BuzzMachine

Janet Coats, editor of the Tampa Tribune, sat down in her newsroom to tell the staff about layoffs, reorganizations, new ways of doing business, and harsh realities and an intern named Jessica DaSilva recorded the event with appropriate admiration.

My favorite bomb: “People need to stop looking at TBO.com [the newspaper's affiliated web site] as an add on to The Tampa Tribune. The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

Another: “She stressed more than several times that if newspaers don’t change then NEWSPAPERS WILL DIE.” (DaSilva’s emphasis) She said that without change newspapers would continue their “death spiral - because that’s what it is.”

More: They laid off a sports reporter in the Tallahassee bureau because it makes more sense to have a reporter working in Tampa than one working in a city four hours away. Local is what she’s emphasizing. DaSilva said: “If they want national news, they have several national news sources to get it. Instead, the Trib should be used to give the community something they can’t get from the NY Times or WaPo. Give them their news.” Amen.

Isn’t the paper profitable, someone asked. “The Tribune hasn’t been bringing in profits for a long time… This isn’t about profit margins anymore…. We weren’t even in the black this year.” This is a reality check not just for the staff but for media-haters who think that papers are still money machines. They are becoming money-losing machines.

Competition? She told the staff to get over the idea that they should operate and judge themselves by doing the same stories as The St. Petersburg Times. Can’t afford that anymore.

I have no idea what went through the minds of the veteran staff. But I’m delighted with what went through the mind of this intern: “Through most of this meeting, I just wanted to shout, ‘Amen!’ and ‘You go girl!’ because Janet understands what’s up…. Janet, you’re my hero, and I think this is worth fighting for too.”

Whether Coats’ formula for reorganization is the right one or not I have no idea and only trying it will tell. But at least she’s trying. Mindy McAdams has the details from an email someone at the paper sent her.

It’s going to be like this:
* Managing editors
* 5-6 audience editors — keep in touch with what the print, TV, online audiences want/need
* 5 sections of reporting (all the reporters for print, TV and Web are mashed up together in these groups):
1. Deadline — for breaking/daily news
2. Data — specifically for database stuff
3. Watchdog — for investigative reporting
4. Personal journalism — stuff for people’s every day lives like weather, health, entertainment
5. Grassroots — citizen journalism….

Outside of these groups are three “finishing” groups for print, TV and online to determine what stories should be covered and with what medium.

All the reporters will be trained in gathering news for online in case there’s a need for it. They’ll be training them on the go. The focus will now be on immediacy and using mediums appropriately. The print product is going to be more enterprise and in-depth, the Web is for breaking news, etc.

They’re also straying from the beats system. They want reporting to be more fluid. Like, if the reporter who usually covers city hall has to work on an investigative piece, someone else (like an education or religion reporter or anyone) could step up to cover daily stories.

This staffer, too, recognizes the necessity, telling Mindy: “Everyone here is kind of freaking out about the change, but what else is the Trib to do? Sit back and let profits continue to drop and keep laying off employees? At least they’re doing something and trying to figure it out. That’s more than what a lot of news organizations can say.”

Here’s Eric Deggens report on the changes.

At the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, we’re proud to announce today that we received a $3 million matching grant from the Tow Foundation to create a Center for Journalistic Innovation. As you can guess, I’ll be very involved in this.

Our idea is to start an incubator to help support new products, businesses, platforms, technologies, and standards from new companies — some that will be started by students out of my entrepreneurial journalism class — and big media as well. We will create a New Business Models for News initiative to gather and share best practices in the industry. Another intitiative will do the same with editorial innovation. We will establish a chair in journailstic innovation and scholarships for entrepreneurial students.

Columbia’s journalism school also received a $5 million Tow matching grant. They will devote their efforts primarily to new journalism education, which is needed across the nation. But because we at CUNY are new and dealt with many of those issues when we started the school from scratch, we decided instead to look outward to the news industry. We believed that the greatest need of the industry is innovation and this was our effort at an answer that we hope will be complementary and collaborative with other efforts in this area from Knight, Poynter, and others. We also will work hard to create international ties for the center’s work so we can learn lessons from around the wrold.

In CUNY’s and my work, there is a continuing theme of innovation in the news industry. The entrepreneurial journalism course received a grant from the McCormick Foundation to provide seed funding for the students’ best proposals for sustainable journalistic enterprises. There were some great plans out of the class but we quickly learned that these llitle shoots need nurturing. We believe there are many similar ideas out there that need such help. Thus, the incubator. Last fall, we held a MacArthur-Foundation-funded conference in networked journalism and David Cohn reported best practices before and after. This October, we will do likewise with another MacArthur-financed conference in New Business Models for News. Those, too, lead right into the work of the Tow Center.

Now we have to raise the other $3 million so we can open the center’s doors. That’s the plug. If you have money, connections to it, or ideas, please do let me know. I’m eager to get going.

David Ardia reports on the fundamental misunderstanding of the link economy of media at the Carnegie-Knight Conference on the Future of Journalism. I got the quote from Jay Rosen’s tweet; he and I aren’t there (why? not sure; could be because our journalism schools aren’t part of the club or it could be because we’re not). Ardia blogs at the Citizen Media Law Project complaining about the one-way panel structure of such conferences:

For example, one attendee asked this morning’s panel on Working Journalists and the Changing News Environment whether news organizations should start charging a penny or two to everyone who links to newspaper content. Aside from the complete lack of any legal justification for such a licensing scheme (see the CMLP legal guide’s discussion of linking), the idea is preposterous and ignores the essential structure of the link architecture of the web. This should have sparked vigorous discussion of how the Internet has fundamentally changed the creation and distribution of news, but it didn’t.

I’d like to know who said it and who didn’t argue so we can spark that conversation. This is vital — vital — to the future of journalism. But I don’t find any evidence of streaming, live-blogging, or other blogging from the event. Too bad.

Phil Rosenthal from the Chicago Tribune asked me the right question: If you were a newspaper in Chicago, how would you react to the invasion of Arianna (see the post below). My response:

The old way would be to treat her as a competitor and try to do what she does.

The new way would be to find ways to work with her in a network: Sell her local ads and get a piece of her revenue as a result. Take feeds of the good blogs and bloggers she finds and put that in your site, taking the advantage of her curation and relationships. Start lots of blogs that crosspost in her product and yours so you use her to promote those blogs to a new audience. Provide her with feeds of your news so she can deliver it to her audience and you can get links from them to your content. Start to curate blogs on your own and include her in that collection so you can deliver the best of the larger network of local content to your audience. You no longer own the market; you are now part of a larger network and the larger that network is — if you’ve put yourself in the right position — the better it is for you.

Last night at one of the Guardian’s Future of Journalism sessions they are running for staff (and putting online), editor Alan Rusbridger had a conversation with Arianna Huffington and I do believe this is new: Arianna is going local. She’ll devote one editor to curating news and blog posts in the market. Jemima Kiss beat me to blogging this (she must have had less of the red wine at the dinner afterwards). She just added a green section and will launch books, international, and sports soon.

“We are an aspiring newspaper,” she said.

I was just with Emily Bell, head of digital at the Guardian, and she used the right word to describe this: Agile. Arianna and company decide to start taking over the world and they just do it. Big, old newspapers plan and fret instead. Want to offer readers a new area of coverage? Start with one editor, find out what’s available, and get moving. Agile.

My Guardian column this week comes out of a tour of the reorganized BBC newsroom with its head, Peter Horrocks. Snippet:

As we stood there, one of many tours of the space was being held for online employees. “They keep asking who’s won,” Horrocks said - did TV take over because they are in TV’s space under a TV person? It had better not be that simple. If newsroom reorganisation - at any news operation - is about nothing more than shuffling desks, then it might as well be an exercise carried out on the deck of the Titanic. Later, Horrocks gave the real answer: “We’ve had to blow up BBC News to totally remake it.”

Even as a Wachovia analyst predicted that newspaper print advertising would fall 12 percent this year — falling 10.4 percent overall this year and falling another 6.5 percent next year — reality caught up to and ran past the prediction as the Newspaper Association of America said newspaper ad revenue fell 14 percent in the first quarter overall and 35 percent in job and real estate classifieds. Jon Fine, as I pointed out in the post below, summarizes the shrinkage of newspapers. The other day, he quoted newspaper owner Dean Singleton’s sober state of the U.S. industry: “By my estimate, as many as 19 of the top 50 metro newspapers in America are losing money today, and that number will continue to grow. The large metros are the hardest hit by change, and they’re the most difficult to change.” Nothing new here. The alarm bell just got louder.

I propose to the Associated Press that it immediately begin linking to all its sources for stories, especially to members’ original journalism because:

* This will support journalism at its source. As I’ve written here, it is vital that we link to original journalism so it can receive traffic, audience, branding, credit, conversation, and advertising.

* This will provide a better service to readers and clients, enabling them to find, read, and link to original reporting.

* This will be an act of transparency that everyone in journalism should be practicing. As they say in the math test, we should show our work. The AP can provide an example that other news organizations should follow.

This comes out of the ethic of the link and quote that I have learned from blogs. It says to our readers: Don’t take my word for it, go see for yourself. And: Here’s what the source said; I won’t rephrase it but I will quote it directly so you can see for yourself.

The Associated Press, like its industry, has been operating under a different ethic for a different time: the ethic of ownership and control.

These two systems are coming into conflict now, but they need not conflict. As Prof. Rosen has been trying to teach journalists in another context: “Newsroom people, hear me out. You don’t have to leave the moral universe you grew up in. Just admit the possibility of another valid one beyond yours.”

The AP sent Drudge Retort and Rogers Cadenhead takedown notices for brief excerpts from and links to its stories. I reacted strongly but I’ll now try to explain calmly what’s at stake here.

The AP was calling bloggers unethical even while the bloggers were operating under their own ethic of the link and the quote. The bloggers believe they are doing the right thing in quoting directly and they think they are doing the generous thing — generous to both their readers and to the AP — in providing links to the source material. The bloggers will also say that this is an ethic the AP itself violates when it homogenizes and commodifies news, rewriting it and stripping it of the identity — and now the address — of the original reporting done by its members and other sources.

But the AP will say that it has a right to own that content and others, including bloggers, do not, so it believes it is protecting that license. That is its ethic.

Of course, these two ethics need not be mutually exclusive.

Bloggers should not quote excessively from others’ content and when they quote it should be for a reason — to agree, disagree, comment on, recommend, correct (there can be many reasons). This is fair use and fair comment. There can be no word-count limit because it depends on the use. If I want to fisk a story, I may well quote the whole thing because I am commenting on it all. The test is reasonableness: a fuzzy test, but life is fuzzy.

The AP, for its part, should recognize that they and their members now live in a new media ecology constructed of links, one they do not and cannot control any longer. To be good citizens in this new economy, the AP should respect the rights of readers who write and recognize the benefits of receiving links and credit, as the bloggers give it. They should further extend this ethic to their own work. And if there is conflict or questions, their reflex should not be to send their lawyers to write letters. Remember that you are dealing with individuals, not corporations. This was a hostile act and that is why it was met in return with hostility, deservedly so.

Now let me make clear that the AP is no idiot. Jim Kennedy, its head of strategy, who responded to my rant in the comments and has done so on other blogs, has the best strategic mind in the industry (if only there were more of him). He has inspired much of my thinking about the ecology of links in news. Tom Curley, his boss, has spoken eloquently about the need to separate content from the container — to, indeed, look at new means to distribute news (by blog quotes and links among them, I’d say). The AP has been dealing with issues of credit for years when TV stations pick up stories reported by newspapers and then rewritten by the AP, giving no credit to the source; the same happens with photos, as someone said in my comments.

No, the AP is no fool. But it acted like one in this episode. I wanted to throttle them. And so I did. My problem is not just that they threatened bloggers foolishly and needlessly and assaulted the right to fair use and fair comment but that it made them appear so clueless. I believe what they did could harm both the AP and the foundering news and newspaper industries.

How could it harm the AP? Well, I return to the case of the Ohio rebellion, where papers are now sharing their original journalism without the AP and its content mill. I think there well could come a day when local papers decide to share their own content around the AP and even to do without the AP state wire. Those same papers may decide to stop covering the world or at least to do it with links instead of syndicated, commodified, expensive wire content. At the same time, as Jon Fine says in his column this week, newspapers will shrink (or disappear). So I suggest that the AP had better reconsider its relationship locally and it may need to be more of a curator than a mill. It may need to provide not rewritten stories but instead selected quotes and links — as bloggers do.

I also believe that in an economy of links, the AP should reconsider its role. Many years ago, when I still worked for a newspaper company, I told the AP that I thought it should become an ad network; that’s what we need. Maybe it should be an aggregator, or perhaps a curator. But I do not think there is a future in acting as an owner of recycled content in an age when the link also commodifies all information in an instant. That becomes a pointless game of wack-a-mole that turns us — the AP’s readers and promoters — into moles.

My suspicion is that it’s the lawyers who got the AP into this mess. My best advice for the AP’s executives is that they should try to practice the bloggers’ ethic of the link and quote themselves (updating their news values with one more value). My next-best advice is that they should walk down the hall and tell the lawyers to put a damned sock in it or send them off for a very long off-site on a golf course where they can do no harm. This is not going to be resolved enforcing the fine print of outmoded laws built for an extinct age. This is a constantly changing landscape that must be maneuvered with flexibility and openness. But if those lawyers continue to threaten bloggers who know more about this new age and are only practicing their appropriate ethics, I will continue to use this space to suggest where socks should go.

[Disclosures: I have many dogs in this hunt, which I try to point out whenever I write about this but I'll make a fuller statement here. I am speaking for myself and none of those dogs. I am a partner at Daylife, which collects news and is a platform for links among news sources. I am on the board of Publish2, which will provide a platform for journalists to provide links to their sources. I am a member of the Media Bloggers Association, whose founder, Bob Cox, a more reasonable man than I, is talking with the parties in this story. I am writing a book about Google and believe that its role as aggregator, linker, scraper, and search engine is vital to the new ecology of media. I quote from and link to AP and others' stories constantly. I have worked with and consider myself a friend of the AP, though they might disagree right now.]

In the news business these days, innovation is coming from the oddest places, like Gannett (which has revolutionized its newsrooms more than any other company I can name here) and now the Washington Times. Yes, the Washington Times. Craig Stoltz reviews the new web design there and I think he’s right: It’s groundbreaking. The ability to dig deeper with media, themes (aka tags), and links (very Daylifey, I might add) is quite nice. The wowy presentation of that on the main story on the home page does not, unfortunately, carry through to story pages. But the information and organization is still there. See also the organization of news by themes. I’d have to live with it to see whether it works or wears thin. But give them points: It’s refreshing.

A few shows ago, On the Media reported on a revolt against the Associated Press in Ohio, where papers across the state are trading and publishing each others’ original stories rather than sending them through the AP homogenizer. There are a few important implications in this, one about the fate of the AP and the other about an ethic I think news organizations must adopt to link to and promote original journalism.

In the ecosystem of links and the new architecture of news that it spawns, I believe it is vital that we as an industry find ways to point to and give credit to original reporting. That is how original journalism will be supported, in the end: by monetizing the audience that comes to it, whether through advertising or contributions.

This leads to a new Golden Rule of Links in journalism — link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff. This emerges from blogging etiquette but is exactly contrary to the old, competitive ways of news organizations: wasting now-precious resources matching competitors’ stories so you could say you’d done it yourself. That must change.

This ethic of the link will become all the more important as news organizations pare down to their essence. I’ve said often that they will have to do what they do best and link to the rest.

And I believe that it will become important for us to link to our sources and influences — as well as transcripts and additional reporting — to show readers how we arrived where we have in a story. When I was last in London, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger called this footnoting a story. He’s better educated than I; I’ll call it linkboxing.

Add that together and we end up with a new link layer atop the news: links to original reporting; links to complementary reporting; links to sources (not to mention links to and from discussions). It’s part of the new architecture of news that I wrote and doodled about here. Upendra Shardanand, the founder of Daylife (where I am a partner), wrote about it here, arguing that the key to the new architecturer is superior navigation to news.

This is why I got excited about working on Daylife, because I believe it provides key infrastructure for this link layer: It allows sites to link to the world’s coverage of a topic — so they can link to the rest and so they can put stories in context — and it also sends traffic to journalism. One thing we’re working on is finding ways to get better at sending traffic to journalism at its source. There are a few algorithmic solutions to see who was early in on a story, but this is also where the ethic of the link also comes in: If everyone links to — not just attributes but links to — the Washington Post’s coverage of Walter Reed then it will make it easier to find where stories begin. We should expose credit where credit is due.

The link layer is also why I got involved with Publish2, sitting on its board, because it will provide the platform for that linkboxing. I say all this not just to plug two companies in which I have an interest but to show that there is a method to my madness. I want to be involved in building of the new architecture of news.

So now I return to the Associated Press. This new ecology of news is what’s at work in Ohio. By running other papers’ stories, the newsrooms are participating in a print version of linking to original journalism. Importantly, these stories are not going through the AP mill, being rewritten under an AP style and brand (which its contract with papers allows because the AP is a cooperative). Instead, now the original stories are getting more attention across the state.

Susan Goldberg, editor of the Plain Dealer, told Bob Garfield on OtM: “I think it’s a lot better because we can get the stories faster. Nobody is rewriting them. … We don’t really need that function.” And later: “I frankly think we’re getting better, more distinctively written stories because they’re not going through the AP mill. But I also think that it does allow us to make some smarter choices. We, and everybody else, have smaller staffs than we used to, and we’ve got to pick some priorities.”

What she’s saying, to translate into Buzzmachinese, is that they’re doing what they does best and linking to the rest and they are linking to original journalism: the new architecture at work.

I have no doubt the Goldberg-Garfield interview caused a hard gulp down the street from me at AP HQ, where they’re dealing with budget-choked newspapers complaining about rates. That is what this little revolt is really about. These dissidents are not trying to kill the AP; they depend upon it more now that their staffs are shrinking. But one wonders what a world looks like with a shrunken AP or, God forbid, without one.

Does the AP possibly become more of a curator of original stories than a reprocessing mill? What reporting does it still need to do complement the work that local papers do best? Do they still need state wires and bureaux or can papers indeed go it alone? As papers inevitably become more local, will they — should they — even bother with national and international news or should they just link to it via smart aggregation?

How does competitor Reuters play into this? Is it in a better position because it is not hampered as a cooperative and is building a consumer brand? I’ve talked about a reverse syndication model as a new opportunity, which was actually sprung from a talk with an AP executive but it is Reuters that is executing on it (rather than syndicating its content to Yahoo, Reuters is now sending them headlines, Yahoo sends Reuters traffic, and Reuters shares the revenue that results; this is linking with money attached). What does a combination of Reuters’ original reporting and, say, Daylife’s aggregation provide in covering the rest of the world?

This gets even more complex when journalism busts out of its professional fence and it is practiced by many people in many places: the ecosystem only explodes. The AP acknowledges that new structure in its deal with Now Public and Reuters does likewise in its deal with Global Voices.

The transformation of news is obviously not as simple as taking print stories and putting them online and even getting fancy adding video and comments. This transformation is happening at a fundamental, architectural level that has impact we are only beginning to figure out.

But out of this discussion, I’d like to start here: with a discussion of the ethic of the link in journalism.

: LATER: In my email, I just got a link to an important study the AP conducted on news use in the next generation. The PDF of the presentation is here (I don’t see a link to the PR yet). The AP’s Jim Kennedy told my students at CUNY about this. They propose a new model of multiple entry points into news — a new way to look at the process — around facts, updates, background, and followup.

Note well that the AP is trying to get its industry to think ahead and rearchitect news but that’s no easy job.

: Reading the AP study… One of the most intriguing findings is that young people use news to build social capital (to converse or to impress).

The Washington Post just lost a passel of talent in its latest round of buyouts. Reducing headcount on newspapers is an economic necessity today. Everybody’s doing it.

Note there’s now a blog called Papercuts tracking journalistic job cuts. So far this year alone in the U.S. alone: 2,170.

But I’d suggest doing it in a few different ways as this continues to progress across the land:

First, offer all the talented people who are leaving a weblog. Tell them you’ll sell ads on the blog and share over 50 percent of the revenue with them. They will own the blog and if they choose to start a company around it, you’ll even invest. For those who continue to write online, the paper continues to get value from the assets and brands it helped build and the writers get promotion and revenue from the paper while readers still get to read their work. Why not?

Second, I’d be redefining every job in the newsroom and giving people still there the opportunity to retrain and apply for new jobs.

I have been the greatest fan and booster of Facebook but I have to wonder whether they are leapfrogging the shark by cutting off Google Friend Connect — not because it is evil but because it is closed, limiting, wrong, and not in their own self-interest, a key and possibly fatal strategic mistake.

The essential question for Facebook is this: Do you want to be a closed site or an open platform? Do you want to be a closed social network or enable the open social network the internet already is? Clearly, it is better to be the platform. But Facebook is being strangely blind to that.

At the same time, I’ve become less addicted to Facebook because there isn’t enough there. That could be because I hang with old farts, who’ve cooled on the fad. But it’s more likely because Twitter has become a more meaningful platform for keeping in touch with friends (though that, too, could change). Though Facebook still has more functionality enabling me to organize those friends, Twitter is better at distinguishing acquaintances (the followers) from friends (the followed). That is, whereas on Facebook, I have — I’m sorry to say — 1,030 ignored friend requests, on Twitter, I have 1,765 followers. Twitter has learned from Facebook’s mistakes. So has Google.

Facebook should have asked — pardon the plug for the book — WWGD? If they had thought like Google, they would have tried to figure out how to use what they had built — an organizing system for friendship — and turn that into a platform we can use — and control — anywhere on the internet.

Google has quite cleverly done that as they explain on their code blog. They used Facebook’s API by all appearances legitimately. They give us control of how we use our data (and our friends are our data). They also kluged it a bit so they don’t retain data (which also means that other sites can really manipulate it, losing some potential functionality but keeping Google on the safe site of the line).

People find the relationships they’ve built on social networks really valuable, and they want the option of bringing those friends with them elsewhere on the web. Google Friend Connect is designed to keep users fully in control of their information at all times. Users choose what social networks to link to their Friend Connect account. (They can just as easily unlink them.) We never handle passwords from other sites, we never store social graph data from other sites, and we never pass users’ social network IDs to Friend Connected sites or applications.

Google is only doing what Facebook should have done: open up to be more useful across the entire internet. Now Google is giving Facebook the opportunity to do that — the dare to do that — and Facebook is chickening out. Big mistake.

I wrote back in 2006 that the internet is the social network. The winner will be he who brings that — to use Mark Zuckerberg’s own words and credo — elegant organization.

But the truly valuable network, the network of networks, the unbreakable bubble of bubbles, will be the one that manages to bring people together wherever we are, not just on MySpace (read: RupertsSpace), not just in Flickr or Del.icio.us, and not even just in the blogosphere, but everywhere. The internet doesn’t need more social networks. The internet is the social network. We have our identities, interests, reputations, relationships, information, and lives here, and we’re adding more every day. The network enabler that manages to help us tie these together to find not just connections or email addresses or information or songs but people — friends, colleagues, teachers, students, partners, lovers — across this open world, that will be the owner of the biggest network of them all: The Google of people.

I’m no mathematician or scientist, so I have to express this in words, but here’s the way I calculate the value of networks:

The Law of Open Networks: The more open a network is, the more control there is at the edges, the more the edges value the network, the more the network is worth.

The business lessons from this: Any choke point of control, via ownership, decreases the value of the network. Enablers increase the value of the network. The network will abhor and find ways around choke points. The network will value enablers and that is the point at which value may be extracted from the network. The value in networks in the open future is not in ownership and control but in enabling others to control.

Facebook put a chokehold around our data about our friends. Huge mistake. As Steve Gillmor said in his excellent Techcrunch analysis:

Facebook finally has a real problem to deal with - an exceptionally rational and well-thought-out strategy by Google that puts the leading social media cloud in the path of a wave of angry users. The only thing Facebook has going for it is that said users don’t yet know they’re angry.

Umair Haque has been purposefully over-the-top calling Facebook’s act “evil” (a few Twitter folks said his language gets in the way). But when you dig down, Umair, as is his habit, finds a brilliant and new law at work here:

What’s really going on here? There’s a massive tectonic shift rocking the economic landscape. All these players are discovering that the boardroom’s first and most important task is simply to try always and everywhere do less evil. In the dismal language of economics: as interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits.

Let’s repeat that and dub it Haque’s Law: As interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Google is really talking about when it promises not to be evil. It is not a campaign pledge (”Yes, we cannot be evil!”) or a geeky Bible lesson about good and bad (open unto others as they would open unto you) but a cold, calculated business rule:

When the people can talk with, about, and around you, screwing them is no longer a valid business strategy.

Be warned, cable companies, airlines, insurance companies, real estate agents, ad agencies, and governments: choke points are evil and evil is bad business.

This is — sorry for the second plug — at the heart of my book. Interaction turns control over to the public and that fundamentally changes business and society. Oh, I know, that drives various curmudgeons, cynics, and polemicists nutty but I do believe it is true. Google has found (not created but exploited) a new economy and only a fool would not try to learn from that and follow its lead if at all possible.

And I can’t believe that Mark Zuckerberg is a fool. I’ve said in the past that he makes mistakes, but he makes mistakes well — listening, learning, and changing quickly. Well, he’d better change quickly on this one. And the lesson here is no different at all from the lessons he learned with the botched announcements of Facebook’s news feed and ad program: It’s about control. We want control of our data.

But there’s a bigger lesson here: It’s about being a platform instead of a service (or portal). Last year, I disagreed with friend Scott Heiferman when he said that Facebook was the new AOL — and, indeed, Scott quickly disagreed with himself. But Zuckerberg may be proving him right after all. If he tries to build his business by attracting us to his garden and then fencing us in, if he doesn’t give us control and let us use Facebook and our identity there as a platform for our lives, then he is turning it into the next AOL when it could be the next Google. And that would be tragic. Tragic.

This is the critical moment in Facebook’s history. This is the moment when they realize that they have to give control to us and to the internet and become a platform. If they do, I’m likely to use my Facebook identity as my key identity only because it is tied to my social network; that is precisely what makes it more valuable than others. I don’t think that Twitter will be that but it may be the best second choice and it is tied to more dynamic information from my friends. Whether friend or follower, I want to link with people online. Who will help me? Who will stop me? He who helps, wins.

: More from Fred Wilson, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble.

: LATER: The irony of Google, of course, is that it’s open when it’s fighting closed systems (advertising, media, Facebook) but its instinct is closed. They wouldn’t even let the NY Times give them harmless publicity for their Lego logo. Don’t need it, they say. Would rather hide in a dark room.

: LATEST: This is why I don’t bet against Zuckerberg. Already, he says he wants to meet with Google and work it out. Smart.