Category: Gigaom

The writing has been on the wall for some time in the book publishing business: platforms like Amazon’s Kindle (s amzn) and the iPad (s aapl) have caused an explosion of e-book publishing that is continuing to disrupt the industry on a whole series of levels, as Om has written about in the past. And evidence continues to accumulate that e-books are not just something established authors with an existing brand can make use of, but are also becoming a real alternative to traditional book contracts for emerging authors as well — and that should serve as a massive wake-up call for publishers.

The latest piece of evidence is the story of independent author Amanda Hocking, a 26-year-old who lives in Minnesota and writes fantasy-themed fiction for younger readers. Unlike some established authors such as J.K. Konrath, who have done well with traditional publishing deals before moving into self-publishing their own e-books, Hocking has never had a traditional publishing deal — and yet, she has sold almost one million copies of the nine e-books she has written, and her latest book appears to be selling at the rate of 100,000 copies a month.

It’s true that the prices Hocking charges for these books are small — in some cases only 99 cents, depending on the book — but the key part of the deal is that she (and any other author or publisher who works with Amazon or Apple) gets to keep 70 percent of the revenue from those sales. That’s a dramatic contrast to traditional book-publishing deals, in which the publisher keeps the majority of the money and the author typically gets 20 percent or even less. If you sell a million copies of your books and you keep 70 percent of that revenue, that is still a significant chunk of change, even if each book sells for 99 cents.

(Update: As a number of commenters have noted, only books that are priced at $2.99 or higher are eligible for Amazon’s 70-percent royalty rate; books priced cheaper than that are eligible for a 35-percent royalty rate).

The overwhelming appeal of that kind of mathematics has other authors moving away from traditional publishing deals as well, including Terrill Lee Lankford, who wrote recently about how he turned down a deal with a major publisher in the middle of negotiations over a new book because the publisher wanted him to agree to a deal for a future e-book that would have given the publishing house 75 percent of the revenue — and tried to entice him with a hefty advance for the original book. But the author said no to both deals, saying:

I see it as a permanent 75% tax on a piece of work that generates income with almost no expense after the initial development and setup charges.

Just as the music industry did, many book publishers seem to be clinging to their traditional business models, despite mounting evidence that the entire structure of the industry is being dismantled, and the playing field is being leveled between authors and publishers. And it’s not just individual authors who are taking advantage of this growing trend — author and marketing consultant Seth Godin has created something called The Domino Project in partnership with Amazon, which he sees as a new kind of publishing middleman that can help authors take advantage of the e-book wave. More traditional publishers should be paying attention, or they will find their lunch is being eaten.

Making the transition from traditional print publishing to being digital-first media outlets hasn’t been easy for newspapers — in fact, many have stubbornly resisted this change, and tried to dip their toes into digital waters gradually without really investing any substantial effort or resources. As media analyst Frederic Filloux pointed out in a post yesterday at The Monday Note, this strategy (or lack of a strategy) is turning out to be a slow-motion train wreck. As author Clayton Christensen described in The Innovator’s Dilemma, it is almost impossible to cope with market disruption by making incremental changes, and newspapers are a perfect example of that principle at work.

Filloux uses financial results from the Washington Post to make the point. In some ways, the newspaper company is better off than a lot of other media entities, because it generates a lot of revenue from its educational arm — more than 60 percent of the company’s revenue comes from it, as well as 60 percent of its operating income — which creates a nice cushion for its newspaper business. And that business needs the help, Filloux notes, because advertising revenue for the paper side of the business has continued to decline at a rapid rate, and even though online revenue has grown, it hasn’t even come close to making up the gap. This is the “digital pennies in exchange for print dollars” problem:

As Filloux points out, the math in this graph is not pleasant: over the last seven years, the Washington Post has lost five dollars in print revenue for every dollar that it has added in the form of online ad revenue — losing almost $90 million in print revenue while its online business has grown by less than $20 million. Other newspapers may have somewhat different numbers, but the trend is likely to be very similar. And Filloux correctly diagnoses the main reasons for this online-revenue problem:

• Too much free content, which has diluted the value of editorial brands like the Washington Post

• The rise of competitors such as The Huffington Post, who have taken advantage of digital technology to build audiences at much lower cost

• The downward pressure on ad prices created by the explosion of content, as billions of pageviews depress the market for banner ads

The big problem for newspaper companies is that incremental change is not really helping them adapt, or as Filloux puts it: “mere adaptive tactics won’t save the traditional news industry in their multi-front war against disruptive technologies.” The Washington Post has done as good a job as any paper of trying to build a business online — online revenue accounts for 43 percent of overall revenue, up from just 10 percent in 2004, according to the figures that Filloux quotes — but overall its business continues to decline because online ads are worth so much less than their print counterparts.

There are no signs that this is going to change any time soon — if anything, online advertising just keeps getting cheaper (newspaper companies are forming private ad networks, but this seems both too little and too late). Newspapers are fighting the law of diminishing returns.

So what is to be done? Many companies, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and the New York Times, are trying to fight a rear-guard action by putting up paywalls to protect some of their print revenue, or pinning their hopes on iPad apps and subscription revenue, despite Apple’s 30-percent fee for doing business on its platform. Filloux argues that “radical re-engineering is needed,” and I think he is right — print may still be producing a large proportion of revenues, but it is also the source of a large proportion of a media company’s costs, and that spells doom if you are competing with digital-only outlets such as AOL and Yahoo that have a dramatically cheaper business model.

The radical restructuring that Filloux describes, which involves a much smaller newsroom, lower costs and a digital-first approach to publishing, sounds very much like what Journal-Register CEO John Paton is trying to do with the company he took over last year after it emerged from bankruptcy. Above all, Paton says, media outlets need to become digital-first, because the print side is only dragging down their businesses and preventing them from being as competitive as they should be. So far, that’s a message too few traditional newspaper publishers have heard.

News360 says it does recommendations using semantic filtering, etc. Washington Post launched a service called Trove that it says will do the same — and aspects of recommendations appear in other apps as well, and the New York Times recently launched its own recommendation service attached to its site.

These kinds of recommendations are largely algorithmic, although the NYT has some behavioral info that comes from anyone who has joined its internal Times social network, which was an interesting experiment — although it’s not clear how many people are actually using it.

The biggest source of recommendation-type data is Facebook, which can see when your friends like something, when they share it, etc. Huffington Post has driven a lot of traffic to the site by making smart use of Facebook integration to recommend stories that people you follow have liked or read, and as I keep pointing out to people — social networks like Twitter and Facebook are inherently farther ahead when it comes to recommendations because of all the social signals that are embedded in my social graph, the relationships with the people I follow and my friends and social network.

There are some services and apps that make use of the links that get passed around via Twitter and Facebook — there’s Twitter Tim.es and Paper.li for showing you links from your Twitter stream, and PostPost does something similar for Facebook links, producing a kind of personalized newspaper. News.me, the social news platform that Betaworks and the New York Times have partnered on, shows you content from other peoples’ streams, which is an interesting twist. And Flipboard pulls in links from your Twitter stream, your Facebook graph and RSS feeds and shows it to you.

But no one is really doing much when it comes to recommendations. I’ve tried playing with Trove, and it is not much better than a random sampling of news that is being shared on the web — and News360 seems equally haphazard. It’s possible that they could get better over time, of course, although there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell either service that it is wrong when it suggests a particular story to you. And News360’s choice of a visual interface with photos sliding by is interesting, but I’m not convinced it’s particularly useful.

Others are trying to solve the recommendation conundrum, including **, which former ** is developing as a kind of **. But so far, if you want recommendations about what to read, your Twitter stream and Facebook graph are probably the best solution — and anyone who wants to do better is going to have to leverage both of them to do it.

Blogging is on the decline, according to a New York Times story published this weekend — citing research from the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project — and it is declining particularly among young people, who are using social networks such as Twitter instead. Pretty straightforward, right? Except that the actual story said something quite different: even according to the figures used by the New York Times itself, blogging activity is actually increasing, not decreasing. And as the story points out, plenty of young people are still blogging via the Tumblr platform, even though they may not think of it as “blogging.”

The NYT story notes that blogging among those aged 12 to 17 fell by half between 2006 and 2009 according to the Pew report, but among 18 to 33-year-olds it only dropped by two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier — which isn’t exactly a huge decline. And among 34 to 45-year-olds, blogging activity rose by six percentage points. The story also admits that the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the U.S. in December than it had a year earlier (a 2-percent decline), but globally its traffic climbed by 9 percent to 323 million.

In many ways, this “blogging is dying” theory is similar s to the “web is dying” argument that Wired magazine tried to float last year, which really was about the web evolving and expanding into different areas. It’s true that Facebook and Twitter have led many away from blogging because they are so fast and easy to use, but they have also both helped to reinforce blogging in many ways.

What’s really happening, as Toni Schneider of Automattic — the corporate parent of the WordPress publishing platform (see disclosure below) — noted in the NYT piece, is that what blogging represented even four or five years ago has evolved into much more of a continuum of publishing. People post content on their blogs, or their “Tumblrs,” and then share links to it via Twitter and Facebook; or they may post thoughts via social networks and then collect those thoughts into a longer post on a blog. Blog networks such as The Huffington Post get a lot of attention, but plenty of individuals are still making use of the long-form publishing that blogs allow, including programming guru Dave Winer, and Hunch founder and angel investor Chris Dixon.

One of the reasons why Tumblr seems to have taken off, particularly with younger users, is that it is extremely easy to set up and use — but it also offers many of the same real-time sharing options that have become popular with Twitter and Facebook. For example, Tumblr makes it easy for users to follow others, and then with a simple click they can “re-blog” another user’s post, which redistributes it to all their followers in much the same way that a “retweet” does on Twitter.

So what we really have now is a multitude of publishing tools: there are the “micro-blogging” ones like Twitter, then there are those that allow for more interaction and longer-form or multimedia content like Facebook, and both of those in turn can enhance existing blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. And then there is Tumblr, which is like a combination of multiple tools. Not every platform is going to appeal to every user, but the fact that there are multiple methods available means there is even more opportunity for people to find a publishing method they like.

So while “blogging” may be on the decline, personal publishing has arguably never been healthier.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Did you hear that noise? It sounded like a cannon shot. And it was: a cannon shot fired from Twitter headquarters, directly across the bow of UberMedia — and, by extension, across the bow of every third-party developer whose app competes in some way with the micro-blogging service. With little or no warning, Twitter flipped the “kill switch” and shut down several of UberMedia’s apps on Friday afternoon, including UberTwitter and the popular Android app Twidroyd.

Twitter says the reasons were simple: trademark infringement and breaches of the terms of service. But there is more to this than just a squabble over usage, and Twitter’s heavy-handed behavior is drawing some fire even from the company’s supporters.

The first notice that anyone had of serious issues between Twitter and UberMedia came when users suddenly couldn’t access the network through UberTwitter and Twidroyd. Shortly afterward, a blog post appeared on the Twitter support blog saying that the apps had been shut down for “violating our policies” — but even that explanation only came after a description of the “official” clients for Twitter (with some helpful links to them) and a generic-sounding statement about how the company asks applications “to abide by a simple set of rules that we believe are in the interests of our users, and the health and vitality of the Twitter platform as a whole.”

The blog post didn’t even describe what the actual violations by UberTwitter and Twidroyd were — those details didn’t come out until someone posted a question on the Q&A site Quora about the shutdowns, which drew a comment from Twitter communications staffer Matt Graves that included the statement the company sent to the media. According to the statement:

The violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.

Graves said the company had “had conversations” with UberMedia about some of the violations since April 2010, including the use of terms such as “tweet” and “twitter” in product names, and that the company hoped “that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon.” Meanwhile, UberMedia founder Bill Gross was busy doing damage control, posting on Twitter that the company was making changes to bring its applications into compliance (including changing the name of UberTwitter to UberSocial, something he said had been in the works for some time) and issuing a news release with the details.

I wrote recently about the potential for a serious collision between UberMedia and Twitter — based on Gross’s accumulation of Twitter clients, his attempts to launch a competing advertising product, and a recent financing that saw a series of venture funds put $17.5 million into the company — and this seems an obvious signal that Twitter is not going to take UberMedia’s potential competitive threat lying down.

If it had wanted to handle things quietly, Twitter could easily have negotiated something with UberMedia via back-room diplomacy. Instead, it clearly decided to send a message, both to UberMedia and to other third-party developers: Namely, don’t step out of line.

Obviously, Twitter has the right to manage its network and provide access to whoever it wishes. But the heavy-handed way in which it terminated UberMedia’s apps drew criticism even from some of the company’s supporters, including venture investor Mark Suster. A partner with GRP Partners, Suster — who doesn’t have a stake in either Twitter or UberMedia — wrote a sharply critical Quora note and a somewhat friendlier blog post about the incident, saying he didn’t appreciate being cannon fodder in the war between Twitter and one of its third-party app developers. Angel investor Dave McClure, meanwhile, yanked the company’s chain with a tweet about the company not having to worry about any Google-style “don’t be evil” mantra.

When Twitter started buying up applications and clamping down on third-party apps last year, it was obvious that the company was no longer the free-wheeling, “everyone join the party” kind of operation it seemed to be in the early days, when third-party apps were seen as partners who could help the network grow and no one worried about things like trademark infringement (TwitPic and Tweetmeme and other apps and services continue to function without any problems — so far). But the no-holds-barred attack on UberMedia suggests that Twitter is even more willing to throw its weight around now, especially since there is a potential $10-billion valuation on the line. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

At a conference in British Columbia this morning, author and media blogger Jeff Jarvis told a room full of corporate and government privacy advocates something many of them probably didn’t want to hear: that society needs more protection for what he calls “publicness,” and less focus on locking down our personal information or prosecuting companies that use that data. “Privacy has plenty of advocates already,” Jarvis said. “It is potentially over-protected, but in any case it is well protected. But publicness also needs its advocates.” Despite stumbles by both Facebook and Google when it comes to privacy, said Jarvis, the benefits of sharing information about ourselves through social media are plentiful and obvious — including the ability to organize popular revolutions like the one that just occurred in Egypt.

In his presentation to the Reboot conference in Victoria — whose tagline this year is “Security and privacy: Is there an app for that?” — Jarvis gave a preview of some of the arguments he makes in his new book, Public Parts, which the CUNY journalism professor said he is still working on. Jarvis, who has written at length on his blog about his battle with prostate cancer, talked about how sharing what might be seen as incredibly personal and private information can have an enormous amount of value. Writing about his cancer, he said, connected him with friends who had had similar issues that he had never known about, and “I got more help and support than any doctor’s pamphlet could ever have given me.”

In the brief video interview embedded below, recorded after his talk, Jarvis spoke about what he sees as the benefits of publicness not just on an individual level but for society in general, and the challenge of balancing that with the ability for governments — including those in Egypt and elsewhere — and others to use our information against us.

Jarvis made a point of saying that privacy “is not binary, not on or off — it’s a continuum,” and that different societies and individuals come down at different points along that continuum. Scandinavians publish the salaries of all their citizens publicly, he said, something other people might recoil at. And in the United States, photos of people who are accused of crimes are published without any concern for their privacy, unlike some other countries. “I am not a proponent of 100-percent openness,” Jarvis said. “For example, I would like to point out that I am wearing clothing. [But] there are benefits to being public, and we need to acknowledge those at the same time as we talk about what could go wrong — we can’t always focus on what might go wrong.”

Among the benefits of being public, according to Jarvis, are that relationships and connections are formed that have value, which is the fundamental purpose of Facebook. “It also enables collaboration, and builds trust,” Jarvis said. And in places like Egypt, those tools have created what the author called “an incredible wave of publicness — and that deserves protection. Yes, privacy deserves protection, but by God so do the tools of publicness.”

Jarvis’s presentation came as a stark contrast to the one before him, which was from British Columbia’s Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who said that Google chairman and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg “don’t think privacy is relevant any more,” (something Jarvis challenged in his talk as untrue) and argued that with so much potential danger around “excessive sharing of personal information,” regulators need enhanced authority and broader powers of oversight, and that federal laws “need more teeth.”

Senator Hillary Clinton gave a speech today at George Washington University about Internet freedom, an updated version of the address she gave a year ago calling for more openness and an end to dictators and foreign governments repressing their citizens through the Net. As it was then, the Secretary of State’s speech was a heart-warming defence of the open Internet and the need for freedom of speech — with one notable exception: namely, WikiLeaks. While other governments need to be lectured by the U.S. on how to be more open and free, apparently it is fine for the U.S. government to persecute a web-based publisher that is widely viewed as a journalistic entity, and is run by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.

Much of the senator’s speech was eminently supportable — the parts where she called the Internet “the public space of the 21st century—the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffee house, and nightclub,” or where she called on foreign governments to “join us in a bet we have made — a bet that an open Internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries” (there’s a transcript of her address available at Scribd). The senator even waded into the debate over what role social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook have played in the uprisings in Iran and Tunisia and Egypt, and provided a summary that could easily have been written by a social-media skeptic such as Malcolm Gladwell. She said:

Egypt isn’t inspiring because people communicated using Twitter; it is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition; it is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

That said, however, Ms. Clinton also went out of her way to defend the U.S. government’s approach to WikiLeaks, which has involved not only imprisoning the man who allegedly leaked thousands of diplomatic cables (former Army intelligence officer Bradley Manning), but also going after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by any means available. The U.S. Justice Department has been working on a legal case involving the Espionage Act, despite the fact that publishing classified documents is not actually a crime under U.S. law — and despite the fact that if it is successful, the same charges would apply to the New York Times and other media outlets who have also published the cables.

As part of its case, the government sent a court order to Twitter — and apparently to other web companies such as Google and Facebook, although they have not admitted as much publicly — demanding that the company turn over a wide variety of personal information about Icelandic MP and early WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jonsdottir, hacker and open-Net advocate Julian Appelbaum and a number of others involved with WikiLeaks. The government order covers not just IP addresses and therefore locations, but also private messages, methods of payment and other materials. Jonsdottir and others named in the order are fighting these demands in a case that ironically was heard today.

And how did Senator Clinton justify this? She said that one of the principles the U.S. upholds is the need for transparency, but that this must be balanced with the need to protect confidentiality, and in particular government confidentiality. This has been a topic of debate in the past few months because of WikiLeaks, Ms. Clinton said, however:

It’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the Wikileaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this act was justified, because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of their work out in the open, in the full view of their citizens. I disagree.

The senator argued that by publishing the cables, WikiLeaks exposed diplomats and activists “to even greater risk” — despite the fact that no one has made any credible claims that the cables published by either WikiLeaks or media outlets such as the New York Times and The Guardian have put anyone in danger. Ms. Clinton said in her speech that denouncing WikiLeaks “does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom,” but on that point she is clearly wrong. And she seemed unfazed by the fact that her comments about targeting WikiLeaks came right after she censured foreign governments for attacking bloggers instead of upholding their rights to freedom of speech.

It’s obvious that while the U.S. government is content to preach to foreign countries like China about how they need to open up and not persecute their citizens, it is more than happy to go after WikiLeaks using whatever means necessary — despite the fact that what the organization did isn’t even a crime. That’s called trying to have your cake and eat it too, and it makes all the stirring talk about freedom in the senator’s speech difficult to take seriously.

After much rumor and speculation, Apple has finally launched its subscription service for publishers, and like many of the things the company does, it has caused equal amounts of enthusiasm and consternation. The enthusiasm stems from the fact that magazines, newspapers and other content companies now have an easy way to sign up users, instead of forcing them to pay every time they download a new issue. At the same time, however, Apple is taking its usual 30-percent cut of any sales, which is a big chunk — and it has also put up walls to keep users buying from within apps instead of on the web, and that could have a significant impact on some publishers such as Amazon.

As Darrell explains, Apple has made some concessions to publishers with its subscription offering — which comes on the heels of the recent launch of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper The Daily, the first to use the new subscription feature. While initial reports were that Apple was not going to give publishers any information about the people who sign up from within an app, the company says that publishers will get names, email addresses and zip codes (although users can also opt out of providing this). And if someone signs up on a publisher’s website, that company gets to keep 100 percent of the subscription revenue. Publishers can also offer free subscriptions, something Apple had also seemed to be cracking down on, at least in the case of some European newspapers.

That’s the good news. The bad news for publishers is that Apple now requires that all subscriptions be offered via in-app purchasing. Companies can also offer those deals on their websites, but they must offer exactly the same deal through their app (which prevents publishers from jacking up prices to cover the 30-percent take that Apple removes). The important line in the news announcement is that:

[P]ublishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

This seems pretty clearly directed at companies such as Amazon, which currently allows users of its Kindle app on iPhone and iPad to click a link and get taken to the retailer’s website to finish the transaction when buying a book. In effect, Apple has put up a roadblock for publishers that makes it difficult to route around the in-app purchase — increasing the likelihood that users will opt for the simplest choice, which is to buy the item through the app itself. Although publishers can obviously try to convince users to do otherwise, by putting call-outs to go to the website or downplaying the in-app purchasing option, many are likely to choose the easiest route, and that means a quick 30-percent payoff for Apple.

The reality here is that Apple knows that it has most publishers over a barrel, just as it did with the music industry when it first launched iTunes. Amazon may have other options since it owns its own platform, but magazine and newspaper companies are desperate to find some way of charging their readers, and Apple provides the easiest method of doing that. But the walled garden that Apple gives them access to, while it is very inviting and pleasant and well-maintained, comes with some serious trade-offs, as I tried to explain when Apple’s subscription plans were being discussed a few weeks ago. There’s a pretty attractive carrot, but there’s also a big stick.

That leaves publishers to ask themselves: How much is it worth to you to let Apple handle your sales for you? Rupert Murdoch has decided with The Daily that he is willing to make the trade-off, but Time Warner and some other publishers such as Conde Nast have made it clear that they are looking for other options, by signing up to offer their publications via Android devices as well as Apple’s iOS devices. Market dominance is a powerful thing, however, and so far Apple has the customers that publishers want to reach. For better or worse, they will have to submit to the stick if they want access to that carrot.

Although many people find things to criticize about Facebook, including its privacy policies, one thing that many users — and many companies that connect to the network’s social graph — like is that the social network requires users to register with their real names. In fact, that’s arguably one of Facebook’s big strengths: it allows you to know who you are connecting to and sharing information with. At the same time, however, that approach makes it difficult for political dissidents in countries such as Egypt to use the network as a tool for organizing protests and other revolutionary purposes, since they don’t want the authorities to be able to track them and their activities. Despite some pressure from social activists, a Facebook official said today that it has no plans to change its policy.

There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the use of social tools such as Twitter and Facebook in uprisings in Tunisia and the more recent popular revolt in Egypt. Although debate continues about how much of an effect these tools have had (a topic we have written about before on a number of occasions) there is no question that activists and revolutionaries in both countries have made use of all the tools at their disposal to organize, including mobile SMS and web-based social networks. While they may not create revolutions where none would otherwise exist, they can certainly help to speed up the process.

To take just one example, Wael Ghonim — the Google staffer who was released Monday after being detained for almost two weeks by the Egyptian government, and who has become a figurehead of the popular movement — has talked about how the Facebook page he helped administer was crucial in building support for the January 25th demonstrations that started the recent uprising. Although he used the name “El Shaheed,” which in Arabic means “the martyr,” the social network has a strict policy against the use of pseudonyms, and some protest-oriented groups in Tunisia and elsewhere have found themselves shut down because of this policy.

While Facebook and other social networks make it easy to spread the word and rally popular support to such causes, however, they also make it easy for government operatives to track activists and dissidents who use such channels to communicate. Although Facebook has taken action to stop outright hacking of the kind the Tunisian government engaged in, there is nothing to stop members of the police or army from simply watching what gets posted to pages about protests, etc. and then following or tracking down those individuals. According to a recent story in the Daily Mail, that’s exactly what government agents have been doing.

Jillian York, who works with the Global Voices Online project — an offshoot of the Harvard Berman Center for the Internet and Society — has been one of those arguing that Facebook should find some way of modifying its policies so that the social network can be used by dissidents in a variety of ways, without the fear of being tracked by their governments and suddenly disappearing the night.

I, for one, would like to see Facebook abandon this policy. It is, for lack of a better word, inane in light of how the platform is used globally. Facebook should listen to their users and accommodate their needs. To me, abandonment of the policy isn’t even that necessary; I just want to see a stop to crackdowns on vulnerable activists.

Simon Axten, of Facebook’s public policy team, told The Register in the UK that the company’s “real name culture” is an essential element of the social network, and that while Facebook is talking to human-rights groups about ways they can use the platform without exposing themselves to government retaliation, the whole point of the social network is to replicate people’s real-world connections online, and having real identities is a key part of doing that. In general, he said, “the benefits of real-name culture outweigh the risks.” So while Facebook makes it easy for you to connect with that old friend from high school, it will also continue to make it easy for governments to track the activities of dissidents as well.

When WikiLeaks exploded into public view last year, with its release of a classified Iraqi war video and then thousands of documents relating to the war in Afghanistan, the response from traditional media outlets — and in particular from the New York Times — was very interesting. Although the Times worked closely with WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange in order to get access to and report on the documents, executive editor Bill Keller made it clear that he did not consider Assange a journalist, nor did he think of WikiLeaks as being in any way a journalistic entity. Based on some comments that Keller made at a symposium at Columbia University on Thursday, however, he may be changing his mind.

In his recently released e-book about dealing with WikiLeaks, which was excerpted in the New York Times magazine, the executive editor makes it clear that considered the WikiLeaks founder just a source like any other, not a journalistic colleague, and said that he would “hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism.” In December, Keller seemed to come close to admitting that WikiLeaks might be practising something approaching journalism, when he told a Nieman Foundation event that the organization was doing things in a “more journalistic fashion.” But he added that it still wasn’t “my kind of news organization,” and that if Assange was acting as a journalist in some way, “I don’t regard him as a kindred spirit — he’s not the kind of journalist I am.”

At a symposium yesterday at the Columbia School of Journalism, however — where Keller appeared along with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and **, in a panel moderated by Emily Bell of the Tow Center for ** — the Times editor all but acknowledged that WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity, when he said that he did not support the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempts to build a case against Assange under the Espionage Act. According to the Huffington Post’s version of the event, Keller said:

[It would be] hard to conceive of a prosecution of Julian Assange that wouldn’t stretch the law to be applicable to us. Whatever one thinks of Julian Assange… journalists should feel a sense of alarm at any legal action that intends to punish Assange for doing what journalists do.

It’s nice to see that the NYT’s executive editor is — however reluctantly — coming around to the view that we have been arguing for some time: namely, that WikiLeaks is effectively a media entity, and that what it does qualifies as journalism (Columbia’s School of Journalism believes this as well, even if Keller doesn’t yet). It may not be the kind of journalism that the New York Times engages in, but it clearly has a role to play in the expanded media ecosystem. And the fact that WikiLeaks is effectively a stateless entity — the first stateless news organization, as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has called it — is a crucial part of that role, as media analyst Clay Shirky argues in a recent piece for The Guardian.

Because this tension between governments and leakers is so important, and because WikiLeaks so dramatically helps leakers, it isn’t just a new entrant in the existing media landscape. Its arrival creates a new landscape.

Because WikiLeaks is “headquartered on the web,” as Shirky puts it, no single country or government can shut it down. Even if Assange is eventually prosecuted or removed in some way as the head of the organization, as early supporter and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir put it recently, “a thousand heads will spring up.” In factm as Shirky notes, that is already happening — Al-Jazeera and The Guardian formed a partnership to release thousands of documents about the relationship between Israel and Palestine (now being called the “Palestine Papers”), and former WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg has launched an entity called OpenLeaks. Meanwhile, the New York Times has talked about possibly creating its own digital tip box where sources could leak documents instead of sending them to WikiLeaks.

Whether Bill Keller likes it or not, the tools of journalism have been set loose from the control of entities like the New York Times or The Guardian. Anyone can effectively become a publisher now, and that includes WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks and anyone who makes use of similar tools — just as people who find themselves in the central square in Cairo or the government buildings in Tunisia can behave as journalists if they wish to do so. That’s an important phenomenon, and it would be nice to see the NYT editor come right out and admit that it is happening, rather than dance around the implications.

After weeks of discussion in the blogosphere over whether what happened in Tunisia was a “Twitter revolution,” and whether social media also helped trigger the current anti-government uprising in Egypt, author Malcolm Gladwell — who wrote a widely-read New Yorker article about how inconsequential social media is when it comes to “real” social activism — has finally weighed in with his thoughts on the subject. But he continues to miss the real point about the use of Twitter and Facebook, which is somewhat surprising for the author of the best-seller The Tipping Point.

Although the topic of social media’s role in events in Tunisia and Egypt — and also in Iran and other countries that have recently seen citizen uprisings — has been the focus of much commentary from observers such as Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York of Global Voices Online, and from foreign affairs writer and author Evgeny Morozov, the response from Gladwell on the New Yorker’s “News Desk” blog was all of about 200 words long. In a somewhat defensive tone, Gladwell suggested that if Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong had made his famous “power springs from the barrel of a gun” statement today, everyone would obsess over whether he made it on Twitter or Facebook. He concluded that while there is a lot that can be said about the protests in Egypt:

Surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.

In other words, as far as the New Yorker writer is concerned, the use of any specific communications tools — whether that happens to be cellphones or SMS or Twitter or Facebook — may be occurring, and may even be helping revolutionaries in countries like Egypt in some poorly-defined way, but it’s just not that interesting. This seems like an odd comment coming from someone who wrote a book all about how a series of small changes in the way people think about an issue can suddenly reach a “tipping point” and gain widespread appeal, since that’s exactly the kind of thing that social media does extremely well.

Gladwell isn’t the only one who has taken a skeptical stance when it comes to the use of social media in such situations. Morozov, who writes for Foreign Policy magazine, is also the author of a book called “Net Delusion,” in which he argues that the views of some “cyber-utopians” are in danger of distorting political discourse, and convincing some politicians and bureaucrats that all people require in order to overthrow governments is Internet access and some Twitter followers (Cory Doctorow critiqued the book recently in The Guardian). This view was echoed in a recent piece in BusinessWeek entitled “The Fallacy of Facebook Diplomacy,” which argued that “the idea that America can use the Internet to influence global events is more dream than reality.”

But as sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci argues in a blog post responding to Gladwell — and as we argued in a recent post here — the point is not that social media tools like Twitter and Facebook cause revolutions in any real sense. What they are very good at doing, however, is connecting people in very simple ways, and making those connections in a very fast and distributed sort of way. This is the power of a networked society and of cheap, real-time communication networks.

As Tufekci notes, what happens in social networks is the creation of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties” in a seminal piece of research in the 1970s (PDF link) — that is, the kinds of ties you have to your broader network of friends and acquaintances, as opposed to the strong ties that you have to your family or your church or your close friends. But while Gladwell more or less dismissed the value of those ties in his New Yorker piece about how little value social media has when it comes to “real” activism, Tufekci argues that these weak ties can become connected to our stronger relationships, and that’s when real change can occur.

New movements that can bring about global social change will still require people who interact with each other regularly, and trust and depend on each other in somewhat dense networks. Or only hope is if those networks span the globe in a tightly-knit, broad web of activity, interaction, personalization. Real change will come only if we can make friends we care about everywhere and we make bridge ties that cover the world in a web of common humanity.

In places like Tunisia and Egypt, for example, individuals or small groups might be thinking about or working towards revolution, but it isn’t until they connect with other people or groups — or see evidence of others who feel the same — that this tips over into actual activity. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas said recently, social-media tools can be a powerful “accelerant” in those situations. A recent report from the security consulting agency Stratfor looked at how social media can be used by activist groups to spread their message and co-ordinate activities.

That’s not to say that the question of who is using which tool is inherently more interesting than the actual human acts of bravery and risks that people in Tunisia and Egypt have taken, or are taking — but those tools and that activity can bring things to a tipping point that might otherwise not have occurred, or spur others (possibly even in other countries) to do something similar. And that is interesting — or should be — regardless of what Malcolm Gladwell might think.

There’s been a lot of pre-launch interest in Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad “newspaper” The Daily, in part because the News Corp. (s nws) founder is known for making ambitious bets on new technology — even if they don’t always work out, as he found with MySpace — and also because Apple (s aapl) was a key partner, and used the News app to launch its new subscription model for content. So does The Daily live up to its billing? Is it the future of newspapers? Not really. It does some interesting things, but it also does some very confusing things, particularly around sharing content. And much of it, apart from some bells and whistles, consists of fairly humdrum day-old stories that you might read in, well… a regular old printed newspaper.

The first clue to what you get with The Daily, as more than one person has noted, is in the name itself. It is published more or less just like a regular newspaper, in the sense that the bulk of the content is produced and then published to the app once a day. Although News Corp. made a point of noting at its launch event that the app will be updated throughout the day as news breaks, there was no sign of that happening while I used it for most of the day on Wednesday, and that was while riots were still breaking out in Cairo. Even though Twitter content appeared in a box in one of the stories (a profile of Rihanna) and had live links, the actual tweets themselves were almost 12 hours old — even after the app updated itself and said it was downloading a new version of the paper.

The result is that you get something that feels very much like a newspaper, with stories about things that happened yesterday. And while you can share stories via Facebook and Twitter, none of the pieces contain any links to anything on the web, making the app feel very much like similar apps from newspapers such as the New York Times and magazines such as Esquire and Wired — disconnected from the Internet in a lot of ways. There are live links in Twitter streams in stories (particularly the customizable sports section, which lets you follow teams), and there is a small section of links called “What We’re Reading,” but other than that there isn’t a whole lot of linking going on at all. There’s also no way to contact the writers or interact with them in any way, as Salon founder Scott Rosenberg noted, apart from posting a comment (which you can also do via audio, an unusual choice).

When it comes to sharing the content, The Daily doesn’t really have a website that is open to the public since it is a subscription app (it costs 99 cents a week or $39 for a year), but when you share a link to a story via Facebook or Twitter, people can click through and read it — a “social media passthrough” that the New York Times is also reportedly building into its upcoming web paywall. But with The Daily, when you click through to read the piece, you get what amounts to a screenshot of the app page; in other words, it’s an image rather than actual text. With some stories, you also get a large warning, complete with a big exclamation mark, that says the story is “missing content available only in The Daily iPad app.” There is no way to navigate from that story to any other story on the site, even if it has been shared already, just a link to download the app.

All of that aside, the biggest issue with The Daily is that even when you share a story, there is little that might encourage anyone to cough up the money to subscribe (a Columbia Journalism Review editor called it “a general-interest publication that is not generally interesting” and added that “great design will not trump lackluster content”). In the inaugural version, there were a couple of features that were worth reading, but they didn’t add much to similar stories that have appeared elsewhere for free. And a surprising amount of what appeared in the app — once you got past all the videos, most of which were devoted to advertising, and the interactive Sudoku and crossword puzzles — was run-of-the-mill news briefs that you might see in any newspaper such as USA Today. Many of them, in fact, appeared to be rewritten wire copy.

Much of the pre-launch promotion of The Daily suggested that it was going to focus on the content in a way that many newspapers don’t, and that the $30 million or so Rupert Murdoch was spending on the project indicated there would be a higher level of quality. But while the app is well designed and the articles and photos are nice to look at, there isn’t a whole lot on the content side that makes it any better than newspapers that can already be read for free — and whose links can be shared and read without the bizarre restrictions that The Daily has invented. David Weidner of WSJ’s MarketWatch said that “the pricing is right,” and that $40 a year made more sense than $240 a year for the New York Times, and it’s true that the low price may get some to sign up — but the bigger question is, how many?

Apple caused a minor firestorm of criticism on Tuesday after it rejected Sony’s eReader app from the app store, saying the service had to allow in-app purchases as well as those that take place on Sony’s website. The company later clarified that this was always the rule for apps, but that it is cracking down on the practice now, and requiring all apps which allow external purchases to also offer in-app purchases — which go through the Apple payment system, and therefore give the company its standard 30-percent cut of every sale.

The news caused all kinds of consternation from media-industry observers, but the deal is really very simple: if you want to use Apple as your distribution platform, you have to pay the piper. That’s a useful lesson for media companies to learn, although it is probably too late for most.

When the first rumors about the imminent launch of an Apple iPad first starting circulating, many newspaper companies and other media outlets leaped at the chance to partner with the company and get their content on the new device. At the time, I (and others) warned that the new tablet was unlikely to be the Holy Grail solution to the systemic problems of the traditional media industry — and also that publishers of all kinds should be careful what they wished for. By giving media companies an all-in-one platform for reaching readers and viewers and potentially selling them content via iPad apps (although that hasn’t been going all that well so far), Apple was also locking down its control over that distribution channel and the relationship with those readers and viewers.

This became obvious when some media outlets started negotiating with Apple about a subscription-based newsstand — a service the company is expected to announce tomorrow, when it launches Rupert Murdoch’s highly-touted new iPad-only publication, The Daily. Apple balked at the idea of giving publishers access to any of the subscription or user data that would come from such an arrangement, saying only it would be able to see that data. For media companies, that kind of information is a huge part of how they sell their content to advertisers, by showing that they are reaching the right demographics and therefore that their content is worth buying.

Then Apple did the same kind of thing that it just did with Sony: it reportedly told newspaper companies that they would no longer be able to give their readers a free subscription to their content through their iPad app — instead, they would have to sign them up for a regular subscription via the app. Just as with the Sony deal, the obvious intention was to shut off a potential escape route by which media companies could provide access to their content, and thereby avoid the 30-percent door charge at the Apple store. Frederic Filloux summed this up nicely in a recent post on the Monday Note blog.

That Apple is doing any of this shouldn’t come as any surprise. What’s the point of controlling a platform like the iPhone and the iPad if you can’t force people to pay you a carrying charge for hosting their content and connecting them with their customers? Allowing Sony or the New York Times to either give away their content for free or to sell it under their own terms and keep the proceeds doesn’t make any sense — it would be like a shopping mall owner giving tenants space for free, then allowing them to send shoppers out to the parking lot to finish a transaction, so they wouldn’t have to pay the mall owner his share. All Apple is saying is “Have your website if you want — but we still get our cut.”

Call it a Faustian bargain or a deal with the devil or whatever you want, but Apple is the one who came up with devices that are so appealing, and a content-distribution model that is so effective, that it has sold billions of apps in a remarkably short space of time, and created a whole generation of users who look to it for content such as newspapers, magazines, e-books and games. Putting your eggs in Apple’s basket is a great way to get them to market — but just remember who owns the basket, and who you have to pay for carrying it. They are the ones who control some of the key terms of your relationship with your customers, not you. And over in the corner stands Google, waving frantically.

One of the big issues with the ongoing explosion of social media, whether it’s blogging or Twitter or Facebook, is a lack of effective ways to filter the signal from the noise — in other words, to figure out who we should pay attention to. Facebook relies on your existing social graph, while Twitter uses its own internal algorithms to suggest people you should follow, and LinkedIn uses your professional status and co-workers or contacts as the benchmark. But the race continues to try and measure online reputation in an effective way. Should it be based on activity? Number of followers? A ranking system in which people can vote on you? All of the above?

One of the latest to jump into this pool is Mixtent, which launched today with a voting-based system that uses data from your LinkedIn profile once you log in with your credentials (and will also pull in your Facebook info if you connect that as well). The company says it is “building a professional reputation graph on top of the main social and professional networks” in order to help people hire others and get hired themselves. If Mixtent looks a little familiar, that’s because it appears to be almost identical to a LinkedIn-based game known as Cube Duel that got some attention a couple of weeks ago, in which users vote for co-workers and can “unlock” various badges, and so on.

In trying to measure who has the highest reputation among your co-workers, and therefore who is best qualified to either recommend you or be recommended themselves, Mixtent is going after the same kind of market that other startups such as Honestly (formerly known as Unvarnished), Namesake and BranchOut are aiming at — namely, the professional end of the social web, in which people are looking to network for jobs. In the same way that Mixtent is based on the LinkedIn network, BranchOut uses Facebook as a platform, and leverages all of the people you are connected to via your social graph who might work (or used to work) at other companies.

One issue for BranchOut that I wrote about when the service first launched is that Facebook is primarily personal, and so the overlap between that part of your life and the professional side is haphazard at best, and useless at worst. In a similar way, the game-like aspect of Mixtent might not jibe well with the more professional aspects of LinkedIn for some users. Honestly, meanwhile, is trying to create a reputation-based network that achieves the same thing as LinkedIn or BranchOut — a way of measuring a person’s skills within a certain professional context — but allows for anonymous (and therefore theoretically more honest) input about the people who are being ranked.

Namesake wants to create a personalized network for professional recommendations that is like a more personal or social version of LinkedIn. You can follow people within the network, and recommend them based on what you see as their areas of expertise, and then you can forward or “route” opportunities to them that come from your contacts. The kind of crowdsourced reputation that Namesake is built on also emerges from social networks like Quora and StackExchange, where people answering questions in their area of expertise builds up their reputation (something VC Fred Wilson discussed with me in an interview last year). And a company like Klout comes at it from the algorithmic end, by looking at your activity on Twitter and Facebook to try and give you an overall social-media “score.”

One big problem for these services, however, is that each of us has different reputation ranks within our social, and even our professional networks: I might trust my friend Chris when it comes to advice on barbecuing, and I know he is an excellent videographer, but I would never listen to him when he recommends music. And while I know that my friend Rob is a lawyer and understands technology, I have no idea whether to recommend him based on his knowledge of carpentry, or of wills and estates. This is why Namesake is trying to create a professional network that functions more like a social web — because the ways in which we interact with each other often don’t fall cleanly into one category or another. Will a simple voting system like Mixtent is offering work? I’m not convinced.

Just as it was during the recent uprisings in Tunisia, the role of social media in the recent upheaval in Egypt has been the subject of much debate since the unrest began on Thursday. Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Friday poked fun at the idea that Twitter might have played a key part in the demonstrations, and there are many observers who share his skepticism. The real trigger for the uprisings, they argue, is simply the grinding poverty and frustration of the Egyptian people — which is undoubtedly true. But it also seems clear that social media has played a key role in getting the message out, as well as in helping organizers plan and co-ordinate their protests. And in the end, it’s not about whether to give credit to Twitter or Facebook: the real point is the power of real-time networked communication.

Foreign Policy magazine columnist Evgeny Morozov has argued that Twitter and Facebook should not be credited with playing any kind of critical role in Tunisia, and suggested that doing so is a sign of the “net utopianism” that many social-media advocates suffer from — the belief that the Internet is unambiguously good, or that the use of Twitter or Facebook can magically free a repressed society from its shackles. Morozov, who has written an entire book about this idea called Net Delusion, made the point in a blog post after the Tunisian uprising that while social media might have been used in some way during the events, tools like Twitter and Facebook did not play a crucial role — in other words, the revolution would have happened with or without them.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology who has also looked at this issue, described in a post following the revolution in Tunisia how professional observers distinguish between what she called “proximate” causes and “**” causes — that is, things that are required in order to produce a certain outcome, and things that are nice to have but are not a requirement. Tufekci and Jillian York of Global Voices Online both seem to believe that social media tools fall into the latter category: useful, but not necessary. Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices Online, has also written about how the uprisings in both Tunisia and in Egypt have more to do with decades of poverty and repressive dictatorships than they do with social media.

But is anyone really arguing that Twitter and Facebook *caused* the revolutions in Tunisia or Egypt, or even the earlier public uprisings in Moldova or Iran for that matter? Maybe cyber-utopians somewhere are doing this, but I haven’t seen or heard of any. The argument I have tried to make is simply that they and other social media tools can be incredibly powerful, both for spreading the word — which can give moral or emotional support to others in a country, as well as generating external support — as well as for organizational purposes. As Jason Cohen of Google Ideas put it, social media may not be a cause, but it can be a powerful “accelerant.”

Did Twitter or Facebook cause the Tunisian revolt? No. But they did spread the news, and many Tunisian revolutionaries gave them a lot of credit for helping with the process. Did Twitter cause the revolts in Egypt? No. But they did help activists such as WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum (known on Twitter as @ioerror) and others as they organized the dialup and satellite phone connections that created an ad-hoc Internet after Egypt turned the real one off — which, of course, it did in large part to try and prevent demonstrators from using Internet-based tools like blogs and social media to foment unrest. As Cory Doctorow noted in his review of Evgeny Morozov’s book, even if Twitter and Facebook are just used to replace the process of stapling pieces of paper to telephone poles and sending out hundreds of emails, they are still a huge benefit to social activism of all kinds.

But programmer and RSS developer Dave Winer made the key point: it’s the Internet that is the really powerful tool here, not any of the specific apps or services such as Twitter and Facebook that run on top of it, which Winer compares to brands like NBC or Fox. They have power because lots of people use them, and — in the case of Twitter — because they have open protocols so that apps can still access the network even when the company’s website is taken down by repressive governments (athough he didn’t mention Egypt or Tunisia by name, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote a post on the Twitter blog about the company’s desire to “keep the Tweets flowing).

But the real weapon is the power of networked communication itself. In previous revolutions it was the fax, or the pamphlet, or the cellphone — now it is SMS and Twitter and Facebook. Obviously none of these things cause revolutions, but to ignore or downplay their importance is also a mistake.