Author: Mathew Ingram

Interesting post by danah boyd — a sociologist who has become known for focusing on social networks such as MySpace and how young people use (and abuse) them — about the billion-dollar question: Who is clicking on all those Web ads, and what does that say about Web advertising and about the online economy in general?

I know I’ve never clicked on a Web ad of any kind, or at least not out of a genuine desire to buy something. So who does? Research suggests it’s primarily lower-income Web surfers, and predominantly women. And the same research suggests that 99 per cent of people don’t click on ads, and only about .2 per cent click a lot.

Are they carrying the entire Web on their shoulders, and if so what does that mean? Read the whole thing.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, gave a long and passionate speech in London last week at a memorial event hosted by The Guardian — the full text of which is here — and in it he said many valuable and wise things about the practice of journalism (although he kind of glossed over stuff like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, but whatever). However, he also said a couple of really dumb things about blogs and social media. Those dumb things are ably skewered by Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine, who Keller referred to in his speech.

In a nutshell, the NYT executive editor says Jeff and his ilk are of the view that bloggers and “citizen journalists” can more or less replace traditional journalists — and then Keller goes on to say that can’t possibly happen, because journalists like those at the Times have standards, training, put themselves in harm’s way in pursuit of the story, etc. etc. The only problem with all that, of course, is that hardly anyone — and especially Jeff Jarvis — is arguing anything like that.

As Jeff notes — and Dan Gillmor does as well — Keller’s argument is a straw man, designed to pump up traditional journalism at the expense of some pseudo-horde of random “citizen journalists” who want to take their jobs. Why can’t we admit that in some cases, people who haven’t been anointed with the title “journalist,” either by someone at a journalism school or by an editor at an established news outlet, can at least help to produce journalism? Why is that so hard?

I’m glad I’m not the only one who was sad to see Tay Zonday’s Dr. Pepper commercial. Jason Calacanis and Jakob Lodwick (now ex- of Vimeo) seem to feel the same, and so does my friend Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous and a few others I came across in my feed reader. If you’re not familiar with the phenomenon that is Tay Zonday, I can’t sum it all up here, but suffice it to say that he appeared out of nowhere — a young black kid with a bizarre singing style — and became a YouTube star.

And then he went and made this craptacular Dr. Pepper commercial. Filled with the same cheesy dancers and rappers and bling you can find in any other rap-inspired ad, combined with the oddly exaggerated, deep-voice singing of Tay — it doesn’t work as a parody, it doesn’t work as a tribute, it doesn’t work as a commercial period. All it seems to accomplish is to make Tay Zonday look like just another wanker looking for a quick payout. I mean, he gets to be on TV and shoot a video with a bunch of dancers, so good for him. But still, it’s kind of sad in a way.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x2W12A8Qow&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

Kara Swisher writes about how a court rejected Mark Zuckerberg’s recent attempt to squash some public documents that were submitted in the court case between the Facebook founder and the trio of Harvard types who claim he stole the idea (and some code) for the social-networking site from them — a story that is detailed in a recent magazine piece in a publication called 02138, which is aimed at Harvard alumni.

The documents Zuckerberg was concerned about are all available on the magazine’s website (most in the form of PDFs) and they include the Facebook co-founder’s application to Harvard — one of the ones he wanted removed, since it contains his parents’ home address in Dobbs Ferry, New York, among other things — as well as excerpts from Zuckerberg’s online journal, two statements he made in the case, an email he sent to Harvard about the dispute, and Facebook’s financial statements from 2005.

The online journal excerpts are particularly hilarious — they detail how Zuckerberg decided (after breaking up with a girlfriend, apparently) to whip together something that would pull people’s pictures from their online Harvard profiles and then post two of them side by side so people could vote on who was more attractive:

“I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland facebook is open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

That’s at 9:30 in the evening. Over the next five hours or so, Zuckerberg whips up a script that will hack into the various residence houses at Harvard and pull the photos out, using holes in the Apache server settings. It makes for pretty funny reading (according to the magazine piece, he was reprimanded for his exploits and briefly suspended).

Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard-trained hacker. In case you’re interested, his Harvard application also notes that he was the MVP on his fencing team at Exeter Academy in 2000; a finalist for the New York Regional Fencing championships; got gold medals at the Science Olympiad in Practical Data Gathering, Astronomy and Physics; and was the high scorer at the American Regional Math League in 2001.

According to a report at a search blog from a conference in Ann Arbor, Google — not usually known as a company that tends to blab about what it has planned for the future — has been doing just that about Google Apps and some of the new features it expects to release next year. Among other things, Gmail and Google Calendar and other apps are apparently going to get offline support through Google Gears, which is something that many (including yours truly) have been waiting for.

One other piece of good news: Google’s lame Page Creator service — which I find it hard to believe anyone actually uses, apart from maybe kids in a sheltered workshop for the developmentally delayed — is reportedly going to get an upgrade, and will become part of a tool/service that is powered by JotSpot, the wiki company, and will let businesses create project sites where employees can collaborate on research.

A move by Google into Enterprise 2.0? Makes sense to me. And once offline support is available for Google Docs and its other apps, it will be able to make a serious push into that market.

Since every weekend must have some drama in the blogosphere, and Mike Arrington hasn’t missed any conferences lately (that I know of), the drama quotient must be filled by Jakob Lodwick, the geeky co-founder of video-sharing site Vimeo — and also a much-loved target of Valleywag cheap shots about him and his red-hot girlfriend Julia Allison. Jake and Julia, in typical celebrity 2.0 fashion, invite such attacks by posting their every thought and action on their blog.

According to a post that has since been removed from Jakob’s own blog, he has left Connected Ventures — the parent company of Vimeo and also two other sites founded by the same group: Busted Tees and CollegeHumor.com. After being acquired last year, all are now the property of Barry Diller and his InterActive Corp. conglomerate, and there have been suggestions that Jake and his bare-all, bong-huffing ways didn’t mesh very well with IAC (imagine my surprise).

It being a slow news day — and/or a topic that Owen Thomas and the rest of the gang just can’t resist writing about — Valleywag has so far written not just one and not just two, but three posts about Jakob and Vimeo, including one about how he had left, one about the fact that he was supposedly fired, and one about whether Julia’s breasts were somehow involved.

Julia amps up the Drama 2.0 by posting on their shared blog that she wished she hadn’t learned of Jakob’s departure from the company he had been with for seven years by reading about it on his blog — which calls to mind her similarly unimpressed posts about Jakob and his shortcomings in the boyfriend department from earlier this year.

Back in the real world, various reports say that Jakob wasn’t fired but left amicably — and that he wasn’t the only recent departure from Connected Ventures, with one other co-founder having left just before him and one having left at the same time, suggesting a potential purge of some kind. Meanwhile, a commenter on TechCrunch’s post says:

“Jakob’s not meek, but he’s not some useless douche. He actually conceived and built a brilliant site that makes YouTube look like a third-grade after-school project. He ran a productive but amazingly happy team, and he inspired love for his site from its users.

Jakob laid his life spread-eagle on the web, and for that he deserves ridicule, like all the rest of us exhibitionists. But it’s lazy and stupid to write off his entire value as a person.”

A surprisingly rational comment amid a sea of Schadenfreude (and worse) and Jakob and the Vimeo phenomenon. I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the commenter was named Matthew 🙂 Update: As Megan has since pointed out in a comment here, that example of rationality appears to be a carbon copy of a comment made by Nick Douglas on Valleywag. Obviously someone liked Nick’s comment enough to pretend it was theirs — and now I’m left agreeing with Nick Douglas.

So the Facebook Beacon privacy train continues to careen down the tracks, braking hard in the turns and doing its best not to come flying off the rails altogether. Already, some of the passengers — including Coca-Cola, a large maker of carbonated sugar-water that you may have heard of — have jumped off the train, saying they aren’t sure that Facebook can salvage the idea and actually produce anything of value for them.

One of the issues for both New York Times writer Louise Story and for Coca-Cola, apparently, is whether Beacon was originally supposed to be — or is now — an “opt in” service. According to her post on the Bits blog, Ms. Story thought Mark Zuckerberg promised it would be opt in, and apparently Coca-Cola got that impression too. To further confuse the issue, Ms. Story now believes that Facebook has changed it to be opt in, but Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider says that isn’t the case.

As I understand it now, Facebook captures your information through a tracking cookie, and will show you what it has captured when you log in to the site, and then ask you whether you want that data to be sent out to your friends through your news feed. That sounds pretty much like an opt-in service to me — but not to everyone. Some say it’s only opt-in if there’s a global “yes I want you to track my info” button somewhere. Mark Zuckerberg seems to feel that by signing up for Facebook, you have effectively opted-in to that idea.

So was Beacon supposed to be opt-in to begin with? According to Ms. Story, her understanding was that Facebook would give users the ability to opt in before releasing their data — but as far as we can tell from the comments made by him and by a Facebook spokesman, they actually meant the opposite: that users would get the ability to opt out, by saying they didn’t want to broadcast the information. If they didn’t opt out, in other words, they had effectively opted in. Confused yet?

About all we know at this point is that Facebook is tangled in a rat’s nest of who said what, and who meant what, and the chorus of criticism is growing louder. As Hank mentions, Moveon’s petition is one thing, but when a major customer like Coca-Cola thinks you’re playing fast and loose with what you promised to do, then you have problems.

I’m shocked — shocked, I tell you — at the conspicuous lack of sympathy that’s being shown for poor Mark Zuckerberg, who has had to sue a magazine aimed at Harvard alumni for publishing some personal information about him, including (as I understand it) his parents home address and some of his, er… passionate journal entries and emails when he was just a young lad at Harvard. How dare they expose his personal data like that? Isn’t that an invasion of privacy? There should be a law or something. It’s almost as though someone was following him around, watching his every move and then publicizing that information without asking him. The nerve of some people.

So the worst-kept secret in the mobile-phone industry is finally out: Google has confirmed that it plans to bid for new spectrum in the 700-Mhz auction that is to be held early next year. One of the requirements of the spectrum auction is that whoever wins must allow users to download whatever applications they want to their mobile devices, which would fit with Google’s Open Handset vision. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said:

“Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet.”

Meanwhile, Canada is planning a spectrum auction of its own, and also hoping to increase the amount of competition in the mobile sector — which is currently held hostage by an oligopoly consisting of Bell, Telus and Rogers. Canada being what it is, of course, we don’t have a Google bidding for spectrum and promising competition, we have the government setting aside spectrum and blocking Bell, Telus and Rogers from bidding on it.

The hoped-for upshot of both moves is more competition, and as a result more features and lower prices (Om Malik doesn’t think Google is in it to win it). Will that be the actual outcome, or will it just mean higher handset prices and more attempts to lock customers into long-term contracts? Stay tuned.

I was watching the interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Om Malik’s show on Revision3, because I’m always interested in what Jimmy is up to, and he mentioned a site called ArmchairGM, which I don’t recall hearing about before — or at least paying much attention to. Om was talking about how he wanted a combination of his blog and a wiki, so that his community could contribute and get involved more, and Jimmy said he saw ArmchairGM as being close to that kind of thing.

ArmchairGM.com is a sports site that Wikia (the for-profit company that Wales runs) bought earlier this year for $2-million. It’s designed as a kind of combination blog and community site for sports fans, and so it has a bunch of the same features as a blog — posts, comments, etc. — but also many features of a wiki, in that anything can be edited (apart from user profiles), as well as some features of a Facebook-style social network.

For example, the site allows members to give each other gifts (which have a twist, in that they can be created by members), and to vote on or rate each other’s posts and comments — and it also has an interesting level system that allows members to work their way up based on the amount of activity they put into the site. Registering gets you 1,000 points and recruiting a new member gets you 5,000, and you get points for writing a new post, editing a post, and whether your comments get votes or not.

It’s an interesting idea, and the site appears to have gained a substantial amount of traction and developed a strong community. I don’t know how long a period the numbers relate to, but the site says it has more than 73,000 pages and there have been 441,000 edits, 660,000 votes and 173,000 comments. As of September it had about a million page views a month, according to TechCrunch.

Despite all the good-natured pokes (or is that Super Pokes?) that Kara Swisher has taken at young Mark Zuckerberg, she’s got a scoop about Facebook, and it’s not even Beacon-related: the company has attracted a $60-million investment from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing — often known as Li Ka-ching, for his ability to turn gigantic heaps of money into even larger heaps of money.

A couple of interesting points to note: Facebook has apparently managed to get the $240-million investment from Microsoft and the $60-million from Li Ka-shing (which apparently didn’t come through either of his usual holding companies) without having to a) protect them from any downside or drop in the company’s valuation, or b) give them a seat on the board of directors. That’s pretty incredible.

It may not be Zuckerberg, but someone on Facebook’s negotiating team has brass cojones — and what’s better, the company continues to get what it is asking for. Rafat Ali at PaidContent sees a possible arrangement between Facebook and Tom Online, the Chinese portal that Ka-shing is chairman of. The big unanswered question, of course, is what the heck is Facebook planning to do with that $300-million?

Came across this succinct appraisal of journalism — and journalism schools — in an interview that Campus Progess did with Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, who is clearly going for the “Hunter S. Thompson” award:

“If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days.

My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism. What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something.

Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors.”

Well, at least there’s some hope left for my friend Dr. Tony Hung, who writes over at Deep Jive Interests.

Nick O’Neill at All Facebook has the news that Facebook has backtracked on its Beacon feature (as I expected they might), and will now present the data for a Facebook user to approve before it is added to their news feed. In other words, you could now prevent the information about the Christmas present (or Christmakkah present) you bought from being broadcast to the person you bought it for.

Will the statement from Facebook placate all of the Beacon critics? That’s pretty unlikely — I think some people have the knives out for anything that they see as an infringement on their privacy, even if they have to agree before their privacy even gets infringed. I know that my friend Leigh, for example, feels very strongly about the Facebook tracking idea, but I honestly don’t see what the big deal is (Update: I’m glad to see that Fred Wilson agrees with me).

Hopefully now that Facebook has made it even more obvious for users what is being tracked, and they have to explicitly approve it before it’s added to their news feed, some of the complaints will die down. Just to be clear, users have always had to approve the disclosure, but many have complained that it was too confusing, or they weren’t paying attention, or the opt-out notice disappeared too quickly, or whatever.

So now, as I understand it, Facebook will present you with a notice about the shopping or other behaviour it has tracked through a partner site like Amazon, and if you click OK then it will be added to your news feed. And then Facebook will let me know that you bought “Chicken Soup For the Heartless Bastard” or whatever, and I will promptly ignore that just like I ignore most of the things in my feed.

You have to hand it to The Pirate Bay. No, really — you have to hand it to them, because they’re just going to take it anyway. (sorry, just a little peer-to-peer humour there; is this thing on?) The BitTorrent site, which has made a career out of thumbing its nose at just about every legal authority, regulatory body and government from here to the Swiss Alps — and not just thumbing its nose, but occasionally dropping its pants — is now in the music recommendation business.

In an irony so twisted that members of the RIAA are likely to get whiplash just thinking about it, site has added some new features to its site that show you similar artists when you search for a particular song or album (which, of course, you plan to download without paying for it). They even have a Last.fm player that will stream music from those related artists — which makes you wonder if there isn’t someone over at Last.fm’s media-giant parent, CBS, who hasn’t been reading his memos carefully.

I was looking around at some of the blog posts and news articles on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, including one at Compete about traffic flows on Cyber Monday, and as usual I wound up at Google News doing a search for the term Cyber Monday. What came up was a cluster of almost 700 articles with one from CNet at the top.

Directly underneath the story cluster, however, was a comment balloon, indicating that Google News had added a comment from someone involved in the story, as the site started doing earlier this year in an attempt to add balance to the news that it presents (a curiously journalistic approach for a search engine). The Cyber Monday comment was one of the first ones I’ve come across “in the wild,” so I took a snapshot of the page. As it turned out, there were actually three comments:

One comment is from the chief retail analyst at NPD Group, a research firm, a second is from the executive director at Shop.org — where they have put together a page with hundreds of Black Friday deals, and a third comment comes from a retail analyst at Forrester Research.

What purpose does this serve? I’m not sure. The NPD analyst is actually quoted in some of the retail stories I came across, but his comment on the Google News page is substantially longer than any of his quotes in news stories; does that add value? Perhaps. The Shop.org comment seems fairly blatantly promotional, which makes you wonder why Google bothered. And the Forrester comment — which is quite short — arguably adds something to the story, but not a huge amount.

Will many people read those comments? And if they do, will it add to their understanding of the story in a way that a simple quote in a news article wouldn’t? I wish I knew.