Paying to socialize?

Tech.blorge, one of the blogs on my RSS feeds, recently published an entry titled “Would you pay to use Facebook“.  They are echoing some of the ideas raised as a reaction to rumors that Facebook, which raised half a billion dollars less than two years ago, is running out of cash.  One of these ideas is subscription-based Facebook, meaning you will have to pay for accessing the website.

Right now this sounds more like a speculation, but it looks like the Russian social networking websites are actually experimenting with the subscription-based models.  I wrote in the past about the various ways Odnoklassniki.ru is monetizing on the social aspects of online social networks.  Recently, my father pointed out an item (RU) in the one of the Russian-language new websites, which states that Odnoklassniki is now requesting payment from new users asking to register.  According to this article, the registration now will cost between $1-2.  Those who choose not to pay will not be able to view other people’s profiles, contact other users, etc.  In other words the free registration is lacking any of the “social” elements, which is the main reason for people to join.

I looked a little bit around and there are more news items about that move in RuNet.  The official rationale stated by the Odnoklassniki management is that the paid registration is aimed at combatting spammers, who tend to open numerous accounts and use them for promotion of their products.  Some of the critics disagree (RU), suggesting this is just a way for Odnoklassniki to force the spammers to share their profits from the network.

In any case, it will be interesting to see whether or not the paid registration model will turn out to be sustainable.  Probably Facebook crew and others will be watching as they think about their next move. In the meantime, I do wonder if you would pay to socialize online?

New media

Thanks to Bob, I got exposed to the “GOOD Magazine” (site) – an online outlet dedicated to social issues with an interesting funding model and young approach to content.  Here is an example of what they create (a few months outdated, but still interesting):

What do you think?

Citizen Media Legal Guide

Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) at Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard) just launched an interesting, and hopefully helpful, project called Citizen Media Legal Guide. Here is an excerpt from their official press release:

The free guide, which is intended for use by bloggers, website operators, and other citizen media creators, focuses on the legal issues that non-traditional and traditional journalists are likely to encounter as they gather information and publish their work online.

“We’ve created the legal guide to address the myriad legal issues faced by online publishers, whether they are bloggers, citizen journalists, or established journalism organizations.  Because many online publishers don’t have a background in media law, we have tried to make the guide as approachable as possible and included dozens of practical tips for avoiding legal liability,” said David Ardia, director and co-founder of the CMLP, an initiative to provide legal assistance, education, and resources for citizen media and to study the impact of law on online journalism.

The guide is covering six major sections:

1. Forming a Business and Getting Online
2. Dealing with Online Legal Risks
3. Newsgathering and Privacy
4. Access to Government Information
5. Intellectual Property
6. Risks Associated with Publication

The website of the project provides a fully searchable version of the guide, which main limitation is that it covers US only.  It would be great to have also some international perspectives as well.

Hope you will find it useful!

Al Gore’s media event

Yesterday was my first time at a typical media event in the US.  Thanks to Joanne, I went to Al Gore’s announcement of a national challenge on climate and energy.  The event was very popular and it was a rather interesting experience.

On the one hand it was well organized in terms of communication leading to the event.  By the time Joanne and I registered, we made it only to the waiting list.  Nevertheless, the organizers kept on communicating with us and encouraged us to come, assuming that they will be able to fit in everyone.  There were indeed a lot of people and getting in was quite a mess.  Of course there were some supporters of Al Gore’s ideas, some protesters, and some advocates for vegetarian\vegan food, demonstrating outside.

Inside, it was rather impressive.  It was my first time in the DAR Constitutional Hall and it was packed (probably over three thousand people).  The crowd was extremely supportive.  Gore was received with standing ovations and many times his talk was interrupted with more ovations.  Well, in fact it wasn’t interrupted, as the speech was very well planned and the ovations came in all the expected places.  It was rather short and didn’t have any famous Al Gore’s use of gadgets (which I hoped for).  I didn’t have a normal camera with me, but took a few pictures with the cell phone.

The speech itself was rather simple and short.  This is not to say it was not good, but I felt slightly used, as it was too obvious that the entire event was held for the small army of journalists who were there typing, taking pictures, and filming.  The audience was there just as a decoration, and it was a really good and interactive decoration.  You usually see it on TV, but when it happens live, the feeling is quite different.

As I said, the message was simple:

• The problem: United States is in a horrible shape with weak economy, distant wars, and high gasoline prices;
• The reason: United States’ reliance on fossil fuels;
• The solution: Shift to using renewable energy sources in 10 years from… NOW!

To help everybody with that Al Gore and Co. have launched the “We” campaign, which has a nice website with additional information about the idea and footage of yesterday’s speech.  According to the website, so far over 1.3 million people already signed up.  From a quick glance at the website, the primary goal of the campaign is advocacy and it is used as a vehicle to collect signatures on various petitions.

Again, it was an interesting experience.  It was not only a typical media event of a kind you usually see on TV (especially now, with all the coverage of US presidential election) – one that is carefully planned and has a weird mixture of sincere ideas and crafted messages.  The way the speech was delivered was also interesting.  Maybe this is the image of Al Gore that i had in my head – one of a global liberal thinker concerned with the future of the entire planet, but I found the speech to be extremely US-centric.  That makes sense in light of my other observations above (after all it is a carefully planned event), but the level of patriotism and nationalism in Al Gore’s speech caught my ear.  It sounded as if US is the world and solving the national problems will definitely make the rest of the planet a better place.  Without judging this way of presentation, it was surprising.

As to the substance, I am no expert on energy, but it looks like the speech was recieved with mixed feelings (not by the audience in the hall, but by experts elsewhere).  Nevertheless, it also seems that the environmental questions are entering every domain of public discourse, including telecom policy.

CNN 1.0

I watched some morning news on CNN today.  One of the main items was the reaction of Obama’s supporters to his vote for an amendment to FISA (official site).

For those who do not follow, a few days ago the senate voted for granting immunity to the telecommunication companies for participating in wiretapping program of the current administration.  In the past Obama opposed this legislation, but in the current vote he changed his mind and voted for the amendment.  As a result, many of Obama supporters came out criticizing him.  A lot of the criticism appeared on the social network component of Obama’s own campaign site (if you haven’t done it yet, take a look, there is a small Facebook on his website).  I think this is the story in a nutshell, but you can search for FISA and Obama for further details (here is an item on CNN’s website for example).

Now to my morning observation….

The main point, made a number of time during the morning news, was amusement, or even shock, about criticism taking place on Obama’s website.  How can it be that a campaign website hosts criticism of the candidate?!?!  After all, Obama is considered to be the one who harnessed the internet and reinvented election in the 21st century!  How come he allows criticism on his own campaign website?!  Is this what the new politics all about?

Leaving sarcasm aside, it really looked as if the anchors found it difficult to comprehend that there is a discussion going on a social networking platform on a candidate’s website.  And their shock/amusement went on and for the half an hour that i had the TV on.  However, what got lost in that shocking reveliation of new politics is the issue itself.  FISA did not get discussed and the change in Barak Obama’s stand deserved only limited attention (as a background to the virtual uprisal).  Most attention was focused on the fact that Barak Obama’s supporters are backlushing on him and they do it on his own campaign website.

The bottom line is that I think CNN missed the point.  In fact it was really surprising that a channel that markets itseld as technologically advanced (just remember all the touch screens obsession) has such an unsophisitcated amusement by technology as its main political item of the morning.  Not impressive at all.

Claiming an acronym – MICT

A while ago a read an article by Boczkowski & Lievrouw, titled “Bridging STS and communication studies: Scholarship on media and information technologies.”  In fact, it became a book chapter in “The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Third Edition” (2007). One of the points Boczkowski & Lievrouw make in their chapter is about the terminology.  They are offering to use the acronym MIT (Media and Information Technology) instead of ICT (Information and Communication technology).  The rationale behind this suggestion is the emphasis on the significance of content in the process of communication.

I think this is a very interesting chapter and I have been trying to use their acronym ever since.  However, using it a ran into two problems.  First, the more substantive problem – it seems that missing out the process of communication from describing the domain of my inquiry is damaging to the cause.  The process of communication and the communication enabling technologies are important factor in what i am trying to look at.  Second, on the more mundane level, the term MIT doesn’t fly because of a very strong brand of MIT the institute of technology.

This is where i would like to propose a different acronym to use for definition of my field of inquiry.   It was created in one of our conversations with Tarleton (i bet the entire credit actually goes to him) where we discussed this issue.  The acronym is MICT (pronounced “mist) and it stands for Media, Information, and Communication Technology.  I think this term does a more comprehensive job in capturing the field of inquiry both Tarleton and I (also probably Josh in our department and many other people elsewhere) are focusing on.

I am actually making a more elaborate argument about it in one of the papers i am writing at the moment, but i would love to hear any immideate thoughts from you.

Framing eco-friendliness

Once, I was told that advertisement is a mirror of the society, but one that exaggerates some features.  This probably explains that when the social reality is surreal, the advertisement is heading in the same direction.  Here are some viral advertisement clips promoting eco-friendliness made by the Israeli branch of Mccann. Some of the clips are usually in Hebrew (HE) and some are in English (EN), however they are being sometimes removed from YouTube.  In the current batch, all clips are in EN:

Ride a bicycle (EN):

Walk more (EN):

Buy a hybrid (EN):

Last updated: 7 July, 2008

Puzzled

I read about a website called Compete.  It provides comparative analysis of website traffic.  After trying the obvious Google vs. Yahoo vs. MSN and seeing Google and Yahoo as very close competitors (which was a little bit surprising), i thought about trying something less obvious.

Usually, websites in foreign languages are not tracked by this kind of websites, but I decided to try.  My comparison was the three major Israeli newspapers: Ynet vs. NRG (Maariv’s website) vs. Haaretz.  I know that at least Ynet and Haaretz have separate URLs for HE and EN versions, so what i compared were the HE URLs.  Also, Ynet is considered to be by far the leading online outlet in Israel, though i am not sure who holds the second place (in print that would Maariv).  Now, imagine my surprise when i got this:

According to this graph, Haaretz is by far the most visited (in terms of unique visitors) online outlet, Ynet is only second, and NRG (not surprisingly) the third.  But that is not all.  Here is the ranking comparison:

Again, Haaretz is in the lead, followed by Ynet (closer this time), followed by NRG.  Though i am not sure how to read this metric.  On the one hand it ranks sites based on the unique visitors metric, but the frame of reference is “the top one million websites in the U.S.”

Where it is getting more intuitive is in the comparison of the number of visits:

But even in that case, the gap between Ynet and Haaretz is not that significant, yet it is growing. Same goes with the length of stay (in minutes):

It looks like people tend to spend more time on Ynet and NRG, but not on Haaretz.  That is, again, counter-intuitive, because Haaretz usually has longer and more complex articles as opposed to sound bites on Ynet and NRG.  One explanation to that metric can be that people arrive to Haaretz’s homepage, but do not actually read.  Or, alternatively, there may be more content on the homepages of Ynet and NRG, compared to that of Haaretz.  So, people navigate away from the homepage to read the articles quicker on Haaretz.

In fact that is one of the more confusing parts for me in these metrics.  Do they account only for activity on the exact domain or on all its sub-domains as well?  Also, it is quite possible that many people have domains of their favorite newspaper saved as a bookmark or they choose it from the auto-complete line in the address bar.  In that case, some of the confusion with Ynet can be explained, as its homepage URL in auto-complete looks something like that: http://www.ynet.co.il/home/0,7340,L-8,00.html instead of a simple www.ynet.co.il (even though i just saw that this is not really the case with the new Firefox).

However we are not done with surprises yet. Here is a comparison of monthly attention each on the of website was getting in the last year:

This one is, again, a relative metric of time spent on a given domain with the refernce frame of “the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users,” which i find quite a confusing one.

Number of pages per visit is yet another surprise:

It seems that people tend to browse through NRG more than through Ynet.  However, this metric implies that they track not just the homepage, but also the rest of the inner pages, which highlights the puzzling aspect of previous results.

All in all, i found this excersise interesting, yet very confusing as it contrudicted the common wisdom i held so far.  This is why i kept on reading in order to find out how exactly they are getting their data.  So, i think my confusion was partly resolved when i read that they derive their information from a “sample of 2,000,000+ U.S. internet users” who gave them “permission to analyze the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys.”  So, on the other hand, that may explain the difference in popularity of the various outlets, but on the other hand, i am surprised that the Israeli websites in HE actually made it into their analysis (ranked among the first 60K out of a million websites).  So, i am still puzzled.

Politics, popularity, and personalization

I already said that i love DC. Another reason to love it, are the many opportunities offered by this city.

A week ago or so, i participated in a debate/discussion about “new” media and political campaigns hosted by Google and National Journal and titled “The First 21-st Century Campaign“. Being hosted by Google, the event attracted some very interesting people and was held in a format of discussion rather than a traditional (academic) presentation-style lectures. Unfortunately, i wasn’t smart enough to bring a camera even though the event was absolutely open and the organizers even encouraged people capturing it in any possible way. Another unfortunate thing was that i couldn’t stay for the entire event and in fact stayed only for the first panel (out of three).

Fortunately, though, the first panel was very thought provoking.  Nothing super controversial or innovative has been said, but it was great to hear thet the industry people are concerned with the same issues that academics are.  Actually, i think the panel would benefit from a visionary academic person who could bring the entire discussion under a comprehensive (dare I say, macro) umbrella.

The first panel, moderated by Judy Woodruff of PBS, hosted Mark Halperin (”Time” – as a representative of the old media), Katherine Ham (Townhall.com, even though she announced she has a new job now), James Kotecki (Politico – he and Katherine were the representatives of “new” media), Phil Singer (Clinton campaign), and Kevin Madden (Mitt Romney campaign _ he and Singer were the political practitioners on the panel).

Most of the discussion focused on the tensions between the “old” and the “new” media.  In my view it started pretty awkward with Kotecki’s remark that he doesn’t see himself as a journalist and was (i got a sense that he was implying that he still is) making his video just to feel popular.  It was particularly stonning because one of the main points of the discussion was credibility of the “new” media as a journalistic practice.  Kotecki himself was making claims for being credible, which (together with some of the other comments, such as those made by Singer) got me thinking whether or not the 2.0 culture equates credibility to popularity.  If so, i find that idea pretty disturbing.  One the one hand, i can buy into the idea of wisdom of crowds (that’s the term i think), but, on the other hand, i cannot buy into dismissal of expertise that seems to be attached to it (at least in the current discussion).

Another interesting point came from the campaign people and it was primarily about the use they make of information.  For Madden, the “new” media were all about speed and precision of the media message.  Even though they never got talking explicitly about how they use microtargeting (even though i raised that questions), it was constantly implied in the examples they provided.  Building of the idea of popularity, it was now also the ability of precise targeting of the message.  I would describe that as an ability of talking about “popularities” rather than a single popularity.  To a a degree that appeared as a distinction between the “old” and the “new” media as well.  I found the latter rather interesting – the basic concepts mass (popularity) did not change, but progressed and evolved (into popularities), but the substance became implicitly even less important.  In other words, there is no substantive change in the policy or in the ideas, but the package is more personalized.

As the discussion evolved, it became more interesting and sophisticated.  To one degree or another, the panelists touched upon many relevant points.  This highlight was, I think, when Singer or Halperin, noticed that the mere division between the “old” and the “new” was artificial.  Ham also was very sharp when talking about the relations between the “old” and the “new” media (even though she was clearly advocating for the legitimacy of the latter).  I found this particularly interesting, because usually you hear a very deterministically-dichotomous discourse where the “new” is presented as separate and mostly superior to the “old”.  Even though Judy Woodruff finished the panel with some techno-utopian remarks (mostly as a tribute to the host), it did spoil the overall flavor of complexity.

On the practical level i came out of this symposium with two titles for potential books.  Not that i plan on writing those this summer, but… If i were to write a book with critical analysis of the modern Western society, particularly focusing on the youth, i would title it “The popularity generation.”  Maybe there is such a book already and maybe it will become the label of generation Y with all the reality shows and a myriad of televised competitions (for popularity of course :).  The other book would be about this campaign, or about contemporary politics in a broader sense.  That one i would title “The politics of personalization.”

Finally, kind of getting back to one of my first points, i think the symposium would really benefit from an academic input.  Maybe even more broadly, i think this industry could learn as much from the academia as the academia is learning from it.  At the end of the day, all the points raised by the panelists are being discussed and studied, and bringing those inputs would enrich the discussion and probably take it into the next level.

You can read a short post following the event on Google’s blog or you can actually watch the entire thing on C-Span (and enjoy me asking some questions :).

The AP drama

I just learned about a currently developing online drama.  Associated Press (AP) decided that they are going to charge bloggers and anyone who cites their content.  The tariff is $2.5 a word or $12.5 for five words.  Now, as I understand it, if I post here a title of AP’s article with a link to it, I will have to pay, and if i cite anything from their article and provide a link to it, i will still have to pay.

AP are explaning this move in copyright terms and are apparently threatening to sue some bloggers. Frankly, I am finding it really difficult to follow their logic.  If they don’t want people to cite and link to their content, why are they making it available online?  Either I am missing some huge point here, or peole at AP don’t understand the “rules of the game” they are into.

« Previous Page — Next Page »