Month: August 2006

Matt Marshall over at SiliconBeat makes a point that is definitely worth making — and one that apparently has to be made over and over again before people get it — which is that Web analytics is (to put it mildly) an inexact science. In fact, looking at the Web-traffic numbers reported by Hitwise, Alexa, Nielsen and Comscore makes the weather-forecasting business look precise and infallible. This is an issue that has come up in the past with MySpace and its growth (as I discussed here) and has now come up again with respect to del.icio.us.

The dancing around in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s recent post at TechCrunch is almost comical, although to be fair at least Marshall is trying to get the story straight. He notes that Mike Arrington wrote about del.icio.us awhile back and was critical because its traffic was stagnating, but then had a chat with creator Josh Schachter and some Yahoo folks (I’m sure no bright lights or sleep deprivation was involved — Yahoo is much more subtle) and now TechCrunch is convinced by a Hitwise report that traffic has doubled.

Stagnating, doubling — tomato, tomahto, right? To his credit, Marshall goes out of his way to note that while Hitwise is a “respected” traffic analysis firm, numbers are all over the map — and he links to the other Marshall’s critique of the field. The simple fact is that Hitwise, Comscore, Nielsen and Alexa all use different methodologies (a good description here) and as a result they are not just talking about apples and oranges, they are talking about apples and oranges and plums and peaches.

When you’re trying to make apple sauce, that’s kind of a problem — and unfortunately all it means is that websites can use whatever data they want to tell whatever story they want, and various blogs and media will lap it up.

It’s only one sentence in a long quarterly report (the so-called 10-Q) filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but it says a lot about Google’s financial picture going forward (the full filing is here). The sentence says:

“The annual rate of growth in 2006 of our spending on property and equipment will be substantially greater than the annual rate of growth of our revenues.”

In other words, costs are going up and revenues — not so much. The search giant blames costs for the giant server farms that it is building (including the two or three that are under construction on the banks of the Columbia River, which the New York Times wrote about awhile back) as well as increased “cash compensation” for its employees. Apparently all those math geniuses need more than just free candy.

Here’s an item I posted to my Globe and Mail blog after surfing through Flickr, Technorati, Sphere, Icerocket, NowPublic and some other Web 2.0-type sites looking for photos and/or commentary about the London terrorist plot. Thanks to links from Dave Winer and Rex Hammock, the post even made it to Techmeme.

Anyone who remembers the London subway bombings probably recalls the dozens of cellphone-camera photos of disheveled victims and twisted metal in the chaos of the London underground — pictures that became a powerful sign of how important “citizen journalism” or “social media” can be during such events. So far, I haven’t been able to find anything quite so dramatic coming out of the British airplane bombing plot (in part because it was foiled before it could take place, of course) but there are bits and pieces trickling in from various corners of the blogosphere and social-media outlets.

On Flickr, the photo-sharing site, several travellers have uploaded snapshots of airports, including a shot of lineups at Newark Airport in New Jersey taken by a user named “sommerspeople,” with the caption “Yes we chose the worst day in years to take a flight. So far from what we have heard a bunch of terrorists were just caught in london while planning to blow up several cross continental flights. We have been standing in this line for a half hour so far and probably have the same amount or more to go.” There is also a shot of two large containers filling up with liquids and gels that passengers have had to discard. Other photos from user spappyjones are here and here.

Another Flickr user named Tomasz Nowak has uploaded several photos of Heathrow Airport in London, including one of the board displaying all the cancelled flights and one of security outside the terminal. Another user had a photo of a long security line snaking down the sidewalk at Lindberg Airport in San Diego. NowPublic.com, a “social media” network that is based in Vancouver, had a photo of the scene at Stansted Airport uploaded by a user named ShoZu, with the caption “The scene at stansted airport this morning following the terrorist alert – Taken at 6:52 AM on August 10, 2006.” And the BBC, which has been asking readers for photos and comments related to the plot, has a collection of user-submitted pictures that are similar. CNN has a new “citizen journalism service called Exchange that collects user-submitted video and stories, but at last check there was nothing about the London plot.

The BBC had more than 1,400 comments on its “Have Your Say” feature as of 1:30 p.m. EST. And The Guardian’s “Comment Is Free” blog hub had several different takes on what happened, including one by Rachel Briggs. The “open source” news site called Wikinews — which tries to do for journalism what Wikipedia has done for the encyclopedia, by letting anyone submit information — had a developing page on the story with a summary of known facts about the plot, and Wikipedia had its own page about the event. The Counter Terrorism blog had a good roundup of some of the coverage on blogs and various other sources, and so did the blog written by Debbie Schlussel (a lawyer, talk-show host and conservative political commentator) and the blog Outside the Beltway, as well as the ABC news blog The Blotter.

One source of blogosphere discussion about the plot is Technorati, which ranks and tracks more than 50 million blogs. Another is Topix.net, which aggregates coverage from newspapers, media websites and prominent blogs. On her LiveJournal blog, a user named Wonder_Woman214 wrote about how troubled she was when she heard the news because her boyfriend was supposed to be on an American Airlines flight the following day. And GemziGirl asked on her blog at Windows Live Spaces that people pray for her country and our leaders so they make the right decisions to bring about justice.” Kristin from California wrote about the terrorist plot on her blog at MySpace.com and said such events made her think about her life and what would happen if she were involved in a terrorist attack.

Update:

Cynthia Brumfield of IPDemocracy makes an interesting point about “citizen journalism” (or whatever we want to call it), which is that it works great when there’s an explosion in a subway or some other event and there are people on the ground who can transmit their photos and impressions. But when it’s just a plot rather than an actual event, we have to rely on official journalists who have contacts with police, law enforcement and so on. As she puts it:

“Citizen journalists serve primarily as eyes and ears when things actually happen. They can provide first-person accounts of scenes that we can’t visit. But when it comes to complicated, behind-the-scenes shadowy developments, only the pros can give us the information we need.”

A good point. And thanks for the compliments too, Cynthia. Dave Winer credits Doc “Cluetrain” Searls with being one of the first on-the-scene citizen journalists, and Doc clarifies somewhat here.

As a kind of followup to my previous post about how new media is attention, it’s worth looking at where that attention is going, and a recent survey by Ofcom (the media regulator) in Britain gives us a snapshot of that. As summarized by Staci over at PaidContent — a great example of new media if ever there was one — the survey looked at media consumption habits by what it calls Generation N (how did we get from Y all the way back to N?). A full version of the study in PDF format is here.

It’s no surprise that the N in Generation N stands for “networked,” since the network is where younger media consumers like to go (and not the television network, obviously). As the survey report (BBC news story here) puts it:

“There is also evidence of a significant difference in communications usage patterns between young adults and the general population: for example, 16-24 year olds spend on average 21 minutes more time online per week, send 42 more SMS text messages, but spend over seven hours less time watching television.”

According to the report, “share of viewing of terrestrial channels among 16–24 year olds is down from 74.3% of their viewing time in 2001 to 58% in 2005.” Over 70 per cent of that age group have used social networking or blogging sites such as MySpace, and over half of those surveyed used such sites at least once a week. A total of 37% of 18-24 year olds have posted material online (compared to 14% across all age groups), while close to one in five have their own website or blog.

While scanning the headlines at I Want Media, one of my favourite media-news aggregation sites, I came across an interview with Jared Kushner, the 25-year-old who recently bought the New York Observer. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Observer is a pink-coloured tabloid that provides a wonderful mix of politics, art, commentary and other stuff, and has a pretty great website too. Jared is the son of a prominent New York developer, and in addition to owning property himself and studying law and business, he nows runs the Observer.

Unlike many of his fellow twentysomethings, Jared says he has never really gotten into MySpace.com and that he still reads newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and so on (although he reads many of them online) — so perhaps he’s not really representative of other media consumers in his age bracket. But he makes an important point when asked about how he thinks attitudes toward the media have changed. He says:

“I believe that when it comes to the news, my generation has shorter attention spans and greater expectations. Society and media have evolved to the point where a person has to put forth very little effort to get the news. Rather, the news comes to us. People now expect to be entertained. And if I am not going to provide them with an engaging and cutting-edge product, someone else will.”

A blogger I have come to enjoy named Chartreuse put the same concept in a slightly different (and more poetic) way recently, with this post. The bottom line is that “You have to find old media (what channel? What time? What theatre? What station?). New media finds you.” And most importantly: “Old media is begging for attention. New media is attention.”

What started as an update to my recent post on the AOL search data debacle has taken on a life of its own, so I’ve turned it into a new post.

I wrote a similar post for my “official” blog at globeandmail.com/blogs/geekwatch — in which I wondered why everyone was getting so upset about the AOL data leak, since privacy on the Internet is effectively non-existent anyway — and judging by the comments that post sparked, I seem (or AOL seems) to have struck a nerve when it comes to personal privacy and the Internet.

One reader mentioned the recent New York Times article about the AOL debacle, in which a journalist tracked down a woman living in a small town based on some of the searches she did, which included personal information such as the name of the town — and another reader didn’t think much of my counter-argument that this says more about the journalist and the newspaper that tracked her down than it does about AOL’s release of the data. Some readers also thought my comparison to Rogers releasing information about pay-per-view rentals was spurious, since that wouldn’t include personal data (and I admit it’s not a great analogy).

As I mentioned in my response to those comments, I realize that there is a lot of information included in what AOL released, and that by putting two and two together (as the NYT did) someone could come up with a pretty good idea of who did those searches. I guess the point I was trying to make is that much of that information is already out there, and is effectively publicly available. If you type in your name or address or credit card number, it can be tracked and accessed, and while it takes a little more effort and knowhow than sifting through AOL’s search data (Elliott Back helpfully describes how to do it here), it doesn’t take a whole lot more. Privacy of information on the Internet is not black and white — it is shades of grey. I guess that was my point.

Law professor and blogger Michael Geist, whose opinion I respect, says that I am wrong and that the AOL incident illustrates why such search data should not only not be released but shouldn’t even be kept. John Battelle says that he was secretly thrilled at the New York Times story because “the silver lining of a data leak like this is that it allows the culture to have a conversation about what we’re getting into here by tracking all this data.” I would agree. If you want to explore the issue further, there is some great discussion going on not just in the comment section of my Globe blog but also at Greg Linden’s and Jeff Nolan’s.

When it comes to the $900-million deal between Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and Google for advertising and search-related services at Fox Interactive Media — the bulk of which is made up of MySpace — there are a number of ways of looking at it. On the one hand, it is in some sense a vindication of the half-a-billion dollars or so that Rupert (definitely not a stupid man) paid for MySpace, as Fred Wilson of A VC points out, saying it could be the “best Internet purchase ever.”

The deal also helps to crystallize some of the debate over valuation that has been going on about social networks such as MySpace, a debate that will likely get even more heated if Viacom bids for MySpace competitor Bebo, a deal rumoured to be in the works. Does it mean that MySpace is worth $3-billion, as some have been arguing? Not necessarily. But it does help put some financial meat on the bones of a company everyone has been trying to arrive at a value for. Rafat at PaidContent has a nuts-and-bolts breakdown of the deal.

One of the most interesting elements for me, however, and one very capably described by Om Malik, is how much MySpace needs Google. One of the reasons why the social network’s CPM (cost per thousand) is down around $1 is that it has a gigantic backlog — in part because there are billions of MySpace pages, and in part because advertisers have remained relatively cool to putting their brands on MySpace next to questionable content, to be looked at by fickle teenage users. Too much supply and not enough demand.

How is Google going to deal with that? According to Om and others, it will avoid certain parts of MySpace, and will include other Fox properties such as the IGN gaming network. But at the same time, the whole reason for the deal is so that Google can help create a social-network ad platform — the holy grail for sites like MySpace, as Gigaom contributor Robert Young puts it. That will be interesting to watch.

Okay, it’s only Duran Duran — the classic 1980’s “Hungry Like a Wolf” hair band — but it’s still pretty interesting that a band is setting up a virtual island in Second Life, where the boys will put on virtual concerts for giant robots, huge pink bunny rabbits, surfer dudes with green hair and other SL avatars. According to comments from the band, they seem pretty excited about the whole thing.

This seems like the next logical step in the virtual music business, after a recent concert put on by the BBC involved a Second Life component (virtual attendees got a tiny virtual radio so they could take the show with them as they moved around the virtual world), and a group of U2 devotees put on a virtual concert involving avatars of the band.

The latter concert didn’t just feature virtual versions of the band but also included downloadable U2 songs and a host of “virtual sponsor” giveaways such as cans of Coke and bottles of Evian water — despite the fact that neither the band nor the companies had agreed to have their names and likenesses featured. The organizer says it was done to increase the realism and as a tribute to the band, but I wonder whether U2 or Evian would see it that way (the organizers tried to reach the band but didn’t get anywhere).

In other Second Life music news, Suzanne Vega — the iconic folk-pop singer whose Tom’s Diner became the first song ever made into an MP3 file — recently gave a concert inside the virtual world, one which started off (naturally) with a version of Tom’s Diner. Although attendees had to remove all add-on objects (including their avatar’s hair, apparently) so as to reduce lag in the game, this sounds to me like the beginning of something, well… real. Bands and performers have already gotten used to using MySpace to advance their careers.

And in other business-related SL news, Starwood Hotels says that it is going to try out a new micro-brand hotel idea inside the virtual world before launching it in real life. More on the process of setting up the virtual hotel can be found here. Lest all this Second Life-ing get a little too serious, I offer you this cartoon I came across at BLaugh while looking around for SL-related stuff in the blogosphere (hat tip to Fred Wilson).

I know I’m late to the party on this one, but I have to say I’m kind of confused about the huge outcry over AOL releasing a pile of supposedly “secret” personal data as part of what seems to be a misguided research effort, something for which it has now apologized. Obviously it’s a bit of a public relations gaffe, in the sense that the information kind of leaked out and everyone got all hot and bothered about it before there was a response, but I don’t really see why it became such a giant sh*tstorm in the first place.

Yes, there was plenty of personal information in the search logs (all two gigabytes of them or whatever it worked out to) that someone could theoretically do something nefarious with — theoretically — but doesn’t that pretty much describe the Internet? As more than one person has pointed out, including one of the commenters on a related post by Paul Kedrosky, much of this information is already available to people who are determined to get it (or pay for it). Didn’t Scott McNealy tell us that we don’t have any privacy on the Internet and that we should get over it?

Markus Frind of Plenty of Fish has said that the personal search data includes some potentially disturbing info, such as a repeated search by one user for information on how to kill your wife. But how do we know that this person was actually looking to kill his wife? Maybe he’s writing a screenplay. He also apparently searched for “steak and cheese” and “poop,” or at least the same user ID did. What does that indicate about the user’s overall mental state? Probably nothing — although I’ve often thought that people who eat steak and cheese are inherently unbalanced. (There’s more data surfing here).

As far as I’m concerned, setting off all kinds of personal privacy alarms over the AOL data is an over-reaction. As Greg Yardley points out, we have no privacy when it comes to Internet searches, and the sooner we get used to it the better. Greg Linden of Findory also seems to think the whole fuss is overdone, and so does venture capitalist Jeff Nolan.

Update:

I wrote a similar post to this one for my “official” blog at globeandmail.com/blogs/geekwatch and judging by the comments that this post has sparked, I seem (or AOL seems) to have struck a nerve when it comes to personal privacy and the Internet. One reader mentioned the recent New York Times article about the AOL debacle, in which a journalist tracked down a woman living in a small town based on some of the searches she did, which included personal information such as the name of the town — and another reader didn’t think much of my counter-argument that this says more about the journalist and the newspaper that tracked her down than it does about AOL’s release of the data. Some readers also thought my comparison to Rogers releasing information about pay-per-view rentals was spurious, since that wouldn’t include personal data (and I admit it’s not a great analogy).

As I mentioned in my response to those comments, I realize that there is a lot of information included in what AOL released, and that by putting two and two together (as the NYT did) someone could come up with a pretty good idea of who did those searches. I guess the point I was trying to make — and perhaps I went a little overboard in doing so — is that much of that information is already out there, and is effectively publicly available. If you type in your name or address or credit card number, it can be tracked and accessed, and while it takes a little more effort and knowhow than sifting through AOL’s search data, it doesn’t take a whole lot more. Privacy of information on the Internet is not black and white — it is shades of grey. I guess that was my point.

Law professor and blogger Michael Geist, whose opinion I respect, says that I am wrong and that the AOL incident illustrates why such search data should not only not be released but shouldn’t even be kept. John Battelle says that he was secretly thrilled at the New York Times story because “the silver lining of a data leak like this is that it allows the culture to have a conversation about what we’re getting into here by tracking all this data.”

I apologize for any repetition, but I continue to be fascinated by the ideas bubbling up around Jason Calacanis’s offer to the top Diggers and Newsvine and Reddit users (most recent post is here — and yes, I know that writing about Jason only encourages him, like paying attention to a child holding his breath). The latest clash came at Wikimania, the conference on Wikipedia and related “open-source knowledge” projects that was held recently at Harvard’s Berkman Center.

Yochai Benkler — author of The Wealth of Networks — spoke about his theories of networked knowledge systems, and Jason jumped up to suggest that his offer to pay the top Diggers, which has gotten several to jump ship for the new Digg-ified Netscape, contradicted some of Yochai’s theories. This moment could almost have been choreographed by notorious Wikipedia skeptic Nicholas Carr, who recently wrote a post about the contrast between Benkler’s ideas and Jason’s offer (he posted a followup response from Benkler as well).

There’s more from Jason on the Benkler speech at Wikimania here, and Andy Carvin has a nice overview of what happened at Digital Divide. A blogger named Alex Halavais also has some thoughts about the metaphor used by Jason in his response to Benkler (and others) — namely, the idea that while there are volunteer firefighters, there are also paid firefighters, and one doesn’t necessarily make the other less useful or important.

Does paying Diggers somehow cheapen what all Diggers do, or change the structure of the social-networking model so much that it wrecks it somehow? Or does it give others something to aspire to, and reward those who try harder? Will it spark efforts to game the system, and thus remove something crucial from the equation, or can both paid and unpaid exist side-by-side without harming each other? I’m not the only one interested in the idea — Matt McAlister also has some thoughts that are well worth reading.