I went to a Facebook developers’ hackathon last night at Thumbplay in New York. I wasn’t the invited participant. Son Jake was. I was merely the chauffeur. Nonetheless, it was a nonvirtual Facebook for me, for I found all sorts of friends there: developer colleague, show-biz pal, investment guy, political geek. Everybody’s into Facebook.
The excitement of having this easy, quick platform and built-in audience and new architecture of content and interaction was palpable. David Henderson of Social Media reminded the group that this has exploded in only 45 days. There have been 125 million app installations and it just keeps growing: more people, more apps. . . . and we haven’t even hit Labor Day and the return to school yet.
What we don’t know is the churn of these apps — only the net growth, not the number who drop off and are replaced. A lot of these apps have a half-life like show business, only accelerated: cool comes and cool goes. But others will become fundamental to this new social architecture. I don’t think the fundamental ones have been invented yet.
There was, of course, a lot of discussion about monetization, with one skeptic in the crowd drawing everyone else’s justification and inspiration regarding revenue: the discussion turned into a human wiki. There’s advertising, of course, and direct-response and barter and loyalty points systems and virtual currencies and also research. Henderson said that at the food fight app, users started with $10 to buy rotten tomatoes but wanted more and so they offered food fight currency in exchange for answering market research questions. To date, he said, they’ve received 20 million responses: 80,000 users per day, 25 per user. That’s what excites them all: instant scale.
There was, of course, much discussion of what Facebook allows and doesn’t allow and what’s behind every decision. Jake chuckled at all the Kremlinology that was going on. “They’re overthinking,” he said. Some things are done just because they’re done, no vast conspiracy.
What excites me most is the prospect of the pipe reversing: using Facebook to help organize the larger social infrastructure that is the web already. I’ve suggested to folks that they use Facebook’s real identity to feed real identity on their sites and forums. One participant said Facebook will plug into the social grid of the web. Or was that vice versa?
This is like sending weapons to the Mujahideen to get them to attack your real enemy: Robert Greenwald, Fox News attacker, mashes together every Fox attack on blogs that he can find: red meat to the link army — and pretty damned funny.
I just spoke with ABC News about its upcoming debates and they’re going to include voter videos — and, one-upping CNN, they’re going to enable voters to also have a voice (if not a vote) in what is selected and shown.
Owen Renfro, a producer there, said most of the videos submitted here would be shared with the public, who can then rate and comment on them. Ratings won’t be the sole determinant of what is used, but it will influence ABC News. That’s all I’ve been wanting. The debate won’t be devoted to user video. Renfro said CNN spent a lot to get its YouTube deal. But moderator George Stephanopoulos will use voter videos alongside his own questions in quizzing the candidates. The first of ABC’s debates is with the Republicans in Iowa on Aug. 5.
I learned this because ABC called to ask my permission to use this video question on health insurance — originally sent in and unused from a Hillary Clinton morning town hall. I also submitted this one, which I sent to the YouTube debate, on broadband internet, and this one about whether the winner will stay online when in office.
(Crossposted from Prezvidgo vote for the broadband video.
CNN, bless their hearts, has made the video of the YouTube debate available for downloading, which makes it easy to remix it. Have at it, video generation.
Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian points us to a Google map cadged together by the BBC that delivers incredible information about the UK floods: rivers that are under warning, and pins taking us to text, photo, and video information on locations. I’m not sure how the citizens add their reports but that’s possible through Google maps mashups like Platial. What a valuable tool for networked reporting on any local story. And this requires no great feat of organization: just make the tool available.
A few days ago, Stephen Baker at Business Week wrote about confirmation of the so-called cover curse:
When you see a glowing cover story on a company, the common wisdom says, sell. Now a trio of financial analysts has carried out a study of this cover curse at BW, Forbes and Fortune. (ex Andreesen). And they conclude, I’m sorry to see, that there’s something to the curse. Basically, a positive or negative cover story marks the end of a company’s “extreme” behavior, either good or bad. After the cover story, they tend to regress, in their corporate way, toward the mean.
To look at this from another perspective, it also means that big media is the last to see the trend. And I don’t mean that as an insult (honest, I don’t). Big media needs the story to be big — evident, justified, confirmed — before devoting its scarce space and promotional voice. So the curse stands to reason: Big media gets stories at their apex.
But now there are all kinds of new ways to detect stories — memes and their movement — long before that, and also detect those who are good, unlike big media, and sniffing them out. There are services, like Blogpulse, that are beginning to try to measure this. But it’s highly complex: Where do memes start? Who spreads them? Who had the authority to do so? Who gets them right and who gets them wrong? What is the biorhythm of a meme? What kinds of memes are there — trouble at a company, positive momentum at a company, and so on — and how do they differ in their growth rates? Some of this can probably be automated and mapped and timed and visualized, but some of this also comes down to what reporters have always done: sniff. Now they have new places and means to sniff and thanks to blogs — which don’t carry the weight of big media — they have new places to float and check memes. I want to see publications like Business Week give me the stories that are not ready for the cover — those are the stories that are truly valuable.
I’m writing my Guardian column this week about the YouTube debate (no surprise) and as I thought about it more, I decided that it was a clash of media. Here’s my take and then I’ll show you the quite contrary take of a BBC editor. But it’s my blog, so me first:
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. . . But TV got in the way. The candidates responded to most of this with their over-rehearsed, well-spun, often-used cant: empty words about change and experience – and if anyone mentions a soldier in the family, the candidate is obligated to deliver the thanks of the nation. This is how politicians behave before the big cameras. But the folks on the YouTube videos were speaking to little cameras; they were more direct, intimate, authentic.
The two media did not mix well. CNN displayed the YouTube videos in small squares on a big screen shot by a big camera – reduced, finally, to postage stamps on our screens at home, so we could barely see them. It seemed the network was afraid to show the videos full-screen because they would not look like real TV. But, of course, that’s just the point. They weren’t real TV. They were bits of conversation.
But TV doesn’t know how to have a conversation. TV knows how to perform. The moderator of the event, prematurely white-haired Anderson Cooper, acted almost apologetic about the intrusion of these real people, who speak without benefit of make-up. He interrupted the candidates constantly, allowing them shallow soundbites a fraction the length and depth even of a YouTube video.
So I wish we’d have the YouTube debate on YouTube and leave CNN at home. A few of the candidates are beginning to answer voters’ questions and challenges directly, small-camera-to-small-camera (as Nikolas SP Sarkozy did in his campaign and as David Cameraon does on his web site). Thus they are opening up a dialogue between the public and the powerful that was not possible before the internet: a conversation in our new public square. That is how elections should be held, amid the citizens. . . .
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And then I read the BBC editors’ blog with the opposite take from Kevin Marsh, a big-TV veteran and head of the net’s “college of journalism.” He writes of the debate:
It was a terrific clash – but not the intended clash of aspirant presidents tussling to give frank answers to the people’s questions in the people’s circus. It was, instead, a clash between two media cultures; old-style ‘big journalism’ and new-style ‘citizen media’. On this showing, ‘big journalism’ is safe. . . .
This time round, social networking has moved on and YouTube has entered the stage, along with zealots advocating the role of ‘citizen media’ in helping America choose the occupant of the most powerful office on earth.
Uber-zealot Jeff Jarvis – who blogs here at Buzz Machine – was one of those behind a website called ‘Prezvid’ – its aim, to bring video sharing into the democratic process. Fine – except that behind it is the unwritten value system that ascribes the highest worth to so-called ‘Macaca Moments’ – named after Virginia Senator George Allen’s apparently racist comment in an unguarded moment. The relationship between media and democracy has got to be more than catching out the unguarded or unprincipled.
Mr. Marsh says that “it” — PrezVid — has an unwritten value system ascribing high worth to Macaca moments. Mr. Marsh, show me where that is my value system, written or unwritten. I have never said any such thing. In fact, I have fretted that we would have too many such moments yielding an resulting in an unforgiving electorate but — characteristically, for me, if I may be the judge of that — I came down on the side of optimism, believing that we, the people, are smart enough to discern the difference between a mere mistake or blooper and a character flaw. That is what I actually have said. Mr. Marsh chooses to project his view of what he wants to think I said on me. Either that, or he has a real problem with his antecedents. In either case, a rather surprising lapse from a “big journalism,” I’d say. He continues:
Citizen media’s advocates, like Jeff Jarvis, had high hopes:
“The YouTube debates could fundamentally change the dynamics of politics in America, giving a voice to the people, letting us be heard by the powerful and the public, enabling us to coalesce around our interests and needs, and even teaching reporters who are supposed to ask questions in our stead how they should really do it.â€
Too high. In the event, nothing new was revealed and a snowman was the star. No candidate was especially tested – indeed, they all seemed to find their key task (don’t get out, don’t give hostages to fortune) substantially easier than with a format such as ‘Meet the Press’ … or even the traditional anchor interview. As far as I could tell, the dynamics remained unchanged.
Contrast Jeff Jarvis’s disappointment after the event with his hopes before it – he and others blamed the format, blamed the anchor … even blamed the system for producing too many candidates.
He misses the point. ‘Big media’s’ monopoly of communication in the democratic process is over. Good. But hopes for ‘citizen media’ need to be realistic; as does any assessment of the enduring merits of ‘big media’ … like its ability to pose and press the really tough questions; like its persistence in coming back to the unanswered questions; like its ability to field ego against ego, personality against personality … not the most attractive aspect of ‘big media’, but its most necessary given the politics that we have.
Maybe there is a way of fusing ‘big’ and ‘citizen’, ‘old’ and ‘new’, but this wasn’t it.
Well, we agree about the fusing but disagree, clearly, about the cause. The citizens spoke with eloquence and directness, when they were permitted to by the big media. It was the big media that messed that up.
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Here is my friend Michael Rosenblum, former big-media guy now small-media guy, taking my side on the question of CNN selecting all the questions:
A few days ago, CNN started running a promo in which CNN News VP David Bohrman and a few producers sat at a table in front of laptops. “We’ve gotten hundreds of questions so far†says Bohrman, “and we have to pick the best ones to askâ€.
Why?
Why does David Bohrman (or anyone for that matter) have to pick the best questions, or any questions. Why not just post all the video questions on the web and let the public decide which ones they like the best.
In the online world, David Bohrman, (or anyone else doing this) simply gets in the way of the process. The beauty of the web is that it does not need, nor does it want ‘executive producers’ or ‘vice presidents’. Neither would I want David Bohrman to be on Amazon.com deciding which of the thousands of books available we will be offering tonight.
Go home.
The same goes for Anderson Cooper.
Get out of the way.
Hell, even Adam Cohen on the New York Times editorial page — big media of big media — understands how it would have been better for the people to have had a role in the selection:
Whatever the ideology, these questions had an authentic feel that is too often lacking in the scripted words of paid professionals. The questions could become even more real in future debates, if the organizers drop the filtering and let YouTube users pick the questions.
The other day, I congratulated Laurel Touby on her sale of Media Bistro and now I get to congratulate my friend Dave Morgan on his sale of Tacoda to AOL. Dave is one of the nicest and smartest men I’ve met in this world and I’ve known him since early in our online careers, in the mid-90s, when I tried to hire him at Advance and he said no because he was burning to start a company. That company was Real Media, one of the pioneers in ad serving and sales, now part of 24/7. Next came Tacoda, which started as a behavioral targeting software company and turned into a gigantic ad network through his vision. There are few people who understand the economic underpinnings of our internet like Dave. And I’m delighted for him and his team.
CNN selected too many obvious, dutiful, silly questions.
Anderson Cooper didn’t pace the debate; he tried to trip the runners.
The videos were too tiny to be given justice.
The candidates’ videos were just commercials.
There were far too few issues.
There were too many candidates.
The candidates gave us the same answers they always give.
I have no doubt — no doubt — that we, the people, would have done a better job picking the questions than CNN did.
I have no doubt that we would have heard far more substance without CNN and TV cameras in this. This should have been a debate held online: candidates answering questions directly without the need for CNN, Anderson Cooper, or their questions.
We end with the usual horserace blather of the TV commentators.
Pardon me if I brag for a moment about my friends and former colleagues at the Star-Ledger in New Jersey and the work they’ve been doing with blogs. Full disclosure: I’ve been consulting with them on this, so this is not only blogrolling but is also self-serving. So sprinkle on those grains of salt.
Take a look at five Ledger projects:
* Yesterday, the Ledger launched NJVoices, a local version of the Guardian’s Comment is Free and HuffingtonPost. It’s the same idea: Invite in some opinion leaders — including the paper’s own columnists — and give them a platform to have their say and interact with their public. The idea behind NJVoices is that it’s entirely local. And it is also a means to blow up the notions of the op-ed page, the letter to the editor, the column, and even the editorial. I remember when I first showed CiF and HuffPo to my friend Jim Willse, the Ledger’s editor, it clicked with him; he saw the future of local opinion. And now it is launched. I next look forward to seeing how this feeds back into the paper.
* They tried to figure out how to get involved with local bloggers and the first step is a blog of blogs. Staffer Kelly Heyboer tracks and writes about local bloggers, which also establishes a relationship with them and creates an expertise within the paper about the scene (’Is anybody blogging about _____?’ ‘Go ask Kelly’).
* Last week, they invited a bunch of prominent local bloggers to go along on the paper’s beloved Munchmobile — a van with a big hot dog on top, dear to the editor’s heart, that goes around the state taste-testing local treats. Inviting the bloggers meant that the paper was writing about the bloggers, the bloggers were writing about the paper, pizza and links were had by all. Smart.
* One of their first moves was to take a beat reporter covering the pharma industry, which is huge in Jersey, and have him start a Romenesko-plus blog covering the news through links and more: Pharmalot. It has gained traffic, links, respect, and now targeted advertising.
* When the paper wanted to show off more and more video, we talked about using existing tools to do video. They put up video on YouTube as well as on NJ.com. Then they invite readers to make their local videos and put them on YouTube, tagged TV Jersey. All this goes up on a blog at TVJersey.com, “the television station New Jersey doesn’t have.”
Lots of papers are now starting their own blogs; that’s an important element of the strategy. But it’s also important to use this as a way to have a new relationship with the public and you see some attempts at that here: steps in the right direction.
