virtualeconomics

Most flagrant flamebait ever

Valleywag's Paul Boutin has an article up on Wired claiming that blogging is over (so 2004, dahling) because...well, like Mathew Ingram, I'm not altogether sure what the "because" is supposed to be. The existence of Twitter and Facebook, and the de facto retirement of Robert Scoble and Jason Calcanis from blogging qua blogging seem to be the thrust of the argument.

This is really just the old Radio Will Kill Books, TV Will Kill Radio argument - "oooh look, a shiny new thing. Everyone will use the shiny new thing and stop using the thing we had last week, and here are two (two!) whole examples of moderately well-known people doing just that very thing so it must be true for everyone".

I'm not linking to the thing. It's just flamebait, and if you want to read it you can see it hanging around on Techmeme gathering the storm of abuse it was clearly intended to generate. It is trivial to take a situation defined by asymmetric competition and redefine it as a straightforward dichotomy (sure, blogs compete with Twitter for time and attention but so does Everquest, The Godfather Trilogy, the books review section of the New York Times, fishing, building model aeroplanes and popping out for a quick pint) just so you can goad the most opinionated people in the world into linking back to you by saying their medium is dead. 

So I'm not playing. The article is nonsense, but it ain't getting a link.

Update: I should have thought of this, but I didn't so I tip my hat to Bob Warfield, who points out that if blogs were really over, no-one would bother baiting them. And so with his flamebait Paul Boutin is really confirming the importance of blogs. Nice point, well made.      

Amusing Technorati "feature"

Technorati currently claims that one of the most recent links to this blog came from Deirdre Molloy's InnovationEye 14,130 days ago - or in other words during the very first few days of the 1970s, a good couple of decades before TBL had his big idea. That's some impressively early adoption Deirdre...


  

Appeal for witnesses

Best sentences I've read since Friday: "The key to life is picking the right witnesses. Thanks for being mine." This from ScottAdams, probably the best explanation of blogging I've seen.

Big aggregators have little aggregators upon their backs to bite 'em

There was a hoo-hah (yes, that's the correct technical term) before the weekend over blog aggregators taking comments away from original content sites. If the conversation fragments, goes the theory, no-one (including the people who originally wrote the content) will be able to follow it and everyone will be the poorer.

Alan Patrick handily solves this problem by proposing a "reverse aggregator" - if content aggregators can gather content from multiple blogs and conveniently assemble it in one place for the ostensible benefit of readers, presumably a similar service can gather comments from multiple feed aggregators and re-assemble them back at the original blog for the benefit of publishers.  And to be honest that pretty much seems to be that - now we're just waiting for someone to build the thing, or more likely for someone like Disqus or Cocomment to add it to their existing suite.

There's no such thing as memes. Tell your friends

Over at the Telegraph Shane has been kind enough to list Virtual Economics in his top ten blogs. If you'll excuse the self-indulgence, "ostensibly it’s about new media economics but Seamus McCauley writes about whatever he likes" made me laugh out loud. Anyway...I'm going to treat Shane's post as a tagmeme and list my favourite ten blogs; perhaps you'll play too.

In alphabetical order.

Adverlab is one of my favourite blogs because it takes a very contained subject area of considerable interest to me - developments in the field of advertising - and covers that area brilliantly. I get a lot of value out of this one.

If you've read Virtual Economics for a while you'll know me for a huge Bubblegeneration fanboy. Umair's also blogging over here now too. Suffice to say that when it comes to media strategy this is the guy who's reading the sextant and plotting the course for us all.

The Dilbert Blog records the once-a-day insights of cartoonist, almost Nobel economist, self-styled philosotainer and general contrarian Scott Adams. It's probably the blog I most look forward to reading every day and I think the sheer clarity of thought and refusal to accept received assumptions it reveals are proof enough for me that Scott Adams should be made president of the world.

One of the things I'm trying to do with this blog is teach myself economics by blogging about it and waiting for people to point out my (regrettably, many) errors. It's probably not a terribly exciting choice but the real economics blog I follow most closely is Marginal Revolution.  (I used to read Freaknomics before it went behind the NYT partial-feed wall: frankly, I care more about media strategy than I do about economics and from a media strategy point of view partial RSS feeds are just wrong. And of course I read Tim, but he's a mate and if I plug him again I expect Simon will tell me off again.)

I'm really enjoying Rick Waghorn's Out With A Bang at the moment. Insights on journalism and media from a genuine British media entrepreneur.

Paidcontent.co.uk is my starting point for work news every day. There's plenty of blogs out there that report media/tech news, but for me Paidcontent.co.uk strikes the perfect balance every day between comprehensiveness and brevity. Reliably, all the important news and analysis is in in Paidcontent.co.uk so I'm happy I haven't missed anything important before I start work. I saw Martin Niesenholtz of NYT call Paidcontent "the paper of record" for online media when hosting a panel with Rafat once, and I can't say fairer than that. (Though I could say almost the all the same things about TechCrunchUK, which under Mike Butcher is much, much better than its more famous US counterpart.)

After Paidcontent I normally turn to Jemima Kiss's PDA, and especially the fantastically useful newsbucket summary. If I had to do my job with access to just one blog post a day, newsbucket would have to be it.

Stuff White People Like is newish and superb. As a white person (in every sense meant by this hilarious blog) I can confidently say that it's generally pretty difficult to be racist to white people in a way that really bugs us. SWPL pulls this off with wit and pathos and a humour that somehow manages to be at the same time both gentle and relentlessly, perfectly vicious.

Unqualified Reservations sometimes likes to style itself as "a neo-fascist hate blog", but only when Mencius really wants to wind people up. It's actually one of the most interesting contrarian views on the web. You don't get many people who are willing to stand up and say that democracy is a really bad idea and back it up with intelligence, learning and sources. (For the record I've long thought that democracy is a terrible idea too, but Mencius does the best job I've seen of actually articulating why.)

XKCD is "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language". Alternately heartbreaking, fatuous, brilliant, wise and totally over the head of anyone who - like me - lacks a comprehensive knowledge of PERL. I am in awe of anyone who can draw a cartoon so sexually explicit it's slightly icky using only stick figures.

How to make money from your blog - print it out

My friend Max in New Zealand has a case study up based on his experiences of running the Flying Pickle local news and community blog on the outskirts of Wellington. Key learnings - explicit not-for-profits gain important advantages in audience perception, and preparing ads for small-circulation publications may simply not be economical in terms of time and effort. Interesting stuff, especially if you're running your own hyper-local reverse-published news experiments (hi David) - here's the link.

Given that everyone is a media company...

The BBC has released some new guidelines for its staff on social networks, blogging, Wikipedia and generally maintaining the reputation of the corporation as they go about their digital lives. (HT: David Black.)

It's an excellent document and, increasingly, something every company or organisation is going to need. (Look at the problems faced by Waterstones, the DWP and even the CIA when they found to their amazement bloggers in their midst.)

Corporate responses to the phenomenon of social media are by no means straightforward. It should be obvious by now, for example, that any organisation proposing a blanket rule "no-one who works here is allowed to blog" will either cut off that organisation's access to digital natives or simply find the rule flouted, ignored and worked around. Social networks are already so embedded in the social activities and lives of digital natives that functioning without them is simply impractical. But as the BBC's new policy  implicitly recognises, the challenge this poses for media companies is at least superficially different than for other sorts of organisation. A media company's product is content. Its brand and its reputation are content. Having its employees engage in incidental content-production activities of their own seems to throw up all sorts of problems unique to the business of media.

The uniqueness of the problem for media companies is, at least partly, illusory. In chapter four of the brilliant Here Comes Everybody (not read it yet? Really, do) Clay Shirky points out that much of the confusion we face in contextualising blogging and other so-called "user generated content" comes from misunderstanding the grey area that the Internet has created between broadcast and communications media. Clay writes

    "Who would want to be a publisher with only a dozen readers? It's also easy to see why the audience for most user-generated content is so small, filled as it is with narrow, spelling-challenged observations about going to the mall and picking out clothes...And it's easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing - why would anyone put such drivel out in public?
    It's simple. They're not talking to you."

And later in the chapter

    "The distinction between broadcast and communications, which is to say one-to-many and one-to-one tools, used to be so clear that we could distinguish between a personal and an impersonal message just by the type of medium used...
    ...Most user-generated content is created as communication in small groups, but since we're so unused to communications media and broadcast media being mixed together, we think that everyone is now broadcasting. This is a mistake. If we listened in on other people's phone calls, we'd know to expect small-talk, inside jokes, and the like, but people's phone calls aren't out in the open. One of the driving forces behind much user-generated content is that conversation is no longer limited to social cul-de-sacs like the phone."
(my emphasis, and I have slightly re-ordered the passage to make better sense isolated from the context of the rest of the book)   

In other words - while companies have plenty of bloggers explicitly broadcasting their personal take on their employers' industries, and while the media industry inevitably has more of its share than most, most blogs are not intended as broadcast at all. They are intended as diaries and aides-memoire, or for a circle of intimates not much wider than could be seated at a large table or reached in a series of phone calls. The reason organisations need a blogging policy is that those semi-private journals can become broadcast if someone outside that circle stumbles upon them, finds something potentially sensational therein and links them back to the organisation for which the author happens to work. Whatever our most earnest intentions, when we live online we live our lives in public and how we live reflects on our associates whether we intend it or not.

(Finally...to return for a moment to the BBC's new social media policy guidelines, it would be pure mischief on my part to suggest that a sentence in the section Political activities on social networking sites - specifically the sentence "if a  Political Correspondent were to join the Facebook group “Labour History” it may also be appropriate also to join “Conservative History” and the equivalents for the Liberal Democrats and the Nationalists" - could be construed as the BBC encouraging its employees to join groups supportive of the BNP. Still, it momentarily crossed my mind as a potentially amusing deliberate misconstrual, and I share that thought with you here, confident that it will merely amuse you too and that no-one would be malicious or foolish enough to take it anything other than frivolously.)

Blank Friday

Last week I mentioned the problems that SUP, the new owners of veteran social network Livejournal, were having "managing" "their" investment. The stealth withdrawal of basic, ad-free accounts came as a nasty shock to not only long-term users but some members of the LJ advisory board including founder Brad Fitzpatrick.

The latest cock-up by SUP is the disappearance (read, censorship) of various Interests. (One of the features of Livejournal is that users can add interests to their profile and then, if so minded, use their own list as tags to find other users that share those interests.) One Livejournal user was able to reconstruct the Interests that have gone missing since SUP took over by using the Wayback Machine, finding that the list included Sex, Boys, Guys, Girls, Fanfiction, Yaoi, Hardcore, Porn, Bondage, Faeries, Pain, Depression, and Bisexuality.

Now, the disappearance of these interests from the site has since been blamed on a technical glitch - Firefox News asked the questions and got the answers - and the interests restored. This isn't quite the "Truth vs Traffic" dilemma faced by professional bloggers, more the issue confronted by mainstream news organisations of how to monetise sensitive news pages (how many mainstream consumer brands, after all, sit comfortably next to a page tagged "depression" and "porn"?).

But users have had enough of SUP's half-baked meddling and are planning a content strike this Friday to protest...well, lots of things. The high-handed removal of the Basic Account option*. The shoddy attempts to sneak changes through without telling anyone, users or the advisory board. And the widespread feeling that the list of Interests taken down from the site indicates a bias against alternative sexuality.

Livejournal is in big trouble. Buying an online community is a delicate matter, and SUP has handled its takeover anything but delicately. A social network with no content is a very short step away from a social network with no users. I've said it before, but it bears repeating - because of the network effect, the costs of moving social network are high. You have to not just move yourself but a bunch of friends along with you. But these costs are not insurmountable. History records a number of mass shifts from one social network to another, and SUP looks increasingly close to finding out just how little an empty social network is worth.

*As an aside, it would be interesting to see what one of the original, ad-free Basic Accounts is worth on the open market but I can't find any for sale. If you see one, do let me know.  

Contra blogging

Robin Hobb, one of my very favourite fiction authors* pen an impassioned, well, rant against writers blogging today.

"You and I, we are meant to write and edit and write again. We are meant to agonize over a verb, to dig in the day’s discarded fragments to recover that one phrase worth saving, and to put all those days of writing into one coherent whole, which, graced with covers, will reside on a bookshelf, not for moments but for years. We are meant to write stories in which events have meaning and lives make sense, to make up for the nonsense and drudgery of reality.

Oh, my dearest writer friend.  Be strong.  Resist the siren call.

Don’t blog.  Write."

Can't even say I disagree especially. If writing fiction is your thing, blogging isn't likely to do much more than take hours out of your day that can't then be spent writing that fiction. Same goes for rock-climbing, herb gardening or dressmaking, of course. Blogging is a great form for quickly sharing time-sensitive ideas. But it does take time, and it isn't the same as writing novels, and if what you want to spend your time doing is writing a novel it really won't help.

*if you haven't read the wonderful Farseer Trilogy go and buy the first book now - here's a link for the UK, here's one for the US, everyone else can have fun Amazon-fishing 

All about me

Chuffed today to see that Adrian Monck has put together a list of the top ten UK journo-bloggers and and been kind enough to list me at nine.  He then has a go at disqualifying me on grounds that I'm apparently "too much of a renaissance man" (and not on the more obvious grounds that I'm not a journalist, or indeed that I'm currently finding the pressures of work keeping me from blogging as often as I'd like) but I'm happy to decline the renaissance man tag if it keeps me in the list...

Also interesting to see the differences between Adrian's list - based on Google reader stats - compares to the similar exercise carried out by Press Gazette earlier this year which (I think) was based on the opinion of journo-blogging experts Martin Stabe and Graham Holliday.

Would it be ill-mannered to accuse Adrian of link-baiting us all with this? I rather fear it would, so let's just say that I hope and expect this valuable exercise in quantifying the UK journoblogosphere (see what a god-awful word I just made up there?) attracts the attention it deserves. I know that when my friend Brendan Cooper, author of the Friendly Ghost PR blog, started quantifying the PR blogosphere with his PowerPR Index it generated a lot of interest so it seems like this sort of exercise does work.