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Requiem for a great magazine

December 1, 2017 in adtech, advertising, Business, Customertech, Journalism, publishing | 3 comments

Linux Journal is folding.

Carlie Fairchild, who has run the magazine almost since it started in 1994, posted Linux Journal Ceases Publication today on the website. So far all of the comments have been positive, which they should be. Throughout its life, Linux Journal has been about as valuable as a trade pub can be, and it’s a damn shame to see it go. I just hope a way can be found to keep the site and the archives alive for the duration, as a living legacy.

I suppose a rescue might still be possible. But, as Carlie wrote in her post, “While we see a future like publishing’s past—a time when advertisers sponsor a publication because they value its brand and readers—the advertising world we have today would rather chase eyeballs, preferably by planting tracking beacons in readers’ browsers and zapping them with ads anywhere those readers show up. But that future isn’t here, and the past is long gone.”

I’m working hard at making that future happen (see the list below), and it bums me deeply that we didn’t succeeded in time to save Linux Journal. But here we are.

My own history with Linux Journal began when Phil Hughes pulled me into an email discussion of his plan to start a free software magazine. That was in 1993: twenty-four years ago. Phil ended that discussion when he announced, to everyone else’s surprise, that he had found this kid who had written a new version of UNIX that would likely take over the world. The kid was Linus Torvalds and his operating system was called Linux. I thought, what? But, as he was about so many things, Phil was right. Our first issue came out in April 1994, when Linux hit version 1.0. Linux Journal’s editor for that issue Bob Young, who left shortly after that to start Red Hat and much else. (I once asked Bob—by then a billionaire but no less a great guy—if Phil actually taught Bob how to spell Linux. Bob said yes.)

I first appeared on the masthead in 1996, and I haven’t left it since 1998. For many years I wrote the “Linux for Suits” column, and for many after that “EOF,” which ran inside the back cover. I also wrote a newsletter called “Suitwatch” and a spin-off blog called IT Garage (which you can still find at that link in the Internet Archive). I was the least technical of all Linux Journal‘s editors, but readers mostly seemed to appreciate my elevated but devoted perspective on Linux’s role in the world.

There were heady times in that history. Linux Journal succeeded fast, got fat during the dot-com craze in the late ’90s, and managed to survive the crash when many other rags went down. Remember Upside? Red Herring? The original FastCompany? (Tip your hat to Brewster Kahle and friends for the fossils of those you’ll still find in the Internet Archive.)

We can thank resourceful management and devoted subscribers for our persistence. And, of course, Linux itself. Today all 500 of the world’s top supercomputers run Linux. Since Android is built on Linux, most of the world’s smartphones run on Linux. Name a giant tech company (e.g. Google, Amazon, Akamai) and chances are the services it deploys run on Linux too. Month after month, Netcraft‘s Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites lists are either all-Linux or close enough. Linux is also embedded in countless devices, from clocks to wi-fi routers to flat-screen TVs.

In its own small but significant way, Linux Journal helped make that happen. Wish it could keep doing that, but alas.

So a hearty thanks to everyone who helped us through all those years. It’s been great, and will remain so.

Now, in hope that other publications might be saved, here are some of the posts and essays I’ve written toward that goal—and toward saving the advertising business from itself as well:

  1. Without aligning incentives, we can’t kill fake news or save journalism (15 September 2017 in Medium)
  2. An easy fix for a broken advertising system (12 October 2017 in Medium and in my blog)
  3. Let’s get some things straight about publishing and advertising (9 September 2017 and the same day in Medium)
  4. Good news for publishers and advertisers fearing the GDPR (3 September in ProjectVRM and 7 October in Medium).
  5. Publishers’ and advertisers’ rights end at a browser’s front door (17 June 2017 in Medium). It updates one of the 2015 blog posts below.
  6. How to plug the publishing revenue drain (9 June 2017 in Medium). It expands on the opening (#publishing) section of my Daily Tab for that date.
  7. Customertech Will Turn the Online Marketplace Into a Marvel-Like Universe in Which All of Us are Enhanced (29 May 2017 at ProjectVRM and in Medium)
  8. What if businesses agreed to customers’ terms and conditions? (28 April 2017)
  9. How are ad blockers affecting journalism? (My answer to a Quora question on 27 April 2017)
  10. The only way customers come first (26 April 2017 in Customer Commons)
  11. Brands need to fire adtech (23 March, and 25 March in Medium)
  12. The Problem with Content (1 March 2017 in Linux Journal)
  13. The Next Revolution in Advertising Will Be One Customers Lead (7 February 2017 in Medium)
  14. How True Advertising Can Save Journalism From Drowning in a Sea of Content (22 January 2017 in Medium and 26 January 2017 in my blog.)
  15. The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is tracking.(21 October 2016 and same date in Medium).
  16. It’s People vs. Advertising, not Publishers vs. Adblockers (26 August 2016 in ProjectVRM and 27 August 2016 in Medium)
  17. The cash model of customer experience (17 August 2016 and 18 August 2016 in Medium).
  18. If it weren’t for retargeting, we might not have adblocking (13 August 2016 in ProjectVRM and 15 August 2016 in Medium)
  19. The Castle Doctrine (19 June 2016 in ProjectVRM, and in Medium)
  20. Why #NoStalking is a good deal for publishers (11 May 2016, and in Medium)
  21. An invitation to settle matters with @Forbes, @Wired and other publishers (15 April 2016 and in Medium)
  22. TV Viewers to Madison Avenue: Please quit driving drunk on digital (14 Aprl 2016, and in Medium)
  23. The End of Internet Advertising as We’ve Known It(11 December 2015 in MIT Technology Review)
  24. Ad Blockers and the Next Chapter of the Internet (5 November in Harvard Business Review)
  25. How the Big Data Craze Will Play Out (1 November 2015 in Linux Journal)
  26. How #adblocking matures from #NoAds to #SafeAds (22 October 2015)
  27. Helping publishers and advertisers move past the ad blockade (11 October on the ProjectVRM blog)
  28. Dealing with Boundary Issues (1 October 2015 in Linux Journal)
  29. Beyond ad blocking — the biggest boycott in human history (28 Septemper 2015)
  30. A way to peace in the adblock war (21 September 2015, on the ProjectVRM blog)
  31. How adtech, not ad blocking, breaks the social contract (23 September 2015)
  32. Debugging adtext assumptions (18 September 2015)
  33. Separating advertising’s wheat and chaff (12 August 2015, and on 2 July 2016 in an updated version in Medium)
  34. On taking personalized ads personally (27 March 2015)
  35. Thoughts on tracking based advertising (18 February 2015)
  36. On marketing’s terminal addiction to data fracking and bad guesswork (10 January 2015)
  37. Privacy is personal (2 July 2014 in Linux Journal)
  38. What the ad biz needs is to exorcize direct marketing (6 October 2013)

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Daily Tab for 2016_06_07

June 7, 2017 in adtech, advertising, Apple, Aviation, Business, personal data, privacy, publishing, Technology | Permalink

away2remember2manytabsFor today’s entries, I’m noting which linked pieces require you to turn off tracking protection, meaning tracking is required by those publishers. I’m also annotating entries with hashtags and organizing sections into bulleted lists.

#AdBlocking and #Advertising

#Apple

#Photography

#Other

Open Word—The Podcasting Story

April 16, 2017 in Blogging, Business, Events, infrastructure, Law, Life, Outlining, podcasting, publishing, Technology | 4 comments

Nobody is going to own podcasting.990_large By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever owned the human voice, or ever will. (Other, of course, than their own.)

Because podcasting is about the human voice. It’s humans talking to humans: voices to ears and voices to voices—because listeners can talk too. They can speak back. And forward. Lots of ways.

Podcasting is one way for markets to have conversations; but the podcast market itself can’t be bought or controlled, because it’s not a market. Or an “industry.” Instead, like the Web, email and other graces of open protocols on the open Internet, podcasting is all-the-way deep.

Deep like, say, language. And, like language, it’s NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it and Anybody can improve it. That means anybody and everybody can do wherever they want with it. It’s theirs—and nobody’s—for the taking.

This is one of the many conclusions (some of them provisional) I reached after two days at The Unplugged Soul: Conference on the Podcast at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which I live-tweeted through Little Pork Chop and live-blogged through doc.blog at 1999.io.

Both of those are tools created by Dave Winer, alpha dad of blogging, podcasting and syndicating. Dave was half the guests on Friday evening’s opening panel. The other half was Christopher Lydon, whose own podcast, Radio Open Source, was born out of his creative partnership with Dave in the early chapters of podcasting’s Genesis, in 2003, when both were at Harvard’s Berkman (now Berkman Klein) Center.

One way you can tell nobody owns podcasting is that 1.5 decades have passed since 2003 and there are still no dominant or silo’d tools either for listening to podcasts or for making them.

On the listening side, there is no equivalent of, say, the browser. There are many very different ways to get podcasts, and all of them are wildly different as well. Remarkably (or perhaps not), the BigCo leaders aren’t leading. Instead they’re looking brain-dead.

The biggest example is Apple, which demonstrates its tin head through its confusing (and sales-pressure-intensive) iTunes app on computers and its Podcasts app, defaulted on the world’s billion iPhones. That app’s latest version is sadly and stupidly rigged to favor streaming from the cloud over playing already-downloaded podcasts, meaning you can no longer listen easily when you’re offline, such as when you’re on a plane. By making that change, Apple treated a feature of podcasting as a bug. Also dumb: a new UI element—a little set of vertical bars indicating audio activity—that seems to mean both live playing and downloading. Or perhaps neither. I almost don’t want to know at this point, since I have come to hate the app so much.

Other tools by smaller developers (e.g. Overcast) do retain the already-downloaded feature, but work in different ways from other tools. Which is cool to me, because that way no one player dominates.

On the production side there are also dozens of tools and services. As a wannabe podcaster (whose existing output is limited so far to three podcasts in twelve years), I have found none that make producing a podcast as easy as it is to write a blog or an email. (When that happens, watch out.)

So here’s a brief compilation of my gatherings, so far, in no order of importance, from the conference.

  • Podcasting needs an unconference like IIW (the next of which happens the first week of May in Silicon Valley): one devoted to conversation and forward movement of the whole field, and not to showcasing panels, keynotes or sponsoring vendors. One advantage of unconferences is that they’re all about what are side conversations at standard keynote-and-panel conferences. An example from my notes: Good side conversations. One is with Sovana Bailey McLain (@solartsnyc), whose podcast is also a radio show, State of the Arts. And she has a blog too. The station she’s on is WBAI, which has gone through (says Wikipedia) turmoil and change for many decades. An unconference will also foster something many people at the conference said they wanted: more ways to collaborate.
  • Now is a good time to start selling off over-the-air radio signals. Again from my notes… So I have an idea. It’s one WBAI won’t like, but it’s a good one: Sell the broadcast license, keep everything else. WBAI’s signal on 99.5fm is a commercial one, because it’s on the commercial part of the FM band. This NY Times report says an equivalent station (WQXR when it was on 96.3fm) was worth $45 million in 2009. I’m guessing that WBAI’s licence would bring about half that because listening is moving to Net-connected rectangles, and the competition is every other ‘cast in the world. Even the “station” convention is antique. On the Net there are streams and files:stuff that’s live and stuff that’s not. From everywhere. WBAI (or its parent, the Pacifica Foundation), should sell the license while the market is still there, and use the money to fund development and production of independent streams and podcasts, in many new ways.  Keep calling the convening tent WBAI, but operate outside the constraints of limited signal range and FCC rules.
  • Compared to #podcasting, the conventions of radio are extremely limiting. You don’t need a license to podcast. You aren’t left out of the finite number of radio channels and confined geographies. You aren’t constrained by FCC anti-“profanity” rules limiting freedom of speech—or any FCC rules at all. In other words, you can say what the fuck you please, however you want to say it. You’re free of the tyranny of the clock, of signposting, of the need for breaks, and other broadcast conventions. All that said, podcasting can, and does, improve radio as well. This was a great point made on stage by the @kitchensisters.
  • Podcasting conventionally copyrighted music is still impossible. On the plus side, there is no license-issuing or controlling entity to do a deal with the recording industry to allow music on podcasts, because there is nothing close to a podcasting monopoly. (Apple could probably make such a deal if it wanted to, but it hasn’t, and probably won’t.) On the minus side, you need to “clear rights” for every piece of music you play that isn’t “podsafe.” That includes nearly all the music you already know. But then, back on the plus side, this means podcasting is nearly all spoken word. In the past I thought this was a curse. Now I think it’s a grace.
  • Today’s podcasting conventions are provisional and temporary. A number of times during the conference I observed that the sound coming from the stage was one normalized by This American Life and its descendants. In consonance with that, somebody put up a slide of a tweet by @emilybell:podcast genres : 1. Men going on about things. 2. Whispery crime 3.Millennials talking over each other 4. Should be 20 minutes shorter. We can, and will, do better. And other.
  • Maybe podcasting is the best way we have to start working out our problems with race, gender, politics and bad habits of culture that make us unhappy and thwart progress of all kinds. I say that because 1) the best podcasting I know deals with these things directly and far more constructively than anything I have witnessed in other media, and 2) no bigfoot controls it.
  • Archiving is an issue. I don’t know what a “popup archive” is, but it got mentioned more than once.
  • Podcasting has no business model. It’s like the Internet, email and the Web that way. You make money because of it, not with it. If you want to. Since it can be so cheap to do (in terms of both time and money), you don’t have to make money at it if you don’t want to.

I’ll think of more as I go over more of my notes. Meanwhile, please also dig Dave’s take-aways from the same conference.

Brands need to fire adtech

March 23, 2017 in adtech, advertising, Business, Journalism, marketing, News, publishing | 11 comments

fireadtech

Brands are starting to bail from adtech, and news about it is coming fast and hard.

The New York Times said AT&T and Johnson & Johnson were pulling their ads from YouTube, concerned that “Google is not doing enough to prevent brands from appearing next to offensive material, like hate speech.” Business Insider said “more than 250” advertisers were bailing as well. Both reports came on the heels of one Guardian story that said Audi, HSBC, Lloyds, McDonald’s, L’Oréal, Sainsbury’s, Argos, the BBC and Sky were doing the same in the UK. Another Guardian story that said O2, Royal Mail and Vodaphone were joining the boycott as well. Wired and AdAge have weighed in too.

Agencies placing those ads on YouTube were shocked, shocked! that ads for these fine brands were showing up next to “extremist material,” and therefore sponsoring it. They blame Google, and so does most of the press coverage as well.

And Google admits guilt. Business Insider:

Google’s executives were summoned to appear in front of the UK government last week after ads for taxpayer-funded services were found next to extremist videos, following an investigation by The Times newspaper. Google must return later this week with a timetable for the work it is doing to prevent the issue from occurring again.

On Monday, at a breakfast briefing with journalists before he took to the stage at Advertising Week Europe — Brittin said the annual ad industry event gave Google a “good opportunity to say first and foremost, sorry, this should not happen, and we need to do better.”

Brittin added: “There are brands who have reached out to us and are talking to our teams about whether they are affected or concerned by this. I have spoken personally to a number of advertisers over the last few days as well. Those that I have spoken to, by the way, we have been talking about a handful of impressions and pennies not pounds of spend — that’s in the case of the ones I’ve spoken to at least. However small or big the issue, it’s an important issue that we address.”

Google also isn’t alone at this. They’re just the biggest player in an icky business. That business is adtech: tracking-based advertising.

Let’s be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising. It’s adtech that spies on people and violates their privacy. It’s adtech that’s full of fraud and a vector for malware. It’s adtech that incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism. It’s adtech that gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling in eyeballs.

Real advertising doesn’t do any of those things, because it’s not personal. It is aimed at populations selected by the media they choose to watch, listen to or read. To reach those people with real ads, you buy space or time on those media. You sponsor those media because those media also have brand value.

With real advertising, you have brands supporting brands.

Brands can’t sponsor media through adtech because adtech isn’t built for that. On the contrary, adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media.

Adtech is magic in this literal sense: it’s all about misdirection. You think you’re getting one thing while you’re really getting another. It’s why brands think they’re placing ads in media, while the systems they hire chase eyeballs. Since adtech systems are automated and biased toward finding the cheapest ways to hit sought-after eyeballs with ads, some ads show up on unsavory sites. And, let’s face it, even good eyeballs go to bad places.

This is why the media, the UK government, the brands, and even Google are all shocked. They all think adtech is advertising. Which makes sense: it lookslike advertising and gets called advertising. But it is profoundly different in almost every other respect. I explain those differences in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff:

…advertising today is also digital. That fact makes advertising much more data-driven, tracking-based and personal. Nearly all the buzz and science in advertising today flies around the data-driven, tracking-based stuff generally called adtech. This form of digital advertising has turned into a massive industry, driven by an assumption that the best advertising is also the most targeted, the most real-time, the most data-driven, the most personal — and that old-fashioned brand advertising is hopelessly retro.

In terms of actual value to the marketplace, however, the old-fashioned stuff is wheat and the new-fashioned stuff is chaff. In fact, the chaff was only grafted on recently.

See, adtech did not spring from the loins of Madison Avenue. Instead its direct ancestor is what’s called direct response marketing. Before that, it was called direct mail, or junk mail. In metrics, methods and manners, it is little different from its closest relative, spam.

Direct response marketing has always wanted to get personal, has always been data-driven, has never attracted the creative talent for which Madison Avenue has been rightly famous. Look up best ads of all time and you’ll find nothing but wheat. No direct response or adtech postings, mailings or ad placements on phones or websites.

Yes, brand advertising has always been data-driven too, but the data that mattered was how many people were exposed to an ad, not how many clicked on one — or whether you, personally, did anything.

And yes, a lot of brand advertising is annoying. But at least we know it pays for the TV programs we watch and the publications we read. Wheat-producing advertisers are called “sponsors” for a reason.

So how did direct response marketing get to be called advertising ? By looking the same. Online it’s hard to tell the difference between a wheat ad and a chaff one.

Remember the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” (Or the remake by the same name?) Same thing here. Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.

This whole problem wouldn’t exist if the alien replica wasn’t chasing spied-on eyeballs, and if advertisers still sponsored desirable media the old-fashioned way.

Fixing it won’t be easy, because the alien replica has been drunk on digital for so long that very little humanity remains. This is true not just for Madison Avenue, but for both the client and the media stages of the advertising supply chain. On the client side, old-school sales & marketing VPs have been replaced by data-obsessed CMOs who would rather hire an IBM to paint a portrait of a fiction called “the chief executive customer” than actually talk to a real one. On the media side, publishers and broadcasters have long since fired their human sales people and outsourced income production to dozens of third party adtech systems.

But at least we’re seeing brands start to wake up, even if they’re still fooled by adtech’s magic tricks. And consciousness is surely happening a level or two above the CMO. Those senior executives, whose brains have not been snatched by adtech, will still recognize the obvious: that brands are best made and served by sponsoring media they know, like and trust.

After all, sponsoring trusted media is what produced brands in the first place. It’s also what still what makes brands familiar to whole populations, and what still sponsors worthy publications and the journalism they contain.

If brands still want to do “interest-based” or “interactive” advertising (adtech’s euphemisms for what it actually does) they should realize five things:

  1. Adtech sucks at branding. Hundreds of $billions have been spent on adtech so far, and not one brand known to the world has come out of it.
  2. Yes, it works, about .0x% of the time, on average. The other 99.9x% of the time it produces nothing but negative externalities, including lots of tendentious math by agencies and platforms to justify the expense.Among those externalities are subtracted value from brands themselves.
  3. Yes, direct response marketing does work, and it works best when target customers have already opted in, consciously and deliberately. (Note that there is a great deal of ambiguity about how much being a Google or Facebook member amounts to deliberate and conscious agreement to being followed and targeted, privacy controls withstanding. The choices in those controls should be much more binary and clear than they are.) So if L’Oreal wants to get a conversation going with customers of Lancôme, Giorgio Armani or The Body Shop, they should do it by those customers’ grace, not because the robots they’ve hired guess those customers might be interested, based on surveillance-gathered personal data.
  4. Adtech starts with spying on people. This isn’t the elephant in the middle of adtech’s room. It’s the volcano about to erupt from under adtech’s floor. In that volcano are pissed off people who will soon get their own ways to kill off adtech. The rumbling under the floor right now is ad blocking. The lava that will pave over adtech is full tracking protection.
  5. Adtech’s rationalizations are all around putting the “right message in front of the right people at the right time,” and aiming those messages with spyware-harvested Big Data. Both of those are direct marketing purposes, not those of brand advertising. The difference is stark, absolute, and essential for everyone to understand.
  6. The only reason publishers go along with adtech is that they don’t know any other way to make money from advertising online — and no developers have provided them one. (But that will happen soon. Trust me on this. I know things I can’t yet talk about.)
  7. What Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” is going to be illegal a year from now in the EU anyway, thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation, aka GDPR. Mark your calendars: on 25 May 2018 will come an extinction event for adtech, because here are the fines the GDPR will impose for unpermitted harvesting of personal data: 1) “a fine up to 10,000,000 EUR or up to 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 4)”‘; and 2) “a fine up to 20,000,000 EUR or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 5 & 6).”

Ad choices won’t do the job. That’s adtech’s way to “give you control” over “how information about your interests is used for relevant advertising.” The link into that system is this little symbol you see in the corner of many ads:

While clicking on it does provide a way for you to opt out of surveillance, you have to do it over and over again for every ad you see with the damn thing, like playing a slo-mo game of whack-a-mole, and it still relies on the adtech industry keeping cookies in your browsers.

If there is a market on the receiving end for “interest based advertising,” let’s have a standard system that puts full control in the hands of individuals, and speaks through open code and protocols to any and all publishers and broadcasters. Anything less will just be another top-down adtech industry paint-job on the same old shit.

An open question is if agencies can be programmatic online without spying on people. I think they can, if they start by admitting that spying is where the problem lies.

It should be clear that spying is why Do Not Track became a thing, and whyad blocking hockey-sticked when the adtech industry and publishers together gave the middle finger to people’s polite request not to be tracked. (Which is all Do Not Track provides.) It should also be clear that ad blocking and tracking protection are not “threats” and “costs” to publishers and agencies. They are clear and legitimate market responses by human beings to having adtech’s digital hands up their skirts.

It also won’t be easy for the big platforms to fix their adtech systems. Consider, for example, the egg that was splattered on Mark Zuckerberg’s face by Facebook’s own adtech when he posted his insistence that “99% of what people see is authentic” and “only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” and fraudulent ads ran right next to his post:

zuckegg

These ads are fraudulent in at least three ways: 1) the headlines are lies; 2) espn.com is not the advertiser; 3) if you click on them, you find they’re bait for switches to something else. (One I clicked on was for a diet supplement.)

And this is no isolated case. Medium’s Ev Williams also reported the same kind of adtech-aimed fakery.

Facebook is going to have a hard time fixing this, because it is entirely in the chaff business. With Google, even though it’s hard to tell whether any given ad placed in a Google property is wheat or chaff, at least some of it really is wheat. (I would guess most search ads are, for example.) It should be just as easy for Google to disclose those ads’ nature as wheat as it is for the company to use Ad Choices to disclose adn ad’s nature as chaff. (I suggest one possible approach to this in A way to peace in the adblock war.)

But fixing the mess needs to start with advertisers. They can do it by firing adtech and its agents and going back to sponsoring reputable broadcasters and publishers. Simple as that.

Saving High Mountain

February 27, 2017 in Geography, history, Journalism, News, Past, Personal, publishing, Technology | 2 comments

 

highmountainI’ve long thought that the most consequential thing I’ve ever done was write a newspaper editorial that helped stop development atop the highest wooded hilltop overlooking the New York metro. The hill is called High Mountain, and it is now home to the High Mountain Park Preserve in Wayne, New Jersey. That’s it above, highlighted by a rectangle on a shot I took from a passenger plane on approach to LaGuardia in 2008.

The year was 1970, and I was a 23-year-old reporter for a suburban daily called Wayne Today (which may still exist). One day, while at the police station picking up copies of the previous day’s reports, I found a detailed plan to develop the top of High Mountain, and decided to pay the place a visit. So I took a fun hike through thick woods and a din of screaming cicadas (Brood X, I gather—the same one that inspired Bob Dylan’s “Day of the Locust”) to a rocky clearing at the crest, and immediately decided the mountain was a much better place for a park than for the office building specified in the plan.

As it happened there was also a need for an editorial soon after that, and Jerry Fuchs, who usually wrote our editorials, wasn’t available. So I came off the bench and wrote this:

wayne-today-editorial

That was a draft proof of the piece.* I ran across it today while cleaning old papers from a file cabinet in my garage. I doubt anybody has the final printed piece, and I’m amazed that the proof exists.

I left for another paper after that, and didn’t keep up with Wayne news, beyond hearing that my editorial derailed the development plan. No doubt activists of various kinds were behind the eventual preservation of the mountain. But it’s nice to know there is some small proof I had something to do with that.

*Additional history: Wayne Today published in those days using old-fashioned letterpress techniques. Type was set in lead by skilled operators on Linotype machines. Each line was a “slug,” and every written piece was a pile of slugs arranged in a frame, inked with a roller and then proofed by another roller that printed on blank paper. That’s what we marked up (as you see above) for the Linotype operators, who would create replacement slugs, give them to the page composers in layout, who could read upside down and backwards as they arranged everything in what was called a forme. The layout guys (they were all guys) then embossed each page into a damp papier-mâché sheet, which would serve as a mold for a half-cylinder of hot lead. Half-cylinders wrapped around giant rollers inked each rotation by other rollers did the printing. Other machines after that cut, stacked and folded the pages that ended up as newspapers at the end of the line. So the whole process went like this: reporter->Linotype operator->editor->Linotype operator->page composer->stereotype operator->printer. Ancestors of robotics eventually replaced all of it not long after I left (and the press burned down). Now in the U.S. exemplars of big-J journalism (New York Times, Washington Post) are tarred by the President as “fake news,” and millions believe him. My, how times change.

More High Mountain links:

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How True Advertising Can Save Journalism From Drowning in a Sea of Content

January 26, 2017 in adtech, advertising, Business, Journalism, problems, publishing, Technology | 4 comments

adtech-content-journalism

Journalism is in a world of hurt because it has been marginalized by a new business model that requires maximizing “content” instead. That model is called adtech.

We can see adtech’s effects in The New York Times’ In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left, by David Chen. His prime example is the Newark Star-Ledger, “which almost halved its newsroom eight years ago,” and “has mutated into a digital media company requiring most reporters to reach an ever-increasing quota of page views as part of their compensation.”

That quota is to attract adtech placements.

While adtech is called advertising and looks like advertising, it’s actually a breed of direct marketing, which is a cousin of spam and descended from what we still call junk mail.

Like junk mail, adtech is driven by data, intrusively personal, looking for success in tiny-percentage responses, and oblivious to harms it causes, which include wanton and unwelcome surveillance, annoying the shit out of people and filling the world with crap.

But adtech is far worse, because it also funds hyper-partisan news flows, including vast rivers of fake news, much of it from pop-up publishers that are as fake as the clickbait they maximize. Without adtech, fake news would be marginalized to the digital equivalent of supermarket tabloids.

Here’s one way to tell the difference between real advertising and adtech:

  • Real advertising wants to be in a publication because it values the publication’s journalism and readership.
  • Adtech wants to push ads at readers anywhere it can find them.

Here’s one way to tell the difference between journalism and content:

  • Journalism has ethics.
  • Content has volume.

Another:

  • Journalism is supported by advertising and subscriptions.
  • Content is supported by adtech.

Companies advertising in the old publishing world were flattered to appear in publications like the Star-Ledger. They were also considered sponsors of those publications.

Companies advertising in the new publishing world are drunk on digital and want to maximize the “big data” they acquire. And there are thousands of bartenders to help with that.

As I wrote in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, in the new publishing world “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.”

That’s also why, to operate in publishing’s new alien-built economy, journalists need to meet that “ever-increasing quota of page views.” Better to “generate content” than to do the best journalism we can, the proposition goes. It’s still a losing one.

See, adtech doesn’t care about journalism, because its economy incentives maximizing the sum of content in the world, so it has as many places as possible to chase followed eyeballs with ads. Case in point, from @WaltMossberg:

About a week after our launch, I was seated at a dinner next to a major advertising executive. He complimented me on our new site’s quality and on that of a predecessor site we had created and run, AllThingsD.com. I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more than a lead generator for target-rich readers, and would ultimately benefit sites that might care less about quality.

If Recode insisted on real ads, rather than coming to depend on surveillance-based adtech, its advertisers would have valued the publication, and not just the eyeballs of its readers, wherever it could find them.

Walt concludes,

It’s no easy task to either make money online as a publisher or to advertise your product in a world where attention is so fleeting and divided. But the current system of ad-supported web content isn’t working for readers and viewers. It needs to be reset.

The ad business is too brain-snatched to do that reset alone. It needs help from readers and brave publishers willing to stop participating in the adtech game.

As I explain in How customers can debug business with one line of code (hashtag: #NoStalking), each of us can come to publishers with a simple term that says “Just show me ads not based on tracking me.” In other words, “Give us real advertising. We can live with that.”

#NoStalking is not only in the works at Customer Commons, but saying yes to it will be an ideal move by companies wishing to obey the General Data Protection Regulation (aka GDPR), which will start punishing stalking severely, starting in 2018.

While the GDPR will blow up adtech as we’ve known it, #NoStalking will save real advertising, and the best of ad-supported publishing along with it, because it will bring economic incentives back into alignment with journalism. We had that in the old ad-and-subscription supported world of offline journalism, and we can get it back in the new world of online journalism. As I explain in Why #NoStalking is a good deal for publishers,

Individuals issuing the offer get guilt-free use of the goods they come to the publisher for, and the publisher gets to stay in business — and improve that business by running advertising that is actually valued by its recipients.

So, if you want to save journalism, the best of publishing and civil discourse that depends on both, bring back real advertising and cure the cancer of adtech.

For more help with that, go back and read Don Marti’s Targeting failure: legit sites lose, intermediaries win. You might also visit the Adblock War Series at my blog.

Two bonus links:

  1. Don Marti‘s What The Verge can do to help save web advertising
  2. Ethan Zuckerman’s It’s Journalism’s Job to Save Civics.

…

The original version of this post was published in Medium on 23 January 2017. This is an experiment in publishing first in Medium and second here. We’ll see how it goes.

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Exploring the business behind digital media’s invisibility cloaks

December 10, 2016 in adtech, advertising, Broadcasting, Business, Culture, data, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Life, Links, marketing, News, Politics, privacy, problems, publishing, Research, Technology | 5 comments

 

amsterdam-streetImagine you’re on a busy city street where everybody who disagrees with you disappears.

We have that city now. It’s called media—especially the social kind.

You can see how this works on Wall Street Journal‘s Blue Feed, Red Feed page. Here’s a screen shot of the feed for “Hillary Clinton” (one among eight polarized topics):

blue-red-wsj

Both invisible to the other.

We didn’t have that in the old print and broadcast worlds, and still don’t, where they persist. (For example, on news stands, or when you hit SCAN on a car radio.)

But we have it in digital media.

Here’s another difference: a lot of the stuff that gets shared is outright fake. There’s a lot of concern about that right now:

fakenews

Why? Well, there’s a business in it. More eyeballs, more advertising, more money, for more eyeballs for more advertising. And so on.

Those ads are aimed by tracking beacons planted in your phones and browsers, feeding data about your interests, likes and dislikes to robot brains that work as hard as they can to know you and keep feeding you more stuff that stokes your prejudices. Fake or not, what you’ll see is stuff you are likely to share with others who do the same. This business that pays for this is called “adtech,” also known as “interest based” or “interactive” advertising. But those are euphemisms. Its science is all about stalking. They can plausibly deny it’s personal. But it is.

The “social” idea is “markets as conversations” (a personal nightmare for me, gotta say). The business idea is to drag as many eyeballs as possible across ads that are aimed by the same kinds of creepy systems. The latter funds the former.

Rather than unpack that, I’ll leave that up to the rest of ya’ll, with a few links:

 

I want all the help I can get unpacking this, because I’m writing about it in a longer form than I’m indulging in here. Thanks.

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The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is tracking.

October 21, 2016 in adtech, advertising, Business, Identity, Internet, Journalism, Law, marketing, privacy, problems, publishing, security | 5 comments

Ingeyes Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking, @JuliaAngwin and @ProPublica unpack what the subhead says well already: “Google is the latest tech company to drop the longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names.”

So here’s a message from humanity to Google and all the other spy organizations in the surveillance economy: Tracking is no less an invasion of privacy in apps and browsers than it is in homes, cars, purses, pants and wallets.

That’s because our apps and browsers, like the devices on which we use them, are personal and private. Simple as that. (HT to @Apple for digging that fact.)

To help the online advertising business understand what ought to be obvious (but isn’t yet), let’s clear up some misconceptions:

  1. Tracking people without their clear and conscious permission is wrong. (Meaning The Castle Doctrine should apply online no less than it does in the physical world.)
  2. Assuming that using a browser or an app constitutes some kind of “deal” to allow tracking is wrong. (Meaning implied consent is not the real thing. See The Tradeoff Fallacy: How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them Up to Exploitation, by Joseph Turow, Ph.D. and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.)
  3. Claiming that advertising funds the “free” Internet is wrong. (The Net has been free for the duration. Had it been left up to the billing companies of the world, we never would have had it, and they never would have made their $trillions on it. More at New Clues.)

What’s right is civilization, which relies on manners. Advertisers, their agencies and publishers haven’t learned manners yet.

But they will.

At the very least, regulations will force companies harvesting personal data to obey those they harvest it from, with fines for not obeying. Toward that end, Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation already has compliance offices at large corporations shaking in their boots, for good reason: “a fine up to 20,000,000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4% of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher (Article 83, Paragraph 5 & 6).” Those come into force in 2018. Stay tuned.

Companies harvesting personal data also shouldn’t be surprised to find themselves re-classified as fiduciaries, no less responsible than accountants, brokers and doctors for confidentiality on behalf of the people they collect data from. (Thank you, professors Balkin and Zittrain, for that legal and rhetorical hack. Brilliant, and well done. Or begun.)

The only way to fully fix publishing, advertising and surveillance-corrupted business in general is to equip individuals with terms they can assert in dealing with others online — and to do it at scale. Meaning we need terms that work the same way across all the companies we deal with. That’s why Customer Commons and Kantara are working on exactly those terms. For starters. And these will be our terms — not separate and different ones that live at each company we deal with. Those aren’t working now, and never will work, because they can’t. And they can’t because when you have to deal with as many different terms as there are parties supplying them, the problem becomes unmanageable, and you get screwed. That’s why —

There’s a new sheriff on the Net, and it’s the individual. Who isn’t a “user,” by the way. Or a “consumer.” With new terms of our own, we’re the first party. The companies we deal with are second parties. Meaning that they are the users, and the consumers, of our legal “content.” And they’ll like it too, because we actually want to do good business with good companies, and are glad to make deals that work for both parties. Those include expressions of true loyalty, rather than the coerced kind we get from every “loyalty” card we carry in our purses and wallets.

When we are the first parties, we also get scale. Imagine changing your terms, your contact info, or your last name, for every company you deal with — and doing that in one move. That can only happen when you are the first party.

So here’s a call to action.

If you want to help blow up the surveillance economy by helping develop much better ways for demand and supply to deal with each other, show up next week at the Computer History Museum for VRM Day and the Internet Identity Workshop, where there are plenty of people already on the case.

Then follow the work that comes out of both — as if your life depends on it. Because it does.

And so does the economy that will grow atop true privacy online and the freedoms it supports. Both are a helluva lot more leveraged than the ill-gotten data gains harvested by the Lumascape doing unwelcome surveillance.

Bonus links:

  1. All the great research Julia Angwin & Pro Publica have been doing on a problem that data harvesting companies have been causing and can’t fix alone, even with government help. That’s why we’re doing the work I just described.
  2. What Facebook Knows About You Can Matter Offline, an OnPoint podcast featuring Julia, Cathy O’Neill and Ashkan Soltani.
  3. Everything by Shoshana Zuboff. From her home page: “’I’ve dedicated this part of my life to understanding and conceptualizing the transition to an information civilization. Will we be the masters of information, or will we be its slaves? There’s a lot of work to be done, if we are to build bridges to the kind of future that we can call “home.” My new book on this subject, Master or Slave? The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization, will be published by Public Affairs in the U.S. and Eichborn in Germany in 2017.” Can’t wait.
  4. Don Marti’s good thinking and work with Aloodo and other fine hacks.

Nobody else owns our experiences

August 3, 2016 in adtech, advertising, Broadcasting, Business, Internet, News, problems, publishing, Research, Technology, VRM | 15 comments

shackles

Who Owns the Mobile Experience? is a report by Unlockd on mobile advertising in the U.K. To clarify the way toward an answer, the report adds, “mobile operators or advertisers?”

The correct answer is neither. Nobody’s experience is “owned” by somebody else.

True, somebody else may cause a person’s experience to happen. But causing isn’t the same as owning.

We own our selves. That includes our experiences.

This is an essential distinction. For lack of it, both mobile operators and advertisers are delusional about their customers and consumers. (That’s an important distinction too. Operators have customers. Advertisers have consumers. Customers pay, consumers may or may not. That the former also qualifies as the latter does not mean the distinction should not be made. Sellers are far more accountable to customers than advertisers are to consumers.)

It’s interesting that Unlockd’s survey shows almost identically high levels of delusion by advertisers and operators…

  • 85% of advertisers and 82% of operators “think the mobile ad experience is positive for end users”
  • 3% of advertisers and 1% of operators admit “it could be negative”
  • Of the 85% of advertisers who think the experience is positive, 50% “believe it’s because products advertised are relevant to the end user”
  • “the reasons for this opinion is driven from the belief that users are served detail around products that are relevant to them.”

… while:

  • 47% of consumers think “the mobile phone ad experience (for them) is positive”
  • 39% of consumers “think ads are irrelevant
  • 36% blame “poor or irritating format”
  • 40% “believe the volume of ads served to them are a main reason for the negative experience”

It’s amazing but not surprising to me that mobile operators apparently consider their business to be advertising more than connectivity. This mindset is also betrayed by AT&T charging a premium for privacy and Comcast wanting to do the same. (Advertising today, especially online, does not come with privacy. Quite the opposite, in fact. A great deal of it is based on tracking people. Shoshana Zuboff calls this surveillance capitalism.)

Years ago, when I consulted BT, JP Rangaswami (@jobsworth), then BT’s Chief Scientist, told me phone companies’ core competency was billing, not communications. Since those operators clearly wish to be in the “content” business now, and to make money the same way print and broadcast did for more than a century, it makes sense that they imagine themselves now to be one-way conduits for ad-fortified content, and not just a way people and things (including the ones called products and companies) can connect to each other.

The FCC and other regulators need to bear this in mind as they look at what operators are doing to the Internet. I mean, it’s good and necessary for regulators to care about neutrality and privacy of Internet services, but a category error is being made if regulators fail to recognize that the operators want to be “content distributors” on the models of commercial broadcasting (funded by advertising) and the post office (funded by junk mail, which is the legacy model of today’s personalized direct response advertising  online).

I also have to question how consumers were asked by this survey about their mobile ad experiences. Let me see a show of hands: how many here consider their mobile phone ad experience “positive?” Keep your hands down if you are associated in any way with advertising, phone companies or publishing. When I ask this question, or one like it (e.g. “Who here wants to see ads on their phone?”) in talks I give, the number of raised hands is usually zero. If it’s not, the few parties with raised hands offer qualified responses, such as, “I’d like to see coupons when I’m in a store using a shopping app.”

Another delusion of advertisers and operators is that all ads should be relevant. They don’t need to be. In fact, the most valuable ads are not targeted personally, but across populations, so large populations can become familiar with advertised products and services.

It’s a simple fact that branding wouldn’t exist without massive quantities of ads being shown to people for whom the ads are irrelevant. Few of us would know the brands of Procter & Gamble, Unilever, L’Oreal, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, General Motors, Volkswagen, Mars or McDonald’s (the current top ten brand advertisers worldwide) if not for the massive amounts of money those companies spend advertising to people who will never buy their products but will damn sure known those products’ names. (Don Marti explains this well.)

A hard fact that the advertising industry needs to face is that there is very little appetite for ads on the receiving end. People put up with it on TV and radio, and in print, but for the most part they don’t like it. (The notable exceptions are print ads in fashion magazines and other high-quality publications. And classifieds.)

Appetites for ads, and all forms of content, should be consumers’ own. This means consumers need to be able to specify the kind of advertising they’re looking for, if any.

Even then, the far more valuable signal coming from consumers is (or will be) an actual desire for certain products and services. In marketing lingo, these signals are qualified leads. In VRM lingo, these signals  are intentcasts. With intentcasting, the customers do the advertising, and are in full control of the process. And they are no longer mere consumers (which Jerry Michalski calls “gullets with wallets and eyeballs”).

It helps that there are dozens of companies in this business already.

So it would be far more leveraged for operators to work with those companies than with advertising systems so disconnected from reality that they’ve caused hundreds of millions of people to block ads on their mobile devices — and are in such deep denial of the market’s clear messages that they deny the legitimacy of a clear personal choice, misdirecting attention toward the makers of ad blocking tools, and away from what’s actually happening: people asserting power over their own lives and private spaces (e.g. their browsers) online.

If companies actually believe in free markets, they need to believe in free customers. Those are people who, at the very least, are in charge of their own experiences in the networked world.

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Help: why don’t images load in https?

May 14, 2016 in Berkman, Blogging, Harvard, Internet, problems, publishing, security | 14 comments

For some reason, many or most of the images in this blog don’t load in some browsers. Same goes for the ProjectVRM blog as well. This is new, and I don’t know exactly why it’s happening.

So far, I gather it happens only when the URL is https and not http.

Okay, here’s an experiment. I’ll add an image here in the WordPress (4.4.2) composing window, and center it in the process, all in Visual mode. Here goes:

cheddar3

Now I’ll hit “Publish,” and see what we get.

When the URL starts with https, it fails to show in—

  • Firefox ((46.0.1)
  • Chrome (50.0.2661.102)
  • Brave (0.9.6)

But it does show in—

  • Opera (12.16)
  • Safari (9.1).

Now I’ll go back and edit the HTML for the image in Text mode, taking out class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-10370 from between the img and src attributes, and bracket the whole image with the <center> and </center> tags. Here goes:

cheddar3

Hmm… The <center> tags don’t work, and I see why when I look at the HTML in Text mode: WordPress removes them. That’s new. Thus another old-school HTML tag gets sidelined. 🙁

Okay, I’ll try again to center it, this by time by taking out class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-10370 in Text mode, and clicking on the centering icon in Visual mode. When I check back in Text mode, I see WordPress has put class=”aligncenter” between img and src. I suppose that attribute is understood by WordPress’ (or the theme’s) CSS while the old <center> tags are not. Am I wrong about that?

Now I’ll hit the update button, rendering this—

cheddar3

—and check back with the browsers.

Okay, it works with all of them now, whether the URL starts with https or http.

So the apparent culprit, at least by this experiment, is centering with anything other than class=”aligncenter”, which seems to require inserting a centered image Visual mode, editing out size-full wp-image-whatever (note: whatever is a number that’s different for every image I put in a post) in Text mode, and then going back and centering it in Visual mode, which puts class=”aligncenter” in place of what I edited out in text mode. Fun.

Here’s another interesting (and annoying) thing. When I’m editing in the composing window, the url is https. But when I “view post” after publishing or updating, I get the http version of the blog, where I can’t see what doesn’t load in the https version. But when anybody comes to the blog by way of an external link, such as a search engine or Twitter, they see the https version, where the graphics won’t load if I haven’t fixed them manually in the manner described above.

So https is clearly breaking old things, but I’m not sure if it’s https doing it, something in the way WordPress works, or something in the theme I’m using. (In WordPress it’s hard — at least for me — to know where WordPress ends and the theme begins.)

Dave Winer has written about how https breaks old sites, and here we can see it happening on a new one as well. WordPress, or at least the version provided for https://blogs.harvard.edu bloggers, may be buggy, or behind the times with the way it marks up images. But that’s a guess.

I sure hope there is some way to gang-edit all my posts going back to 2007. If not, I’ll just have to hope readers will know to take the s out of https and re-load the page. Which, of course, nearly all of them won’t.

It doesn’t help that all the browser makers now obscure the protocol, so you can’t see whether a site is http or https, unless you copy and paste it. They only show what comes after the // in the URL. This is a very unhelpful dumbing-down “feature.”

Brave is different. The location bar isn’t there unless you mouse over it. Then you see the whole URL, including the protocol to the left of the //. But if you don’t do that, you just see a little padlock (meaning https, I gather), then (with this post) “blogs.harvard.edu | Doc Searls Weblog • Help: why don’t images load in https?” I can see why they do that, but it’s confusing.

By the way, I probably give the impression of being a highly technical guy. I’m not. The only code I know is Morse. The only HTML I know is vintage. I’m lost with <span> and <div> and wp-image-whatever, don’t hack CSS or PHP, and don’t understand why <em> is now preferable to <i> if you want to italicize something. (Fill me in if you like.)

So, technical folks, please tell us wtf is going on here (or give us your best guess), and point to simple and global ways of fixing it.

Thanks.

[Later…]

Some answer links, mostly from the comments below:

That last one, which is cited in two comments, says this:

Chris Cree who experienced the same problem discovered that the WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME constants in the wp-config.php file were configured to structure URLs with http instead of https. Cree suggests users check their settings to see which URL type is configured. If both the WordPress address and Site URLs don’t show https, it’s likely causing issues with responsive images in WordPress 4.4.

Two things here:

  1. I can’t see where in Settings the URL type is mentioned, much less configurable. But Settings has a load of categories and choices within categories, so I may be missing it.
  2. I wonder what will happen to old posts I edited to make images responsive. (Some background on that. “Responsive design,” an idea that seems to have started here in 2010, has since led to many permutations of complications in code that’s mostly hidden from people like me, who just want to write something on a blog or a Web page. We all seem to have forgotted that it was us for whom Tim Berners-Lee designed HTML in the first place.) My “responsive” hack went like this: a) I would place the image in Visual mode; b) go into Text mode; and c) carve out the stuff between img and src and add new attributes for width and height. Those would usually be something like width=”50%” and height=”image”. This was an orthodox thing to do in HTML 4.01, but not in HTML 5. Browsers seem tolerant of this approach, so far, at least for pages viewed with the the http protocol. I’ve checked old posts that have images marked up that way, and it’s not a problem. Yet. (Newer browser versions may not be so tolerant.) Nearly all images, however, fail to load in Firefox, Chrome and Brave when viewed through https.

So the main question remaining are:

  1. Is this something I can correct globally with a hack in my own blogs?
  2. If so, is the hack within the theme, the CSS, the PHP, or what?
  3. If not, is it something the übergeeks at Harvard blogs can fix?
  4. If it’s not something they can fix, is my only choice to go back and change every image from the blogs’ beginnings (or just live with the breakage)?
  5. If that’s required, what’s to keep some new change in HTML 5, or WordPress, or the next “best practice” from breaking everything that came before all over again?

Thanks again for all your help, folks. Much appreciated. (And please keep it coming. I’m sure I’m not alone with this problem.)

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