the other day that we will also need some physical-world functions, like concierges to handle house tours for far less than real-estate agents charge (cue defense wailing by Realtors here.)

: OK, but this is bigger than classifieds. It’s bigger in two ways:

: First, this is really about control. Realtors and multiple-listing services act as if they own our for-sale listings. But the truth is, that’s our information; it’s data we create and we own that we lend to these agents if they perform a service for us (or because they hold a monopoly on that service today).

I was talking about this with Seth Goldstein of AttentionTrust and Rootmarkets the other day: We own not just our attention data — what we look at, what we do, the things that Seth works in — but also have an even greater proprietary interest in the transactions we create. This holds if we are a prospect to buy a house and if we are selling a house.

The natural state of the marketplace should be that we control that information at the edges — buyer and seller — and that others join in that transaction only when and if they add value, such as the functions I listed just above. This will make for less friction and a more efficient marketplace.

It will also make for a lot of unemployed middlemen. The newspapers and Realtors that charged us too much for too little for too long will be knocked aside at the first opportunity.

: Second, this is also about content … and about people. Everything Edgeio does for classified ads, it — or someone — could do for, say, local restaurant reviews. Rather than relying on one restaurant critic for a paper to tell us what’s good and rather than trying to get all the diners out there to come to a centralized marketplace of reviews (see the late Abuzz et al), we should be able to write our reviews on our blogs, under our identities, and have them found with all the other reviews. That can occur thanks to tagging. This is what I hoped (incorrectly) that Dinnerbuzz would do, though I explained my wishes here.

It’s about people because identity matters: We want to know who is reviewing the restaurant or selling the house or seeeking the job. Verified identity and trust, I believe, will be the next huge frontier of business online. More on that later.

And it’s about people because such means of tagging and searching as Edgeio enables will also help people find each other. I wrote about this long ago, inspired by David Galbraith’s one-line-bio tag. See also Consumating.org, where people tag themselves.

See, this tagging thing is about more than bookmarks and coolness. They help reorganize the world and its relationships.

That’s why I say that Edgeio is a big deal, because it begins to enable this new world.

: A few of my posts are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here….

: [DISCLOSURE: Michael Arrington and I are each aiding a startup. I gave him my two-cents about Edgeio. He once gave me a Techcrunch T-shirt. We link to each other. He held a spot for me at the lunch table at Web 2.0 And aren't these disclosure statements getting a bit ridiculous?]

: SPEAKING OF TECHCRUNCH: I see that Arrington will critique presentations by 10 companies at Supernova.

: LATER: Note good comments, including one from none other than Craig Newmark.

You don’t want to own community. First, because you can’t; the community owns the community. Second, because then you become responsible for all the community’s sins: See MySpace having to hire a safety czar who, presumably, will tell people not to be stupid enough to meet strangers and get murdered. Way back when, in the heyday of personal homepages, I argued to my boss that he didn’t want such services because he didn’t want his brand appearing on the 6 o’clock news with the phrase “devil-worshipping serial killer’s home page.”

What you do want to do is enable community. You want to leave control and responsibility at the edges — because that’s where it is anyway — and bring people together with information and each other. The web is the social application. The challenge is to find ways to bring people together in ways they couldn’t otherwise do themselves. Think the social Edgeio (below) or the open Flickr or the Technorati of people.

Two links on LostRemote.com continue to show the impending doom of old TV networks: There’s an IBM report entitled “The End of TV as We Know It” and there’s the report that NBC stupidly demanded that its viral video be taken off YouTube.com — when they should have celebrated that distribution — proving that old networks don’t get it and deserve to be disrupted.

Trendspotter spots trendy Japanese man kissing his phone.

It wasn’t hard to piece together an explanation — the man was making a video call to his lover. His lover had asked for a screen kiss, or perhaps they’d synchronized one. It was my first glimpse of this behavior, and it happened in Tokyo, but I knew it wouldn’t be my last.

Recently, I asked you all for blog jargon on behalf of a columnist writing about our endearing, albeit ear-grating, habit of making up words. Here’s that column from William Safire, who says:

This brief survey — a labor of link love — was conducted by means of blogging. Thanks to the blogerati who shot my query around the Web asking for jargon, a solicitation that N’Gai Croal, technology editor at Newsweek, calls blegging.