BuzzMachine

MySpace isn’t my space at all but Rupert’s Space and that that is its weakness. The Times reports today that MySpace is restricting users from using widgets they want on their own pages unless there’s a business deal in place.

The internet already is a social network. The big winner will be he who finds a way to bring — in the words of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — elegant organization to that.

One of the thin threads I saw cutting through much of my Davos experience was the notion of identity:

* We are what we make. Our YouTubed videos, Technoratied blogs, Flickred photos, Facebooked pages, Amazonned reviews, and iPodded podcasts and playlists altogether are an expression of us. There was a lot of hubbub at Davos about avatars: interviews with the players in Second Life (I wonder how many saw those sessions vs. read blog posts about the proceedings vs. read news accounts… vs. didn’t care). I remain skeptical about Second Life. I don’t need an avatar. What I put on the internet is my avatar. Our creations express us.

* Caterina Fake of Flickr gave the media people an elegant explanation of the value of “publicness” (they like to make up words at Flickr; see “interestingness“). She said that was what separated Flickr from his predecessors: the realization that people want to make what they make public; it is an expression of their identity.

* Often, creation is its own reward. At Davos, Chad Hurley revealed that the service will share revenue with producers. But he said he started YouTube without remuneration (and I suspect he couldn’t afford it on top of the bandwidth bill) because he didn’t want people running off to the next highest bidder. He wanted to give people a voice and build a place where they would share. Creation creates community.

* Anonymity is a virtue that can enable freer conversation, especially in repressive environments. But anonymity also cloaks the bad guys who spam and bot our internet or troll our blogs.

* Privacy is a concern. Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner of Information Society and Media, kept raising fears for the privacy of the individual online. And yes, there are concerns. But what the parental types don’t realize is that standards of privacy are changing rapidly: Privacy matters less to the children of the internet because you have to give up something of yourself to make connections with other people. You have to have an identity on the internet to find friends.

* Transparency is identity, too. You have to give up something of yourself for people to trust you. Journalists are having a terribly hard time understanding that; they keep thinking they should be trusted because of who they are (or whom they work for). But we don’t really know who they are.

* Every mogul wants a social network like Rupert’s; media people kept begging for clues about how to build social webs about and around their stuff. One of the young moguls at Davos said that media properties are not meant to be social networks. I’ll disagree somewhat: The sad thing is that old media don’t realize that if they had just opened up years ago, they’d have seen that they already had social networks. I tell magazine people that they have communities gathering around the good stuff they create or find that we all like; newspapers have local communities. But because they were closed castles that kept their communities outside, they didn’t realize this. And so the people outside have gone to build their own social structures — which they clearly always wanted — now that they can. Too late for the big, old guys? Maybe.

* All this opens up lots of opportunities in technology. I said to a couple of my fellow participants at Davos — a media mogul, an internet entrepreneur — and I will say it in another post here that I think the real opportunity is not to start a social network but to better enable the social network that the internet already is, to pull together our distributed identities and help us manage them and make the connections we want to make. That comes through the expression of our identities. We express that both with our content and our connections: We are the company we keep.

I’m sitting in the front row for a panel on internet governance with future guy Paul Saffo, internet godfather Vint Cerf, Oxford Jonathan Zittrain, John Markoff, ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure, and Michael Dell. Yes, Michael Dell (more on that later; I met him last night). And yes, I have my Mac laptop open. Liveblogging a bit…..

Markoff says that “unless we find a way to police the commercial internet, it won’t survive…. (or) we’ll have to walk away from the internet and leave it like you’d leave a bad neighborhood.” That is, he fears for attacks on servers from around the world. He says that we have “a thriving security industry that sells fear” but that has not done a good job protecting consumers. He talks about pirated copies of Vista coming with trojans and about botnets; Cerf adds that there may be more than 100 million machines ensnared in this giving the bad guys supercomputers, as Markoff says. He talks about malware that took up to 15 percent of Yahoo’s search to grab the random text that is going into the current wave of spam to get it through the filters. Markoff is asked whether policing is the right metaphor; Cerf says others call it a fire department and the goal is still to put out the fire. Toure says this needs a global response. So the metaphor shifts to pandemics and vaccinations.

Cerf adds that “in spite of all the turmoil… the internet seems to be working, it’s a very resilient system.” He says it’s not just the net that needs work but also the operating systems that allow hackers to dig deep into them to do bad.

Dell says that the internet is largely anonymous “but the question has to be asked, as these issues and challenges escalate into ever more disruptive and vexing problems can this continue to be an almost completely anonymous system.” Cerf replies that there are good reasons to authenticate and validate (e.g., servers, domains) and that they can build a more refined structure. “Anonymity has its value and also its risks.” He says he reminds us that the United States was built on anonymous tracts.

Asked to give good news, Dell jokes that he has was to get that spam to you faster. He says there are two big opportunities. One is the unused spectrum that will be freed up in the shift to digital TV and opens up new communication and devices. The other is fibre, where the U.S. is behind. “We think of that is the real broadband.”

Zitrain gives a typically cogent explanation of where we are: from the whimsy of the start of the internet to the hard reality of security invasions that are too great to count. He says it is like the days of the old phone network when the means of communication are the same as the means of control, allowing hackers to break in with a Cap’n Crunch whistle. Zittrain is worried about the world of information appliances tethered to their makers, allowing central control of our devices. He says that the solutions will come, “similar to global warming,” by finding ways to track what is happening to our environment.

My Guardian column this week is a sanded and polished version of recent posting and linking about the death of the page view and, with it, the mass. (Nonregistration version here.)

Just when we were getting used to it, the page view has been declared dead. There are many reasons for its passing, having to do with how web pages are now made and how web content is now distributed. But there is one seismic implication to this - in media, mass is over. Size doesn’t matter.

It was only about a decade ago that I sat on a dreadfully boring committee of the American Audit Bureau of Circulations debating how to define a page view (rather than a hit) as the elemental measurement of new media. This body, which blesses the circulation counts of print products, tried to replicate its world-view online, verifying the circulation - that is, the audience and traffic - of internet properties. But as it turned out, no advertiser or publisher wanted these audits. All marketers cared about was verifying whether they got what they paid for: views, people, clicks. You see, overall circulation mattered only when you and your ads were stuck in the same pages with many other advertisers and you all got the same audience, whether that audience gave a damn about you or not. But now, online, you could find better ways to reach just the people you wanted or who wanted you. Thus, travel advertisers needn’t care about the circulation of Guardian Unlimited, only about who saw their ads on travel pages.

In recent times, the situation has grown more complicated because, on the web, a page is no longer a page. Video can be served on a page, but it is measured in time, not space. Flash and Ajax technology can make any individual page many levels deep, allowing users to interact with content - navigating maps, ordering merchandise, viewing slideshows, chatting - without ever leaving the page. So the activities that once would have added up to a dozen page views will now count as only one. This is having a significant impact on businesses such as Yahoo, which are using these technologies to improve the user experience, reducing clicks in the hopes of increasing time on the site or satisfaction or loyalty. But this reduces page views and with that, bragging rights and, in some cases, revenue.

Now add to this the widgetisation of the web. Content may be displayed not only on your pages but also in widgets - boxes, gadgets and applications - that are embedded in pages elsewhere. This is how much of MySpace is built and how YouTube spreads video all over the internet. The audience becomes the distributor. How do you count that?

And consider Google AdSense modules that are spread all across the web, from NYTimes.com to my humble blog. Shouldn’t each of those be counted as Google page views since Google revenue is attached? Doesn’t that make Google look even more gigantic than it already is? What this really means is that in the new distributed media economy, owning a site doesn’t matter so much as enabling a network. This, in a nutshell, is why Yahoo, the centralised media property, is at a disadvantage versus Google, the distributed network.

Things get even crazier when you consider that if you make a good commercial, the public will distribute it for you on YouTube - advertising becomes content. Now that is really an upside-down world.

Finally, consider the impossibility of the old means of measurement. TV ratings were based on a sampling that determined the proportion of the audience watching, say, channel 2 or 4. But in this new niche world, no sample can possibly be large enough to measure millions of blogs or online TV shows.

But more fundamental than all this is, again, that size doesn’t matter anymore, not in media. Oh, yes, the movie with the biggest box office or the book with the biggest sales still makes the most money - for now at least. But in more and more of the media, mass measurements are obsolete because we are now fragmented into the mass of niches. And the truth is that we, the audience, never cared how many more people were watching what we watched. And advertisers don’t care so much what we’re watching so long as we’re watching them.

In a world of so many choices, the audience care about trust, taste, relevance, usefulness, not ratings. And advertisers care more about targeting, efficiency, engagement, branding and return on investment. These are better measurements than print circulation or broadcast ratings or online page views. And so now, publishers, advertisers and technologists must catch up and change their yardsticks for success yet again. It is time to measure quality over quantity.

Jason Calacanis says he’s favoring hiring people who’ve worked 10-12 years on the web. I do think one needs new blood and thinking in any endeavor. And in an accelerated world, it takes less time to become an old fart, stick-in-the-mud (I’ve seen it happen and keep vowing that it won’t happen to me, no matter how old a fart I become). But I also think Jason has a point: It’s good to have the perspective of making mistakes and surviving and seeing how much the world can change around you. It’s a small fraternity, ours: the people who stuck to it and who couldn’t ever go back. I think we need a club. (And I started working online in 1994 and before.)

The Times spends much ink telling us that Disney is going to redesign its homepage. Who isn’t always redesigning their homepages? Oh, and who goes to homepages anymore?

The Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T offered concessions to the FCC to get its merger approved, including a promise to follow the principles of net neutrality.

Here’s my Guardian column this week — about making mistakes and corrections online — in full:

The internet speeds up the dissemination of not only information but also misinformation. So what are we to do about this? Regulate? Legislate? Complain? Ignore? Or respond?

Consider the experience of Tim Toulmin, director of the Press Complaints Commission, when the BBC reported online that he thought bloggers should subscribe to a voluntary code of conduct, or else there is no redress for errors. I was one of many bloggers who responded tartly. On my site and on the MediaGuardian podcast, I called Toulmin - with apologies, dear readers - a “Brit twit” for thinking that one could regulate this vast conversation, which is what blogs really are.

Only problem is, Toulmin didn’t say that. He told me by email that if he had, he might have understood my moniker for him. But instead, he complained to the BBC and to me, making reference to damage and lawyers. Both of us clarified what we wrote. And Toulmin told his tale in last week’s MediaGuardian.

The internet can be better at corrections than old media. A fix can be attached to an error where it occurs, and many online denizens pride themselves on confessing missteps faster than their print and broadcast counterparts. But the internet can also be worse - online, errors can spread wider faster and take on a longer half-life. I wish we had a technical solution - that everyone who linked to an incorrect article could receive an alert and correction.

The internet brings a fundamental change to the relationship of publisher and subject: now the subject can publish, too. So Susan Crawford, a professor at New York’s Cardozo Law School and a member of Icann, the board that oversees internet structure, has blogged that in this era, “libel law seems much less relevant - rather than sue, you can just write back”. A commenter on my blog responded that some bloggers boast larger audiences than others, so this playing field isn’t as level as it seems: “On occasion, a weak target can become a cause célèbre.” True. But I still argue that libel law was built for an era when few owned the press and the doctrine must be updated to account for the democratised and accelerated means of response today.

Should blogs subscribe to a code of conduct? I don’t think so (and neither does Toulmin). Again, blogs are mostly just people in conversation and I don’t wave a code when I talk to my neighbours and friends; I know that my integrity rests on my credibility. On the other hand, when I argue that bloggers who commit acts of journalism should enjoy the rights and privileges of professional journalists, how can I say that they should not suffer the same regulation? Well, for me, that’s easy, because as an American first amendment absolutist, I bristle at any attempt to regulate speech.

And I do fear that in their efforts to protect truth, legislatures, courts and self-appointed industry watchdogs could chill speech in new ways. If the people fear retribution without the legal resources that the owners of presses have, they will either shut up or hide behind the anonymity the internet allows. That would be a tragedy.

We need to recognise that the internet alters how media operate. Blogs - whether written by professionals or amateurs - tend to publish first and edit later, which can work because the audience will edit you. In this medium, stories are never done; rather than turning into fish-wrap, they can grow and become more factual and gather new perspectives, thanks to the power of the link and, yes, the correction.

We all make mistakes. We’re human. And the internet makes our humanity more apparent than polished print and broadcast do. So we need to modify our expectations of media, tune our scepticism, update our laws, restrain our regulation and enhance our technology. We are left, though, with the same ethic of the error we have always had: it’s wrong to make them and right to correct them, and you get a bonus for apology. So, Mr Toulmin, I’m sorry.

The German tabloid Bild is starting an English-language newspaper called AvaStar in Second Life. It will sell for 150 Linden-Dollar (42 cents) and will include ads from real advertisers with real dollars. That’s one way to expand your readership: adding virtual readers. [via Medienlese]

See also stats on Second Life’s growth.

What I need is for someone to create Second Life for Dummies and Old Farts.

Michael Arrington loses it in the comments on his own blog, attacking his friend Dave Winer, Rafat Ali, and me. This all seems to spring from his odd, fetishistic hate of The New York Times.

The Times introduced a simple little feature allowing/encouraging readers to recommend stories on Digg, Facebook, and Newsvine. It’s not terribly new; Gothamist has a similar feature letting people add links to Del.icio.us or Yahoo. I claim no credit for the feature but I do like it and I did suggest it a few months ago; I’m sure I was not alone. (Disclosures: I’ve been consulting for About.com at the Times Company and The Times Company invested in Daylife, where I am a partner, and where Arrington and Winer also invested.)

A writer on Arrington’s TechCrunch reported the addition of the Times feature under a headline with curiously uncalled-for snarkiness: “New York Times Surrenders To Social News.” In the comments, many TechCrunch readers respectfully called them on the attitude. Winer did likewise. That awoke Arrington from his bear’s hibernation and he growled:

Dave, I’m wondering out loud if your support for the NYT stems primarily from their support for RSS and their occasional links to you. As an occasional (but always unlinked-to) source of breaking news to the NYT, our respect for them doesn’t go quite so far. They are in the middle of a war for their life, and they are doing just about everything wrong.

And then:

Sure. RSS is important. But the NYT is an ethically bankrupt institution. I have first hand evidence, being trashed by them at a conference (which was subsequently mischaracterized), but there are other examples, too: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/24/nytimes_two_point_nought/

You, Jarvis and Rafat Ali are sucking up to them to further your own agendas. I don’t think that’s a good idea in the long run. In the case of Jarvis and Ali, this loyalty has resulted in outright fabrications.

Fabrications? Them’s fighting words, big fella. But I have the DVD and plenty of reliable witnesses to Arrington’s meltown and effort to bully The New York Times, which ended with The Times demanding and getting a sheepish apology from him. As I said here, bullies always back down.

At Arrington’s site, Winer tried to get the discussion back to a civilized track:

Hmmm.

I don’t think this deserves a response other than I doubt it’s true about Jarvis and Rafat, and I know it’s not true about me.

Back off dude, you’re in over your head.

But Dave failed. Arrington continued: “Wow. You are completely lost Dave.”

I would have said all this over at Arrington’s site, but he then cut off the comments, even though they hadn’t turned nasty — except from Arrington himself. Bullies can be wusses, too.

: See also Matthew Ingram’s post and Valleywag’s coverage of the latest Arrington meltown here and here. I’m glad Denton et al drew my attention to Arrington’s snitfit. I wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise. I stopped reading TechCrunch long ago. My loss, missing scoops like “Talkster Launches Presence-Based Service For The Enterprise” and “Jott to Convert Cell Phone Calls to Text” and “Add Text Bubbles To Videos” and “Wordie Is Like Flickr Without The Photos” and “Web App Provides Virtual Fitness Support.” Web 2.0 is so, well, 1.0.

See Tim Toulmin, head of the U.K. Press Complaints Commission, responding to the dustup created when he was misquoted as wanting to regulate bloggers. I was among those stirring dust but I corrected that when Toulmin properly complained. Says Toulmin:

Last week I read on one of the political websites about some twit who had said that a voluntary code of practice for blogs was needed. How absurd, I thought. Bloggers are hardly a homogenous profession; they operate in a naturally self-regulatory environment where inaccuracies can quickly be corrected by other posters; they have (sometimes) transnational followings, yet different countries have different cultural standards; it would be a bureaucratic nightmare to enforce; there is no proven need for one and so on.

But then - horrors! - I saw that this viewpoint was ascribed to me, with some predictably unflattering remarks. The American blogger Jeff Jarvis took to MediaGuardian’s weekly podcast to fulminate against my stupidity. Thousands of bloggers globally rounded on the suggestion, deploying all manner of exotic language.

I’m thinking about writing my Guardian column this week about the means and rights of response and correction in the internet: what’s working and what’s not. Also: Whether libel laws are outmoded when there is a new means of response (credit: Susan Crawford). And what happens when courts — nevermind regulators — attempt to define and treat blogging as media and thus threaten to put a chill on simple conversation? But on the other hand, if we bristle at subjecting blogs to the restrictions of media then can we still claim press protections for bloggers’ acts of journalism? And are codes of conduct worth the pixels they’re written in? Your thoughts?

The Times confirms what many of us had suspected, that spam has suddenly exploded again as the assholes who send it found new ways around filters. Anyone who thinks that spam is a problem that has been or will be solved with technology alone is wrong.