I’ve Said Too Much

Jeff Jarvis has posted a characteristically insightful piece on Google and its capacity to “commodify” everything, to turn it into units of potential economic value which all look the same in the stripped down flatness of the Google results page:

Google certainly has done the same thing with online advertising. It’s doing that on this very page (half the time; the other half, Yahoo’s doing it) and it’s doing that with the big guys, too. And we all take it because, yes, we want the money. With AdSense, Google has commodified the content and brands of online content. It turns our pages into opportunities to play its advertising Match Game, placing ads on pages not on the basis of brand, context, content, environment, engagement, or trust - all the things advertisers supposedly care about and pay a premium for - but on the basis of the simple and perhaps coincidental occurrence of a word.

Of course, when you’re seeing the commodification of things at this level you start asking yourself: where will the premium services be which break this commodification down? Jeff rightly points to the likes of indeed.com as examples of emerging “vertical searches” which focus down on a particular area. That’s one way to go (though if I were in that business I’d be forever worried that one day the big Google beast was going to cast its glance towards my business and snaffle that up too).

So here’s a couple of thoughts:

When will those being commodified say “enough”? Is it even possible anymore to envisage content and service providers “opting out” of Google because the commodification is actively damaging to them? Might the commodification go so far that digital media actually starts to retreat back behind its walls to try and create some value for itself again? I’m not saying this is desirable or even possible, mind. I just think it’s interesting that the question isn’t being asked. Who will be the first to say “hey, Google, don’t index me.”

Second thought. I’ve seen some pretty messianic stuff on Google in the last few days, including John Battelle’s piece in the Guardian today, in which it’s suggested that the only limit on Google’s potential economic value is the gross domestic product of the entire planet. Hmm. Is no-one thinking that, at some point, Google’s power to commodify becomes so immense and so central to the way human beings interact with digital media, and with each other via digital media, that someone in some government somewhere starts asking some questions? Or a smaller example: if enough trade starts going through Google to have a significant impact on the world economy, aren’t those secret-sauce algorithms going to have to come out in the open a little more? Might Google become the archetypal victim of its own success?

The new PubSub LinkRanks service is a thing of great power and beauty, but there seems to be one obvious thing missing which would make it transforming for media owners: the URLs on our site which others are linking to. That would enable us to see what we published that made a big noise. As it is, I need to go into our internal stats and find out why on September 7 we were the number one site for incoming links on the planet (well, PubSub’s version of the planet, at least). If the functionality’s there, I must have missed it. Hell, they could even make that a paid-for service and I’d buy it.

There’s a very important article by our legal director Siobhain Butterworth in MediaGuardian today, covering the outcome of a court case in Canada regarding a Washington Post story that was published online. The legal issues are complex, so I won’t summarise them here, but here’s a key para:

The superior court of justice had concluded that the Washington Post should have foreseen that the story would follow Mr Bangoura wherever he resided. The Canadian court of appeal disagreed, noting that the newspaper could not have been expected to foresee that Mr Bangoura, who was working in Kenya at the time the articles were published, would end up as a resident of Ontario three years later, “to hold otherwise would mean that a defendant could be sued almost anywhere in the world based upon where a plaintiff may decide to establish his or her residence long after publication of the defamation”.

Essentially, it brings a little common sense into the current vacuum of international online publishing jurisdiction. Read the whole article for more.

My colleague Neil McIntosh has written an interesting editorial about a flame-up which happened on our talk boards last week. I’ll let Neil tell the essence of the story:

This week’s internal debate was sparked by the first edition of the paper’s new Family section last Saturday. Doubtless with the maxim “a problem shared” in their mind, the section’s editors had hit upon the idea of asking readers to help solve family problems via our talkboards.

The intention was - is - for useful discussions from Talk to be printed each week. A new area was created, the conversation started, and it produced some interesting material. Some readers talked about what to do with the child trust fund cheque they’d received. Others talked frankly about the pain of divorce. And then it was printed in the paper.

The result, in talk-room parlance, was that we were badly flamed. Some users said it was a blatant breach of trust. Users were concerned that what they thought was a discussion between a few of them might, exposed to a bigger audience, leave them vulnerable to identification.

Neil goes into the rights and wrongs of this debate in some detail, so I won’t rehearse them here. One concept which he only alludes to, though, is the sense to which Guardian Unlimited is a space we share with our users. It seems to me that this goes beyond the experience of offline media, where it is clear that the space is owned by the publisher and the users can only comment (like, for instance, when BBC radio listeners complain about a regular feature being moved, or, ahem, national newspapers are forced to correct decisions to drop popular items).

The web space, though, becomes a different kind of shared ownership when you allow user-generated content. Our talk threads are a distinctive part of Guardian Unlimited, but they are also something of a self-governed area, like Scotland within Britain. Because the content is so uniquely owned by the users who created it, we have to be minutely careful with how we speak to that community. Sometimes this can be problematic. But the problems are more than compensated for by the delight in discovering an area of GU which users have made uniquely their own, with little or no input from us.

Want to ask John Battelle a question? You should. And thanks to Guardian Unlimited, you can ask him a question right now.

Battelle is one of those rare commentators who is never wrong, always clear and fabulously well-connected. The fact that I haven’t read The Search yet just makes me feel vaguely panicky and ill-informed.

Interesting news from the Beeb, where they’re planning to open up their user comments system and allow people to post stuff which hasn’t been pre-moderated:

BBC site braces itself for more open user comments system: Due to launch on 10 October after nine months in development, the new system is effectively a heavily customised message board system that features different discussion topics each day. More contentious subjects subjects will be fully moderated but for the first time, comments on selected threads will be posted live on the site. The new system will rely mostly on ‘reactive moderation’, asking readers to report inappropriate content and material that breaches house rules.

It will of course be interesting to see what the BBC’s definition of “contentious subjects” is going to be, but even now I can’t help but admire their courage. The status of the Beeb as an independent, critical voice of the Establishment while remaining effectively state-owned is one of the marvels of the modern British constitutional arrangement, Hutton notwithstanding. I’m just afraid that a small avalanche of vitriol from a tiny cadre of obsessives on an out-of-the-way message board could bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. When questions in the House start being asked of posts on BBC-hosted message boards, it’ll be an interesting moment. But good luck to them.

Haven’t blogged about this yet, what with one thing and another, but last week we pushed out the beta of a new service, called Been there. Essentially, it’s a platform for people to recommend things they like to do in places they love, and for other people to say if they agree with them.

It’s very much in beta at the moment, and there’s a host of features we’d still like to add, but with a project like this we just felt it was important to get it out in the wild as soon as possible so we start learning from it. The main trick we’ve tried to pull off is the combination of “travel journalism” with massive user input.

It works like this: someone writes a profile of a “place” (for now, we’re taking cities as our taxonomy, but this could change or expand - Guardian people are pretty city-based, though), and then people start adding tips for things to do in that place. The city profiles are fairly “journalistic”, in that we’re careful about the places that get written about and what gets written about them - in the first instance, we commissioned writers to put these profiles together, but from here on in anyone can write a profile, although it will be edited before it appears on the site.

The user input part comes through in the tips part of the site, where people recommend things to do in a particular city. And, for the first time anywhere on GU, we’re adding tags to the tips. You can add tips with any tags you want.

Finally, the feedback loop: every tip has a “do you agree” button next to it. In some ways, this was the most controversial part of the system. We wanted to ensure that a real howler of a tip, or a tip that had become out of date, was somehow exposed to user feedback, but we also didn’t want a forum for massive rows about whether this restaurant really was the best on the Upper West Side. So this is the compromise. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s starting to work.

So, all pretty exciting. But here’s the real Big Media exciting thing (bloggers look away now) - once a week, we’ll be running a section in the Travel section of the newspaper about a particular city, with users’ tips a big part of it. So, citizen media storms the Big Media gates once more. Should be fun.

Call me cynical, but is Yahoo’s hiring of journalist Kevin Sites quite as groundbreaking as is being made out. Sure, it’s interesting. Sure, it’s even smart, and I completely buy the narrative that has Sites doing something interesting journalistically on the Yahoo platform with a combination of text, audio and video.

But the future of media? I don’t think so. It’s a blog, after all, a very well-promoted and resourced blog, but still a blog. As I’ve said before, Yahoo and its ilk will only become “media” companies when they understand the relationship they have with society, with the law, and with history. Hiring a guy (however talented that guy may be) and giving him a camera doesn’t change that.

This, remember, in the same week that Yahoo handed over details of a dissident journalist in order to conform with Chinese law. So which law is Yahoo the media company going to conform with? Because a news organisation governed by Chinese law is going to be a little constrained, no?

So, how’s this for responsive?

Doonesbury: returning to G2 from The Editors’ Weblog: Happily this particular error of judgement (unlike many of the countless others I have made) is easily put right: Doonesbury will be back in G2 from Monday. We’ll run a catch-up omnibus for the week on Friday and start the daily strips again next week. (I hope you’ll bear with us for a few days till then - I think it would be better to find it a good home, than squeeze it into the first crack we can lever open.)

And I’m sorry, once again, that I made you - and the hundreds of fellow fans who have called our helpline or mailed our comments address - so cross. The good news is that we now know just how strongly you feel about it and no damn fool features editor is going to mess with it - for at least 25 years.

That has to be one of the fastest bits of market research and product response the publishing world has ever seen.

Yes, yes, yes, I know I’m banging on about it, but what would you expect from a work-based blog by someone who works at the Guardian? Anyway, the new paper is out there now, so you may have seen it. Did you like it? I hope so.

There’s a fair few posts out there talking about it. Tom Coates had this to say:

“My first reactions to theguardian’s redesign - now that I’ve seen it in the flesh - are almost uniformly positive. But I think I’ll write about that more thoroughly later in the day when I’ve really had time to get my head around it.”

Dan Hill’s written a very thoughtful response, which includes this:

The all-important front page actually looks pretty bloody good, with some really nice navigational touches and bold layout (which I’ve annotated on this Flickr pic, including some notes on visual design).

Smart. He’s got some rather harsh things to say about GU’s need for a redesign, and our new Been There service, which I’m currently grokking.

Norman Geras likes the redesign. Helmintholog is broadly positive but hates the front page, and can’t quite believe Doonesbury’s no longer in the paper.

I’ll add more links here as I come across them. But here’s one mild gripe: in an era in which everyone’s talking about Big Media and having a conversation with readers, why on earth aren’t we getting a little bit more credit for being as open as we have been? Sounds snarky and peevish, I know, but I think the stuff we’ve done on the website has been revolutionary.

Sat here in the office on a Sunday night watching the first edition of the new format Guardian hitting the presses. We’ve got a live webcam link from the print facility, and there was a great cheer when papers started churning through. On the web side, we’re just checking content comes through to the website in the normal way, and that the Digital Edition of the paper doesn’t fall over as a result of the template changes.

If you’re into this stuff, check out Assistant Editor Vic Keegan’s minute-by-minute blog of the new paper being launched. It’s fascinating and, I reckon, unprecedented for a newspaper to show its working in this way.

Oh, and buy the paper in the morning, won’t you? Whether you usually do or not. Support independent journalism!

UPDATE: I should point out that above webcam link is a private one, which is why I didn’t link to it! Also, there’s a very good set of interviews with the editor, chief exec and designer of the Guardian on GU - if you’re interested in the thinking behind all this, check it out.

Lots of juicy goodies on the website today for anyone interested in the redesigned paper. We’ve put up a special report on how the design came about, with a PDF download of the sample copy that’s going in tomorrow (Saturday’s) paper. Great to see the design out in the wild, but caution - you have to hold the thing in your hands to get a real idea of how cool it is.

Oh, and Robin Grant asks what this means for the website, using a collection of characteristically fighting words. What, is a redesigned national newspaper not enough for you, then?

Still not excited about e-paper? Check out this demo unit from Philips - the first functional e-reader that can unroll to a size larger than the core device.

Yahoo has been accused of handing over email and personal registration details of a dissident journalist, Shi Tao, to the Chinese authorities, by none other than Reporters Without Borders. Rebuilding Media has this to say about it:

If the charges are true, it’s a telling failure on Yahoo’s part. Media Companies know what it means to exert cultural weight and know that sometimes you have to make decisions that are bad for business simply because they are the right thing to do ethically. Or at least, we hope media companies understand that — sometimes the modern media landscape does shake that faith a trifle.

On a fundamental level, tech companies still don’t realize that as they semi-kinda-really-sorta-maybe-yep-it’s-true morph into media companies they must assume certain profound social responsibilities. These responsibilities include not outing dissident voices to the authorities, no matter how good it is for business.

Good point. The best media companies (a group in which I include, needless to say, the Guardian) have a whole set of rules, either explicit or implicit, under which they operate. They could be rules about fair reporting. They could be injunctions like CP Scott’s famous dictum “comment is free, but facts are sacred”, which is less of a rule and more an unbreakable truth which Guardian journalists have drummed into them. It could even be legal rules about libel and contempt of court (how many lawyers at Yahoo worry about libel and contempt, I wonder?). Or it could be non-specific rules of journalism, such as never reveal your source. Or it could be an awareness that part of your brand as a media company is the extent to which people trust you to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

Yahoo, say it ain’t so:

Yahoo IM users get more than they bargained for | CNET News.com: By accepting Yahoo’s “typical” installation of Yahoo Instant Messager with Voice, it will also download Yahoo’s Search Toolbar with anti-spyware and anti-pop-up software, desktop and system tray shortcuts, as well as Yahoo Extras, which will insert Yahoo links into the Internet Explorer browser. The IM client also contains “live words,” which will automatically show an icon when the user highlights words online and then hyperlink to Yahoo search results, definitions or translation tools. Finally, the installation will alter the users’ home page and auto-search functions to point to Yahoo by default.

Not only that, but then they seek to justify it:

Yahoo spokeswoman Terrell Karlsten said that for avid Yahoo users, the included services are valuable and highlight the integration among all its tools.

“By setting it that way we’re giving people choices. For people who want to download software in one fell swoop, they have that option. If they don’t want it we give them the ability to customize it,” Karlsten said.

Of course, imposing configuration choices on end-user’s machines in this way is a brilliant strategy, one which in no way confuses users or makes them uncomfortable with new media or gives them a feeling of loss of control over the computer they paid good money for. It’s a far-sighted, innovative and brave strategy. Well done.

UPDATE: Even Zawodny is prepared to say this sucks.

Following my post last week about Yahoo IDs, here’s a nice thought along the same lines from Napsterization:

Flickr and Yahoo and identity management: Yahoo could take it’s hundreds of millions of IDs (that all authenticate in Yahoo’s system through the front section of their email accounts) like joeblow468 which is really joeblow468@yahoo.com, and change those to iNames. Yahoo could become an iBroker for all of it’s IDs, which are unique, turning them into:

=joeblow468

or better yet

=joeblow468.yahoo

These ids could then easily be interchangeable with Flickr IDs:

=photojoe.flickr

… I think what Yahoo is really looking for is something simple to integrate IDs between their company and those they acquire, as well as ways to make themselves more open. I don’t think they intend to freak everybody out, or make them paranoid because of the necessary integration. If Yahoo used an iName system, all ID’s no matter where they come from could be made into iNames, with Yahoo as iBroker, where they could then integrate additional ID’s into this system. ID’s from newly acquired systems could remain essentially the same.

She also says some interesting things about the experience of “losing” your Flickr ID which I, in my autistic male unempathetic way, hadn’t even considered.

Matthew Gentzhow of the University of Chicago has written a study of the impact of online versions of newspapers on the print circulations of those newspapers, using the Washington Post as an example. It’s the most complete survey of this kind which I’ve seen - there have been some internal studies done (I know News International looked at the impact of the Sun’s website on the paper a year or so ago), but precious little in the public domain.

Gentzhow’s conclusion is that washingtonpost.com reduces the daily readership of the Washington Post by 30,000 (based on a readership of 405,000) - ie, if washingtonpost.com didn’t exist, the readership (not circulation) of the paper would increase by 30,000. Based on 2003 numbers, Gentzhow estimates the estimated $33.3 million in revenues at washingtonpost.com came at a cost of $5.7 million in lost newspaper profit.

He then goes on to suggest that, economically, the optimal model is for a 20 cent daily payment for washingtonpost.com rather than the free model that currently stands. This, says Gentzhow, would provide the biggest overall economic benefit to the Washington Post in terms of compensating for newspaper profit decline with online revenue increases.

Fascinating, and tons of data which I’m sure will be appearing in internal presentations at most English-language newspapers for the next 12 months. Many commentators have already pointed out the basic flaw with the model, though - that it’s based on 2003 online advertising revenues. Gentzhow himself acknowledges this, saying that the zero-cost model for washingtonpost.com makes increasing sense as online advertising revenue increases. Indeed, Gentzhow implies that the rise in ad revenues since 2003 might already have closed the gap. In other words, the Post’s investment in washingtonpost.com is already paying dividends. And online ad revenues are still growing, fast.

One other point - Gentzhow makes an interesting observation that the “overall welfare effect” of having free-to-air newspaper websites is significant. Not being an economist I don’t fully understand this, but if my reading of it is correct, the economic benefit to the readers of having a free washingtonpost.com is double the economic value of the loss to the Washington Post in 2003. For newspapers who see themselves as part of the social fabric of their markets, that seems to me an interesting point for development.

Is Fox building a portal? That’s the question paidcontent.org is asking:

That’s according to some feelers and other messaging coming out from the company. Also, in its latest annual report, it has this line: “FIM will focus on leveraging the Company’s current and archived video assets, while building an integrated web domain with multiple points of entry and navigation capabilities that users will be able to customize and personalize.”

If Fox does build a portal, and then make that the main gateway to their content, big mistake. Fox isn’t a brand that people care about. Nor is Warner Bros. or Columbia or United Artists or any of them. Disney might just be, Pixar isn’t (but could be one day), Dreamworks definitely isn’t. Why do these entertainment companies think they have entertainment “brands” that are strong enough to build web portals on? My kids don’t care about Fox; they care about Star Wars and Ice Age and The Simpsons. Those are the brands. A million-pieces-loosely-joined strategy that allowed people to access their favourite content in any way they chose is what is required here, not another massive bucket on the web whose front page crumples under the weight of getting people to what they want.

The furore over Yahoo’s integration of Flickr user accounts into its main user database was probably predictable, but has raised some interesting questions about how users relate to their communities and to what extent they perceive their identities as being vested in both the community and in the data which the community holds about them. But what I found really interesting was this post on O’Reilly Radar which talks about the fact that Flickr has an API to its user database, which now means that, effectively, there is an API to Yahoo’s database too, and the fact that it’s now being used by a third-party website, geobloggers.com.

I think, unless I’m mistaken, that geobloggers is the first web site (as opposed to cool tool) to have fully intergrated with the new Flickr/Yahoo authentication scheme. The whole site is built on and backended by the Flickr API (while the map interface is managed by the Google maps API). I use Flickr to manage user registraion, login, information and photo storage.

Because the new Flickr API ties in with Yahoo is means that anyone with a Yahoo username can login and use the geobloggers site, without any additional registration. Geobloggers has gone from a potential user base of anyone with a Flickr account, who sent me an email, that I’d have to process by hand, to anyone with a Yahoo Account and I don’t have to do anything. The user base has shot up into the millions, any Yahoo member is a geobloggers member by default. Frankly I actually find that pretty scary.

It’s a fascinating development, which may well be squashed soon, or it may be completely intentional. If I can use my Yahoo ID to sign into a third-party site such as geobloggers, it basically means that Yahoo has made a huge de facto leap towards becoming an online identity standard of the kind which the Liberty Alliance has been attempting to put together. For it to become a really powerful standard, it would have to allow me as a user to define the information about myself which I’m happy to be shared with third parties, and it would have to make that information available via the API to relevant third parties. If it can do that, Yahoo’s user database will leap into another realm altogether - one where its privacy policy will presumably need to be regulated by the UN!

UPDATE: Well, the post below got me thinking two years back, and now it’s led to the formation of a company: MessyMedia. Found out all about it here.

Simon’s got a good post on an Economist article which accused Yahoo of no longer having a strategy - of basically being the biggest corporate thrower of spaghetti against the wall. Simon’s point is that “messy media” (a phrase coined by Kevin Kelly in his recent essay on the Web) may well demand “messy corporates”. I kind of saw the point of that, but it also kind of worried me. And then Nik explained why it worried me as much as it did:

All this means that we consumers are going to encounter quite a lot of unreliable or unintegrated services. And quite how we react to this going to have repercussions on the media monoliths themselves, which in turn affects the economy and our society generally. We could choose to accept a life of enforced variety, as we move our RSS feeds, e-mail accounts, VoIP services, etc, from one supplier to another. That would mean lots of redundancies in the media monoliths as they close down underperforming divisions (and rehire for equally short-lived new ones). Or we might force them to fix and consolidate their services. That would mean long periods of stagnation as they try to integrate disparate divisions, with disparate technologies, using people who realise the exciting company they joined 12 months previously is starting to look a lot like to nasty old company they left to go there in the first place.

I think that’s very true. Of course, this may all settle down before too much longer, but at the moment we seem to be in the middle of an orgy of technical innovation, unleashed by a combination of open standards, massive network capacity and the mainstreaming of huge computing capacity. The question is, will the orgy continue indefinitely? Because (as people have said recently when pointing out that most people haven’t a clue what RSS is) we run the risk of at best ignoring and at worst alienating the user base with all this stuff. Messy minds may enjoy messy media; tidy minds (or minds busy with living their lives) might find it a major turn-off.