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March 17, 2007
John Cass spoke with Mercenary Audio and got their side of the story about why they fired Drew Townson . Drew has been asked by his lawyer not to respond, but says (through our mutual friend) that he strongly disputes the company’s account. [Tags: blogging drew_townson mercenary_audio digital_rights blogosphere]
March 15, 2007
Drew Townson started a blog. Two weeks in, his fifth post was an announcement of the birth of his baby son, along with an adorable photo. (Mazel Tov, Drew!)
Then he was fired. For blogging.
He had asked his employer, Mercenary Audio, if he could blog on the store’s web site. Nope, said Mercenary, even though Drew has over the course of 25 years created a name for himself as an audio engineer and producer. (Check Google and the AMG All Music Guide.)
So, Drew started his own personal blog. On it he did not mention Mercenary, did not link to Mercenary, did not sell or offer any products or services that might be construed as competing with Mercenary. It just wasn’t about Mercenary. He didn’t even use his own name.
His boss learned about the blog when coworkers passed around the posting with the adorable photo of his newborn son. His boss then fired Drew by leaving him a voicemail that Drew picked up when he got home from the hospital.
From this we may conclude several things:
1. Mercenary wouldn’t know good marketing if it drove by with “Good Marketing” vanity plates.
2. The first amendment has been rescinded at Mercenary Audio.
3. The reports of a douche bag sighting at Mercenary seem quite plausible.
(This post is based on email correspondence with Drew, who is a friend of a friend.) [Tags: digital_rights blogosphere ]
Some of my colleagues at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center (did I mention it’s Harvard Law) point out that the First Amendment doesn’t actually cover this case. Details details! (I actually did know that, but was being all rhetoricalish. With this note I’m being accuratitious.)
March 12, 2007
I’m at the Cable Television Public Affairs Association meeting to give a lunchtime talk to the marketing folks.
It’s in the Ritz-Carlton in DC, which tells you something about the industry. This is a well-dressed crowd. Maybe one-third are women. I’m the only one in the audience iwth an open laptop. (The Ritz provides wifi everywhere in the hotel for $10/day.)
I come in late to the morning panel. On it are Mark Robichaux (ed., Broadcasting & Cable Magazine), Mark Coblitz (SVP of Comcast), Laureen Ong (Pres, National Geographic Channel), Joseph Sapan (Pres, Rainbow Media), Michael Wilner (CEO, Insight Comms). Unfortunately, I don’t know who is who, except for the woman, and Robichaux, who is moderating. [As always, my live blogging is deeply flawed and more unreliable the closer to quotes and details it gets. Also, in the broad themes and characterizations. Also spelling.]
Blogs
In response to a question about negative blogs, one of the panelists says that some of their operators actually have blogs. “We embrace it.” Another writes them off as a few people who like to complain. “Everyone in this room should read blogs every day about their companies,” says another. “If we’re not listening as much as we’re speaking to our constituents, we’re not doing our job.” [Then how about symmetric bandwidth up and down, hmmm?] Mark Robichaux, the moderator, says “Sometimes bloggers are canaries in the coal mine.”
Laureen Ong of National Geographic says that bloggers and others online answer questions for them in a useful way.
A la carte tv
How about a la carte TV, asks Robichaux? Josh Sapan (Rainbow Media) praises the diversity of cable offerings, all the way from BET to National Geographic. “It’s a great diversity of voice.” [Hah!] Mark Coblitz agrees that’s lots of diversity. Each person may only watch seven channels, he says, but the seven channels vary from person to person. Michael (?) says we need to argue against a la carte, just as we have to argue against Net neutrality.
Net neutrality
“What’s Net neutrality?”
“That’s easy: People should be able to go anywhere they want to, attach any device, and know what the terms of their service are.” [He’s implicitly citing the FCC’s Four Principles, which isn’t what most people mean by Net neutrality. And I left one out because I couldn’t keep up.] “Isn’t that that the Internet is all about?,” says another. “Anyone get to do anything they want,” he continues, I think sarcastically. The first says “This is all about sharing resouces so everyone gets the maximum out of them.” The task, he says, is to communicate the technical reasons why Net neutrality is bad. “People said in the year 2000 that we need to save the Internet, but we don’t want the Net of 2000. I want the Internet that’s coming,” the one that lets people do the new things they want to do.” [The one that shows Time-Warner movies and requires a company to pay for competitively fast service? Or the one where anyone can create and innovate in any way she wants, on equal footing?]
They complain that they don’t have the anti-net neutrality sound bite. “We talked about Net neutering, but that doesn’t work too well. That’s our own internal, because that’s what it does.” [Cool! “Net neutrality” works! We’re so used to complaining that the anti-NN folks beat us at marketing that it’s great to hear the same sort of whining coming from them.]
“The Internet is beginning to show the strains of its technology,” says another. “We offer 10 meg down and one meg up, which is a lot.” [Only compared to the pathetic speeds in the US, and only down, not up.] The geeks who measure it don’t always get that.” “The infrastructure can’t handle what everyone’s idea of what the Internet is unless someone starts to build it out.” People won’t be able to make the investment to enable, say, Netflix, to use the Internet effectively so that it works all the time and people have a good experience almost all the time.
Robichaux: “So the government would be handcuffing you.”
“Exactly. And it’s not just the last mile. It’s all along the way.”
Another: “Back in the lat 90s, there was a lot of fiber put in the ground. And guess what? We’re using it up.” [Most of the fiber is unused. And see Bruce Kushnick on the $200B of tax money the incumbents took to run fiber to our houses, but then forgot to.] “Net neutrality says everone should be able to go where they want and be able to pay. We don’t diagree with the four principles. But as soon as you put them down in writing, they’re open to interpretation. And that interpretation changes everything.”
“You know who’s making the money and making the NN argument? Little companies like Google.” He cites someone who said that NN would kill innovation. “If you want Net neutrality, it should be Internet neutrality for all the elements.” E.g., Google is too dominant, eBay owns its means of payment. [This is equivalent to saying that if you want free speech, you really ought to enforce all points of view in your dinner time conversation.]
Competition
Mark Robichaux: Satellite?
Ong: Brand counts. Viewers know that the facts on our channel are triple-checked.
Sapan: It’s made us better via competitive pressure. E.g., IFC hosts small films, and we let you watch it on-demand simultaneously when it’s released to the theaters
“Congress says the problem with out industry is that we don’t have competitors. But we wake up every day thinking about how we compete in the marketplace. Every business we’re in is extremely competitive on the distriution side.” [Still, most of us don’t have much of a choice.]
“We’re all losing eyeballs to the Internet, and I’d go so far as saying you can lose your phone before you lose your video, and you can lose your video before you lose your online connection. It trumps everything. The younger generation is turning TVs off. They’re on the Internet. They’re watching the same content thanks to some of our friends [sarcastic] making it available.” [Wow.]
User-generated content
Robichaux: “What’s the best idea for using the Internet as a tool for your company?”
Ong: We have a tech savvy audience so the Internet is something we use to promote back to the channel, to put programming out that they can’t see on the linear channel, and we recognize that it’s making us rethink our business because no one is going to watch a full-length documentary on the Internet. [Maybe not, at least this month. But we’ll move it onto our iPod our TV, if we’re able.]
Sapan: The area we’re messing with right now is mixing user generated content with video on demand and linear television. Not much has been done with that.
Robichaux: why is ugc important?
Sapan: The history of TV is you make something, copyright it, put it on TV and the max number of people watch it. Now each of those is violated: There is no owner, there is no copyright. There’s all these people spending all this time looking at user generated content. From a purely mercantile point of view, if there’s a lot of time spent on it, that one way or another will be translated into money. What intriques is how to connect what people are making with video on demand. In the case of indie films, we’re asking people to submit their short films. We curate them. We would like to place those films on the servers of cable companies in the geographic areas from which they come, so there could be “the best of” films in that area, and the “the best of the best of” that would make it onto the channel. [Current.tv? Why do we need the cable companies to do this for us?] This is good because it gives them the fastest Internet connection to the video, video on demand, and a linear channel. We pursuing this on IFC and We TV.
Coblitz (Comcast): We’ve woven Internet into just about everything we do.
Q&A
Robichaux: Take-aways: Be honest. Keep it simple. It’s about relationships. For example, when you’re talking to a Congressperson… [And here I thought he was talking about talking with customers!]
Questions from the floor.
Q: What are you doing about Internet safety?
A: (comcast) We provide parental controls to people who want them. Our 12 yr old said, “Dad, block anywhere you don’t want me to go…but then don’t look where I go.”
A: (Insight) It’s up to the parents, but most parents don’t use the controls.The bad experiences are behind us [??]
A: (Rainbow) The computers aren’t in the kids’ bedrooms.
[Tags: ctpaa net_neutrality cable tv broadband blogs everything_is_miscellaneous media]
March 9, 2007
Berkman‘s Vendor Relationship Management site now has its own blog, which is off to a good start with a posting by Doc… [Tags: vrm doc_searls berkman]
March 8, 2007
The University of Alabama at Birgmingham has a lab full o’ bloggers in Antarctica. They’re posting up a blizzard, and filing photos at flickr as well. Very cool, so to speak. (Thanks to Jeff Keeton for the link.) [Tags: blogging anarctica science everything_is_miscellaneous ]
March 5, 2007
Yochai Benkler, author of the single most important book about the Internet — The Wealth of Networks — is giving a “theme-setting” talk.
He points to the wide distribution of computer power and “insight, intuition and experience” across the population, as opposed to their concentration during the industrial revolution. The behaviors that have already been there but on the periphery — friendship, cooperation, decency — now move to the core. We see “commons-based prodiuction,” i.e., produciton without exclusion from the inputs and outputs. This decentralizes the authority to act. “The commons locates authority to act where capacity resides.”
It enables peer production and sharing: cooperation without control or the price system. It is based on social relations. (See “Sharing Nicely.”) He points to the success of open source software, and to a mapping of Mars craters by a collaborative process (“Martian clickworkers”). Also, of course, Wikipedia. He asks us to imagine when Wikipedia started that someone predicted that Nature would find it about equal to Britannica in its science articles in five years. He concludes: “We’re beginning to see a solution space, rather than a particular phnenomenon.” There’s a “load balancing of motivations over time” — people can contribute when they want and for whatever reasons they have.
“Building such platforms is hard.” “Coase’s Penguin” says peer production tasks require modularity, granularity and integration. (He says he’s been working on seeing how this works. He’s looking at experimental literaure on cooperation and reciprocity, game theory, evolutionary biology and anthropology. “There are more design levers than I initially thought.” Factors include: Self-selection, communication, humanization, trust construction, norm creation, transparency, monitoring/peer review/discipline and fairness. Introducing money can muck things up.
So long as large-scale needed to be concentrated, we were llimited to firms and governments, or we could work in decentralized form through the market. Now we’re seeing a non-market decentralization via social sharing and exchange…a parallel form of production. We go from recording industry to p2p, Microsoft to open source, Grollier to wikipedia, telecoms to Skype. And there are new “opportunity spaces,” from well behaved appliances to production tools. He points to the BBC citizen journalism effort, among other examples. [Yochai moves very quickly. . This is the double fudge Death by Chocolate form of knowledge overload.]
But, this is a threat to incumbent business models. So there’s a battle on. Yochai shifts to politics. “The core idea is that people now as a practical matter can do more for and by themselves.” And they can do more in loose assoiciation with others. When it comes to democracy, our epxerience “is purely with a mass mediated public sphere.” We’re beginning to learn what it means to have a networked public sphere. He recounts how concerns about e-voting machines from Diebold were raised by activitists, put out info, and how it spread.
The Internet democratizes. It’s boring by now, but important, he says. The first generation objections are generally unfounded: “The Daily Me” fragmentation hasn’t happened, and it doesn’t polarize the way claimed. For one thing, polarization is a matter of interpretation: Is 85% of links pointing to like-minded sites a sign of polarization or its opposite? And the power law misses the topology of the Net that hooks small sites to large sites as part of a community. Those large sites then can get the word out.
There’s a strong “see for yourself” ethic. We come to understand that everything we read is a provisional judgment, rather than training ourselves to seek authority as we did in the mass distribution system.
The Human Development Index depends on who and how produces information, Commons-based and peer production are beginning to help: open source, open academic publishing , free hs science texts in South Africa, BiOS and BioForge out of Australia.
The threat is being played out over institutional ecology. “Rules can make some actions easier or harder.” Incumbernts are trying to make distributed production harder, more expensive, subject to permission. And there’s a push back to be free and productive. Broadband duopoly vs. muni broadband. “Trusted computing systems” vs. general purpose devices. Software patents vs. free and open source. DMCA vs. sharing and open innovation. There’s been a tightening up of all the “toggles,” e.g., copyright. “Law has been systematically optimized for control-based business models…”
“But we’re beginning to practice new ways of being free and equal human beings.” This is subject to a persistent battle.
Now there’s a panel: Mark Cooper, Elliot Maxwell, KC Clafy and Gigi Sohn.
Elliot Maxwell talks about Yochai’s ideas applied to pharmaceuticals. Among other things, he points to the PLoS library of failed clinical trials.
KC Claffy (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis). Things we cannot measure on the Internet: The topology from one point to another at any layer. Propagation of routing. Router won’t give us its entire state (it’s second best routes.) One way delay from two places on the Internet without customized instruments. Can’t get an hour of packets from the core. Accurate flow counts. Accurate bandwidth. How much spam, phishing. A commons infrastructure would allow all this. (See this presentation.)
GG Sohn from Public Knowledge first praises The Wealth of Networks. Then she says that her one complaint is that Yochai gives the government too much of a break.
Mark Cooper wants to chart a course between Yochai’s optimism and Lessig’s pessimism. Yochai points to the use of collaborative production in the material economy. But, in his politics he shrugs off the attacks under the claim that in the long run the superior mode of production will prevail. “I think he’s clueless about politics.” But, “we can build an alternative politics on Yochai’s epistemological and moral base.” We need more than the blogosphere. We have not yet shown we can transform the public sphere. The public sphere needs institutions that transform the routine activities of daily life. [Yes, but how we do this except by having good ideas an implementing them? E.g., come up with another Creative Commons.]
Q: (isenberg) Yochai, would you like to address whether loose goosey has a chance against righty tighty?
A: There’s a common thread between Gigi and Mark. In the long term we care about social practices rather than policies, laws and institutions, because those are subsystems we occupy and life practices are the outcome. Law matters, but the critical question is: Do we need an affirmative set of rules that will enable things, or is blocking bad law and rules enough? I used to work on reforming laws and was pessimistic, and now I’ve flipped. “I do think that what we’re seeing in the Net roots, in the blogosphere, in the global access to knowledge is that political organization is also shifting away rom the standing institutional model, toward more ad hoc networks that mix different kinds of players nad get updated over time…and that disconnect and reconnect, rather than relying on stable institutions…I see the future of political engagement being much flatter, ad hoc…” [Tags: f2c yochai_benkler economics peer_production ]
March 3, 2007
From the header of Blog to America:
Content for Blog to America is completely generated by the readers. Blog to America is a site where individuals from around the world post their opinions on the United States in the form of letters and comments. This can be done by clicking on the “submit a letter” tab and filling out the form or by simply sending us an email. Our site aims to encourage global communication and create an international dialogue between America and the world.
As an American, this is some painful reading so far. The posts range from tough love to just tough. It’ll be especially interesting to see if the comments develop an ethos of dialogue; there’s some hope there so far.
It’s one of those experiments that depends on getting unpredictable small things right. Otherwise, the site might turn into AmericaSucks.com.
(BTW, BlogToAmerica.com claims the copyright for anything posted there. Also btw, the domain AmericaSucks.com is registered to Register.com.) [Tags: america blogs gv global_voices]
March 2, 2007
The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Jennifer Saranow about live blogging personal events that’s entertaining, provocative, and ends with an anecdote about the Accordian Guy, Wendy Koslow and AKMA.
It’s a nicely done piece, although I’m not satisfied with its main explanation of why people live blog everything from births to funerals. Jennifer seems to view it as a type of narcissism. But all writing in public is narcissistic —”Hey, listen to me!” — and I’m not sure that live blogging is especially so. For one thing, frequently live bloggers are writing about other people’s events.
I don’t have an alternative hypothesis to offer. Live blogging is inexplicable enough that it seems likely to be an indicator of a more important fault line in how we’re constructing public and private spaces. Or something. [Tags: live_blogging blogging blogs wsj everything_is_miscellaneous ]
March 1, 2007
From the BostonNow blog:
BostonNOW is a new free daily newspaper launching this year that will incorporate both traditional and citizen journalism. Your ideas about the Boston community (news, politics, sports, the arts, etc.) will appear side-by-side with the words of BostonNOW staffers and wire service journalists. We will promote your work prominently both in the paper and on the website, not in a “local blogs” or “reader photos” ghetto.
Every day, BostonNOW will direct readers to the Web, where they will find real depth and discussion. BostonNOW will become the place to learn what folks around here really think about politics, entertainment, sports, and their fellow humans. This dialogue will create a newspaper of the people, by the people, for the people.
BostonNOW will truly be your newspaper.
Sounds good on paper, so to speak. In fact, it sounds great. They’re holding a get-to-know-the-bloggers party this Saturday, March 10:
RSVP here. (Thanks to Steve Garfield for the link.) [Tags: boston media msn journalism blogosphere blogs ]
February 28, 2007
James McGrath Morris has an article at Law.com that tries to de-hype blogging’s contribution to news by saying what bloggers do is nothing new and pointing out that blogs are error-prone.
We’ve all been over the error prone argument forever. As for the argument that blogging is nothing new, well, nothing is really new. The importance of blogging for journalism does not rest on a claim that it’s without any precedent. In fact, James says that the blogs’ claim to a lack of objectivity is a return to the “Golden Age of Journalism,” which would mean that while it’s not new, it’s different. James is arguing against a strawperson, and thus sleighting the real effects of blogging on journalism.
Finally, he goes on to say that “blogging may be more democratic, but it’s also likely to be less read. There is a point when there are simply too many blogs. With 30 million blogs today, we may well have reached that point.”
That last point sounds a bit like the Yogi Berra remark that no one goes to that nightclub any more because it’s too crowded. It ignores the research that shows there’s a short head and a long tail, which means that a handful of blogs are being massively read and — more important — there’s a huge network of nodes each of which accretes a local readership.
And then he sort of misrepresents me. The nerve! He says that I announced in an “All Things Considered” commentary that I am no longer reading many of my friends’ blogs. Not exactly. I didn’t stop reading my friends’ blogs; I gave up on keeping up with them every day. There’s a difference: I still read my friends’ blogs, just not as steadily as I once did. And, fwiw, my point was that it should be considered rude to assume that anyone has been keeping up with your blog. So, James was off a shade. But, then, we all know that articles about blogs and journalism are error-prone. (Damn humans!) [Tags: blogging journalism media citizen_journalism msm everythin everything_is_miscellaneous]
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