It's Fixed in the Next Release - Society

Feel Free to Ignore this Link

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:49:21 -0500

In his article If You Can't Understand The Difference Between Money And Content, You Have No Business Commenting On Business Models, Mike Masnick takes a shot at some "logic" advanced by Canadian IP lawyer James Gannon, who wrote "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy".

Masnick is justifiably unforgiving in his analysis: "It's brilliant only if you don't understand all of the following: money, economics, copyright, business and value. If you understand any of those things, you might recognize that the analogy makes no sense. Misunderstand all of them... well, then I can see how this argument might make sense."

Then Gannon stopped by to claim that it was rude or discourteous for Masnick to link to his content.

Newsflash: It's neither. It's what HTML was designed for! Seriously, welcome to 1990. Personally I think it's rude to advance obviously illogical arguments in defence of legacy content providers, but that's just me.

Audience: The Social Media Killer

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:42:50 -0600

I've been engaged with social media since forever. Always found it fascinating, even exciting. I really like Twitter. Now Quora seems interesting, but in a semi-social-media sort of way. There's a bit of a shift happening. A lot of "early adopters" have been doing the Quora thing for a while and now it's on the upswing of that familiar knee function of exponential growth.

Meanwhile, Twitter seems a little less vibrant. Is it because all the cool kids are playing with Quora? Partially. After all anyone with a real job only has so much time to dicker with this stuff, unless you're a rare beast: a Professional Social Media Guru that's a real job. So maybe Twitter is a little less shimmering with excitement because really interesting people are spending less time on it.

But that isn't all. That only explains part of it.

I think the dampening of Twitter is something that's been repeated many times with other trends – most notably blogging – and the common factor is audience. I think audience kills.

Along with a few million people, I signed on to Twitter about two years ago (call me a just-past-the-bleeding-edge adopter). What was compelling about it was the community. Chances you were going to find someone interesting, or even be followed by someone interesting were pretty high. That's exciting.

Then it became a mass phenomenon. People stopped talking to their community of followers and stated talking to their Audience. Many people stripped character from their tweets, so they didn't run a risk of offending their Audience. Characterless marketing opportunity opportunists joined in droves. Now I get endless series of follows who have triggered off some word I've used. Say the dreaded "Search Engine Optimization", expect to get followed by 35 so-called experts, half of whom promote the same methods I labelled as absolute garbage in the tweet that triggered the follow! No dialogue, no engagement, not even an argument. Just follow on keyword. These aren't people, they're applications. It's not a conversation, it's not anything.

The result is low grade ore. Generic, bland grey goo. Repetitions of repetitions of the mildly informative, rehashed. It's not spam, it's not interesting. It's a fire hose of information with few gems. The vibrancy is increasingly hard to find.

This decay is all down to Audience. Many blogs were great – when almost nobody read them. Now they write to their Audience, mostly with corresponding non-offensive blandness. Twitter offers diminishing returns, thanks to Audience. Facebook continues to survive, but only if you "friend" people you stand a chance of recognizing in a police lineup, which severely limits scope. LinkedIn has gone from a way to connect to people with specific skills or knowledge to ways to connect to people with a mail address. Now there's value.

I see MetaFilter is charging a nominal amount ($5.00) to create an account, mostly to keep the spam out. Maybe this is the kernel of a good idea. Maybe the cost of joining a community should increase as the membership grows. Maybe someone will develop an automated value ranking system that makes connecting to a site a low cost proposition for high value individuals, and vice versa. I'd sign up for that. Screw the audience.

Silicon Valley – Adjusting to the Internet's Long Tail?

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 12:50:50 -0500

Over the past year or so there's been an unusual amount of public navel gazing on the investor side of Silicon Valley (and by proxy most of the North American venture capital space). Venture capital companies have an image of being slow, demanding, and cumbersome; solely focused on big wins with huge valuations. So called “super” angels have emerged to fill a void in the VC deal space, and new hybrid models like that of YCombinator have emerged.

As Max Levchin observes, angels have an interest in lower valued exits. He concludes that the positioning of super angels as VC alternatives has resulted in a “lack of visible significant innovation”. While Levchin's observations are correct, I'm not certain that it's the angel's fault.

Instead, I think we're reaching the “long tail” of the Internet, and we need to look for innovation elsewhere. The big hits in the Internet space have all had to do with providing analogues of existing human behaviours, and the number of untapped behaviours is diminishing. A preponderance of incremental innovations – with corresponding low exits – is only to be expected.

We have been so focused on Internet related innovation for the past decade and a half (and software for the decade previous) that for a lot of investors seem to have forgotten that there are alternatives.

It's not that there's a shortage of demand for innovation. There are many areas that need great minds and risk capital. Unfortunately those aren't the opportunities that can be exploited by a bright kid with six months programming experience. They're big, capital intensive, long term projects that need teams of highly skilled people to address them. Some of these problems are critically important. They need to be solved if we're going to preserve our current lifestyle, if not ensure our survival.

If the investment community wants to innovate, it's going to have to stop looking for the ultimate solution to determining how to rank “influence” on Twitter, and instead look for better transportation solutions, better solar power generation, methods to scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, local power generation and distribution, and solutions for other truly important problems.

While North America becomes increasingly concerned about it's own relatively trivial problems like how to make an even cooler handheld device, our ability to innovate – our very concept of innovation – is collapsing in on itself like a dying star. Meanwhile, Asia is fast becoming the true leader in innovation and unless we pull out of this “make it big on the Internet” vortex, it won't be long before we're buying critical technology from abroad.

Let's not blame the angel investors. Levchin says “we should aim higher.” He's right. The question is whether or not we know which way is up.

Social Media: Why Facebook; Why Twitter?

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:37:11 -0500

As either a younger member of the boomer generation, or an older member of Gen-X, I'm a member of a big demographic that seems to have a hard time understanding social media. The most common reaction I get to mentioning something on Facebook is "I will never have a Facebook account!"

I realize now that part of the bad reputation that social media has with middle-aged adults is due to the fact that most of these people are parents, and everything they know about social media sites has come from their kids.

This led me to a great insight. Good social media sites are malleable to individual users, and that's what makes them so powerful. I am certain that my Facebook experience is vastly different from that of your average teenager's, and that's a good thing.

A middle-aged friend recently asked me about Facebook and Twitter, with the subtext "I don't 'get' either of them." I've reworked my response a bit in hope that it will be helpful to others:

The main purpose of Facebook is to get found by people you already know but have lost touch with, think of the people you would invite to a high school reunion. Simple as that. It's also good for keeping up on the big stream of small things that winds up being news in a nominally mundane life. It works well if you're not "always on" the net. You can pop in every week or so and catch up. If you ignore the clever little time-wasting applications and notification noise, it's a useful tool. In short, Facebook is good at making an electronic link to people you already know.

Twitter is much more geared to making new connections and is really something for those of us who are "on the 'net" most of the time. What it's best at is finding new clever people, and getting breaking news. Information travels very quickly in Twitter, and to a large extent it's filtered to the interests of the people you follow, which means you get more information about the things you care about. As a writer, it's also superb at making you edit things down. The 140 character limit is brutal, but it enforces the practice of a clarity that can carry into other writing.

So how did I do? Is there anything else that "defines" these sites?

A List of Twitter Types

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:36:38 -0600

I've been "hanging out" on Twitter for about three weeks now. My interactions with it have evolved quite a bit over that time.

When I first got on, my attitude was "what's the point?" That became "okay, so this is the best part of Facebook minus the dumb applications and a lot of FB's cool-but-useless user interface." But along with this functionality came a challenging signal to noise ratio. How can you decide who to follow? It's certainly not by popularity. Some of the most followed accounts are little more than posts of the form "(hook text) (external link) more on (topic) at (posters_site)." In other words, "Here's something vaguely interesting on a topic we cover. Hopefully the first link will generate the expectation that our site has even more useful information, and you'll start using us as a source."

If that's all Twitter had to offer, I'd be gone by now. But despite the noise, there's quality in the signal when you find it. I have interacted with people with unquestionable intelligence, people with expertise in interesting areas, and people with humour and insight. Twitter is also undeniably a superb source for news, both global and local.

The other problem is that few of us are consistently brilliant, so even on an individual level there's no telling how many mundane posts you'll have to read before encountering the gem that makes it worthwhile.

So I have developed a list of user types for Twitter that I use as a guideline when deciding who to follow:

The "I am a Channel" type is interested in their follower count above all else. Every post they make returns to a gateway on their site, so they can pump up their traffic stats. Some are more subtle, but the ultimate goal is to make their web properties a destination.
The "monetize" type is intent on convincing you that they know how to monetize your online presence. Inevitably this leads you to a pitch for their e-books and/or training courses. Somehow I get the feeling that these people are all modern equivalents of the "Make $1 Million from Classified Ads" artists. why do I get the feeling that the way you monetize is by selling e-books telling people how to monetize?
The "I am a social media maven" type — which is distinct from an actual social media expert — is a variation on "monetize". All you have to do is buy/subscribe, and they'll show you how to get to the top of the social media heap. By and large, these folks would fare far better if fewer of them appeared to be laid off auto workers living in their mother's basements. The ones who seem to have some class wind up being the ones who value connections above all else. As I've said before, there's something unsettling about "hook up with me on LinkedIn as a trusted source, even if I don't know you from a serial killer".
The "random link" type finds purportedly interesting information and tweets it with a useless explanation, as in "wonderful (link)". I suppose that somewhere out there, the simple act of posting makes the link worthwhile, but in my experience so far, 85% of the links go to stuff that is old, dull, boring, or just plain not interesting. A complete waste of time. Explain what's interesting about the link, please.
The "topic feed" type usually picks a well-defined topic to post about and either relates facts about that topic or posts links with information relevant to the topic. Focus is the key to success here. If the topic is pig farming, it no good can come from posting random comments on abstract art.
The "expert" type goes one better than the topic feed. These are people with a real interest and some expertise in their field, and they regularly post observations and insights along with the "topic feed" fare. A significant number of posts from these people reference original content that hey have compiled or authored.
The "personality" type is someone who has a real world profile and is using Twitter as another channel for communicating to their audience. Think Obama.
The "community" type is a member of a smaller community that uses Twitter to keep up to date. This is what Twitter seems to have originally been designed for. Some of these communities have "personality" types, who have a significant profile in within the scope of that community.
The "shared mundanity" type posts nothing but tidbits from their life. As in "listening to x while doing y". There's a fine line here. Much of the charm of Twitter is getting a snapshot into other people's lives, but we don't need the whole film; odds are that you're just not that interesting. If none of these posts have any meaning, if they don't transcend mere observation, then the unfollow button is not far away.

The real challenge here is that most people exhibit a mix of these types, and probably a few more that I haven't identified yet. Twitter is all about constructing your own community and becoming a part of it. It's social media at its most fascinating.

Newspapers are Dead. Expect a Very Long Funeral.

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:42:22 -0600

Writing on ojr.org, Getty Storch asserts that "Papers must charge for websites to survive". There is a lively debate in the comments that follow, most of them are in disagreement with Storch's analysis.

This includes mine, which I reproduce here.

Anyone who thinks newspapers can survive on local content needs to spend a few weeks on Twitter. Here is a medium where news arrives in near real time, is reliable (since misinformation is rapidly corrected by others), and relevant. This applies just as well in a global environment. I have seen real reports from people on the scene of demonstrations in Thailand and Athens, and learnt about the supply of gas from Russia to Slovakia from people in cold buildings. Twitter and similar channels tell me about traffic jams on my route downtown, about power outages and emergencies in ways that no newspaper or even television station can ever dream of achieving.

Twitter has merely brought something that has been happening for a very long time into the mainstream. As a case in point, I learnt about the death of Princess Diana via an international online chat almost three hours before the local media picked it up. This is a decade ago. Times have changed.

Information is now free and it will remain so. Any attempt to charge for access to it is absolutely doomed. The only hope that news media, particularly "print" media have for survival is by adding value. This means aggregating sources, adding perspective, and performing astute analysis. Even so, most of the revenue from these activities will be derived from online advertising, and those revenues will be orders of magnitude below what the industry currently sees as normal.

The newspaper as we know it is dead. There is no model that will resuscitate it, period. Rigor mortis has set in, the patient just doesn't fully realize it yet.

A New Internet Term - Bacn (or is it BACN?)

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 01:58:55 -0500

Chris Brogan recently blogged about some people who coined the term "Bacn," defined as "any email you receive that isn’t spam, but isn’t exactly a personal message either". The essence is that Bacn isn't Spam, because you signed up for it somehow.
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Farewell, Dear Globe

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 14:29:22 -0600

I learned to read from the pages of the Globe and Mail newspaper. For longer than I'm prepared to admit (as in -- since Grade 2) opening that paper has been part of my morning ritual. I've stuck with it through thick and thin, borne with some of it's ill-fated attempts at investigative journalism, it's deep insights, it's left-wing sense of social justice and it's right wing apologists who heaped praise on (choose a pejorative) like Conrad Black, even it's tragically misdirected hiring of Christie Blatchford (complete with some contractual clause that seems to guarantee her at least a sliver of space on the front page every time she writes an article, no matter what).

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Intellectual Property in a Digital Era

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:28:34 -0600

Last night I attended a presentation by Doug Hyatt, Business Economics Professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business. Although billed as focusing on the music industry, his comments were actually more broad ranging, even abstract.

I guess that is a telling indication of how early we are in the process of adapting to the digital era. When very smart people who make their careers from studying these problems speak in abstract terms, you know we have a long way to go.
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The Future of the Gardiner Expressway

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 16:37:00 -0500

Last month the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) released a report on dealing with the Gardiner Expressway an ageing elevated highway that cuts through the centre of downtown Toronto and pretty universally regarded as an eyesore.

In general it's a well reasoned report, but it's striking for its continuing embrace of car culture.
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Things You Can Learn from a Survey

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sun, 14 May 2006 22:40:00 -0500

I just fielded a call from Ipsos-Reid, a large and reputable polling firm. The subject was Canada's "diplomatic and development" role in Afghanistan. The sponsor of the survey was the Federal Government. It began by asking what aspects of the media's coverage I was aware of. Then it went on to ask about how I felt about the role, conveniently ignoring anything to do with the military's current combat operations. Then it asked if I agreed or disagreed with various aspects of our non-military activities. After going through all of these items, it asked again how I felt about the overall role (still restricted to diplomacy and development, of course).

The repetition of the question is fascinating. You expect that really what's being measured here is this question: "If we keep telling Canadians about all the good things, will they change their opinion to support the mission, conveniently ignoring the occasional body bag (which we'll hide by blocking the media from showing them)?"

But that's not the reason for this entry...
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Abandoning the Blogosphere?

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 17:20:00 -0600

Leah McLaren recently wrote an interesting article, titled "Logging out of the blogosphere" where she describes the reasoning behind her decision to stop reading blogs. I must admit I find myself agreeing with her in many respects. Even correcting for the volumes of garbage from spam and search engine placement games, the signal to noise ratio -- the ratio of useful, accurate, or meaningful content to incoherent, unoriginal and redundant content is disturbingly low. This is a problem with ideas that get picked up en masse on the net. Universal accessibility implies average results. For this a favourite phrase comes to mind: It's almost like half the people have below average intelligence.

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When Advertiser Integration Goes Terribly Terribly Wrong

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:25:00 -0600

I caught an episode of HGTV's "Designer Superstar Challenge" last night. It's a pretty hokey pseudo-reality show where a bunch of hopeful "designer host" candidates compete in hopes of landing a job hosting a show on HGTV. Sound like a premise for bad programming? You bet it does. You keep on thinking that the winner will wind up hosting the next challenge, and they'll just keep on endlessly searching for a new host until they find one that's good. It's the perfection of cannibalistic programming, each new season consuming the previous winner.

What takes this from merely cheesy to "bad movie bad" -- as in so bad it's funny -- is Home Depot's sponsorship. More accurately, it's the gymnastics the show goes through in an attempt to integrate Home Depot that took this episode from bad to laugh-out-loud awful.

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Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a Waste of Time

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 15:23:00 -0600

I read a blog post today by Simon Phipps (DRM and the Death of a Culture) which was a well reasoned complaint about the constraints that DRM can place on use of content. Yet no matter how well reasoned, nor argued from which position, these arguments on DRM don't matter. They don't matter because DRM will never work on static content. This is so basic, so obvious that I'm not sure why anyone ever thought it would. In fact, let's make it more general: all copy protection technologies, past, present, and future do not and will not prevent copying of non-interactive media. In fact they're a colossal waste of time, effort, and money that only serve to inconvenience legitimate users (and as Phipps points out, kill culture).

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Terrorism as Economic Warfare

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:20:00 -0600

I did a quick search for the title of this post and mostly found references to "asymmetric warfare", meaning warfare where there's a large difference between each side's military capability or methods of engagement. It's a term frequently used to refer to terrorism. Then there's economic warfare, which can be part of a military effort or completely non-military in nature.

It's interesting to note that Osama Bin Laden's version of terrorism makes for some pretty fine economic warfare in and of itself. One wonders what Bin Laden's total investment has been in his adventures to date. Probably nothing over a few hundred million dollars or so, including labour, materials, equipment, etc.

But what has the rest of the world invested in fighting him? The U.S. tab is probably well over a hundred billion dollars. Add the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus in investments by other "coalition partners" like the U.K. and it's not unreasonable to double that.

So that's a thousand to one return on investment, conservatively. Worse yet, given a reasonably well established and autonomous organization, Bin Laden's cost of ongoing operations is a fraction of his investment to date. Yet the cost of overthrowing governments, replacing infrastructure, improving economic opportunities and installing a resilient democracy remain astronomical. Moreover one can be cerain that the U.S. has invested a mere fraction of its final cost in Iraq so far. What's that take the terrorist return on investment to? One to 100,000?

As far as I'm concerned the USSR collapsed under the economic weight of the cold war. With a far less efficient economy, it was only a matter of time before the West won. Now we find ourselves in a similar situation. All terrorists have to do is motivate the world's larger military powers to mobilize their resources a few times and then wait. We'll fall under the weight of being dramatically less economically efficient at the game. Asymmetrical economic warfare indeed.