Tom Watson

Google Trust

I run my business largely on Google's platform: email, files, calendar, my telephone number and easy syncing across multiple devices. I'm also a power user of Google's Android mobile operating system - it's my choice for both phone and tablet. Of course, Google is my default search engine and mapping program. And like many journalists, academics, and information obsessed geeks, I organized the RSS feeds from blogs and news sites that I followed with Google Reader.

Last week in my Forbes column, I joined the general din of outrage among hard-core Reader users when Google announced it was killing the service.

Does Google understand the concept of corporate social responsibility? That seems to be the basic question around the company’s strange decision to shut down a tiny service that serves as a major audience conduit for many thousands of bloggers, citizen journalists, and self publishers.

Google’s announcement today that it is destroying Google Reader, the most popular RSS syndication tool was a massive blow to the blogging community – and to most of those speaking out tonight via social media, an entirely unnecessary attack on an important corner of the public Internet by a company with more than $50 billion in revenue and a newly-won reputation as a tech giant on the move.

Don't forget, Google launched Reader to gain an important niche in the news world - and because of its dominance in search and email, Reader quickly became the largest RSS outlet in the world. But Google seems obsessed with its failed social media platform G+ and is apparently interested in competing with Amazon and Apple on paid magazine and news subscriptions. So Reader became a cost center of limited value....or so the Google chieftains believed.

In fact, the decision to shutter Reader has been a disaster for Google because the company alienated that key user base so completely (and cluelessly, if you ask me). For the couple million it probably saved in not maintaining Reader, it lost many untold millions in social capital and negative publicity, threatening the reception of its upcoming Glass product - and leading most of the tech press to mock this week's release of its new note-taking product, Google Keep.

The headlines told the story - nobody trusts Google to keep a service, even if its successful in winning adoption.

Google Keep? It'll probably be with us until March 2017 - on average

Google Keep Arrives, But For How Long?

Google Keep: The Next New Service to Die

A matter of trust: Will Google Keep stick around?

Om Malik was particularly tough - and on point:

Sorry Google, but you might not realize that you are acting like the company you wanted to replace: Microsoft. The Barons of Redmond used to float products into the market — smart displays and weird stuff — that companies like Samsung and LG would put out in the market, only to yank them later. In the end, I stopped believing in Microsoft and shifted my dollars and attention to other brands.

And so on. It really is a matter of trust, and that's something that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin don't seem to understand. Sure, they're great at innovation for a large company. But where's the sense of common cause, the recognition that social capital actually matters over the long term.

Maybe Dave Winer is right: maybe Google really is no good at being evil.

Postscript: I'm trying Feedly as my new RSS reader. It's pretty good. A little too "magazine" like compared to Reader's spare stack of links, but I'll keep it for a while and see.

Let's Link to the Salt of the Earth

The annual Personal Democracy Forum unfurls its banner of Internet freedom and open digital communications this week at NYU, convening transparency geeks and "we-government" advocates from around the world for two days of wifi-powered gab and jab. I'll be there and look forward to the immersion in the networks and back-channels that powered, for example, the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.

In an interesting post on his Buzz Machine blog, one of PDF's perennial voices, Jeff Jarvis, sagely scrapes the wired government question to its core: sovereignty. To what extent can governments, elected and otherwise, yield power and legal oversight - and indeed, public citizen participation itself - to the borderless, socially-networked digital polity?

As is his wont, Jeff props up an adversary to pummel in his ferocious Fight Club sparring and yeah, he's French:

The e-G8 was government’s opening volley against the internet as its agent of disruption. Oh, yes, the gathering was positioned as exactly the opposite: We come in peace, said Nicolas Sarkozy. After hearing him speak to the thousand net, corporate, technology, and government machers he’d assembled in Tuileries tents, I tweeted that I felt like a native of the Americas or Africa watching colonists’ ships sail in, thinking, this can’t end well.

I rewatched Sarkozy’s welcoming address and heard him alternately begging to be invited to the cool kids’ party–and warning them of trouble if he isn’t. “As long as the internet is part and parcel of the daily lives of our citizens, it would be a contradiction to leave government out of this massive discussion,” he said.

Then he asserted: “No one should forget that governments in our democracies are the only legitimate representatives of their citizens.” Really, Mr. President? Tell that to the people of Tahrir Square. The citizens of Egypt found their true voice apart from the government of their so-called democracy. Spring is not only overtaking the Middle East. In Spain, too, citizens are speaking for themselves, because they can. Where else will it spread?

Jeff didn't drop in the reference to the Tuileries lightly - it's pretty easy to cast a scripted old-school pol like Sarkozy as a modern Louis XVI, defensively awaiting the mobs in his garden, and he's quite right about the connected nature of the Tahrir Square crowds. But there are two aspects of  the Jarvis post that I might take issue with.

The first relates to style and culture, to the idea so resident among - well - tech machers that they're the beans on the vines of the rest of the world's population. They are not. Indeed, "tech cool" has become such a mass consumer brand proposition - the linked sans serif world of Apple and Google and Twitter - that there's no exclusivity at all, hence no "cool kids party." Take it from someone who wrote that "the big boys don't get it" in one of the early proto-blogs in 1995 that the big boys do indeed get it - indeed the big boys are it (more on this in a moment). Techno-hip is the default culture, not the province of the vanguard. Google is Wal-Mart, Apple is McDonald's, Twitter is Target and Facebook really is your father's Oldsmobile.

Yet the idea of an elite persists, even in the hallways of PDF, where organizers Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej go to long lengths to ensure a broad, diverse and grounded level of discourse. In part, it relates to the anti-government attitude so prevalent in Silicon Valley, where "self-regulation" in industry is not greeted with the peals of laughter the concept receives in the rest of the world. The great new social networks we rightly celebrate for their role in democratic movements are themselves controlled by a corporate few. For better or worse, our technology industry does think of itself as undeserving of intervention by the elected representatives of the citizenry and has often attempted to set up its own governance. So when Jarvis sets up Sarkozy as an old dude grasping for membership in the "cool kids" club, he's positioning democratic heads of of state outside the digital elite - which in fairness to Jeff, doesn't just mean the big business CEOs, venture capitalists, and A-list digerati but also the new leaders on the world stage using connected technologies to build movements.

Yet here's the rub: there should be no digital elite if this thing goes the way we'd all like it to go. Not in Egypt or Tunisia. Not in Silicon Valley. Not in Foggy Bottom. Not under house arrest in Norfolk, England. Certainly not among the anarchist hackers who attack privacy and speech. I have no interest in creating a new power structure defined by control over digital assets and audiences.

And that's my second point: I refuse to yield my rights as a citizen of the United States to any digital plebiscite, or any appointed committee of self-appointed "industry leaders" ...  or to lay down for the bullying wired brownshirts for that matter.

Sarkozy's point about democratic governments being "the only legitimate representatives of their citizens" was clumsily expressed. It implies a yolk of obedience to the state, while ignoring the vital concept of civic duty that has always been at the core of Jeffersonian democratic principles. That is to say simply: democracy is, and should be, a two-way street. Despite the failings of American government and political leaders - a constant since the founding of the Republic - that push and pull still exists, in my view. And it  defines legitimacy and undergirds sovereignty.

The rise of networks, while an annoyance to those in power at times, should actually work to legitimize elected government by connecting groups of citizens and lessening the distance between the government and the governed.

Those who believe in democracy online, and the strong worth of social media tools in both demanding representation and strengthening its every day expression, should recoil at the shenanigans of some who posture to attack the legitimacy of the elected - whether it's the Tea Party, the hard-core followers of WikiLeaks, or the digitial mobs who threaten cyber-death to any who disagree with their ever-changing demands and manifestos.

The argument that the Internet comprises a new borderless polity is strong one. Jeff Jarvis argues: "many of us — net people — have a new loyalty that inevitably undercuts old, national authority." Yet in that brave new world, where do I vote? Whom can I impeach? And where are my rights when the principles of Jefferson and the ideals of Emerson lay trampled in the digital gutter in a virtual world where coding might equals moral right?

And yet we cannot look away from the power of self organization and activism - of new alliances - partially empowered by digital networking tools. Sociologist blogger Zeynep Tufekci, who was on  PDF's WikiLeaks panel with me last December, has a great post up on the mood in post-Mubarek Egypt, and she goes inside the organizing structure - only to immediately encounter that tension between radical change powered by self organization ... and self determination powered by the the institutions of democracy. This snippet captures the essential friction of transition:

The organizers were identified with orange badges and took turns manning (and womanning as females were searched by women volunteers) the many entrances. At my last entrance, the polite young woman doing the search apologized to me, as she seemed to do to everyone she had to search, even as she did a fairly good job of looking through my small purse. Unlike regular police, she was not socialized into the idea that there is nothing disturbing about treating people as if they may do something wrong before they’ve done anything wrong. She did her job diligently, knowing it needed to be done, but also clearly uncomfortable with her role as treating people as presumed troublemakers. It was as if she symbolized the tense transition facing the idealist street activists of Cairo who are now struggling with questions of governance, of organization, how to contest elections and how to deal with the myriad of powerful forces from the Army to others.

That "tense transition" is what I'm hoping to hear more about at NYU this week. In a post previewing PDF, Micah Sifry wrote that he was looking forward to hearing Tunisian activist Sami Ben Gharbia of Nawaat.org  and Global Voices - and points to his long essay on digital activism in the Arab world. The essay is startling, but perhaps it shouldn't be. In arguing that nascent democratic movements in the Middle East and North Africa need, more than anything else, their independence from the influence of western governments and NGOs, Ben Gharbia is mirroring an American ideal, even while opposing American influence - and his goal is to "prevent digital activism in the Arab world from losing its most genuine and cherished characteristic which is its autonomy."

While it may look easy to grasp, digital activism is a complex multi-faceted movement, varies strongly from one country to another, and changes over the course of time. It’s always evolving by adopting new tools and tactics and through a constant adjustment of its strategies of resistance and actions.

[snip]

Caught in the middle between authoritarian regimes aggressively engaged in repression, Internet filtering and monitoring on the one side, and growing attention from Western public agencies and associated NGOs on the other, digital activists and online free speech advocates in the Arab world are going through one of the most challenging phases of their short history that could alter their ecosystem dramatically.

That challenge is theirs, as it should be. There is no "8th continent" or new government of the Internet. There are lands and there are peoples and there are myriad interlocked cultures. If you would not challenge the hard-won rights and sovereignty of a Northern African democratic movement in its infancy, please don't challenge mine. After all, thanks to the ever-growing growing network of networks, my democracy grows more responsive and transparent daily....doesn't it?

Book of the Year: You Are Not A Gadget

"Think For Yourself" would have been an apt subtitle for Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget, my pick for non-fiction book of the year and the most important piece of writing on technology and communications to be published in 2010. Instead, Lanier and his publishers went with "A Manifesto" and it certainly is all of that - bright, opinionated, often meandering, occasionally pedantic, happily confrontational and in its totality a bold red stop sign in the path of wired society's long march toward a thin, common identity.

Not that I wanted to stop at that particular intersection.

My 2008 book CauseWired chronicled the rise of online social activism and presented a generally (but not entirely) rosy outlook for a socially-networked world with access to information and the digital tools needed to change society. I chose to focus on the development of positive, collaborative platforms like Kiva, Change.org, GlobalGiving and DonorsChoose and the creation of networks to fight poverty, disease and genocide. And I saw the ascendancy of vast social applications like Facebook and Twitter as generally benevolent to the movement for social change; greater participation could yield more democratic structures, more authentic power from below - and if more individuals could see a wider view of the injustice in the world, more of them would organize to fix it.

Yet I've never embraced techno-utopianism or served time as a social media triumphalist; back in the 90s Jason Chervokas and I would regularly rail in @NY against a form of cyber-libertarianism that argued for a self-regulated technology industry and no societal restraint on anything digital. Where some treated "information wants to be free" as a physicist's formula, we saw it as a political slogan. Chervokas and I recognized that that the "freedom" some technologists were arguing for was merely a cover for seeking power; in a new world ordered by technology, who would be in charge? Fast forward to the socially-networked Internet of 2010, and it's no surprise that a few powerful players now control vast amounts of our identities and our content.

Nonetheless, You Are Not a Gadget was a head-snapper for a me. And the intellectual whiplash was worth the collision.

The central tenet of Lanier's manifesto is the idea that humanistic values are too often lacking in widely-adopted digital technology - that in using online services driven by algorithms and marketing (and what's better for the programmer and the advertiser), users naturally adopt a less complex online personality, a less nuanced identity. In CauseWired, I relayed the wisdom of my then-16-year-old daughter, who explained that Facebook wasn't your actual self, it was "your best you."

Fitting neatly into a Facebook profile is reductive, argues Lanier, who wonders "whether people are becoming like MIDI notes - overly defined and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer." Twitter limits in another way, by placing severe strictures of the actual form of communications. With each message limited to 140 characters (much less with a link and a hashtag or two) it often removes the gray space. The big issues can be reduced to a half sentence and a link, really very little more than a click on the Facebook "like" button. It becomes a fantastic echo chamber, a vast din of repetition with easily-delineated sides like a soccer match. No wonder every single politician and celebrity gravitates to Twitter - the control over the messaging is fantastic (indeed, the comical early mistakes some pols made on Twitter were the exceptions that proved the rule). Marketers now understand the on/off MIDI-like notational quality of short messages - they're paying six-figures for so-called "promoted" tweets and trends, which are just a fancy and expensive method for Twitter to lie to the very userbase that built the service. Or as Lanier puts it in discussing social networks like Twitter: "Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am."

Lanier's point is that by reducing personality and the wide sweep of human thought into chunks that can fit easily into databases and digested through clever widely-popular front end designs, the possibility for horrific "crowd-sourced" activity is that much greater. To put it simply, the good guys don't always win. Throughout history, they've often been shouted down by crowds. While it's impossible to argue with the sunny opening lines of the introduction to Yochai Benkler's seminal Internet text The Wealth of Networks - "Information, knowledge and culture are central to human freedom and human development" - and to sympathize with a point of view that argues that great access to those qualities improves the lot of mankind, Lanier's warnings also seem in tune with the times.

It's not crazy to worry that, with millions of people connected through a medium that sometimes brings out their worst tendencies, massive, fascist-style mobs could rise up suddenly. I worry about the next generation of young people around the world growing up with internet-based technology that emphasizes crowd aggregation, as is the current fad. Will they be more likely to succumb to pack dynamics when they come of age?

That kind of thinking flies in the face of a more utopian view of free information, embodied in hacker philosopher Richard Stallman's famous '90s proclamation that when "information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving." I'd naturally ask "what does generally useful mean?" and Lanier goes a step further, noting that the free flow of information also brings large-scale vitriol to arguments between semi-anonymous actors on the Net. "What's to prevent the acrimony from scaling up? Unfortunately, history tells us that collectivist ideas can mushroom into large-scale social disasters."

Lanier's "digital Maoism" may be the intellectual equivalent of crying "fire!" in a crowded theater, especially one filled with venture capital-backed tech companies, media conglomerates and telecommunications outfits all mining profits from the social gold rush (not to mention the trade press that loves them). And Lanier's is a particularly well-aimed attack on geek culture: "The new twist in Silicon Valley is that some people - very influential people - believe they are hearing algorithms and crowds an other internet-supported nonhuman entities speak for themselves. I don't hear those voices though - and I believe those who do are fooling themselves."

You Are Not A Gadget also warns against an Internet-based democracy, a world of governing chaos in which "superenergized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax code on a frantic, never-ending basis." The remedy is our current actual democracy - "the slower processes of elections and court proceedings" - which are like calming bass waves in Lanier's musical metaphor. They reduce "the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an overexcited state when too many rapid changes coincide in such a way that they don't cancel one another out." It's dull and it doesn't make a handy retweet. And it also argues against some of the aspects of the latest techie cause célèbre - Wikileaks, a secretive organization that claims it represents the interests of more open government but renounces public accountability. Three weeks ago, I wrote that I didn't think "Wikileaks advances the cause of more accessible government or international justice." And Lanier didn't win too many allies with his essay in The Atlantic last week that argued for more skepticism toward Julian Assange and his shadowy organization, while taking "nerd supremacy" to task for the near lock-step support of Wikileaks at the cost of traditional avenues of trust:

"The strategy of Wikileaks, as explained in an essay by Julian Assange, is to make the world transparent, so that closed organizations are disabled, and open ones aren't hurt. But he's wrong. Actually, a free flow of digital information enables two diametrically opposed patterns:  low-commitment anarchy on the one hand and absolute secrecy married to total ambition on the other."

In a spirited Atlantic response to Lanier's piece, Zeynep Tufekci (who by chance I happened to sit next to on the stage for our panel at the Personal Democracy Forum's Wikileaks symposium on Dec. 11) argued that he "makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations." In other words, those large organizations stand opposed to individual liberty - which the free flow of information can help to guarantee. And that idea also infused some of the criticism of You Are Not A Gadget, especially reactions to Lanier's dystopian view of a purely crowd-sourced social commons, his somewhat alarmist suggestion that "collectivist ideas can mushroom into large-scale social disasters."

Frankly, it's part of the deeply romantic view that so many technologists hold of the Internet (I'm not immune to this) and it's an especially American viewpoint. We tend to view corporations and big organizations and "the state" as monoliths, rather than collections of many individual humans working toward a loose common cause - and we tend to welcome the new frontier than disintermediation brings. In 1997, in a column for The New York Times, Chervokas and I wrote:

For more than 200 years Americans have been driven by the myth of the frontier, the feral, boundless space beyond known civilization where opportunities are infinite, where homesteaders can discard identities of birth and inhabit instead their own identities of mind, and where law is what you make it. This libertarian, romantic myth has informed a lot of the national discourse about the Internet -- America's new "freer, vast, electric world," to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman.

That "freer, vast, electric world" still holds tremendous promise, in my view. Questioning our direction does not mean losing that promise or ending the Internet experiment. Yet Lanier's point of tends to get lumped into naysayer's category. In a tweet today, NYU press watcher Jay Rosen posited that as they age, digital people tend toward the insight that "de-excites." Some keep going, he wrote, while others "become professional debunkers." Challenged by Jeff Jarvis, he named Jaron Lanier as one of the latter - but I think that's a bit off the mark. If you dig into You Are  Not A Gadget, the sense of wonderment at the possibilities of this digital age remains intact. Lanier is more than a professional debunker. And in my view, the very questioning of the impact of crowds and networks on the social commons is welcome.

"Next to the many problems the world faces today, debates about online culture may not seem that pressing," writes Lanier. "We need to address global warming, shift to a new energy cycle, avoid wars of mass destruction, support aging populations, figure out how to benefit from open markets without being disastrously vulnerable to their failures, and take care of other basic business. But digital culture and related topics like the future of privacy and copyrights concern the society we'll have if we can survive these challenges."

I agree. You Are Not A Gadget didn't change my thinking, but it made me a think a lot more. It's the book of the year for 2010.

I'll Be Your Mirror

The targeting on Facebook advertising is starting to annoy me. Then again, I have only myself to blame. After all, the basic value of the Facebook experience is simple: you tell them everything you can  bear to about yourself and create a list of your "friends." Then you read about what those friends are doing. How can you be surprised when the advertising widgety gurus in the Facebook lab create an algorithm that spits back a version of you - the improved if you buy our products you.

Hence, the hideous targeted advertisement to the left. Which hit me flat in the, er, gut today at about 3:37 just as I perused the 30 or so friend requests I can't make heads or tails of in my Facebook queue.

Honestly, you don't enter your height or weight in the little Facebook query form, so how did they guess? I joined no Forty-something and Flabby groups. My photo is discreet. Was it all those Big Bill Broonzy songs in my iTunes playlist?

Or were they just playing the odds of date of birth, 1962.

As I've long argued, the privacy debate is over - has been since the 90s or before. Everything we purchase is tracked or logged or dumped into a database; swipe cards - from bank cards to EZ-pass - track our movements. Cell phone bills show our migratory patterns. And just wait till the new GPS numbers. There are security cameras is every building in midtown, a camera on every corner, every stop-light. Our web surfing tracks are rubbed in digital brass. Email is forever. And as we know, the telecom companies will turn over the records to any tinhorn who happens to ask, Federal warrants be damned. Hell, even the Democratic nominee for president, a man seeking to undo the horrors of the Bush years, agrees with it.

So I long ago decided to try and embrace this public stance, to give up on digital privacy and enjoy the increased communications and the new relationships that social networks can provide. But now, this targeted ad for green tea and a flat belly and has riled me. I have no beefcake aspirations, Facebook. Turn off your evil machine and keep your "abs" to yourself.

Nor Was I Aware of Any Coveting...

“I’m aware that there is killing in the game. I wasn’t aware of the stealing.”

- Brenda Stanhouse, in testimony during a lawsuit involving hidden sex scenes in the hit video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which she bought for her 15-year-old son.

The Case for Old Comments

Fred Wilson is  thinking about closing off his older comment streams to help adapt to a new technology that will make his well-traversed blog's comments a bigger part of the clickstream. I understand the rationale - comments have been buried in blog architecture for too long - but I think it's a mistake.

I love getting comments on old posts, and I get them all the time. My Guitars R Us post from way back in 2004 is great case in point. It's become the de facto public commons for Guitar Center employees (current and former) to dissect the company's management practices, compensation structure, and business plan. My original thoughts have been long since cashiered to mere background status; the commenters have been going at it for years. The most recent post there is from August 19th - indeed, that single post has almost reached full-blown blog status on its own.

There are others. I got a comment from a friend of Marina Lakhman just the other day. In the spring 02 2004, I wrote about Marina, a terrific young woman who died tragically young. It was a short remembrance of a colleague and a friend who didn't live to see Web 2.0, but would have embraced its social aspects in all fullness. I get comment on that post a couple of times a year. Last week, I got this from Manny:

I agree with the poster who said she is one of those people that when you hear they're dead, you go "what the..." One of the saddest days of my ife is when I found out she died.

And, of course, it brought Marina to my mind. That's a good thing. I still get comments on some of my Mukhtaran Bibi posts from awhile back. And punk rock fans of a certain vintage are always liable to drop in and defend Johnny Ramone's politics or mourn untimely demise of Johnny Thunders. That's great. Over on Fred's blog, commenter Shannon Clark nails it, I think:

There is indeed value to the comments in certain old posts - I know of many bloggers whose old posts on a given topic have sparked a small community in the comment threads for a given post (usually on topics hard to find elsewhere online).

Exactly.

We need to open comments to the distributed media model; our posts go everywhere, but comments stay home. And comment spam is an incredible annoyance. But I'd hate to see Fred close off comments to older posts - his is an influential blog and it may lead others to take the same step. and I think he'll miss the little late-arriving gems that can really pick up an old post.

Platform Facebook

I joined Facebook a year ago, built a small network of contacts (mainly political bloggers), and left it at that. Turned to it now and then to look people up. But lately, I'll admit to spending more time. Facebook has become a big-league platform and frankly, it's wonderful to have a still-independent big-time new media platform out there and growing.

Now, Facebook germinated with the college kids - linking campuses and causes, "faces" and wannabes. It's often thrown into conversation by middle-aged guys who need a buzzword or two about the hot social networks. "The MySpace and Facebook crowd." So the names drop.

But while MySpace remains a generally inpenetrable mess (sorry Rupert, you bought a lemon), Facebook has grown up and it now has real professional uses. It's also a pleasure to use.

So much so, that I created a newcritics Facebook group today, rather than add bulletin boards and other features on the site itself. It just made sense. For one, the ease of use at Facebook and its new open platform (you can build apps there now) is attractive. For another, there's a built-in audience that can come to newcritics from the Facebook platform itself. I like that.

Bits and Pieces

Whatcha got under the hood there, fella? That a six-cylinder or the eight? What kind of gizmos and flibgadgets are you using on the front end? How's the mileage on the hozzle? These are the kinds of high-tech questions that we hard-core early adopter types have to field on a daily basis. We try to boil it down to layman's terms, of course, so that even the non-engineers can attain a vague grasp of the fundamentals. So now and again, we take a quick look at some of the more technical advances at Tom Watson: My Dirty Life & Times - a tip of the virtual hat to the massive team that keeps this blogmobile moving down the highway. Some new additions to the basic muscle car Typepad V8 powertrain:

See that box of head shots and avatars down the left side - no farther, the LEFT side. There. That's the handy little widget from MyBlogLog, a newish web service that Fred tipped me off to. It's incredibly viral - and for grownups, too. Kind of a MySpace for middle-aged people who write blogs. Basically it tracks other bloggers who visit your site, creating a kind of central community around blogs. I like it very much so far,and I'd love to see more of the bloggers in the B-roll join up. Here's a hint: it's already bringing in new readers. so please sign up and join my community. I'm curious to see what feature sets MyBlogLog adds down the line.

Also down that left column is the feed from my coComment account - a nifty service that I use to track my comments left on other blogs. Too often, I've found I drop a comment or two and orget to come back and follow the conversation. Then too, how will my own readers know what I'm commenting on elsewhere? In the open spirit of this conversation of ours - and with coComment's help - you can track my virtual footprints around the web and leave your own as well if you choose. I like this feature very much.

On the right side are two features that have been up for a while. The first is my Flickr box, which has been a feature here almost since the start. Love Flickr - an almost too obvious thing to say. But since it's recently been redesigned, I love it more. Keeps track of my pics, helps distribute photographs to a wider world, and lets me in on the lives of many friends and colleagues online. Visit my Flickr page. Tell me how cute my kids are.

Finally, there are the charts from Last.fm, a social music site that is really amazing - not only does it track what I'm listening to on my desktop (but not my iPod, alas) and report it back to me - and me to you - it offers up an infinite set of tag-based "radio stations" that allow me to discover new music and old faves. I use it all the time. Feel free to comment on my taste in music. (Strangely, my most-played track at work is Brand New Cadillac by the Clash - hmmm). That's what this sucker is for.

Part of the purpose of this blog is pure experimentation with the medium - of it there's anything else I should add, let me know. Features are liable to come and go, depending upon whether they work for me. But hey, it's my blog. I'm the digital grease-monkey here. Over and out.

UPDATE: Of course, as soon as I endorse coComments, the javascript for publicizing the service takes the site down for a couple of days for those of you stuck using the Internet Explorer browser. I endeavored to take it down - from the shore, via my Treo phone - and patched things together. Fred apparently suffered the same problems, and comments on his experiments with "blog bling." I agree with him - this is an experiment for me, and if a script takes my breathless writing offline for IE users for a day or two, well that's the price ya pay for living in a transparent world.

MySpace is YourSpace

Typepad is like the ancient Buick Skylark I used to drive. Sometimes it flies, that killer 350 smacking down shiny Camaros out on Central Avenue. And sometimes it just answers with a cold, empty "click, click, click" when you turn the key. Today was the dead battery Typepad, so while I sat there unable to post, it got me thinking about these internets of ours.

Specifically about social networks, actually - those hotter-than-Hades social-bookmarking, social-tagging, and social-er-hooking-up sites that are sucking up more and more user time online, and more and more ink in the press.

First off, I'm not hooked.

Yeah, I use tags...sometimes. When I forget, I forget. Mostly I use 'em to keep track of stuff for myself, whether on Technorati or Flickr or my own blog. I don't use them to meet other taggers. Same thing with Delicious (when I can figure it out). The only other reason I use tags is the somewhat hypocritical notion that they'll deliver a larger audience. Both selfish reasons, unrelated to a wider sense of online community - for that, I rely on comments, both on my blog and the many other sites I track on a regular basis. Comments are social networking, to me.

I was thinking about this after reading a terrific post by Mark Hurst of Good Experience, who was hired by Delicious (again, no dots, I'm too tired) to help in making the site/service more user-friendly. Mark's key observation hit home:

Since we finished the project a few months ago, I've noticed a lot of attention in the press paid to this area. Every other week, it seems, there's a major story about "social bookmarking", "tagging", "folksonomies", or some such term. Despite the fact that the average user has no idea what these mean, and no easy way to reach the benefits, these stories proliferate. And here's why: techies are so adept at understanding these tools and reaping the benefits that they sign up in droves; journalists talk to techies to get story ideas; and voila! a new "hot trend" is born in the press.

Now, I'm something of a techie (slightly lapsed but recovering rapidly) and an early-adopter in these matters, but the benefit of spending hours creating a complex taxonomy for free, so that other users may somehow benefit (in mysterious and often unclear ways, as Mark points out) seems to come up a few dollars short of a bargain. This is something Joshua Porter over at his Bokardo blog took up in a post back in May (pointer by Mark):

Unfortunately, the ability to aggregate has blinded many software developers to think that tags are a cure-all to the success of their software. Tags have almost become a requisite feature in new software. I’ve received many emails in which developers try to sell me on the merits of their brand-new software based mostly on the ability of potential users to tag things, as if users inherently enjoy tagging things as a matter of course. Real people, in contrast, tag for their own benefit. And they surely won’t tag if the incentive to do so isn’t clear.

Aggregation, in general, is probably more effective as a second-order feature of software. If we create features just to aggregate them, without providing users with tangible value first, then people simply won’t use the features. My guess is that aggregation technologies which prove most useful will be ones that are added to some activity that users have already started doing without the promise of any aggregation benefits.

Still, you've seen the news about MySpace, haven't you? It's gotten more bytes in certain circles than the North Korean missile program - and in my book, the trajectory is just as steady. MySpace - where I spend zero hours and zero minutes per week because of age restrictions - is the new traffic leader, blowing by Yahoo and eBay in terms of total percentage of Internet traffic.  According to Hitwise, 4.46% of all Web traffic is MySpace. That means Rupert Murdoch - who picked up MySpace for half a billion - is the king of social media, the master of tags, kaiser of social bookmarks.

Strange, actually.

I would have thought that for people of Murdoch's generation, "social bookmarking" conjures images of sweet old ladies gathering on Saturday nights to crochet lovely placemarkers for their Bibles and book club bodice-rippers. Pass the lemonade dear.

In reality, big media masters like Murdoch believe that anything pulling people away from their traditional properties must immediately be tamped down and defeated or purchased and rolled into their empires. And they're right, quite honestly. Big media companies, if they're to remain big media companies, have to evolve or die - these days, just faster. And yet, if people roll their own media, where's the value to content-laden media vaults like Fox or Time-Warner or Disney? Robert Young has a terrific essay over at GigaOm that raises more questions than it answers, but is well-worth reading. He argues:

But just as the Internet was not a subset of AOL, social media will not become a subset of traditional media. In fact, social media will increasingly begin to compete directly with traditional media consumption. Yes, it is true that the media output produced and distributed by the audience itself will generally be of lower production value and quality. Even so, they will prove highly competitive to Hollywood products, as the personal engagement factor inherent in personal media outweighs any loss of production value.

So given the competitive nature of social media and the operational challenges it represents, why should media companies even think of embracing social integration? Because they have no choice… social media will continue to take market share away from traditional media, regardless of whether the media companies participate or not.

Defense for the social media startups seems rather difficult: anybody with a server farm and slightly-tipsy naming committee can come up with the next YouTube or Flickr. New services hit the clickstream daily. But the connections that people are making seem to be permanent - or at least the time they take to make them seems as permanent as the time they take on telephone calls and email. Notes Fred Wilson:

So we may have to wait until the fall to see where all of this is headed but my sense is that "social media" is here to stay. The individual properties may rise and fall (remember Geocities and Tripod?), but the idea of media that is personal and social is a lasting one and an important one.

I agree that social media is a permanent addition to our media lives, but it probably won't resolve in one big company. MySpace is hot as hell, but how do you play defense in a company like that? When you give the people full power over the tools that create media, who knows how it shakes out? We may well face a media future with lots of smaller companies, a trove of tool and die manufacturers for the digital age and a vast media heartland of server farms. Which will be pretty cool to follow, actually.

Well, I notice that Typepad is back up so I can go in and start tagging. Ah forget it, I'll just drop this post in and call it a day.

UPDATE: Jay at Compete adds some original analysis to the MySpace vs. Yahoo debate (which apaprnetly matters to some people, though I'd say revenue and profits are better yardsticks). And Markos points to a Wired story that claims MySpace has been "Foxified" under Murdoch's reign. It apparently pulled a video critical of right-wing Sen. Ted Stevens (he of Bridge to Nowhere fame).

The Man Who Hears Music

No sooner had I thought to myself "it's too bad Pete Townshend now only posts to his regular, old rock star web site - no more two-way communications with a core group of bloggers" than the landscape changed. This morning, Pete's reopened his Boy Who Heard Music site on Blogspot, probably in reaction to the outpouring of intense discussion that erupted earlier this week over the origins of Won't Get Fooled Again.

Wait, a rock anthem released in 1971, fully 35 years ago. A lanky 60ish rock geezer clutching maniacally to a pitted Telecaster. Uh, cutting edge of the Fab New Media Explosion?

Yeah man.

Townshend gets it. After a lifetime at the very cushioned pinnacle of big media - and there is no more cushioned environment than that of the mega rock star (just read the riders) - Pete is making music and other in closer collaboration with those who consume it than ever before...or at least since his days at Ealing. Earlier this week, I posted on the National Review's insane list of 50 most conservative rock songs, giving my own semi-humorous choices, but more importantly, touching off a nice little debate among regular readers - which centered, not surprisingly, on the No. 1 on the Right Wing Hit Parade. Multiply this blog by about three dozen other blogs with similar conversation and the news of the ongoing debate reached old man Townshend's ears toot-sweet:

Won't Get Fooled Again has been listed in the UK Independent Newspaper as the number one song with - as I understand it - the political message most often misunderstood - in this case the message is said to be 'conservative', a word that may mean different things in the UK and USA.

Of course the song has no party-allied political message at all. It is not precisely a song that decries revolution - it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets - but that revolution, like all action can have results we cannot predict. Don't expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.

The song was meant to let politicians and revolutionaries alike know that what lay in the centre of my life was not for sale, and could not be co-opted into any obvious cause.

Has the world changed? When, in the past, could a group of writers essentially ping a rock star and get a thoughtful response in a matter of hours? I'll tell you when - never. But tag a bunch of posts with Pete Townshend, get the feeds fired up, and word gets passed up the big media food chain pretty quickly - or rather, pretty directly. The point is: there is no food chain now - no Under-Secertaries of A&R and Communications to keep us away from them.

This is something that Old Blue Eyes - always an artist before a rock star, really - understands quite well. In this post, he talks about live webcasting of music (which he and Roger Daltrey plan to do when The Who go on tour this summer) and how it changes the who, what, and when factors of media production and consumption.

...if you wish to address a Live audience, in real time, intimately, and free of interference from petty government regulation, broadcast restrictions, or even internet controls – Live webcasting is the future for you. On In The Attic we can smoke, swear, attack hypocrites, even be hypocrites. We can have fun and be funny. The most important thing is that we can play Live music when the whim takes us. No one can argue that you are a true performer if you can appear Live and do your thing. No tricks. No ‘auto-tune’. No computer fiddling. No puffed up personality stunts effected by extreme video editing (of the style that made Keith Moon – for example – appear insanely funny every moment of his life when in fact he was often depressed, serious and incisive). The beauty of Live webcasting is that it does not preclude the inclusion of small films, or even pre-recorded music; the Live presentation element makes it all hang together.

The circle here? Imagine logging on each day to a report from Robert Fisk on the ground in Baghdad and being able to send him a Blog comment that let him know you were with him as he exploded with frustration over what was going on around him. Imagine being logged on, and knowing there was probably less that a two or three second time delay, and witnessing a truck being blown up, or a group of police-volunteers being attacked. Such news could be relayed on Robert Fisk’s terms, and not his editor’s. Imagine knowing that you were in a small elite of subscribers who were seeing what was happening first hand, and had a duty to help spread the word. Journalism as we know it will be unravelled by Live webcasting – sadly (perhaps) it seems Rupert Murdoch is the only person on the planet who can see this ahead of time and is buying up web companies like candy. He is – like me – rather old to be so prescient. But there it is – I predicted music downloading in 1985 at a lecture at the RCA and most people walked out.

Sometimes it pays to watch the icons - especially those who prefer life off the pedestal. Oh, and something else. You may recall that Townshend supported the invasion of Iraq, and Britain's involvement. Well, he's changed his position a bit - and painfully - with an openness and honesty that's missing in Whitehall and Washington:

At first, personally knowing one of his torture victims, I wanted Sadam Hussein removed at any price. I also wanted to send a message to the Islamic world (again, a place full of many of my friends) that the West was run by dangerous men with powerful weapons and our going into Iraq to ‘tidy up’ was a better option for sending that message than dropping nuclear warheads on Afghanistan or Pakistan which has such deep and tenuous links with Britain. It is too easy to sanction war when you don’t know what is actually happening to the soldiers and civilians in the conflict, and pretty much all British newspapers have kept everyone abreast of the true horrors. The Independent through Robert Fisk has been a leader in speaking of the reality of the conflict in Iraq, and the real ‘price’ of removing Sadam. I won’t go back on my initial support for the invasion, but I feel blooded and humbled, deeply, deeply ashamed at the way things have turned out.

UPDATE: Pete's serious about video - the very first Who rehearsals are already up in QT. Oh yeah, PT welcomes TW here. And comments here. New world? Yeah... [He also hit Blue Girl and Mannion].

Technorati tags: Pete Townshend | Who | The Who