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Curing High School

December 13, 2010 in Berkman, Blogging, Business, Future, history, infrastructure, Links, Live Web, problems, Research, Technology, VRM | 10 comments

So I’m in the midst of my first encounter with PeerIndex, which I found through this Petervan’s Blog post. I’d been pointed to PeerIndex before, and to other services like it, and have always found them aversive. But this time the lead came from a friend and business associate, so I thought I’d check it out.

While it’s kinda creepy using Facebook Connect and other means of dumping one’s online life into a service one does not yet understand, much less trust, I don’t have any secrets at any of those data sources, so I gave it a try. Here’s the result, in graphical form:

peerindex

Here’s how Peter explains this:

Peerindex helps you understand and benefit from your social and reputation capital online. How much is your online reputation worth ? PeerIndex is a web technology company that is algorithmically mapping out the social web.

The way we see it, the social web now allows everyone endless possibilities in discovering new information on people, places, and subjects. We believe that the traditional established authorities and experts – journalists, academics, are now joined by a range of interested and capable amateurs and professionals. As this locus of authority shifts, many new authorities emerge. PeerIndex wants to become the standard that identifies, ranks, and scores these authorities — and help them benefit from the social capital they have built up

Btw, my Peerindex is 60. That’s based on my digital footprint on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and my blogging activities. It is obvious to see that this number “60” may one day translate into some virtual social currency.

Friends, this is high school with a business model.

While our value in the marketplace depends on our reputations, we are not reducible to “captial,” “assets,” “currency” or any other measure.

What I write on this blog, what I tweet, what I share through LinkedIn and Facebook, is not for an “audience.” I have readers here. That’s who I write for. While my services, whatever they are, have value in the marketplace, and I get paid for some of them, that’s not why I write what I write—here, in Twitter or anywhere other than in private correspondence that concerns actual business.

Somewhere back in the early days, this blog plateau’d at about 20,000 regular readers. It’s still there, I’m sure, though I haven’t checked in years. On Twitter I’ve got about 12,000 followers, who I suspect are a subset of my blog readers. That’s fine with me. I’m not looking for more. And I don’t care if I have less. I write stuff that I think is worth sharing, mostly on the old Quaker maxim of not speaking unless you can improve on the silence. Shouting louder isn’t my style. Joking around is. Saying too much or too little is. Being myself is.

Somewhere in the oeuvre of Kurt Vonnegut is a line I can’t find on the Web, but remember going like this: “High school is the core American experience.”  [Later… Mike Warot found the original. Very cool.] I think this is true. And I think that’s what this kind of stuff, as otherwise well-intended as it may be, appeals to.

In his first World Entertainment War album, Rob Breszny pauses in the midst of a wacky narrative to offer a multiple choice question for which the correct answer is this: “Burn down the dream house where your childhood keeps repeating itself.”

Wishing for popularity and approval is a mark of adolescence, a term invented to describe a normative high school condition—specifically, one in which childhood is prolonged. The best cure I know is chug down some Whitman. Here’s a sample:

In all people I see myself, none more
and not one a barleycorn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

I know I am solid and sound.
To me the converging objects of the universe
perpetually flow.
All are written to me,
and I must get what the writing means.
I know I am deathless.
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept
by a carpenter’s compass,

I know that I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself
or be understood.
I see that the elementary laws never apologize.

I exist as I am, that is enough.
If no other in the world be aware I sit content.
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware, and by far the largest to me,
and that is myself.
And whether I come to my own today
or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I cheerfully take it now,
or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

My foothold is tenoned and mortised in granite.
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.

I am a poet of the body,
And I am a poet of the soul.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man.
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

I chant a new chant of dilation and pride.
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough.
I show that size is only development.

Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President?
It is a trifle.
They will more than arrive there every one,
and still pass on.

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night.
I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.

Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of the departed sunset!
Earth of the mountains misty topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon
just tinged with blue!
Smile, for you lover comes!

Prodigal! you have given me love!
Therefor I give you love!
O unspeakable passionate love!
Thurster holding me tight that I hold tight!

We hurt each other
as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other

You sea! I resign myself to you also…
I guess what you mean.
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers.
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me.
We must have a turn together.
I undress. Hurry me out of sight of the land.
Cushion me soft. Rock me in billowy drowse.
Dash me with amorous wet. I can repay you!
Howler and scooper of storms!
Capricious and dainty sea!
I am integral with you.
I too am of one phase and all phases.

I am the poet of common sense
and of the demonstrable and of immortality.
And am not the poet of goodness only.

What blurt is it about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me.
I stand indifferent.
My gait is no faultfinder’s or rejecter’s gait.
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

Did you fear some scrofula out
of the unflagging pregnancy?
Did you guess the celestial laws are yet
to be worked over and rectified?

I step up to say what we do is right,
and what we affirm is right,
and some is only the ore of right.
Soft doctrine a steady help as stable doctrine.
Thoughts and deeds of the present
our rouse and early start.

This minute that comes to me over the past decillions.
There is no better than it and now.

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs,
a cosmos.
Disorderly fleshy and sensual…
eating, drinking and breeding.
No sentimentalist… no stander above men and women
or apart from them… no more modest than immodest.

Whoever degrades another degrades me.
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
And whatever I do or say I also return.

Through me the afflatus surging and surging.
Through me current and index.

I speak the password primeval.
I give the sign of democracy.
By God, I will accept nothing which all cannot have
their counterpart on the same terms.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the generations of slaves,
of prostitutes and deformed persons,
f the diseased and despairing,
of thieves and dwarves.
Of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars
— and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Of the fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts. Voices veiled,
and I remove the veil.
Voices indecent are by me clarified and transfigured.
I do not press my finger across my mouth.
I keep as delicate around the bowels
as around the head and heart.

Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites.
Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles,
and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

Divine I am inside and out;
and make holy whatever I touch or am touched from;
The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.

If I worship any particular thing it shall be some
of the spread of my body.
Shared ledges and rests, firm muscular coulter,
it shall be you.
Breast that presses against other breasts, it shall be you.
Mixed tussled hay of head and beard and brawn
it shall be you.
Sun so generous it shall be you,
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you.
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals
rub against me it shall be you.
Hands I have taken, face I have kissed,
mortal I have ever touched, it shall be you.

I dote upon myself. There is that lot of me,
and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy.

I cannot tell how my ankles bend…
nor whence the cause of my faintest wish.

A morning glory at my window
satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

To behold the daybreak!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows.
The air tastes good to my palate.

Hefts of the moving world turn on innocent bearings,
silently rising, freshly exuding,
Scooting obliquely high and low.

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs.
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

The earth by the sky staid
with the daily close of their junction.
The heaved challenge from the east that moment
over my head,
The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!

Dazzling and tremendous how quick
the sunrise would kill me
If I could not now and always send sunrise out of my self.

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun.
We found our own way my soul in
the calm and cool of the daybreak.

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach.
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds
and volumes of worlds.

Speech is the twin of my vision…
it is unequal to measure itself.
It provokes me forever.
It says sarcastically, Walt, you understand enough —
why don’t you let it out then?

Come now, I will not be tantalized.
You make too much of articulation.

Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me.
I crowd your noisiest talk by looking toward you.

Writing and talk do not prove me.
I carry the plenum of proof and everything else
in my face.
With the hush of my lips I confound the topmost skeptic.

All truths wait in all things.
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it.
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any.
What is less or more than a touch?

Logic and sermons never convince.
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so.
Only what nobody denies is so.

I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals.
They are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied.
Not one is demented with the mania of owning things.
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.
Not one is respectable or industrious over all the earth.

I am a free companion. I bivouac by invading watchfires.

I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
And tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

My voice is the wife’s voice,
the screech by the rail of the stairs,
They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drowned.
I understand the large hearts of heroes.
The courage of present and all times.
I am the man. I suffered. I was there.

I am the hounded slave. I wince at the bite of the dogs.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments.

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels.
I myself am the wounded person.
My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane
and observe.

Distant and dead resuscitate.
They show as the dial or move as the hands of me…
and I am the clock myself.

The friendly and flowing savage: who is he?
Is he waiting for civilization or past it and mastering it?
Behavior lawless as snowflakes. Words simple as grass.
Uncombed head and laughter and naivete.
They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers.
They are wafted with the odor of his body and breath.
They fly out of the glance of his eyes.

You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
open your scarfed chops till I blow grit within you.
Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets.
I am not to be denied. I compel.
I have stores plenty and to spare.
And anything I have I bestow.

I do not ask who you are. That is not important to me.
You can do nothing and be nothing
but what I will infold you.

I seize the descending ;man.
I raise him with resistless will.

O despairer, here is my neck.
By God, you shall not go down.
Hang your whole weight upon me.

I dilate you with tremendous breath. I buoy you up.
Every room of your youse do I fill with an armed force.

The weakest and shallowest is deathless with me.
What I do and say the same waits for them.
Every thought that flounders in me
the same flounders in them.

I know perfectly well my own egotism.
And I know my omnivorous words,
and cannot say any less.
And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.

I do not know what is untried and afterward,
But I know it is sure and alive and sufficient.

It is time to explain myself. Let us stand up.

I am an acme of things accomplished,
and I an encloser of things to be.
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me.
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing,
the vapor from the nostrils of death.
I know I was even there.
I waited unseen and always.
And slept while God carried me
through the lethargic mist.
And took my time.

Long I was hugged close. Long and long.
Infinite have been the preparations for me.
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing
like cheerful boatmen;
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings.
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother
generations guided me.
My embryo has never been torpid.
Nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb.
The long slow strata piled to rest it on.
Vast vegetables gave it substance.
Monstrous animals transported it in their mouths
and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employed
to complete and delight me.
Now I stand on this spot with my soul.

I know that I have the best of time and space.
And that I was never measured, and never will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey.
My signs are a rainproof coat, good shoes
and a staff cut from the wood.

Each man and woman of you I lead upon a knoll.
My left hand hooks you about the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes and continents,
and a plain public road.

Not I, nor any one else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born
and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds, and I will mine,
and let us hasten forth.

If you tire, give me both burdens and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip.
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me.

Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams.
Now I wash the gum from your eyes.
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waited,
holding a plank by the shore.
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again,
and nod to me and shout,
and laughingly dash your hair.

I am the teacher of athletes.
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own
proves the width of my own.
He most honors my style
who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then. I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.

I concentrate toward them that are nigh.
I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work
and will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.
He complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me.
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any
on the shadowed wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the desk.

I depart as air.
I shake my white locks at the runaway sun.
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt and grow
from the grass I love.
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.
And filtre and fiber your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.
Missing me one place search another
I stop some where waiting for you.

Today, this is that place.

[Later…] @PeerIndex responded with a generous and non-defensive tweet. As I tweeted back, hats off.

FreedomLeaks

December 9, 2010 in Business, Future, infrastructure, Journalism, Places, Politics, problems, Technology, VRM | 7 comments

We’ll start with four essential posts on the Wikileaks matter.

First is Iran and the Bomb, by Hedrik Hertzberg, It’s this week’s Talk of the Town in The New Yorker. Here’s the pull quote:

Perhaps the two biggest secrets that the WikiLeaks leaks leaked are that the private face of American foreign policy looks pretty much like its public face and that the officials who carry it out do a pretty good job.

Second is Clay Shirky‘s Wikileaks and the Long Haul. His bottom lines (or, paragraphs):

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us “You went after Wikileaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”

Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.

Third is Hackers Give Web Companies a Test of Free Speech, in the New York Times. It’s about secretive hackers attacking MasterCard, Visa and Paypal, and doing so in what we might call a “social” way. Sez the Times, “To organize their efforts, the hackers have turned to sites like Facebook and Twitter. That has drawn these Web giants into the fray and created a precarious situation for them.” The pull-grafs:

Some internet experts say the situation highlights the complexities of free speech issues on the Internet, as grassroots Web companies evolve and take central control over what their users can make public. Clay Shirky, who studies the Internet and teaches at New York University, said that although the Web is the new public sphere, it is actually “a corporate sphere that tolerates public speech.”

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “Any Internet user who cares about free speech or has a controversial or unpopular message should be concerned about the fact that intermediaries might not let them express it.”

She added, “Your free speech rights are only as strong as the weakest intermediary.”

Fourth is Dave Winer‘s Are we starting a full-out war on the Internet? His post pivots from Wikileaks to a larger issue: the Net itself:

I watch my friends root for the attackers and think this is the way wars always begin. The “fighting the good fight” spirit. Let’s go over there and show them who we are. Let’s make a symbolic statement. By the time the war is underway, we won’t remember any of that. We will wonder how we could have been so naive to think that war was something wonderful or glorious. People don’t necessarily think of wars being fought on the net and over the net, but new technology comes to war all the time, and one side often doesn’t understand…

…the Internet no longer has to fight for a right to exist. The people want it. But what kind of Internet we get, and what kind of government we get, those two things are now very deeply intertwined, and absolutely not decided. And how our financial system functions, that’s going to be what the war is fought over, if we can’t avoid having a war — which we should, if we can.

Let’s go back to Clay’s characterization of the Web as a corporate sphere that tolerates public speech. This is true, and in a way that goes far deeper than the current popularity of Twitter, Facebook and other “social” sites and services. It goes to the Domain Name System, or DNS.

You don’t own domain names. You rent them. You do this through a domain name registrar. Most of these are commercial entities. These sit in a domain name space that is hierarchical in nature and structure. This is why it is possible for governments and well-placed companies to cut off Wikileaks from every Web location other than wikileaks.ch, in Switzerland, which is characteristically neutral on the matter. It’s also why, even with COICA (the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act) still in its larval stage, Homeland Security can kill off websites for alleged copyright infringement without showing probable cause, issuing a warrant, or anything else so traditionally procedural. (Here’s one example.)

The Web and the DNS are also organized on the client-server model. In addition to putting site owners at the mercy of greater powers in the hierarchy, this puts users — you and me — at the mercy of the site owners. Think about this every time you don’t read the terms of an “agreement” you submit to. The pro formalities of these conform to the submissive/dominant relationship between clients and servers. These agreements, known as contracts of adhesion, nail down the submissive party while leaving the dominant party free to change the terms. Such is the law of the Web’s jungle: a system in which site owners control the rules of engagement, and provide the means as well. This is why you have to carry around a janitor’s keyring of separate logins and passwords for every different site and service with which you do business. The shortcuts provided by Twitter and Facebook are handy, but can also mask high degrees of exposure — especially in the Facebook case. (See I Shared What? for schooling on this.) Think about why “privacy policy” appears in nearly a billion sites, with the quotes, and in three and a quarter billion sites without the quotes.

So, why don’t you have your own policy? Why can’t you be as trustworthy on the Web as you are walking into any store off the street? The reason is that you have no status on the Web itself beyond the minima implied by the term “user.” Whatever status you experience is what’s granted by site owners. You are the client. Your position is submissive. The dominant party is in charge, and there are a billion-plus of those.

I don’t propose fixing either DNS or the client-server model. I do propose, however, that we work on new models that don’t put us in submissive roles. For one example, see “How is your idea new?” under our Knight News Challenge entry. (And, if you like it, give it a good rating.) There are others as well. David Siegel wrote a whole book on one. Kynetx has another. (They’re complementary.) I could go on (and I invite others to do exactly that).

The Wikileaks mess was made on the Web, and less so the Net. These things are different. More to the point, we are netizens and not just webizens. The war for the Net is a separate one, and it is being faught in many places. From some of those places, little if any news escapes. (For example, did you know that your city in Texas you can’t do what Chatanooga’s doing in Tennessee?) Others places, such as Washington, are beyond fubar.

I’ll have more to say about that war in another post soon. Meanwhile, it might help to read an oldie but (very) goodie: Retired Texas Judge Steve Russell’s reaction to the late Communications Decency Act.

Some context on privacy

December 7, 2010 in Business, problems, Research, Strange stuff, Technology, VRM | Permalink

Searches:

So if you’re looking for something about privacy that’s not a site with a privacy policy, you’re also looking at a high haystack/needle ratio.

Just saying.

Not sure what else that data says, such as it is. But it’s interesting.

Tags: , , ,

Some context on privacy

December 4, 2010 in Business, problems, VRM | 1 comment

Searches:

So if you’re looking for something about privacy that’s not a site with a privacy policy, you’re looking at a high haystack/needle ratio.

Just saying.

Public radio still rocks

November 26, 2010 in Business, infrastructure, Journalism, Politics, problems, Quote, radio, Technology, VRM | 5 comments

Lately, thanks to the inexcusably inept firing of Juan Williams by NPR brass, and the acceptance of a $1.8 million grant from George Soros, NPR has tarred its credentials as a genuinely fair and balanced news organization. Which it mostly still is, by the way, no matter how much the right tries to trash it. (And mostly succeeds, since trying to stay in the middle has itself become a lefty thing to do.)

Columnists all over the place are calling for the feds “pull the plug on funding for Natonal Public Radio”. (That’s from No subsidy for NPR, by Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby. An aside: NPR’s name is now just NPR. Just like BP is no longer British Petroleum.) In fact NPR gets no money from the feds directly. What NPR does is produce programs that it wholesales to stations, which retail to listeners and sponsors. According to NPR’s finances page, about 10% of that sponsorship comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Another 6% comes from “federal, state and local government”.

Jeff points to a NY Times piece, Move to Cut NPR Funding is Defeated in the House, which says “Republicans in the House tried to advance the defunding measure as part of their ‘YouCut‘ initiative, which allows the public to vote on which spending cuts the G.O.P. should pursue.’ The You Cut page doesn’t mention public radio. It does have this:

Terminate Broadcasting Facility Grant Programs that Have Completed their Mission.

Potential Savings of $25 million in the first year, $250 million over ten years.

In his most recent budget, President Obama proposed terminating the Public Broadcasting Grants at the Department of Agriculture and Public Telecommunications Facilities Grants at the Department of Commerce. The President’s Budget justified terminating these programs, noting that: “Since 2004, the USDA Public Broadcasting Grants program has provided grants to support rural public television stations’ conversion to digital broadcasting. Digital conversion efforts mandated by the Federal Communications Commission are now largely complete, and there is no further need for this program.” and “Since 2000, most PTFP awards have supported public television stations’ conversion to digital broadcasting. The digital television transition was completed in 2009, and there is no further need for DOC’s program.”

CPB isn’t in there. And they’re right: the digital conversion is done. So maybe one of ya’ll can help us find exactly what the congressional Republicans are proposing here.

Here’s a back-and-forth between Anna Christopher of NPR and Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard. Says Anna,

NPR receives less than 2% of its funding from competitive grants sought by NPR from federally funded organizations (such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts).

Replies Michael,

I appreciate the smug, condescending tone of this letter, but I’m unconvinced. As one former CPB official I spoke to explained, “they love to claim they’re insulated, but they’re very much dependent on the public tit.” The other 98 percent of NPR’s funding comes from a mix of donations, corporate support, and dues from member stations. The fees and dues paid by member stations comprise more than half of NPR’s budget. Where does that money come from? In large part, from the federal government.

Take the local NPR affiliate in Washington, WAMU 88.5. That station paid NPR in excess of $1.5 million in dues, the station’s largest single expense outside of fundraising and personnel. The station also took in $840,000 in public funding and grants from the CPB. The station spent nearly $4 million on “fund-raising and membership development,” with a return of just $6 million. Fundraising is expensive — public money isn’t.

I looked at the .pdf at that link and don’t see the same numbers, but it’s clear enough that NPR affiliates pay a lot for NPR programming, and a non-trivial hunk of that money comes from CPB. According to this CPB document, its regular approriation for fiscal year 2010 is $420 million, and it’s looking for $430 million in 2011, $445 million for 2012 and $604 million for 2013. Bad timing.

Still, here’s the really interesting thing that almost nobody is talking about. Public radio kicks ass in the ratings. It’s quite popular. In fact, I would bet that it’s far more popular, overall, than right wing talk radio.

In Raleigh-Durham, WUNC is #2, with an 8.2 share. That’s up from 7.5 in the prior survey. Radio people can tell ya, that number is huge.

In San Francisco, KQED is #4 with a 5.2 share.

In New York, WNYC-FM is down in the teens with a 2.2 share, but nobody has more than a 6.5. Add WNYC-AM’s .8 share and classical sister WQXR’s 1.8 share, and you get a 4.8, which is #3 overall.

Here is Boston, WBUR has a 3.3 share. WGBH has a 1.1. Its classical sister station, WCRB (which now avoids using call letters) has a 2.7. Together those are 6.1, or #3 overall.

In Washington, WAMU gets a 4.8, , and stands at #5. Classical WETA has a 4.4, for #6. Add in Pacifica’s jazz station, WPFW, with .8, and you get 10, which would be #1 if they were counted together.

There are places where public radio, relatively speaking, sucks wind. Los Angeles is one. The public stations there are good but small. (The Pacifica station is technically the biggest in the country, but its appeal is very narrow.) Dallas is another. But on the whole, NPR stations do very well.

But do they do well enough to stand on their own? I think so. In fact, I think they should. That’s one reason we created ListenLog, which I visited at length here last July. ListenLog is an app that currently works with the Public Radio Player from PRX.  The idea is to show you what you listen to, and how much you value it. Armed with informative self-knowledge, you should be more inclined to pay than just to cruise for free.

We’re entering an era when more and more of our choices are both a la carte and our own. Meaning we’re more responsible, on the whole. And so are our suppliers. There will be more connections between those two facts, and we’ll be in a position to make those connections — as active customers, and not just as passive consumers.

So, if you want public radio to do a better job, to be more accountable to its listeners and not just to the government (even if indirectly), pony up. Make it yours. And let’s keep building better tools to help with that.

[Later…] Here’s a bonus link from Bob Garfield’s AdAge column. (He’s also a host of NPR’s On the Media.) And a quote:

The only quality journalism available, at least in this country, is from a few dozen newspapers and magazines, NPR, some alt weeklies, a few websites  Slate.com, for instance) and a few magazine/website hybrids such as Atlantic. On TV, there is “The News Hour” and “Frontline” on PBS and that is it. Cable “news” is a wasteland (watch for a while and let me know when you see a reporter, you know, reporting). Network news, having taught cable how to cut costs and whore itself to ratings, isn’t much better. Local TV news is live remotes from crime scenes and “Is Your Microwave Killing Your Hamster?”

Good stuff. Read the whole thing.

Balk Friday

November 26, 2010 in Business, Events, Ideas, VRM | Permalink

Yesterday’s paper came late. Guess it was too heavy. The thing weighed about four pounds, most of which was advertising for sales today, Black Friday, the first day of the Christmas Shopping season. Buy Now and Save! Celebrate the birth of the Savior by spending big, in herds.

We were at a house with TV for Thanksgiving yesterday. There on the flat screen I saw news coverage of people huddled on sidewalks, awaiting rain overnight and store openings in the morning. I guess those people are grazing on savings in those very stores right now.

One sane alternative is to join in celebration of Buy Nothing Day. It’s today in the U.S. and tomorrow elsewhere. BND is part of Adbusters‘ Carnivalesque Rebellion, the idea behind which is to “shut down consumer capitalism for a week”. Today is the culmination of that.

About Adbusters: “We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.” My work kinda fits that description, but my means toward the same ends are different. Adbusters is at war with captialism, and I’m not. I just think that the demand side of the market has never been properly equipped — and that once it is, we won’t need the war, because the system will reform itself. We’ll discover that it’s possible to prosper and improve our lives and the world by actually relating, rather than by controlling from one side or rebelling from the other.

But, each to their own. I’m glad Adbusters is out there and has a sense of humor about what they’re doing. And hey, think about how much you’re actually saving by spending nothing today.

Thank what?!? for sharing

November 9, 2010 in Business, Ideas, Technology, VRM | 1 comment

If you want to know what data you’re sharing — without (thus far) knowing about it — on Facebook, ISharedWhat.com is the way. You run it as a simulator and what’s what.

It was developed by Joe Andrieu, a stalwart contributor of wisdom and code to the VRM community, and has been covered by and tweeted by the Wall Street Journal’s @WhatTheyKnow.

It’s what we call a fourth party app, meaning it performs as an instrument of your intentions, rather than a seller’s or a site operator’s. Check it out and give Joe feedback.

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Networds

November 8, 2010 in Berkman, Blogging, Business, Events, Ideas, infrastructure, Politics, problems, Technology | 6 comments

Live blogging Barbara van Schewick’s talk at Maxwell Dworkin here at Harvard. (That’s the building from which Mark Zuckerberg’s movie character stumbles through the snow in his jammies. Filmed elsewhere, by the way.)

All the text is what Barbara says, or as close as I can make it. My remarks are in parentheses. The talk should show up at the MediaBerkman site soon. When it does, go there for the verbatim version.

(In the early commercial Net, circa 1995 forward), the innovator doesn’t need to ask permission from the network provider to innovate on the network. Many different people can innovate. Individuals at the network’s ends are free to choose and to use. Obligation to produce a profit in the future isn’t required to cover development costs, because those costs are often cheap.

Innovators decide, users decide, low costs of innovation let a large and diverse group can participate.

The network is application-blind. That’s a virtue of end-to-end. (Sources Reed, Saltzer and End-to-End Arguments in System Design.)

Today the network operators are in a position to control execution of programs. “Imagine you have this great idea for a video application… that means you never have to go back to cable again. You know you have a fair chance at the marketplace…” In the old system. Not the current one. Now the network provider can stand in the way. They say they need to manage bandwidth, or whatever. Investors don’t invest in apps or innovators that threaten the carriers directly.

Let’s say Google ran the network when YouTube came along. Would YouTube win this time, like it did the first time? (Disregard the fact that Google bought YouTube. What matters is that YouTube was free to compete then in ways it probably would not now—so she suggests.)

In the early Net (1995+), many innovators decided, and users decided. There was little uncertainty about the supportive nature of the Internet.

User uncertainty or user heterogeneity? More and better innovation that better meets user needs. More ideas realized. (That’s her slide.)

With fewer or less diverse innovators, fewer ideas are realized.

Her book concentrates on innovators with little or no outside funding. (Like, ProjectVRM? It qualifies.)

One might ask, do we need low cost innovators now that there are so many billionaires and giants like Google and Yahoo? Yes. The potential of the early Web was realized by Netscape, not Microsoft. By Amazon, not by Barnes & Noble.

Established companies have different concerns and motivations than new innovators. Do we prefer innovation from large self-protecting paranoid companies or small aggressive upstarts?

Users decide vs. Network providers decide. That’s the choice. (The latter like to choose for us. They did it with telephony and they did it with cable TV.) In Europe some network providers prohibit Skype because it competes with their own services. Do we want them to pick winners and losers? (That’s what they want to do. Mostly they don’t want to be losers.)

Users’s interests: Innovators decide. Users decide Network can’t control Low costs of innovation, very large and diverse group of innovators. (Her slides are speaker’s notes, really.)

Network providers’ interests: They are not interested in customer or user innovation. In fact they oppose it. They change infrastructure to protect their interests. There is a gap between their private and public interests: what economists call a Market failure.

Do we need to regulate network providers? That’s what Network neutrality is about. But the high cost of regulation is a difficult question. Not saying we need to preserve the Net’s original architecture. We do need to protect the Net’s ability to support innovation.

Let’s pull apart network neutrality and quality of service (which the carriers say they care most about).

Best effort is part of the original design. Didn’t treat packets differently. Doing that is what we call Quality of Service (QoS).

Question: How to define discrimination? We need to ask questions. Such as, do we need a rule against blocking? Such as against Skype. One defining factor in all NN proposals is opposition to blocking. If Comcast slows down YouTube or something else from Google to favor it’s own video services (e.g. Xfinity), that’s discrimination.

Option 1: allow all discrimination…. or no rule against discrimination. That’s what the carriers want. Think of all the good things you could get in the future that you can’t now if we allow discrimination, they say. (Their promise is a smooth move of cable TV  to the Net, basically.)

Option 2: ban all discrimination … or treat every packet the same. This is what Susan Crawford and others argue for. Many engineers say “just increase capacity,'” in suipport of that. But that’s not the best solution either. It’s not the job of regulators to make technical decisions about the future.

All or nothing doesn’t work. Nether allow all discrimination nor Ban all discrimination.

Application blindness is the answer.

Ban discrimination based on applicaitons. Ban discrimination based on applications or classes of aplicaitons.

Fancast vs. Hulu. YouTube vs. Hulu. Allow discrimination based on class of aplication… or like treatment. Treat internet telephony vs. email differently. But don’t favor Skype over Vonage. (This is hard to describe here. Forgive.)

Problem 1. Distorting competion. Capturing some value from gaming, for example, by favoring it as a class. Give it no-delay service while not doing that for VoIP. But both are affected by delays. In the Canadian network management proceding, we found that P2P is slowed down either all the time or during congestion time. That allows real-time to work well. But then real-time video came along. What class do they say that belongs to? We don’t really know what the Canadian carriers did, but we do visit the question of what they should do if they discriminate by class. Thus…

Probem 2. High cost of regulation. (Self-explanatory, so it saves me the effort to transcribe.)

Problem 3. User choice. Support from the network. The moment you require support from the network (as a user or app provider), you throttle innovation.

Constraints on Network Evolution allows quality of service: 1) Dfferent classes of service offered on a non-discriminatory basis; 2) Users able to choose wheter and when to use which class of service; 3) Net provider only allowed to charge its own Internet service sustomers for use of different classes of service*. So network providers don’t destroy competition any more. Users get to choose which quality of service to use. And the network provider doesn’t need to provide QoS except in a general way. They’re out of the market equation.

(Bob Frankston is across the aisle from me, and I can see the word balloon over his head: “Why constrain thinking with ‘services’ at all? Why not just start with connectivity? Services keeps us in the telecom bottle.”)

Constraints on network evolution. Cost of regulation.

MY SOLUTION: (not on screen long enough.. there was more on the slide)

Preserve factors that have fostered application innovation ≠ Preserve original archictecture of the internet.

Final question to talk about. Why care about application innovation?

Have you ever tried to explain to your partner’s grandmother why she should use the Internet? You don’t argue about sending packets back and forth. You talk about grandchildren pictures, and being able to talk for free. That comes from innovation at the ends, not the carriers.

We need to protect the sources of innovation.

Yochai: What do you do with Apple iPhone? Tremendous user adoption being driven precisely by a platform that reverses many of your assumptions smack in the middle othe most controversial boundary, regarding wireless. (Not verbatim, but as close as I could get.)

Barbara: People say, “Look, I’ve got a closed device supporting lots of innovation.” No, you need to think about this differently. Apple created a device with open interfaces that supported lots of innovation. So it moved us from a world where few could innovate and it was costly, to a world where many could and it was cheap. Proves my point. Now we have an experiment with iPhone vs. Android. Apple controls, Google doesn’t. Now we get to see how this plays out. We’re starting to see where lots of innovators are moving to Android as well. More are starting with the Android, experimenting and then moving to the iPhone. The cost of starting on the Android is less. So we have two shifts. I think we will se the platform with no control being more successful.

Every network neutrality proposal has a network management exception. Mine doesn’t.

Q from the audience; Some apps still need a lot of money, whether or not the network is neutral. Building a big data warehouse isn’t cheap. And why is innovation all that matters? What happens when it is actually hurtful to rich incumbents such as news channels?

Barbara: I agree. If you’re a rich company, your costs of entry are lower. Kids with rich parents have advantages too. To me the network itself is special because it is the fundamental point of entry into the marketplace. We want the impediments to be as low as possible. The cost of starting Facebook for Mark Zuckerberg was actually rather low. He scaled after getting VC money, but he got a significant number of users first, without a lot of costs. I do think this is very important. Innovation is often disruptive, sure. But that’s not a reason for messing with this fundamental infrastructure. If newspapers have a problem with the Net, fix the papers. Separate that problem from the infrastructure itself. As a general matter, one of the good things about the Net’s infrastructure is that it allows disruption.

Q: What about companies as users? (Can’t summarize the answer.)

Bob Frankston: If your grandmother is on a phone… (couldn’t get what Bob said or make sense of Barbara’s response… sorry).

Q: (What about subsidies? I think.) The theory of two-sided markets. With papers, subscibers and advertisers. With the Net, users and app providers. If you’re attached to one platform, the providers are likely to attach to one side. (I think that’s what she’s saying.) This gives the provider a way to monopolize. In Europe, where there is more competition, there are more trade-offs. I think what would happen if we forced the net to be neutral, would we solve the problem by charging a different way. Subsidies, tax breaks. Perhaps a solvable problem. Let’s say we allow the carriers to charge extra (for premium use?). We break the system at its core. It doesn’t make sense to give up the value of the Internet to solve a problem that can be solved a different way.

Q: A question about managed vs. unmanaged isochronous delivery. We should be thinking about what happens when the carriers start charging for better service. (But they already do, with service tiers, and business-grade service (with assigned IP addresses, unblocked ports, etc.). The Europeans give the regulators the ability to monitor quality and impose minimum standards. This has a whole bunch of problems What really are acceptable levels? for example. The Europeans think this is sufficient to discipline providers. Well, in the end there might be some apps that require strict guarantees.

Okay, it’s later now. Looking back over this, I have to say I’m not sure it was a great idea to live-blog it. There are others who are better at it. Within the Berkman fold, David Weinberger is one, and Ethan Zuckerman is another. Neither were in the room, so I thought I’d give it a try. Again, visit MediaBerkman for the actual talk. Or just go get her book, Internet Architecture and Innovation. I got one, and will start reading it shortly.

The picture above, by the way, is one of a set I shot at the talk.

e-commerce makes me tired

November 4, 2010 in Art, Business, Ideas | 3 comments

So my friend Joe tells me to check out a book called Where Good Ideas Come From. I look it up on Google and click on the top result, an Amazon one for Steven Johnson’s book by that title. That goes to an Amazon page for the book, with links and pitches to various other books I might also want. One is Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surpus. Another is Ian Morris’s Why The West Rules — For Now. Another is for Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. I already have Kevn’s book, but would like to buy the other three, in a bunch.

So I go to put them all in my cart. But I can’t—far as I know, anyway. Not on that page, because it turns out this search result is intended mostly (or entirely… hard to tell) for Kindle users. I don’t have a Kindle and prefer to buy actual paper books. So I search again, within Books this time, on the Amazon site. This brings up a page for Stephen Johnson’s book, and a grouping of books “Frequently Bought Together” that has Kevin’s and Clay’s books and a way to pay for all three at once (for $50.57).

But I don’t want Kevin’s book this time, and I’m missing Ian Morris’s book. Can I put together a different “Price for all three” that includes the books I do want this time around? Well, I have to find Ian’s book. It’s not in “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”—at least not on that page. I eventually find it on page 3 (of 20) in a horizontal scroll to the right of the original five. But how to combine them? I dunno, and decide just to do it the aging-fashioned way: by putting all three individually in my basket.

Back in 1996 this seemed miraculous. Now it seems like a chore.

I would love it if Amazon gave me a simple search result, for the book I want, and then let me optionally add all the other stuff that right now is aggressive guesswork about what I might want.

Or maybe there’s already a way of doing that. Is there?

The Data Bubble II

October 31, 2010 in Business, Cluetrain, Events, Future, Journalism, Live Web, problems, VRM | 16 comments

In The Data Bubble, I told readers to mark the day: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. That same series is now nine stories long, not counting the introduction and a long list of related pieces. Here’s the current list:

  1. The Web’s Gold Mine: What They Know About You
  2. Microsoft Quashed Bid to Boost Web Privacy
  3. On the Web’s Cutting Edge: Anonymity in Name Only
  4. Stalking by Cell Phone
  5. Google Agonizes Over Privacy
  6. Kids Face Intensive Tracking on Web
  7. ‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on the Web
  8. Facebook in Privacy Breach
  9. A Web Pioneer Profiles Users By Name

Related pieces—

Two things I especially like about all this. First, Julia Angwin and her team are doing a terrific job of old-fashioned investigative journalism here. Kudos for that. Second, the whole series stands on the side of readers. The second person voice (you, your) is directed to individual persons—the same persons who do not sit at the tables of decision-makers in this crazy new hyper-personalized advertising business.

To measure the delta of change in that business, start with John Battelle‘s Conversational Marketing series (post 1, post 2, post 3) from early 2007, and then his post Identity and the Independent Web, from last week. In the former he writes about how the need for companies to converse directly with customers and prospects is both inevitable and transformative. He even kindly links to The Cluetrain Manifesto (behind the phrase “brands are conversations”).

In his latest he observes some changes in the Web itself:

Here’s one major architectural pattern I’ve noticed: the emergence of two distinct territories across the web landscape. One I’ll call the “Dependent Web,” the other is its converse: The “Independent Web.”

The Dependent Web is dominated by companies that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites “depends” on their proprietary model of your identity, including what you’ve done in the past, what you’re doing right now, what “cohorts” you might fall into based on third- or first-party data and algorithms, and any number of other robust signals.

The Independent Web, for the most part, does not shift its content or services based on who you are. However, in the past few years, a large group of these sites have begun to use Dependent Web algorithms and services to deliver advertising based on who you are.

A Shift In How The Web Works?

And therein lies the itch I’m looking to scratch: With Facebook’s push to export its version of the social graph across the Independent Web; Google’s efforts to personalize display via AdSense and Doubleclick; AOL, Yahoo and Demand building search-driven content farms, and the rise of data-driven ad exchanges and “Demand Side Platforms” to manage revenue for it all, it’s clear that we’re in the early phases of a major shift in the texture and experience of the web.

He goes on to talk about how “these services match their model of your identity to an extraordinary machinery of marketing dollars“, and how

When we’re “on” Facebook, Google, or Twitter, we’re plugged into an infrastructure (in the case of the latter two, it may be a distributed infrastructure) that locks onto us, serving us content and commerce in an automated but increasingly sophisticated fashion. Sure, we navigate around, in control of our experience, but the fact is, the choices provided to us as we navigate are increasingly driven by algorithms modeled on the service’s understanding of our identity.

And here is where we get to the deepest, most critical problem: Their understanding of our identity is not the same as our understanding of our identity. What they have are a bunch of derived assumptions that may or may not be correct; and even if they are, they are not ours. This is a difference in kind, not degree. It doesn’t matter how personalized anybody makes advertising targeted at us. Who we are is something we possess and control—or would at least like to think we do—no matter how well some of us (such as advertisers) rationalize the “socially derived” natures of our identities in the world.

It is standard for people in the ad business to equate assent with approval, and John’s take on this is a good example of that. Sez he,

We know this, and we’re cool with the deal.

In fact we don’t know, we’re not cool with it, and it isn’t a deal.

If we knew, the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t have a reason to clue us in at such length.

We’re cool with it only to the degree that we are uncomplaining about it—so far.

And it isn’t a “deal” because nothing was ever negotiated.

On that last point, our “deals” with vendors on the Web are agreements in name only. Specifically, they are a breed of assent called contracts of adhesion. Also called standard form or boilerplate contracts, they are what you get when a dominant party sets all the terms, there is no room for negotiation, and the submissive party has a choice only to accept the terms or walk away. The term “adhesion” refers to the nailed-down nature of the submissive party’s position, while the dominant party is free to change the terms any time it wishes. Next time you “agree” to terms you haven’t read, go read them and see where it says the other party reserves the right to change the terms.

There is a good reason why we have had these kinds of agreements since the dawn of e-commerce. It’s because that’s the way the Web was built. Only one party—the one with the servers and the services—was in a position to say what was what. It’s still that way. The best slide I’ve seen in the last several years is one of Phil Windley‘s. It says,

HISTORY OF E-COMMERCE

1995: Invention of the Cookie.

The End.

About all we’ve done since 1995 on the sell side is improve the cookie-based system of “relating” to users. This is a one-way take-it-or-leave-it system that has become lame and pernicious in the extreme. We can and should do better than that.

Phil’s own company, Kynetx, has come up with a whole new schema. Besides clients and servers (which don’t go away), you’ve got end points, events, rules and rules engines to execute the rules. David Siegel’s excellent book, The Power of Pull, describes how the Semantic Web also offers a rich and far more flexible and useful alternative to the Web’s old skool model. His post yesterday is a perfect example of liberated thinking and planning that transcends the old cookie-limited world. The man is on fire. Dig his first paragraph:

Monday I talked about the social networking bubble. Marketers are getting sucked into the social-networking vortex and can’t find their way out. The problem is that most companies are trying small tactical improvements, hoping to improve sales a bit and trying tactical savings programs, hoping to improve margins a bit. Yet there’s a whole new curve of efficiency waiting in the world of pull. It’s time to start talking about savingtrillions, not millions. Companies should think in terms of big, strategic, double-digit improvements, new markets, and new ways to cooperate. Here is a road map

Read on. (I love that he calls social networking a “bubble”. I’m with that.)

This week at IIW in Mountain View, we’re going to be talking about, and working on, improving markets from the buyers’ side. (Through VRM and other means.) On the table will be whole new ways of relating, starting with systems by which users and customers can offer their own terms of engagement, their own policies, their own preferences (even their own prices and payment options)—and by which sellers and site operators can signal their openness to those terms (even if they’re not yet ready to accept them). The idea here is to get buyers out of their shells and sellers out of their silos, so they can meet and deal for real in a truly open marketplace. (This doesn’t have to be complicated. A lot of it can be automated. And, if we do it right, we can skip a lot of the pointless one-sided agreement-clicking friction we now take for granted.)

Right now it’s hard to argue against all the money being spent (and therefore made) in the personalized advertising business—just like it was hard to argue against the bubble in tech stock prices in 1999 and in home prices in 2004. But we need to come to our senses here, and develop new and better systems by which demand and supply can meet and deal with each other as equally powerful parties in the open marketplace. Some of the tech we need for that is coming into being right now. That’s what we should be following. Not just whether Google, Facebook or Twitter will do the best job of putting crosshairs on our backs.

John’s right that the split is between dependence and independence. But the split that matters most is between yesterday’s dependence and tomorrow’s independence—for ourselves. If we want a truly conversational economy, we’re going to need individuals who are independent and self-empowered. Once we have that, the level of economic activity that follows will be a lot higher, and a lot more productive, than we’re getting now just by improving the world’s biggest guesswork business.

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