BuzzMachine

In the UK, a MySpace competitor called Bebo has been challenging the king for the top spot in traffic, says The Guardian. Scott Karp has been asking with good analysis whether the MySpace fizzle has begun. I don’t know, but I still say that the issue for MySpace is that it isn’t really my space; it’s their space. And that’s weak glue.

Warning: Guardian worship to follow. I know that I keep quoting those folks, but that’s because they keep saying good things. (Full disclosure: I write for them.)

At the Hay Festival in the UK, Georgina Henry, editor of Comment is Free, talked with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger about their interactive future. Henry said she has learned a lot after diving into the realm of community:

“When I started this, I did look on it as a newspaper journalist; these were things that we were putting up that you had to read. I didn’t really get the measure of the conversation that goes on.

“Two months on, I’m kind of humbled by it. You have to think in a different way about what exactly does divide your professional columnists and the people that I recruited to blog from the readers, who are sometimes extremely erudite.”

She also wrote about the experience in the paper:

Setting up CiF as a collective, group blog was, to my un-web-educated eye, more a practical solution than a philosophical one. We wanted to recruit hundreds of people - academics, politicians, scientists, environmentalists, writers, etc - and encourage them to blog as and when they wanted. We wanted to foster all shades of opinion. We had a tiny budget - a fraction of that spent on the paper comment pages - so we needed to offer freedom and space to write instead of big fees.

We also wanted to get our professional columnists to engage with readers by allowing people to comment instantly on their articles, but I admit I thought only in passing about reader reaction and the kind of conversation the site might provoke online. What I did not foresee was that two months on I would find myself in the middle of a raging argument about professionalism versus amateurism - with sub-headings covering language, anonymity, accountability, democracy, censorship and the art of conversation….

On good days I think this is the most exciting new frontier for journalism - the immediacy of the debate, the excitement at watching readers engage with the big (and occasionally trivial) issues of the day with wit, verve and insight make print seem sluggish, out of date, even a bit dull.

Other days, when I have spent hours removing the anti-semitism and Islamophobia that dances round any piece about Israel/Palestine, and the incoherent abuse, the swearing, the false statements, the ill-disguised misogyny, the intimidation and the downright nastiness that fuels so many comments, I wonder whether Guardian values - free comment, but fair comment too - are in danger of being drowned out in an anarchic, unmoderated medium populated, it seems, by weird men. I look with fondness at the rigorously edited paper, and the polite discourse on the letters page….

Stung by one particularly brutal comment on a piece by a young Muslim woman we had recruited to blog, I did what Emily Bell, editor of Guardian Unlimited, advised and entered the fray myself. Why, I asked in an end-of-the- week post, was it necessary for commenters to personally abuse those with whom they disagreed? Why did so many resort to swearing to make their point? Would they behave like this if they weren’t hiding behind the anonymity of their screen names?

Some of the response was predictable (you can read it at [here]) - but I was struck by how thoughtful others were. And funny. Commenters whose names struck fear in me when I saw them popping up on our bloggers threads turned out to be unexpectedly reasonable. While they fiercely defended their right to take on the professionals, there were many useful bits of advice about the rules of engagement.

Last week Jackie Ashley and Polly Toynbee joined in. Ashley robustly defended professional columnists - in her case, with 25 years of experience of political reporting. She wasn’t claiming that she always knew more than her readers, but the least they could do was tell her so without insulting her. Toynbee attacked the anonymity of commenters and the aggression of their discourse - and revealed the contents of a particularly obnoxious email she had received that morning. (She got quite a lot of sympathy in return.) Both got plaudits from some of their fiercest critics for getting down and dirty and joining the discussion.

Is Bell right that the way to raise the standard of debate on the site is to engage properly with readers? …

Guardian columnnists have taken to heart that blogging is about more than just writing your piece and disappearing once the conversation starts. They have started, as a matter of course, going back into the debates they have generated to talk to their readers….

At Hay, Henry and Rusbridger talked about the nominal fees they give to bloggers whose pieces are commissioned or picked as featured posts. Rusbridger said:

“What we’re doing, which no newspaper has ever done before, is to take your elite stable of columnists, who are paid, and pitch them into the same space as people who aren’t paid,” he said.

“What is professional journalism and what isn’t, and how do they share the same space? We’re making this up as we go along.”

And then we have the paper’s media commentator, a journalism veteran at high levels, blogging — mainly aggregating media news (though I’d like a big more commentary on it) — and telling the paper’s readers:

It allows everyone to have a voice. To many journalists, especially editors, this is anathema. How dare the great unwashed usurp the customary right of the professional journalist to decide what should, and should not, be reported?

We are on our way to the demise of top-down journalism in favour of bottom-up journalism, and the journey is proving rather uncomfortable.

And you wonder why I like these people?

Busy spending time with the kids and working, too. I declare a blogging holiday. Later…..

Forty-five years after Amnesty International was founded in London’s Observer, the two come together again to launch a campaign for internet freedom: Irrepressible.info. This campaign is not just about getting governments to behave civilly, it is also about getting companies to act responsibly.

The Observer and Amnesty target technology companies. But I would add media companies, who depend on freedom of speech and have an ethical, a moral responsibility to stand up for that freedom for others. I find it disturbing that tehy have not stood up. At the We Media conference in London, sadly, we heard mostly the company line: that you have to abide by the laws of the country where you choose to do business. I fear we will look back at China and other repressive nations in a generation and see the lost opportunity to free people; I fear the internet will have its S.S. St. Louis. We should stand for nothing less than freedom for all people and we should fight to make the internet an instrument of that freedom.

Says the Observer editorial:

States that cannot tolerate dissenting voices have previously found it relatively easy to stifle them. Presses can be confiscated and radio signals jammed. But the decentralised nature of the internet - the way it routes information around the world with no regard for national borders - makes it difficult to censor. That has not stopped authoritarian regimes from trying. Citizens of countries such as China, Iran, Vietnam and Syria have been targeted - sometimes jailed - for posting opinions online….

Amnesty has a long and proud tradition of defending those who are silenced by the unjust exercise of state power. But one thing that makes this new campaign different is that it calls also on the private companies that provide the bulk of internet services to take some responsibility for what happens to dissidents. Digital giants such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft stand accused of working in complicity with authoritarian regimes, customising their content at the behest of state censors.

In their defence, they say they are simply doing what all businesses do by obeying the laws of the land in which they operate. That is disingenuous. These companies have come from nowhere in a very short time to dominate a global medium. They do not own the internet and yet, de facto, they run it. They must accept that they have obligations to the wider online community as well as to shareholders and the bottom line….

There is a new interconnectedness to global issues that demands co-ordinated global action.

Amnesty UK Director Kate Allen writes, referring to the founding of AI:

Much has changed in those 45 years. The Iron Curtain has been torn down and apartheid has ended; we have witnessed genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. And the world has moved on technologically: in 1961 people were expressing their opinions in books and newsprint; Amnesty members responded to their repression by writing letters. Now we have the internet; and Amnesty is able to mobilise its supporters online to lobby governments with emails and web-based campaigning.

Sadly what remains the same is that people are still being imprisoned for peacefully expressing their beliefs. Benenson started Amnesty after reading about two students arrested in a Portuguese cafe for raising a toast to freedom: 45 years on, we were recently made aware of three young Vietnamese people arrested after taking part in an online chatroom debate about democracy….

Another massive change since 1961 has been the rising power of multinationals, but some companies have been complicit in these abuses. So Amnesty is increasingly lobbying not just governments but powerful firms to respect the rights of ordinary people.

The internet is big business, but in the search for profits some companies have encroached on their own principles and those on which the internet was founded: free access to information. The results of searches using China-based search engines run by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and local firms are censored, limiting the information users can access. Microsoft pulled down the work of one of China’s most popular bloggers who had made politically sensitive comments. Yahoo gave information to the authorities that led to people being jailed for sending emails with political content. We do not accept these firms’ arguments that it is better to have a censored Google, Yahoo or Microsoft in China than none at all.

So Amnesty International is again calling on Observer readers to join with us to take a stand for basic human freedoms….

The first case Amnesty is focusing on is that of Shi Tao, the Chinese journalist serving a 10-year sentence for “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities” — that is, Allen says, “emailing a US pro-democracy site about warnings from the Beijing authorities to news outlets against covering demonstrations to mark the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests.” At his trial, “account-holder information provided by Yahoo’s Chinese partner company was used as evidence to convict him.”

Amnesty asks that we go to Irrepressible.info and sign this pledge:

I believe the internet should be a force for political freedom, not repression. People have the right to seek and receive information and to express their peaceful beliefs online without fear or interference. I call on governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of freedom of expression on the internet, and on companies to stop helping them do it.

I was one of the first thousand to sign.

Jemima Kiss reports in PaidContent that Rupert Murdoch’s London Sun has unveiled a new classifieds site, Sun Local, using Oodle, which scrapes and organizes classified listings from around the web. This is the money quote from News Group Digital director David Roddick:

The advantage for us is that we don’t have these verticals running in the paper so we’re not cannibalising our print ads. It’s designed to get us into a space that we don’t currently occupy and being The Sun we wanted to go in with scale.

In other words, this enables anyone who’s not now in the classifieds business — national newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, you — to enter in and go local. Of course, they won’t be making the tens of millions of dollars per category per year that major metro papers have made. But then, in the future, neither will those papers. To the newcomers, it’s new revenue in a business they could enter with scale before. And the revenue may not be from the classifieds themselves. Jemima report: “…the long-term revenue from the site will be worked out later on, but for now it’s Google AdSense.” So when you aggregate audience around advertising, you are able to target other advertising.

So what does it mean to the incumbents? I think they have to play along. They need their advertisers’ ads to be distributed and aggregated so they are found via search and links. And they, in turn, should be aggregating as well.

Jonathan Last has lots of suggestions for J-schools.

In the continuing discussion about books, Eoin Purcell, who has had a number of interesting posts on the matter, adds a fascinating speculation:

:It would be excellent if you Biology textbook were hyperlinked to bring you relevant text and images as you cram for some final exam, brilliant indeed to have the entire resources of the web organised for you and connected to from a single source.

I do wonder though at what point the book as such ceases to exist and becomes simply an access point to information rather than the source itself. I am not saying this is a negative rather that at some point you the amount of linking and directing changes the book from the product offering the information to one pointing you in the general direction of the information.

This echoes what the head of Gruner + Jahr said about journalists becoming moderators.

Purcell and one of his commenters also quite rightly challenge me on whether my own speculation about books applies to fiction. I think much of it doesn’t. I was never one of those who believed that technology would allow us to create our own endings to movies or books. Stories are the creation of an author; they do have their own beginnings and ends.

And so Purcell takes this one step farther and suggests that the future of books may have two separate trajectories: fiction and nonfiction. He writes:

Are we then creating a twin track of books, Non-Fiction which will whiz ahead and, by the sounds of the current discussion, become something new (I think calling it a book will become redundant if the features discussed become reality) and Fiction tied to the format that has seen it through so many changes already? And if we are is that such a bad thing? I am sure Fiction authors will avail of the possibilities of the new offerings when they emerge.

Yes, I don’t think that most fiction would benefit from links and discovery through tagging and other such wonders of the modern age. But one benefit of the internet novelists are starting to discover is that they can now have a direct relationship with their audiences, which will at least help them sell their next books and perhaps will let them go around or strengthen their positions with the middlemen: the publishers and booksellers.

A subculture of curmudeons is growing, ironically, in the blogosphere, the very medium they fear and dismiss. Nicholas Carr fancies himself the king of the curmudgeons. I’ll add Andrew Keen to the list. And that’s not just because they’ve both gone after me this week: Carr here (I returned fire here) and Keen here. They’re both worked up because I dared to suggest that book publishing needs updating.

It must not be easy being a curmudeon. You have to wake up every morning and find something to be against, something old to defend, and something new to ignore. Lots of commenters on Carr’s blog said he ran out of targets when he declared Wikipedia dead. Said one:

I think you’re overdoing your contrarian behaviour and seriously risk coming through as an attention-craver. Your analysis is very destructive and offers no suggestion for improvement - moreover it does not make for interesting, witty or even provocative reading.

So there. Keen — after having blown up with a business in the web bubble — now vaguely warns against the “grave cultural consequences” of the web and blogs and all this voodoo we do. He declares that he is “exposing Web 2.0 as Communism 2.0″ with “unfashionably conservative thoughts about media, culture and technology.” (See the end of this post for another reference to the web as communism from someone who occasionally tries to play the curmudeon but who fails because he’s too open-minded, passionate, and eager for conversation to maintain the sneering, squinting growl of the dreaded ‘mudgeon for long.)

Now you might say that we’re the same, since I’m declaring books, newspapers, and networks dead or dying every other day. But I think the difference is that I am calling for not just the preservation but the expansion of writing, journalism, and entertainment into new realms: new forms, new audiences, new opportunities. Do I get carried away with my enthusiasm? Guilty, with glee.

Curmudgeons defend orthodoxy, power, and tradition. Carr rails against the democratization of media and defends the elite of paid critics and pundits. Keen goes so far as to rail against progress. I’ve been fascinated to see the curmudgeons come out of their dusty attics in the ongoing discussion here about books arguing that they don’t need no stinkin’ progress. Of course, I’ve seen the same atttitude in newspapers, where so many feared, resisted, and even attacked change — but that is now changing as journalists, like TV networks and producers, realize that resisting change is futile. Growling at the approaching glacier won’t make it melt. Just ask the dinosaurs.

An appeals court handed a big victory to bloggers and citizen journalists in the Apple leak case.

A state appeals court on Friday rejected Apple Computer Inc.’s bid to identify the sources of leaked product information that appeared on Web sites, ruling that online reporters and bloggers are entitled to the same protections as traditional journalists.

“In no relevant respect do they appear to differ from a reporter or editor for a traditional business-oriented periodical who solicits or otherwise comes into possession of confidential internal information about a company,” Justice Conrad Rushing of the 6th District Court of Appeal wrote in a unanimous 69-page ruling.

“We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes ‘legitimate journalism,” he wrote. “The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here.”

The online journalists are thus entitled to the protections provided under California’s shield law as well as the privacy protections for e-mails allowed under federal law, the court ruled.

I may love my Apple computer but I hated the way Apple the company was behaving; I also feared the way the lower court tried to tiptoe around this issue; so I salute the appeals court for standing up for the idea that anyone can commit an act of journalism.

: Key quotes from the ruling in the Times story:

In its ruling, the appeals court said online and offline journalists are equally protected under the First Amendment. “We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ news,” the opinion states. “Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.”

: Here’s the PDF of the decision. The good bit about the First Amendment and us starts on page 35.

: So the court decides that the person doesn’t make journalism — you don’t have to be a journalist to commit an act of journalism:

We can think of no reason to doubt that the operator of a public Web site is a “publisher” for purposes of this language; the primary and core meaning of “to publish” is “[t]o make publicly or generally known; to declare or report openly or publicly; to announce; to tell or noise abroad; also, to propagate, disseminate (a creed or system).”

The court even gets into the issue of whether packaging makes journalism — that is, you don’t have to write a newspaper story to deliver the news:

Nor does Apple supply any colorable ground for declaring petitioners’ activities not to be legitimate newsgathering and dissemination. Apple asserts that petitioners merely reprinted “verbatim copies” of Apple’s internal information while exercising “no editorial oversight at all.” But this characterization, if accepted, furnishes no basis for denying petitioners the protection of the statute. A reporter who uncovers newsworthy documents cannot rationally be denied the protection of the law because the publication for which he works chooses to publish facsimiles of the documents rather than editorial summaries. The shield exists not only to protect editors but equally if not more to protect newsgatherers. The primacy Apple would grant to editorial function cannot be justified by any rationale known to us.

Moreover, an absence of editorial judgment cannot be inferred merely from the fact that some source material is published verbatim. It may once have been unusual to reproduce source materials at length, but that fact appears attributable to the constraints of pre-digital publishing technology, which compelled an editor to decide how to use the limited space afforded by a particular publication. This required decisions not only about what information to include but about how to compress source materials to fit. In short, editors were forced to summarize, paraphrase, and rewrite because there was not room on their pages to do otherwise.

Digital communication and storage, especially when coupled with hypertext linking, make it possible to present readers with an unlimited amount of information in connection with a given subject, story, or report. The only real constraint now is time— the publisher’s and the reader’s. From the reader’s perspective, the ideal presentation probably consists of a top-level summary with the ability to “drill down” to source materials through hypertext links. The decision whether to take this approach, or to present original information at the top level of an article, is itself an occasion for editorial judgment. Courts ought not to cling too fiercely to traditional preconceptions, especially when they may operate to discourage the seemingly salutary practice of providing readers with source materials rather than subjecting them to the editors’ own “spin” on a story.

: LATER: Eugene Volokh’s good analysis.

The Wall St. Journal reports that Sirius will pay CBS $2 million to settle the suit against Howard Stern — but Stern gets the rights to broadcast all his archives, which come cheap. CBS had wanted huge shares of sub revenue for those rights and then wanted huge chunks of Stern’s stock and all it got was $2 million, which probably didn’t cover the legal expenses. Spinsters will spin away but I say Stern won.

The Guardian’s Comment is Free launched a contest to name the best commenter, who will be elevated to official CiF blogger. (Yes, I know, it’s a class system. But that’s OK. It’s Britain). I do hope this works because — probably among others — I suggested it to CiF editor Georgina Henry as a way to stop focusing on the few assholes who soil comments and start recognizing all the witty folks who bring their wit, knowledge, and — this being Britain — irony to the discussion. Here is the announcement of the blogoff. Here is the list of nominees (names I recognized from my reading of CiF; it’s a good list). The nominations thread had more than 850 posts and, from what I could see, a notable lack of vile bile. So far, it seems to be working, which proves that commenters, like columnists and bloggers, like attention.

The British Home Office is going to lump release of all its big reports into one day each month and reporters are complaining that they can’t possibly go through it all at once. So Tim Worstall is trying to organize bands of citizens to do the sifting. [via Daniel Davies in CiF]