Matthew Hindman talks about mapping traffic between political websites. He shows a way cool animated graphic of traffic between sites. Mainly the cross-position traffic is name-calling. 45% of the conservative traffic goes to FreeRepublic.com because it gives lots of links to the five other largest conservative sites. Liberal site are less concentrated.

Lada Adamic breaks the male-only panelist barrier. She teaches at U of Michigan and talks about how cascades happen. The fact that nodes cluster doesn’t mean that all the power is in the hub nodes. A meme can start on a small site and spread to the hub nodes. In a “barbell distribution,” it’d be interesting to see how info flows.

Tony Conrad of Sphere.com talks about his service that seems to be the anti-Technorati. He stresses that Sphere.com does not rank purely (or mainly?) on how heavily linked a site is. For example, it gives special weight to the first post on a topic.

Matthew Hurst of BuzzMetrics shows a graphic of an overview of the Blogosphere. [Why think that the Web has a top-down view?] The social political blogs are at the center of the English-speaking Blogosphere. Geographically, LiveSpace bloggers are spread out in a way that maps roughly to the Blue States. Xanga, meanwhile, maps to Red states.

Marc Smith of Microsoft Research shows his graphic display of Usenet interactions. He concludes by pointing out that we’re leaving traces behind everywhere we go.

Q: (me) The maps that show the gap between sides are used often to demean the Internet because it’s just a re-concentration. But the question is whether the Net makes us more democratic than before (as per Yochai Benkler and Mary Hodder). What do we compare those with? With how many dinnertime conversations fairly include the opposition point of view? Barroom conversations? Even articles in magazines?

Q: (Jeff Jarvis) Blogs aren’t trying to be media. It’s people in conversation. How many times do Democrats hang out at Republicans meet-ups? Vice versa? But together they do make democracy.

Q: How does what you do help Microsoft’s business? [very rough paraphrase!]
A: The future of computing is social.

[Does the online Contemporary American Literature group have to have 50% of its links going to romance novel sites and medieval discussion groups or else democracy has failed on the Web?] [Tags: annenberg hyperlinkedsociety maps politics]

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Fantastic set of panelists: Jimmy Wikipedia Wales, Ethan Global Voices Zuckerman, Nicholas Debunker Carr, Martin NYT Martin Nisenholtz, moderated by Saul NYT Hansell.

Nick: Content is being atomized, fragmented. Each of the fragments has to stand on its own economically in the marketplace. But, the market works well for toasters, but not necessarily with books and articles. The cross-subsidies have provided much of what’s good in newspapers and magazines. E.g., the classified ads pay for reporters to go to Africa. In an atomized world, you lose the cross-subsidies.

Martin: About.com is actually our biggest property on the Net. Our task is to turn people who come in through a side door (e.g., Google) into regular readers who engage with us as a package (as opposed to engaging with NYT atoms).

Jimmy: We have four employees and Wikipedia has four times the reach of About.com, compared with 150 there. And we have more than enough money to pay the bills each month. Communities can build content that others want to see using an economic model far less expensive…

Ethan: A lot of the old models haven’t done a good job of covering the developing world. While I have enormous esteem for msm like the NYT, it’s worth pointing out that the system isn’t without its flaws. Writing for an interconnected world is much different than reporting for a newspaper…

Saul: Why don’t Nick and Jimmy go at it…?

Nick: It’s a myth that Wikipedia is an open collective without any centralized control that naturally gets better as the community engages. Wikipedia is evolving more and more hierarchical structures. In the history of culture, you could throw out all the collectively written stuff and never miss it. The myth sucks the air out of the market for any professionally created product.

Jimmy: I’ve been saying for years that Wikipedia is driven by a core community. That’s always been the case. The “Edit this page” link gives people the wrong impression that it’s about millions of people each writing one sentence. As far as it driving others out of business: That’s their problem. And, btw, Wikipedia is more highly read in Germany than in America, and [the German encyclopedia publisher] Brockhaus’ sales are up 30%. Maybe it’s because Wikipedia reminds people that encyclopedias are cool.

Martin: Our research says that a relatively small group of people want to aggregate RSS feeds.

Jeff: I find it fascinating that this has turned into a panel on economics. And economics is about control. You, Nick, fear it, but the horse is out of the barn.
Ethan: Few of us want to lose the media’s ability to put a reporter on an airplane. But we do want recognition of what’s going on bottom up. [Paraphrasing!] Global Voices has 120 people around the world, but they’re bloggers, not reporters. They have a different, complementary take on what’s being reported by the msm.
Martin: We bought Blogrunner to make sure we can insinuate the Blogosphere at the article level.

Q: Nick, isn’t Wikipedia really a hybrid model in which the small group of amateurs who run it are becoming professionalized? And, Ethan, is there anything we can do to make things work better in the next five years.
Nick: You’re right. Wikipedia is moving toward a more professional structure. But there’s still a question about how good it will be. Right now, it’s mediocre with some very good entries and some very bad ones. But, because there’s no money in it, there’s no incentive for competing products, so you’re left with less choice.

Jimmy: No money means less choice? Take a look at the Blogosphere. And the fact that Wikipedia is freely licensed means people take it and do all sorts of interesting things with it.
Martin: We have over 600 editors because we’re trying to get at the best possible facts. We think the two worlds can coexist.

Ethan: There’s been a revolution in mobile phones in Africa, but not laptops. Mobile phones are relevant to people lives because it’s an economic tool: Should I bother going to a market, etc. Laptops are not relevant that way. Some of the communal tools online are developing on mobiles phones and talk radio. But that doesn’t connect globally. We found during Live 8 that there’s a disconnect that actually can be healed.

Q: Students rely on Wikipedia?
A: I get at least one email a week from a college student who says he got an F citing Wikipedia. I write back saying, “For God’s sake, you’re in college. Why are you citing an encyclopedia?” We tell people to be aware of what it is. It’s pretty good but any particular page could have been edited five minutes ago, incorporating a new error. It’s generally “good enough.”

Q: How do links change society?
Ethan: At GV they let people around the world talk. When you see the next billion enter the Net, you’ll see them build this into a medium of interconnection.

Saul: Spend some time on MySpace where people are turning their lives into media spaces.
Nick: So, we’re training our children to gather information in shallow, superficial ways, and lose their ability to be contemplative.

Saul: Didn’t we lose that with TV? Aren’t we taking a half step back from TV?
Nick: I worry that understanding something will mean understanding it in how Google’s Larry Page’s algorithms understand the world.

Q: How do we help people become media literate?
Martin: Whenever we talk about professional versus non-professional, we’re getting it wrong. They’re complementary.

Saul: I think we’re going to get very savvy about media.

Q: Is Wikipedia really different from OhMyNews and the like?
Jimmy: OhMyNews is exactly what I have in mind when I talk about hybrid models. [Tags: annenberg wikipedia global_voices nytimes nicholas_carr hyperlinkedsociety]

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I’m at an Annenberg conference on “the hyperlinked society.” Subtitle: “Questioning connections in the digital age.” (Program Panelists No known stream, although apparently it’s being taped. IRC: irc.freenode.net #annenberg. Bloggers include: Jeff Jarvis Ethan Zuckerman Jay Rosen Seth Finkelstein Mary Hodder … this is a rough list. sorry if I missed you. It’s early.) [As always, I’m paraphrasing, at best.]

The first panel is led by Jay Rosen. It’s on “mainstream linking.”

Tony Gentile of Healthline talks about his site’s interest in getting people linking to it. Healthline indexes 170,000 sites it considers reliable. In one case, they contractually required a partner to link to them, although it’s usually more mutual. “Pretty much everything is driven off of the links,” including their REST-based API.

Tom Hespos of Underscore Marketing, has an advertising and journalism background. Google was a turning point in the history of hyperlinks, he says. Google gave links intrinsic value [because links boost page rank]. One intended consequence: Link spam. The spamming “is beginning to erode the value” of linking “and we need to do something about it.”

Eric Picard works for the advertising side of Microsoft. His group tries to understand “the economic model of hyperlinking: connecting people to information and to businesses relevant to that information.” E.g., how do you put linked ads into a virtual world that brings value to both the user and the vendor, “or at least doesn’t piss off the user.”

Jay Rosen says that returns to Raymond Williams who says in Culture and Society: There are no masses. There are only ways of seeing people as masses. People are unique, but you can address them as a mass. The Age of Mass Media, says Jay, is about the art and science of seeing people as masses. But today all these ways of seeing people as masses are coming apart. They;’re not as effective. People don’t stand for it any more. So now we have to learn how to see people not as a mass but as a public, a community, knowledge producers. Links connect us horizontally, not just up and down. “All the professions that specialize in seeing people as masses, or as the market, are having to contend with a world where horizontal communication is so much more effective.” Often, if people can meet each other, they don’t need the mass world, says Jay. And, as a blogger, he says, through the “magic of links” he was able to talk about the press without having to go through the filter of the press. “So, for me linking has been powerfully associated with intellectual freedom.”

Q: (Jonathan Kaplan) Comments on the new telecom bill that does not have network neutrality protected?
Tim Hespos: So now we may have another variable about links: How fast it is. That’s a shame.

Tony Gentile: It’s not something people will stand for. We’ll find a way to route around it.
Eric Picard: My personal opinion is that I’d like to see things stay as they are, without tiered access fees.
Jay: I’ve often had the feeling that blogging can’t last because it’s too open and too democratic. A sense of foreboding that they won’t let us keep doing this. It’s too much fun and it’s too free. But I think people won’t stand for it.

Q: (Jeff Jarvis) Google is capturing the wisdom of the crowd. (We do need to figure out how to outsmart the spammers.) Links give power to the people and the collection of links is our collective knowledge.

Q: How does one get links?
Tony: Don’t ask for one. I need to come to know your writing first.

Q: (Me) I asked a rambling question about worrying about commercial interests in getting links, and ego interests in getting links, disrupts the semantics of the web. [Then I was too upset to be able to grasp the answers :( ]
Jay: It has to do with how we see other people, value their time, regard their own freedom. The notion that your time belongs to me because I can trick you into clicking this link…that whole idea that you belong to me because I can stimulate you is the difference between the two types of links.

Q: There’s no nuance to a link. We could put microformats into links.
Tony: Structured blogging or something like it is necessary because right now links don’t imply anything.
Jay: It’d be great to have some sort or urgency, like a triple underscore.

Q: (Consumer Reports) Are you ever approached directly by advertisers? What do they want and what do they give you? Also, it seems like there’s enthusiasm here for exchanging one set of gatekeepers for another.Tony: Advertisers don’t approach us.
Jay: It’s better to be a gatekeeper than to beg a gatekeeper. And the barriers of entry are far lower. [Tags: annenberg hyperlinks hyperlinkedsociety]

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<plug>

I’m plugging Boston BarCamp because it sounds like it will be a fun, informative, community-building unconference. So, if you’re a geek – or geek camp-follower like me – consider coming out to Monster Worldwide in Maynard, June 3-4.

(I can only be there part of the time, probably Saturday evening through the Sunday. I think I’ll hold a session on Everything Is Miscellaneous.)

</plug> [Tags: barcamp conferences boston]

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Richard is head of Edelman PR, the third largest PR agency in the world. [Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, reporting to Richard.] Eric Norlin is interviewing him. (Robert Scoble bowed out because his mother is ill. Best wishes, Robert.)

[Josh Hallet has posted the audio of the this session.]

Q: Why are you pitching bloggers without reading them?

A: On behalf of the PR field, I apologize. There’s a better way. If not, bloggers will revolt.

Q: What’s different about Edelman?

A: We try to be a good example. We don’t always succeed.

Q: So, how would you pitch Robert Scoble?

A: You’d probably send him an email saying that you saw something he wrote, that you represent a company, would you like a sample without any strings attached? Would you like to get info about this company in the future? Permission based!

Q: Does the offer to provide product without strings scare companies?

A: Yes. Tech companies are scared the least. Heavy industry is worried the most. The mentality of corporations is the control of the message. We’re saying that if you want to be credible, you can’t control the message. E.g., GM Tahoe ads.

Q: If your product doesn’t suck, why do companies worry? It’s like 7th graders on the playground.

A: Marketers want to know they’re getting a certain audience at a certain frequency. The ad agencies have impressed on them for 30 years that you go from impressions to action. We — all of this in the room — deconstructing that model. You can’t have a topdown conversation where you buy a certain number of impressions. We’re saying it’s a horizontal conversation, peer to peer. It can turn bad for a company but that’s good because you can learn something. We you do media training you learn the message triangle: Always come back to the three same messages. Kerry lost the debates because he was media trained while Bush came across as a regular guy. So, the message triangle is gone from Edelman’s lexicon. That you can only communicate three messages is baloney. It’s a great opportunity for PR if done properly. If it’s message triangles and top down and spin, we’ll be flushed down the toilet of history.

Q: Are the ad agencies getting this?

A: Somewhere between panic, fear and nerves. The ad agency world has a huge reservoir of people who know how to make 30 second films. They don’t have a model for making money in the new world. The best work being done in ads is being done by younger agencies that don’t have an installed capability of doing 30 second ads. The ad guys are terified. It’s ruining their revenue model. They should be at this conference, but they’re not.

Q: Who reads press releases these days?

A: I had a discussion with _____ [missed it] who said the press release needs reinvention. Add tags to the press release: This is the company description, this is the supporting quote. He said he doesn’t want our news judgment because PR companies don’t have news judgment.

Q: Plus every company is the leading provider of…

A: It’s a word that will go away.

Q: So what replaces press releases?

A: We’ll give a set of information with tags, so you’ll organize it the way you want. [Sounds like a microformat to me.]

Q: How does a PR agency deal with the fact that a 12 yr old in Australia can break news as quickly as John Markoff of the NY Times? (A Scoble question.)

A: You have to be listening to the voices, and not limited to those you’ve always thought of as your sources of news. Stories can start with those of little “authority” (in Technorati speak). Second, stories frequently start in the blogosphere; the PR agencies don’t generally understand that. The Dove Real Beauty campaign started when Gawker noticed. We’re working with Technorati on a system that will work across seven languages — PR agencies willl be able to watch seven languages, real time, for your clients.

Q: Are big clients up on all this?

A: It’s a challenge. We’re working with having our clients show bloggers their products in advance of launch.

Q: What about Wal-Mart? Did you pay bloggers? [This is not actually what the accusation was. The issue was that some bloggers used pro-Wal-Mart information from Edelman without attributing it to Edelman or Wal-Mart.]

A: No, we did not pay bloggers. We look for bloggers who are positively inclined toward Wal-Mart, our client. Then we try to establish a conversation with them. A guy from our DC office sent a message to bloggers identifying himself as a PR agent and asking whether the bloggers would like more information about what Wal-Mart is doing about health care, etc. That got misrepresented by the NY Times. But: We identified ourselves and our client, told them our interests, and asked if they wanted a conversation. We followed every rule of engagement. It’s our right and our responsibility to do precisely this.

Jeff: The NYT requested a standard of bloggers that the NYT doesn’t hold to. It wants bloggers to identify where their info came from.

Richard: It would have been better if the bloggers had atttributed that the info had come from us for Wal-Mart. We didn’t say “You must mention Wal-Mart’s name as the source.”

Jeff: Bloggers don’t know the rules. They need training.

Richard: We will tell bloggers that they should mention the source.

Eric: What will PR look like in 5 years?

A: PR involved earlier on in the product life cycle: We’ll be a means by which a company can reach out to bloggers to affect prod development. Deconstructed press release. A more robust role in the corporate suite. I don’t see PR as being disintermediated. David Weinberger [hey, that’s me!] thinks PR gets in the way; no one wants to talk to the PR person. I think we should want the flak. We are indeed agents in that we represent our clients. I don’t see that PR has to be a negative connotation, which it currently has. We have to be about truth, listening, learning, and telling the corporation stuff it doesn’t want to hear. Five years from now, I hope PR people have the bvalls to say what they know. We need to give clients good advice. (We have thirty people blogging at Edelman. You learn by falling on your face.)

Q: What’s the retraining process at Edelman like?

A: It’s not easy. We have 30 people blogging. We probably have 15-20% who are regularly in touch with bloggers. That’s pathetic. I have to be tougher about it.

Q: (Audience) A blogger got sued by an ad agency, who then dropped the suit. Is it a good idea to sue bloggers.

A: No.

Q: Are you modeling the topology of the blogosphere?

A: There isn’t a model yet.

Q: Is PR getting smarter by looking at how groups interact, etc.

A: PR agencies are getting slammed for bad behavior, as they should.

Q: Who among the consumer brands get this best?

A: Unilever gets it.

Q: Who’s the best publisher – newspaper, magazine, etc.?

A: Washingtonpost.com is interesting.

Q: Do you advise clients to do executive blogs?

A: If the executive has an interesting voice.

Eric ends it by having a moment of silence for Robert Scoble and his mom. Amen. [Tags: pr richard_edelman syndicate]

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After being away all weekend, I’m just catching up…before heading off for a day at Syndicate. First off, Ethan did some of his usual worldclass conference blogging of the Beyond Broadcast shindig. Items tagged by participants can be found at del.icio.us. Here are the flickred photos. And here are some more links, taken straight from Amanda Michel at the Berkman Center:

Jessica Duda at Beyond Broadcast overviews panel focusing on new tools for public broadcasters.

Barbara Abrash at Beyond Broadcast reviews The War Tapes.

Andy Carvin gives the stats on college students’ Internet use.

Andy Carvin paraphrases Brendan Greeley of Open Source Radio.

[Tags: beyondbroadcast media]

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Jennie Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast site has a bunch of interviews with participants at the Beyond Broadcast conference I missed this weekend. (I was at a World Resources Institute offsite to work on communications strategies. Fascinating group of people and they’re working on one of the most important issues on earth. I was thrilled to be included, but sorry to miss the BB conference.) [Tags: berkman beyondbroadcast thoughtcast jennie_attiyeh wri]

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Berkman is holding what promises to be a great conference, called “Beyond Broadcast” today and tomorrow. The webcast is here, Second Life is here, the question submitting tool is here. (I’m really unhappy that I’m on the road and can’t attend in any of these forms!) [Tags: berkman beyondbroadcast media]

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Bar Camp, which the organizers insist is pronounced “Bah Camp,” is coming to Boston — well, Maynard, actually — June 3-4. Bar Camp is a sleep-over for geeks (and for admirers of geeks such as moi). The time is unstructured and the schedule is made up by the attendees. Dress is business casual. (Just kidding.)

Bar camp was invented as a response to Foo camp. Foo camp is O’Reilly Publishing’s “Friends Of O’Reilly” sleep-over that I so much enjoy. Because Foo is by invitation — there’s limited space in the O’Reilly back yard — Bar was created to be open to all.

If you’re in New England and like the smell of unshowered geeks in the morning, Boston Bar is the place to be.

[Tags: bar_camp geeks]

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John Kruper of Cardean moderates. (I’m live blogging while I’m on the panel.)

Will Richardson, who teaches in the K-12 system, thinks blogs provide a powerful opportunity for students to make connections to other people, ideas…”I cringe when I hear people say blogs are online journals. They’re learning places.” His 6 and 8 yr old children have blogs and engage with other kids their age.

Liz Lawley says she uses blogs to get info out to her classes. She also sets up a class blog where students can talk about the assignments, comment on each other’s activities, post results of research and other projects. They look at one another’s posts and comment on them. “It encourages a kind of thoughtful ongoing dialogue that you simply can’t do when you only have four hours a week in class.” She also invites authors to engage in a dialogue with the class. This teaches them that there are long term consequences to what they say.

George Siemens explains his term “connectivism.” The half-life of knowledge is diminishing, he says: it’s becoming obsolete faster than ever. Courses can’t keep up. Connectivism says that the knowledge resides in the networks we create. Our education system was designed to create certainty. Now the system has to be able to adapt quickly. The network persists longer than traditional relationships with teachers.

Adrian Chan says that different social software apps are organized to support different themes: Dating, career networking, etc. He looks at the social practices in the use of the software, including in the educational environment. What matters is how technology is embedded in the process. In the case of edu, many of the students already have practices set up: They already IM, chat, etc. How do these technologies change conversation? Is there a type we can identify as learning? If you integrate technologies, would you lose some of those learning opportunites.

I talk about lessons from Wikipedia ,but I can’t blog and talk at the same time.

Doug Thomas, who has an article with John Seely Brown in Wired this month, says he’s concerned that we’re training kids for the best jobs in the 20th Century. Instead, we should be helping expand imagination. He knows a student who has to sneak art and music into his studies because they’re not on the test. “Our mission is to try to re-integrate imagination back into the curriculum.” MMORPGs are one way to do that. They’re not just games; they’re synthetic worlds. (He says the average age of WOW players is 28.) Because you can imagine liberating things in the game, you imagine liberating things outside the game. E.g., a mgr at Yahoo approaches every task as if setting out on a quest. Doug shows the famous video of the Star War Galaxies emergent party – 100 players learning choreography, etc. He taught a course with a heavy mmorpg component and learned he had to get himself out of the way. They learned from experience. E.g., it’s hard to lecture about ethics, but if you can put them into a situation where they have to make a choice…

Q: It’s all so basically new. Are people basically good or bad in this environment?
George: Content is useless. The instructor provides guidance, not content, and isn’t the center of the experience.

Liz: Content isn’t irrelevant. If we’re going to turn out people with the credentials employers want, we have to be sure they have the content required. But it’s not a matter of pouring content into people.

Q: Companies access MySpace of potential employees. Should your 6 and 8 year olds be worried?
Liz: This is a huge issue. We can’t tell our kids not to blog. We have to teach them to think about what will happen in 5 or 10 yrs.
George: We have to teach them how to handle the freedom.
Will: This is a literacy we’re not teaching our kids. And enabling kids in MySpace to link to Old Spice is what’s really bad.
Me: And we need a culture of forgiveness. Maybe our kids will figure it out.

Q: You’re creating a generation of Borgs that play games.
(We didn’t really answer this.)

Q: We get it. How do we get there? E.g., not everyone can afford a laptop.
Liz: You have to start with the teachers. The technology has to be part of the day to day environment.

George: The problem is a lack of will, not of resources.

Q: With 50,000 blog posts an hour, the problem is one of discovery. How do we know whom to trust?
Doug: Scale counts. E.g., at Second Life a group looks for copyright infringement. When it gets really big, they can’t police it. Community governance arises.

Me: These are issues we can only solve by working through them. The change is too deep.

Q: In Shanghai, you can go into a Net cafe where people are playing mmorpgs that put them into medieval China. And I blog and get hate mail. What about the dystopian aspects?
Doug: It’s both/and. People probably said about the first cave paintings: “Oh no, the kids will spend all day on line and won’t hunt.” People miss the subtleties of what’s going on.

Liz: In part it’s because you’re writing for Huffington Post.

Q: We still have the old leadership style.
Liz: People react by banning laptops. It puts a burden on the professors when they have to actually hold students’ attention. We’re performers at heart but that’s not what professors will need to be.

Will: The control issue is at every level. There’s a district in Texas that’s banned the word “MySpace” — not the site but the word.George: Same issues for corporate education.

Doug: Scaffolding knowledge is different than experiential knowledge. Some ways are not taught well in an exploratory fashion. [Tags: milken education blogs]

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