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Jason Kottke of kottke.org has been taking some well-deserved time off and having guest writers post things to his blog, and one of the most recent ones was an interview that Joe Turnipseed (aka writer Joel Hernandez) did with thinker Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks. Among other things, Benkler talks about the diversity of voices that the Internet makes possible, and how that can be both a good thing and a bad thing.

In that sense, his comments are a great riposte to the gloomy views of Andrew “the Internet is killing culture” Keen, who has been on a bit of a roadshow since his book came out. There are others who also make great anti-Keen arguments, including David “Everything is Miscellaneous” Weinberger — who did a great one-on-one dismantling of Keen’s viewpoint in the Wall Street Journal not long ago — but Benkler is among the best.

Turnipseed asks about the discussion of Benkler’s book that has been taking place at the website Crooked Timber, and says that his understanding of the author’s arguments was helped by reading some of the commentary and debate at the site. Benkler responds:

“I thought the discussion on Crooked Timber was in fact excellent, as good a discussion as you would get in a thoughtful seminar, whether academic or whenever you get a collection of thoughtful people in a book club.

There should be nothing surprising about this, any more than there should be anything surprising about there being blogs that are utter nonsense.”

Benkler makes the point that the “networked information economy” allows a billion people to produce and communicate information and knowledge, and so it effectively widens the range of viewpoints and knowledge levels that are available — which can be both good and bad.

“The probability that any newspaper, however well-heeled, will be able to put together the kind of legal analytic brainpower that my friend Jack Balkin has put together on his blog, Balkinization, is zero. They can’t afford it.

On the other hand, even the Weekly World News is tame and mainstream by comparison to the quirkiness or plain stupidity some people can exhibit. The range is simply larger. That’s what it means to have a truly diverse public sphere.”

And Benkler’s next comment on the topic seems an almost direct shot across the bow of people such as Keen — and his partner in crime, Nick Carr — who argue that an intellectual and cultural elite should continue to dominate media and culture (for our own good, of course):

“If you want to find evidence of nonsense — as of course it is important to people whose sense of self-worth depends on the special role traditional mass media play in the public sphere — you will easily find it.

If you want to find the opposite, that too is simple. What’s left is to wait and see over time whether one overwhelms the other.”

I would agree with Benkler that the evidence of both is plentiful, and that when it comes to which will win, I am firmly on the optimistic side. As he puts it, his ultimate conclusion in the book was that:

“While the networked public sphere was not the utopia some in the early 1990s would have liked it to be, it was certainly an appreciable and important improvement over the industrial, mass media structure of the public sphere in the century and a half that preceded it.”

The whole interview is well worth a read, and it can be found here.

It would be funny, if it didn’t hit quite so close to home for a long-time newspaper guy like me. Aw, what the heck, it’s still pretty funny, even if it does hit pretty close to home — kind of like when someone makes a crack about your weight and you find yourself laughing along with them, despite the fact that they effectively just called you a lard-ass.

What’s so funny? Before I had a chance to read AP chief executive Tom Curley’s closing speech at the Knight-Bagehot dinner on Thursday, I read Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget’s summary and rather pointed annotations of the speech at Silicon Alley Insider. Many of the jabs that Blodget took were well-deserved, including the ones that seemed to suggest an inspirational talk such as Curley’s might be coming, well… a little bit late in the game, shall we say. At the same time, however, it’s nice to hear the senior executive of a news organization — any organization — saying some of the things he says, including these tidbits:

“I’ve been inside many major news organizations the last couple years, and, invariably, I hear the same refrain. We know what to do, but we can’t get it done.

Or, sadly, we’re in worse shape than we were two years ago because we’re spending even more proportionately trying to keep the old model functioning.

More than a few persist in trying to make their online sites life rafts for newspapers or newscasts.”

At one point, Curley says “we who rule the content,” which is a little much — but then you have to consider the audience he’s speaking to. No one would have even flinched at that phrase. He also talks about how AP and other news providers have to “get control” of their content, which I would argue is a losing battle — and it’s an odd statement given the deal that the AP struck with Google to host stories at the Googleplex.

But a little later the AP chief almost makes up for all of that by saying “The first thing that has to go is the attitude. Our institutional arrogance has done more to harm us than any portal.” If only saying it would make it so. Rafat Ali has more coverage at PaidContent, and NYT tech editor and blogger Saul Hansell has some thoughts as well.

Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider and Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch are reporting that Facebook board member and investor Jim Breyer said at an event last night that the social-networking site is open to working with Google’s OpenSocial project. The money quote:

“Nobody’s going to beat us because they are more open,” he said.

Breyer also reportedly said that the rumours of another $500-million or so being invested in Facebook (in addition to the $240-million that Microsoft put in recently) are not true, and that the site has no plans to do an IPO until sometime in 2009 at the earliest.

So I guess Facebook is either going to jump on the OpenSocial train, or we’re going to have a war in which it and Google both try to “out-open” the other. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?

To say that there has been a lot written about Google’s announcement of OpenSocial, the social-networking standard it developed along with MySpace and others, would be more than a bit of an understatement. There have been some excellent posts — including one by Joe Kraus at the official Google blog and one from Marc Andreessen that has a recap of the festivities at Google’s campfire-style launch of OpenSocial.

But while there is a lot to be excited about — and don’t get me wrong, the prospect of a unifying standard that makes interoperability between social networks easy is definitely a good thing — one of the posts that stuck with me was from Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web, entitled “Open Social: Three Big Concerns.” I think Marshall is asking some good questions about OpenSocial and what it implies, questions that I hope will get answered at some point. His questions are:

1. Is Google exercising leadership or control?

“It’s not possible that one of the largest companies in the US and the largest in this consortium would act entirely out of concern for the world at large. You know they bullied everyone else involved into accepting their terms of openness.”

It’s Google’s consortium, so they probably set the standard, right? Even if they didn’t do any bullying, that gives them a lot of control over what the standard allows or doesn’t allow.

2. Are the APIs Write-Only?

“The OpenSocial APIs might be capable only of allowing widgets to be published from one network to another. Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another? That’s not being discussed at all.”

If all OpenSocial allows you to do is make widgets that run on different networks, without allowing data to be pulled out of and injected into those widgets from all networks, then what good is it?

3. Will Official Sanction Kill It?

“Why couldn’t this all be based on microformats and other existing open standards? Perhaps the culture of control… is the only thing that the big players participating could comprehend. In that case it’s probable that OpenSocial will likely be more closed and more anti-social than many of us would like.”

A fair question. Why couldn’t this be accomplished using XML and other formats that people have been working on for a long time to allow data portability and so on? Why did Google have to come up with something to solve that problem? Those are just some of the questions hovering over OpenSocial, and I think Marshall deserves some credit for asking them.

There’s more skepticism from Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, Don Dodge at The Next Big Thing and The Stalwart at Seeking Alpha.

An interesting move by the New York Times: it has effectively added a blog-aggregation news feature to its technology pages, as described by Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web. In the middle of the site there’s a column of the top tech headlines from around the blogosphere — in other words, a very Techmeme-like feature — and you can click below each one to see other posts about the same story.

When you click, you go to BlogRunner.com, which is a blog aggregator/headline engine that the New York Times acquired last year. I wasn’t initially that impressed with it when I first saw it (before the Times bought it), but I’ve been back several times since and I think it does a pretty good job. As Erick Schonfeld notes at TechCrunch, the Times is also building content aggregated by BlogRunner into other parts of its site, including at the bottom of news stories (the same way I use Sphere on my posts).

One small design point that I like about BlogRunner, and wish that Gabe would duplicate at Techmeme: there’s an expand/collapse button for the discussion links on each topic heading (Techmeme lets you expand or collapse them all, but then your preference is set until the next time). The Times has also done some syndication deals with PaidContent and IDG, among others.

I think this is a very smart move by the Times, and by tech editor Saul Hansell (who also writes for the Bits blog). Newspapers by definition have always been aggregators and curators of information — both their own and that culled from news wires and other sources. Aggregating Web content from many different sources seems to me like a natural extension of that.

Further reading:

For more on this development, there’s the NYT press release, Saul Hansell’s comments, a take from Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 and some impressions from Frederic at The Last Podcast.

This is Darren Barefoot’s version of Robert Scoble’s social-media “starfish.” Of course, starfish don’t have 12 arms, but you get the picture (although Darren found one with eleven — check his comment below for the link to a photo).
(click for larger version).

And no, by the title on this post I don’t mean that Facebook is good and Google is bad (please see my previous post), or that Facebook is well-designed and Google is bloated and buggy. Instead, I’m thinking about a line in Erick Schonfeld’s post at TechCrunch about the whole Google Social-Facebook thing (incidentally, an interesting idea to have Erick write a post disagreeing with the one that Mike Arrington wrote). In his post, Erick says that the best approach for Facebook may be to join the Google movement, or:

“it risks becoming the Apple of the social networking world (the old Apple of the 1980s, which always offered a nicer, more controlled experience than Windows, but ceded application momentum.”

Obviously, no such comparison is going to be 100-per-cent accurate, but I think there is something to Erick’s analogy. Apple in the 1980s was a much better experience in almost every way but one — namely, it had a small market share and because it was a proprietary platform it required developers to do more work. By developing for Windows they could have their software run on 100 times as many computers and reach that many more people, for the same effort.

It’s true that Apple has been successful in all kinds of ways, with its iPods and Macbooks and so on. But I would argue it has done so despite being a closed system (i.e., proprietary hardware and software joined together) rather than because of it. In a similar way, Facebook has become successful by controlling all aspects of the service — in other words, both the online equivalent of hardware (design) and software (features).

By contrast, Google doesn’t really have a horse in this particular race — unless you include Orkut, which I don’t — in the same sense that Microsoft didn’t make hardware. So Google can concentrate on the software that underpins the social-networking phenomenon, making it easy for other companies’ apps to work together. Of course, as Dare Obasanjo points out, there are negatives to being Microsoft as well.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has confirmed a rumour first advanced by Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider: that MySpace, the 800-pound gorilla of the social-networking sphere, is joining the Google Social platform effort — and so is SixApart, the blogging network that includes Moveable Type and LiveJournal. Bebo, which is not that prominent in North America but is huge in Europe, is also joining Google Social.

Apparently Google moved up the timing of its conference call about its social platform, likely in part because of the rumours, and TechCrunch has some notes from that call — in which Eric Schmidt reveals that Google has been working with MySpace for about a year now, and this deal will supersede the project that MySpace had already announced to create its own Facebook-style platform for developers.

I’m going to write about this some more later, but I think this is potentially huge (although Saul Hansell of the New York Times disagrees). In effect, we have Google and everyone else that matters in the social-networking space on one side, and Facebook and its more or less proprietary, walled-garden approach on the other. Game on.

Update:

Mike Arrington says at the bottom of this post that a source at Google says Facebook has been talking to the company about Google Social, contrary to a statement by Facebook’s publicist.

It’s a shame when stereotypes about religious differences lead to misunderstandings and resentment, isn’t it? No, I’m not talking about the Middle East, I’m talking about Apple and Microsoft. The conventional wisdom about the two is that Microsoft is the embodiment of evil — with products that are poorly designed, break often and are otherwise a giant pain in the ass — while Apple can do no wrong, with products that are virtually flawless in every way.

The growing number of reports about problems with Leopard, the new Mac OS, show that there is a lot more to it than that. I just heard from a friend — a relatively recent convert to Apple PCs — who said that the upgrade didn’t just present him with a blue screen (something that until now had been associated exclusively with Windows machines), but actually wiped out most of his data and a substantial number of applications as well. I don’t know whether his problems were a result of using the third-party Application Enhancer software or not, as some have reported.

What I do know is that for my friend, losing that kind of data is no laughing matter — it is a serious, serious issue. Much of that data is crucial to his business, and while he does regular backups (as we all should), he doesn’t do them every minute of every day. Having a blue screen, or a buggy install, or having to jump through hoops is one thing. Losing data permanently through no fault of your own is a completely other thing.

I’m not some Microsoft fanboy who is gloating that Apple is having problems too (including reports of a Trojan in the wild and other reports of problems with wireless connections after installing Leopard). I’m just saying that Apple is not infallible. Upgrading operating systems is no trivial task, and things go wrong — even with Apples.

Update:

My friend Rob has put up a lengthy description of what happened — and is taking predictable fire from Apple fans in his comment section.

As several people are reporting this morning, the search engine Hakia has added a new feature called “Meet Others,” in which you can see whether other people using the tool are searching for the same things you are. I confess that, like Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web, I am wondering what the point of this feature is exactly. Do social networking features make any sense as part of a search tool?

I can see that if you were searching for companionship, for example, you might want to know that others were searching terms like “lonely” or “desperate for a relationship” or whatever your search might be. But how many searches would actually benefit from having a social component? Would you want to know that others were looking for the definition of “amanuensis” or the location of a good hardware store? I’m not convinced that really makes any sense.

After much rumour and speculation about what Google might do as far as social-networking goes, TechCrunch has the details on its first real foray into the social sphere, and it sounds like the search giant is trying to do exactly what many were thinking — and perhaps hoping — it would do: namely, offer a set of APIs and other tools that could allow users to make sense of the various profiles and information that have embedded in different networks (the NYT has the deets as well).

This is something that social networking has been needing for some time, and Google is just the one to do it. For one thing, the company is large enough and carries enough weight that people want to play along — although I noticed that the list of partners TechCrunch has (the full announcement is scheduled for Thursday) doesn’t include a certain company whose name starts with Face and rhymes with “schnook,” although that probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. MySpace isn’t there either.

This goes even further than the earlier reports from Erick Schonfeld and others, who talked about Google using a single API to build connections between its own apps and create “activity streams” not unlike Facebook news feeds (I wrote about those rumours here. I for one hope that Google succeeds in getting all of the various networks — including Facebook — to sign on, but I expect that Facebook will see this attempt as a threat (and rightly so) to its more walled-garden approach to its data.

Further reading:

— Nick Carr thinks Google Social could possibly play a role in Enterprise 2.0.
— Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 talks about Facebook’s vulnerabilities.
— Mike Masnick at Techdirt says Google and Facebook are flipping each other’s business models around.
— Marc Andreessen thinks Google Social is the next big Internet platform, and he has screenshots of the new feature/service as well.

Update 01/11/07:

Mike Arrington says he has confirmed that MySpace and SixApart are both joining the Google Social platform, confirming a rumour that Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider first reported earlier today. At this point it looks like it could be Facebook vs. the Googleplex.

Full credit to Eric Eldon of VentureBeat for the nice piece of link-bait that he posted this morning about how Facebook “could” be worth $100-billion, a topic that has spent the better part of today climbing up Techmeme. But it’s too bad that the bubble-math in the headline (which Eric actually blames on Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures, a Facebook-only VC, based on this post) tends to obscure Eric’s point.

The point (I think) is that a targeted advertising network — based on Facebook’s database of user profiles and demographic data, combined with the use of cookies that would generate ads even outside of Facebook’s network — could produce a much higher payoff than the site’s current attempts at advertising are doing. I’m not an advertising guy, but I think there is probably a lot to that theory (although there are flaws).

Unfortunately, everyone wants to talk about how Facebook is building “a Google killer,” and how the search-advertising giant with the $200-billion market cap is “afraid” of the as-yet-unreleased Facebook ad program — as Lee Lorenzen argues here. That’s almost certainly nonsense, of course. Still, there is a potential battle of sorts heating up.

I think of it as a battle between “intent” and “relevance.” Google’s power comes from the fact that when you search for a keyword, there’s a good chance you’re going to be open to advertising that is related to that — i.e., your search betrays your intent. Facebook’s power could come from its knowledge of your profile, your behaviour, your demographics, your interests. That could make its ads more relevant.

Even if there is such a battle, does that suddenly make Facebook worth $100-billion, or $10-billion, or even $1-billion? Who knows.

Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web has a post up today in which he talks about PlentyofFish.com, the Vancouver-based dating site, and the mind-boggling pageviews, unique visitors and revenue it is generating. Although founder Markus Frind can no longer claim to be a one-man shop (he recently hired his first employee), to be doing $30,000 a day in revenue and over 1 billion pageviews a month is still incredible.

Although Markus and Plenty of Fish have gotten some notice here and there — particularly in the SEO/AdSense community — it’s surprising how little attention they get for a site that is number one in its market in Canada and the United Kingdom, and second in the United States according to Hitwise. Not bad for one guy (okay, two now, plus Markus’s girlfriend) and a roomful of servers.

To me, Markus is a little like Craig Newmark. He started a service because it seemed like a good idea — although I think he had more of a sense that it could be a moneymaker than Craig did — and he hasn’t spent more than a dime or two on site design, as you can see if you go there. All he has done is to make things easier and more convenient for his user base (mostly by making membership free).

Markus may not be doing eight billion pageviews a month the way Craigslist is, but then they have 200 servers and 25 employees. Compared to Markus, Craig might as well be Microsoft 🙂 Is Plenty of Fish worth $1-billion, as Richard speculates? I have no idea — but it is definitely worth a ton of money to someone, and Markus deserves all the credit.

So Newsweek magazine has confirmed that Tom Anderson — one of the co-founders of MySpace, and the guy who is automatically added to your list of friends when you create a profile on the site — was actually 31 when the service launched, and not 27 as his profile claimed. That would make him 36 now, rather than 32 as his profile says. Mike Arrington passed along a rumour to that effect awhile back, and Newsweek checked it out using state licensing records, etc.

Opinion seems divided on whether or not anyone really cares about this little tidbit of news or not. A number of commenters on the latest TechCrunch post about it say they really couldn’t care less, and Caroline McCarthy greets the revelation with a yawn and asks for some real news please. Mike, however, responds to critics in the comments section of TechCrunch by pointing out that while it is just a simple “white” lie, it is one that is amplified by the fact that Tom becomes everyone’s friend by default, and also:

“There is significant irony: if you can’t believe what you see in the founder’s profile, then you really can’t believe anything you see on the site.”

I’m going to go with Mike on this one. Do I care that Tom Anderson is 36, or was already 31 when he created MySpace? No, but I do think it’s interesting that he chose to lie about his age — possibly because of the Valley’s ageist approach to startups — and I think it probably will make some people more cautious about what they read on MySpace. And maybe that’s a good thing.