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I suppose it was inevitable that the whole “social networking” phenomenon — which until now has been pretty much a grassroots effort, aside from Google’s purchase of YouTube and News Corp. buying MySpace — would eventually attract the attention of the Big Iron boys. And by that I mean companies like Cisco, the networking-equipment maker that is reportedly going to buy social network Tribe.net next week sometime.

I must admit that I share Pete Cashmore’s “WTF” response to this news. Maybe someone at Cisco overheard people talking about Facebook or MySpace and using the term “social networking,” and all they heard was the “networking” part. “Hey, we do all kinds of networking — Ethernet, PBX, optical, you name it,” the Cisco type might have thought. “How hard could social networking be?” Buy a provider like Tribe.net (which probably cost as much as the Cisco branch office in Mobile, Alabama spends on paper clips every year), and away you go. Drop in on Really Big Corp. Ltd., sell them some switches and throw in some of that social-type networking too.

Coming so soon after the announcement of IBM’s big Lotus Connections rollout, in which the giant computer services company mashed up its own del.icio.us-type tool, a blog tool and some other social networking apps, it seems fairly obvious that the Big Iron boys would like be the ones helping companies get on board the social networking train. But is that really the best way to go? I’m pretty sure that it isn’t.

Paying Cisco millions of dollars to put together your wired or wireless network makes sense. They control the hardware, they know the protocols and technology standards, and they know that security is important for a corporate network. But social networks and social networking tools aren’t exactly rocket surgery, if you know what I mean — there aren’t really any complicated tools or standards (other than ethical standards).

What makes a social network function isn’t so much the tools as it is the attitude. You gotta have the “want to.” And that isn’t something you can get out of a box.

Further reading:

Om Malik is similarly skeptical of Cisco’s newfound interest in social networking, and compares the combination to the marriage of Angelie Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton. And Joe Duck makes a similar point to mine: social networking isn’t about technology, it’s about people. My friend Mark Evans is also skeptical of Cisco’s move.

Just as we did last year for the first mesh Web conference in Toronto, we’re offering a limited number of student tickets for the ultra-low price of $25 (plus GST), thanks to the help of our sponsors. And this is a quick note to say that they are going fast. If you’re interested, better head over to the mesh site and register now. Regular-price tickets are actually going pretty quickly too, incidentally. But there are still some left 🙂

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

N.B. Just one more quick mesh-related note, now that I think of it. We’ve gotten some feedback about our choice of keynotes — specifically the maleness thereof — and if you’re interested there’s a post up about it (on behalf of the organizing group) at the mesh blog.

So Viacom is apparently bragging about how traffic to its properties, including Comedy Central, has climbed by as much as 90 per cent since it told YouTube to take down 100,000 or so of its video clips. And much of that traffic boost is people coming to watch videos, the company says.

To me, this sounds like some premature back-patting by whichever senior executive at the media conglomerate decided to get all medieval on YouTube for hosting things like clips of Jon Stewart, or South Park’s brilliant World of Warcraft parody episode. It will be interesting to see whether those traffic increases stick or not. And it’s also interesting to see that the venerable BBC — an “old” media giant that has been teaching much younger media outlets a thing or two about new media for some time now — has taken a different tack when it comes to YouTube.

The Beeb has signed a deal to host several channels at YouTube, with short clips that the broadcaster says it hopes will drive traffic back to the BBC hubs. Since the Beeb is financed by a TV licensing fee (which it polices using high-tech “TV detection vans”), there will be IP blocks for anyone located in Britain — although not for the BBC Worldwide channel, as PaidContent notes.

This seems like a much smarter strategy to me than just pulling hundreds of thousands of clips (in fact, the BBC has said that it doesn’t plan to crack down on the clips that are already out there). The broadcaster presumably gets some juice from the clips, it gets some ad revenue as well, and then drives some traffic back to the full video content at its own site. Win-win, theoretically — although Ben Metcalfe seems to disagree with me.

Of course, there’s always Mark Cuban’s approach as well. And while we’re on the subject of back-patting, YouTube doesn’t seem to have suffered all that much as a result of the Viacom clips disappearing, and is busy signing deals with smaller content owners, including the NBA. See Mark Cuban’s comment below.

Update:

Seamus McCauley has some thoughts (somewhat conspiratorial) about why the BBC might have wanted to do a deal with YouTube. Could it be all about the licensing fee?

The story in Wired magazine entitled “I bought votes on Digg” shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone. Not only has the service used by the author — an automated voting system called User/Submitter — been written about before, but anyone who has paid any attention over the past six months to a year knows that there are problems with the Digg model.

The site has had issues with people “gaming” it pretty much since inception, and there has been a back-and-forth battle between Kevin Rose, Digg spammers and the top Digg submitters for some time now. Digg recently removed the top Diggers list in an attempt to cut down on the incentive for gaming, but as Scott Karp notes in a recent post at Publishing 2.0, there is still an incentive to vote up sites like the fake blog that Wired cooked up for its story, because doing so gets you reputation points if the link becomes popular and moves to the front page. Muhammad Saleem of The Mu Life has written about these issues many times.

So the Wired magazine piece isn’t exactly a surprise. That wouldn’t be noteworthy, except for the fact that — as Mike Arrington at TechCrunch reminds us — Wired magazine is part of a publishing company, CondeNast, that owns one of Digg’s main competitors: namely, Reddit. The story mentions the ownership issue parenthetically, but I still think it’s offside. Unlike Mike, I don’t think Digg should sue Wired, but I do think it looks bad for a magazine to cook up an event to make a company look bad, and then write about that event, when a sister company is a major competitor.

I would compare the story written by Annalee Newitz (a freelance writer who used to be a policy analyst with the Electronic Freedom Foundation, according to the bio on her blog) with the kind of “sting” that newspapers write when they sneak knives aboard a plane to show how lax security is. The only difference, of course, is that in most of those cases, the newspaper’s parent company doesn’t own a competing airline.

Wired’s piece for me crosses a line. If the story had been about some neutral third party that hired User/Submitter, then that would be one thing. But Wired effectively perpetrated the sting itself, and that smells bad to me.

Update:

Ms. Newitz’s story is a companion piece to this article entitled “Herding the Mob,” which is about reputation hacking on sites like Digg and eBay. There’s also a third piece about Digg by another author that is part of the same package, called “Hunting Down the Bury Brigade.”

Further reading:

Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker has some worthwhile thoughts about manipulating reputation systems here, and Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests — also a veteran Digg watcher — has a post here. Frantic Industries also thinks Wired is playing on the wrong side of the tracks with this one, and Robyn Tippins at Sleepyblogger takes a crack at it as well.

Update:

Jimmy Wales has posted a statement on his talk page at Wikipedia about the Essjay affair, and from the sounds of it he has changed his mind about what Ryan Jordan did — and has asked him to resign from his positions within the Wikipedia community. And I for one think he has done the right thing.

I understood this to be primarily the matter of a pseudonymous identity (something very mild and completely understandable given the personal dangers possible on the Internet) and not a matter of violation of people’s trust.

I want to make it perfectly clear that my past support of EssJay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on.

There’s some more background and details in this New York Times story.

Original post:

Hardly a month goes by without some new dustup involving Wikipedia — either because someone edited their own entry, or because someone bitched about not being able to edit their own entry, or because someone paid someone else to edit an entry. The latest brouhaha concerns a New Yorker piece that quoted a senior Wikipedia administrator named Essjay, a person described as a tenured professor of religion at a private U.S. university.

As it turns out, Essjay is no such thing. His real name is Ryan Jordan, and he doesn’t have a degree in theology or canon law (as his Wikipedia profile claims), nor does he teach at any kind of educational institution. He is 24, and works for Wikia, the for-profit company started by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. And what was the response to the New Yorker piece? Jimmy Wales told the New Yorker that he regards Essjay’s fake profile as “a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.” On his talk page at Wikipedia he says:

“EssJay has always been, and still is, a fantastic editor and trusted member of the community. He apologized to me and to the community for any harm caused.

Trolls are claiming that he “bragged” about it: this is bullshit. He has been thoughtful and contrite about the entire matter and I consider it settled.”

There is much discussion on the talk page about how Ryan Jordan maintained a fake profile under a pseudonym because he wanted to protect himself from “stalkers” such as Daniel Brandt, who runs a site called Wikipedia Watch that is critical of the open-source encyclopedia and regularly reveals the identities of Wikipedia editors. Others such as Chris Edwards point out, however, that Jordan was using his fake profile before Brandt started becoming a nuisance, not to mention the fact that fear of stalkers doesn’t explain why Jordan regularly cited his fake credentials.

Others at Wikipedia are arguing that Essjay was a valuable contributor to Wikipedia, that none of the editing he has done is being questioned (although perhaps it should be), and that a person’s actual biographical details should be irrelevant. Even Jimmy Wales seems to feel that Jordan’s misinformation was a harmless mistake, since he has appointed him to the arbitration committee.

I would argue that both Wales and Jordan’s supporters are wrong. Whether Essjay’s work at Wikipedia is above reproach isn’t the point. The point is that Wikipedia already has people questioning its credibility right and left, and the fact that a supposed expert — one who was put forward by Wikipedia itself as an authority on the project, not to mention a shining example of how it works — would effectively lie to the New Yorker is beyond the pale. If Wikipedia wants to have any claim to credibility at all, Essjay should be fired.

Update:

Essjay has made a statement on his talk page, and still maintains that he disguised his identity to protect himself from trolls and stalkers. Why he made up the credentials is not explained, although he says he was surprised that the New Yorker didn’t check those facts. He also says that it was his impression that it was “well known that I was not who I claimed to be.” Please see the comments below for further clarification.

Well if book publishers like HarperCollins and Random House have got it half right, as I wrote earlier today, then that puts them light-years ahead of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (yes, the Oscar folks), who don’t seem to get very much at all.

It’s not really all that surprising to hear that the Academy told YouTube to take down video clips of portions of the telecast. In fact, when I saw the headlines on Techmeme, I initially discounted it as just another notice and takedown effort, just like Viacom’s not so long ago. But the Oscar takedown makes even less sense than that, as Techdirt points out. At least Viacom had some kind of sensible rationale for pulling the clips — because it wanted to run them itself at its own site. The Oscar team? The exact opposite.

In fact, Variety reports that the Academy is only running a five minute highlight clip at its official site, with none of the musical numbers or the opening monologue available (two of the most popular clips on YouTube were the skit with Will Farrell and Jack Black and the monologue by Ellen DeGeneres). And then the spokesman comes out with this howler: Not only are there are no plans to post additional clips, but the current ones will be removed soon, to “whet people’s appetite for next year’s show.”

That’s some good work there, Academy dudes. Forget about all the free advertising YouTube is giving the Oscars by letting people see how funny it was. Better to take those clips away and hope that next year someone watches it anyway. That’s a great idea. At least Mark Cuban has a plan that makes some kind of sense — it may be crazy, but it’s a plan. And Larry Dignan of ZDNet notes that many of the video clips are back anyway.

They may not be all the way there yet, but at least HarperCollins and Random House — both ultimately owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — are trying to bring books into the Web era with their new “browsing” widgets. As Pete Cashmore over at Mashable describes, the HarperCollins one pretty much just opens a new window where you can browse through the text, but the Random House one is a bit more elaborate.

The latter is a full-fledged Flash widget, suitable for plunking into the sidebar of your blog or embedding on MySpace pages or wherever, and it allows you to search right inside the widget box, and then view the pages in a larger pop-up version of the widget (although it took awhile to load for me). You can see small thumbnails of the pages, or larger versions, and you can search within the text. But — as with most other book searches, including Amazon’s and Google’s — you only get a few pages at a time.

I have to say, though, that as cool as the Random House widget is, I wonder why the publisher decided to go to all that trouble instead of just doing a deal with Google as part of its massive book indexing project. I know there are copyright issues, but it still seems counter-intuitive to keep your own books segregated in a little pile that belongs just to one publisher rather than part of a giant archive that is easily searchable.

Like Mike Masnick at Techdirt, I don’t really see the wisdom of snubbing Google in favour of what amounts to an “expensive, fragmented and limited” book search.

Houston, we have liftoff.

For some time now, people have been emailing and calling and otherwise buttonholing us (that is, the mesh organizers — Mark, Rob, Stuart, Mike and yours truly) to ask when the next mesh Web conference was going to launch, and we are pleased to say that moment is now.

Sorry to keep everyone waiting, but we think — and we hope you’ll agree — that it has been worth the wait 🙂

Just as it was last year (memories and podcasts here), mesh 2007 will be an interactive forum for talking and learning about how the Web is affecting media, marketing, business and society, and we have lined up what we think is a killer combination of keynotes, panels and workshops to help make that possible.

At this point, we can tell you that the “keynote conversations” for the four streams will consist of:

• Michael Arrington, founder/editor of TechCrunch.com, speaking about new media and journalism in the age of the Web
• Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist.org, talking about how the Web is disrupting traditional business models
• Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Co., on the tension between the openness of the Web and traditional marketing
• Tom Williams, founder of GiveMeaning.com, and Austin Hill, founder of Gifter.org, talking about the Web as a tool for charity.

So come to mesh and ask Mike Arrington what it’s like to build a new media entity that gets quoted in the New York Times and profiled in the Wall Street Journal — but one that has also been criticized for getting too close to its Web startup sources.

Come to mesh and ask Richard Edelman how it felt when his firm, a leader in Web-based marketing and public relations, came under fire for the behaviour of a blog launched by one of its largest clients.

Come to mesh and hear Jim Buckmaster tell you why Craigslist isn’t interested in making the $50-million (or more) in revenue that some analysts have estimated it could make every year if it wanted to.

And come to mesh and find out why Tom Williams and Austin Hill see the Web as a powerful force for social networking and social action.

You can register here, and stay in touch by subscribing to the mesh RSS feed. More news to come.

From Steve Safran at Lost Remote — which has quickly become one of my favourite media blogs — comes a link to a piece of commentary at the Hollywood Reporter, written by Steve Bryant. The headline is “Hollywood too often misses the moment,” but I think Steve Safran’s headline at Lost Remote captures the point much better: taking a line from the HR commentary, he says “Media that can’t be manipulated is almost useless.”

An exaggeration, perhaps, but the more I read of Steve Bryant’s piece the more I found myself nodding my head in agreement. He describes how, having written about, blogged about, seen mashups of and otherwise consumed content related to the Borat movie, he has virtually no interest whatsoever in buying or watching the DVD. “Media is changing from entertainment into utility,” he says. “Media that can’t be manipulated is almost useless.” When listening to the radio, he says he wants to freeze the broadcast so he can pull a link from it and email it to someone. Likewise when he watches TV or goes to the movies.

All of the chatting and blogging and linking and YouTube-watching, he says:

“make a greater imprint on my psyche than any single media event inside a theater — or inside a DVD — could have. It’s simple reward/response psychology. Online, I can track who watches my clips, who reads my posts, who liked my mash-up. The Internet flatters us with attention in a way Hollywood no longer can.”

The solution? “Join the gabfest while the gabbing is good,” Bryant says. “Get rid of distribution windows, or shorten them dramatically. Between the theatrical release and the DVD, seed the Web with deleted scenes. When the DVD comes out, include shareable clips and tell people to upload them. And put the entire movie online. Allow people to stream it, download it, whatever.”

Good advice.

From Howard Owens comes a link to a hilarious post by Amy Gahran at the Poynter Online site (where she edits the E-Media Tidbits feature). In it, she tries to describe this new information-delivery technology called a “news-paper” to her skeptical husband:

“Check it out,” I said, “It’s a different kind of news delivery technology. It’s called a news-paper.”

“How does it work?” he asked.

“They have giant printers in Denver that print up thousands of these every day with news that was current as of something called ‘press time,’ and then they truck them out to towns, divide the truckloads into cars, and drop them on subscribers’ doorstep.

“You paid for this?…” he frowned, shaking his head. “How do you search it?”

“It’s not really searchable, but it’s scannable. See, you can open up the pages wide and see lots of stories.”

“Looks like mostly ads.”

Hilarious. And yet, kind of sobering too. At least by the end, Amy’s husband grudgingly admits that “at least the screen resolution is decent.”

For something that was created by legendary Netscape founder Marc Andreessen — the Blake Ross of his day, for you Firefox fans — the social-media “engine” called Ning has kind of been flying under the radar for awhile. As Mike Arrington notes at TechCrunch, the initial release of the service was somewhat underwhelming, and so I think a lot of people sort of forgot about it. But it has steadily improved, and just rolled out some more enhancements.

I have some first-hand experience with Ning, because I decided awhile back to use it as a tool for helping to plan a journalism school reunion that I’m involved with. It’s been quite awhile since I was at Ryerson in Toronto (don’t ask how long or I’m liable to punch you), and many of my former classmates have scattered to the winds. After a couple of members of the group sent out some emails trying to get a reunion under way, it became obvious that having a single place to co-ordinate things would make a lot of sense. One or two people mentioned MySpace, but it seemed too — well, MySpacey. Then I thought of Ning.com.

The reason Ning came to mind was that a Toronto group — helmed by Mark Dowds — created a site related to a new “open office” concept called Indoor Playground. It seemed relatively simple to add members, send out updates, upload photos and had a nice, clean look to it, so I decided to try it out. In just a few minutes I had the site set up (there is even more customization available with the new features), and apart from a few glitches in getting people signed up — it’s invitation only — it was a no-brainer.

Further reading:

Om has some thoughts about the new Ning, and Scoble has an interview with Marc Andreessen and CEO Gina Bianchini up at Podtech — and Ms. Bianchini has a post on the Ning blog with some of the insights that she has gained from starting the company (I particularly like the “Underhype your service” one). Frantic Industries has a good overview of the service too. Steve O’Hear at ZDNet has some thoughts too, and Don Dodge wonders whether it’s any better than Live Spaces or Yahoo Groups.

When it comes to Google and video, most people probably think about YouTube or Google Video and the struggles that have been going on with Viacom pulling its content and the deal with CBS falling through, etc. (which I wrote about recently). But as a story in the New York Times reminds us this morning, there is another whole side to the Google video story, and that is the advertising side, where Google is moving to expand a trial project.

According to the NYT story, Google has signed on Dow Jones Co., CondeNast and others as partners for its video ad trial, which runs video content in Google ad space on websites — complete with post-roll ads — and then shares the revenue with the site owner and the content provider. As Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy points out, this is much closer to Google’s “core competency” (as the business types like to say) than streaming clips from The Colbert Report on YouTube. And as PaidContent notes, it is an extension of a trial that started last year and was then expanded earlier this year.

There is obviously a lot of jockeying for position going on here. As the NYT story makes clear, one of the stumbling blocks is that the content providers — such as the Wall Street Journal, MTV and so on — want to maintain control over not just the content but the relationship with the advertiser as well. Although they seem open to experimentation, there is bound to be friction as Google inserts itself into that process.

A couple of things I’ve come across have got me thinking about the media business — broadly speaking — and just how profound the changes it is undergoing really are. It’s easy to dismiss them as just some kids on MySpace or a bunch of yahoos posting their juvenilia on YouTube, but it is really much more than that. Not a magical transformation by any means, but more like a rapid evolution, and a turbulent one at that.

One of the pieces that got me thinking was Scott Karp’s post over at Publishing 2.0, which he calls The Great Media Schism. In a nutshell, he says, the media industry is “dividing itself into content creation on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.” And he is exactly right. From newspapers to movies, media titans are grappling with the fact that content and distribution no longer go hand in glove — and just because you used to control one doesn’t mean you still do, or will. “Content creation is no longer an easily scalable business,” he says. “In fact, many players in the new content creation game are not in it to build scale business, or even to make money at all.”

For some reason, that statement reminds me of the success of Craigslist.org, which has become an accidental business in a sense — a service that Craig Newmark decided to start because it seemed like a good idea, and people adopted, and which has become wildly profitable almost by accident. All of which makes the damage it has done to the newspaper classified business seem even more of an insult, since Craig didn’t even mean to do it.

The other piece that got me thinking was a story in the Los Angeles Times by author Neal Gabler called The Movie Magic is Gone. Gabler describes — in a piece not-so-coincidentally published at Oscar time — how the traditional movie industry is in decline, in part because:

“To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content.”

The reality is that the Internet is unbundling the movie industry in the same way it is unbundling the newspaper industry and the music industry — dismantling or disrupting the traditional power relationships, in part by separating content from distribution. As Gabler puts it: “Much of modern media is dedicated to empowering audiences that no longer want to be passive.” And even when they do want to be passive, traditional content sources are finding a whole lot more competition for those eyeballs.

Further reading:

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan of HipMojo has some thoughts about the future of video, distribution and scalability. And please see the comment below from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Far be it from me to question the motivations of Bram Cohen, the genius behind the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol, who has finally launched (NYT link) the long-awaited (or at least, much discussed) movie download service that BitTorrent has been working on with the major Hollywood studios. It’s possible that he entered into the deal under duress, in order to avoid a blizzard of lawsuits.

But one thing is pretty clear by reading between the lines — or even just reading the lines themselves — in the New York Times story that is headlining Techmeme right now: the service as it is structured will almost certainly fail, and Bram Cohen knows it. The BitTorrent service will sell downloads of TV shows for $1.99 an episode, but will only rent movies, which expire 30 days after they are bought or 24 hours after someone watches them, thanks to the ever-helpful digital rights management features of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 10.

BitTorrent co-founder and chief operating officer Ashwin Navin effectively admits that this is a dumb idea, and says that (NYT link) the company actually had agreement from the studios to sell movies outright for download, but the prices that the studios wanted to charge didn’t make any sense. “We don’t think the current prices are a smart thing to show any user,” he said. “We want to allocate services with very digestible price points.” Translation: We want to offer something that has a hope in hell of actually working.

Then Bram Cohen says that he thinks the new service will provide a compelling alternative to downloading illegally — but in the very next breath, he says: “We are not happy with the user interface implications” of digital rights management. “It’s an unfortunate thing. We would really like to strip it all away.” And then the real money quote comes right at the end:

“The sad thing is, it’s not about the money,” said Aaron, a 36-year-old San Francisco programmer who regularly uses BitTorrent to download movies illegally. “I’m not interested in renting a movie. I want to own it. I want total portability. I want to give a copy to my brother. Digital convergence is supposed to make things like this easier, but D.R.M. is making them harder.”

Bang. That was the door slamming shut on BitTorrent’s new service — or maybe the bullet in the temple of the studios’ hopes that they can somehow eat their digital cake and have it too.

From Cory at Lost Remote comes a link to what has to be one of the most creative — and elaborate — classified ads ever, which the Roanoke Times newspaper from Roanoke, Virginia put up as part of its search for an editor. If you have even a few minutes to spare, you really should check it out. And be sure to click on all the links in the toolbar at the bottom — it’s worth it. In fact, it makes me want to work there.