I’ve noticed that a lot of high profile (read lots of followers) Twitter accounts retweet their retweets. In other words, personA writes a tweet, personB retweets it, then personA retweets that retweet. What do you think? Tacky? Smart marketing move? Something else?

You should follow me on twitter.

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The Mac version is in beta testing; there is a trial version for Windows.

Post first appeared at com495 course blog.

Almost two weeks ago, I urged early recipients of the Twitter retweet link to be cautious with its use, because most third party clients seemed unable to display these retweets.

Today I’m repeating the caution, and it’s not only because of spotty third party client implementation. It’s also because these new retweets don’t become “real time” in the Twitter.com timeline for tweets made by anyone you are already following.

High Level Summary
One of the advantages (to the original author) of RTs is that each becomes a new tweet, a new instance. This increases the chance that someone will “see” the original tweet.

Think of a retweet as “bumping” an item “up” in time. But that’s not how the new Twitter.com interface works. On low volume accounts, this isn’t a big issue. But on moderate- to high-volume accounts (measured by number followed), it is. Here’s why.

Twitter doesn’t “bump” the old tweet — it merely changes the “retweeted by” count. So if you read your Tweets on the Twitter.com site and missed a tweet the first time around, you’ll miss it each-and-every time it’s retweeted … because it will remain in “history,” far below the fold.

The third party clients that have implemented the new retweet feature, however, appear to be treating the retweet like a new instance. In other words, they are treating them like the “old” retweets. The problem: some popular third party clients haven’t yet implemented the feature.

1. Twitter.com – The new RT feature does not “bump” tweets, ie, these new retweets are not “real time” for tweets made by anyone you are already following. I think this is a fatal flaw.
2. TweetDeck — both desktop and iPhone application — is still not displaying retweets sent via the “retweet link” in the Twitter web interface.
3. Seesmic Desktop is still not displaying retweets sent via the “retweet link” in the Twitter web interface.
4. Brizzly, a beta web interface for managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts, is displaying the new retweets
5. Tweetelator and Tweetie2 (iphone apps) are still displaying the new retweets

Methodology
In order to test how well clients render the new retweets, I “bracketed” the new retweet with an old-fashioned copy-and-paste one — either immediately before or immediately after using the Twitter retweet link. I sent retweets from all three of my accounts: @kegill, @kegill_uw, @kathygill. Each account follows the other two; this is great for testing!

1. Twitter.com
Even though I do not follow Howard Rheingold from my @kegill_uw account, the retweet showed up in that timeline on Twitter.com, with his avatar. Note that the timestamp relates to when Howard tweeted, not when I retweeted. This is a major change and is a little jarring if you’re looking at tweets before and after it that were sent seconds ago. Twitter should add the time stamp after “you”. This time-stamp business has other ramifications that I will explain momentarily.

This Tweet Appeared In My Timeline As "Retweeted"

On both of my low-volume accounts, the Twitter.com interface shows both original and test retweets in real-time. But on my high volume account, @kegill, not a single test tweet (there were four) was displayed in real-time. Why not?

For example, the @kathygill timeline shows multiple retweets — both the “test” retweets as well as tweets retweeted by the account and by other accounts. This is a very very low volume account (follows 18 mostly low-volume accounts).

Example of Multiple Retweets, @kathygill Timeline

Next, see an example of the @kegill timeline, with the @eMarketer test retweet showing at the top. In this instance, the test retweet was made after the new retweet, as you can see from the prior screen capture.

The original tweet, with the eMarketer avatar, did not appear in my @kegill real-time timeline on Twitter.com, although I retweeted it, using the new feature, from both @kathygill and @kegill_uw. I went 5 minutes back in time looking for it, even though the tweets were sent seconds apart.

This is a big problem with the new feature.

Because @kegill already follows @eMarketer, that tweet had already been displayed in my timeline. The new retweet doesn’t “bump” the tweet in time, it merely changes the “how many people RTed” data on the original tweet. This means retweets aren’t “real-time” for anyone who is already following the account you retweet. I think this is a fatal flaw.

Twitter.com Displayed Only The Test Tweet In @kegill Real-Time Timeline

However, if someone that I do not follow is retweeted by someone that I do follow, that retweet shows up in real-time, even when it’s really old (in this case, 48 hours old):

Real Time Retweet From Someone @kegill Does Not Follow

One of the advantages of the new feature, however, is public metrics. Twitter added a “Retweets” link beneath favorites (right hand navigation). It’s a handy way to see how many people retweet the things you do (or your tweets) as well as who they are.

2 and 3. TweetDeck and Seesmic

This is the latest version of TweetDeck

I made several attempts to see if TweetDeck would display a tweet that was retweeted via the new web interface link. Not a single one was displayed on TweetDeck, whether iPhone app or desktop app. I do have the latest version of TweetDeck on both the desktop and iPhone.

Here are sample screenshots — they show the “test” retweet (copy-and-paste). I guess you’ll have to take my word for it when I saw the original did not show on any screen.

In this screenshot from the desktop, the “test” retweet was sent immediately after the original. Howard Rheingold’s tweet, without my “test” label, did not show up in TweetDeck.

TweetDeck Desktop - No New Retweets

The same is true for TweetDeck iPhone. In this instance, the “test” retweet was sent immediately prior to the original.

TweetDeck iPhone - No New Retweets

Seesmic Desktop does not display the new retweets, either. What follows are three screen captures — one from Twitter.com, showing a retweet; one from Seesmic, showing that it is missing; and one from Tweetdeck, showing that it’s missing.

Retweet In Context From @kegill Timeline

Seesmic Does Not Display The New RT

TweetDeck Does Not Show The Retweet Either

4. Brizzly
Brizzly is in beta (just ask if you’d like an invitation) and is doing a great job of rendering new retweets.

Brizzly Displays New Retweets

4. iPhone application Tweetelator
There’s no change since my last report; Tweetelator is still displaying the new retweets. Moreover, it marks them with a little flag:

Tweetelator Marks New Retweets With A Flag

Conclusion
First, the new retweet link is designed to make it easier for people to retweet. However, there’s nothing to stop old-fashioned copy-and-paste if you’re using the Twitter.com web interface. Keep an eye on how your third-party clients implement this feature — will they retain their current “RT” process or adopt the new? My vote is for the former.

Second, one advantage of using the retweet link is the Retweets summary link, just below Favorites in the right-hand navigation. This feature makes public statistics about each retweet — just how many people retweeted and who they are. I’m not convinced this advantage outweighs the limitations of retweets not being real-time, however, for moderate- to high-volume accounts.

Therefore, until Twitter displays retweets in real-time in the timeline (something that I doubt they will do) and until all third party clients display retweets (hopefully like Tweetelator and Brizzly, in real-time), I again urge caution if you are using Twitter for branding or influence. Not only is there an issue with everyone being able to see these retweets (think Tweetdeck) but there is the issue of their possibly not being real-time on the Twitter.com interface.

Update: problem resolved. User error (but you’d probably already guessed that!)

The goal this afternoon … walk five communication students through setting up WordPress on their UW student accounts. Armed with the UW step-by-step instructions and with the help of Kristina Bowman, it seemed doable. After all, Kristina and I had both done this before.

Well, it wasn’t doable.

After two hours, the students left the lab disappointed. They were far more familiar with “pico” and “cd” and “ls” than they ever wanted to be, I’m certain.

I uninstalled, reinstalled; uninstalled, reinstalled. I found one place — ONE — where I’d made a mistake the first walk-through. But even that wasn’t enough to make phpMyAdmin work (although it did result in a different error message) or cause WordPress to complete its installation.

Here We Go
Computing services has a few relevant “how to” pages:

• Installing Word Press
• Using the UW mysql Libraries
• Installing phpMyAdmin

(1) The first prerequisite is mysql. We successfully got mysql running (step 11). However, everyone ran into an error when trying to grant privileges to “root@” … “grant command not found” (step 9). [1]

Error : no "grant" command found

(2) Nevertheless, we moved to on phpMyAdmin installation. Several of us had problems. The tutorial says:

The phpmyadmin configuration script hasn’t been working very well.

You can say that again. We had a 25 percent success rate; everyone else had create a config.inc.php file from scratch and then copy-and-paste from the tutorial, followed by an edit, per the tutorial.

We were then able to set up phpMyAdmin, but were unable to administer the account: “Host ‘courses02.u.washington.edu’ is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server”. Huh? Is this related to the inability to “grant” privileges while setting up mysql? [In the off chance that the courses alias is linked with the student server, I substituted "vergil.u.washington.edu" for "ovid.u.washington.edu" ... and got the same error message.]

Success setting up phpMyAdmin

UW mysql installation rejects connection

(3) Not terribly surprising, WordPress would not install either. I know that the login information is correct (root, mysql-password). And the path to the database server is also correct. So what gives?

WordPress would not install, either.

Dangling Prerequisite
The WordPress installation tutorial has two prereqs. The first, get mysql running, is clear (and there is a link to the tutorial, even if following it was less than successful). The second, related to the php.ini file, not so much:

Before you install a PHP application on your account you should configure your php.ini file. In order to do this you need to copy the file to your public_html directory and then edit any settings you need to change. You should at least edit the upload_tmp_dir setting. Depending on the application and how you’re using it, other settings might also be a good idea.

I talked to a WordPress-savvy admin who helped me find the ini file; I then edited it per the “minimum” (upload_tmp_dir) recommendation.

mysql error
After writing this, I started thinking about permissions. So I tried to shut down mysql. Something is clearly amiss, however, because I cannot (and yes, I know the password):

-psh-2.05b$ ./bin/mysqladmin -u root -p shutdown Enter password: ./bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at ‘localhost’ failed error: ‘Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)’

I tried to reset the mysql password. After all, if I can’t stop the process, there’s something bad happening with authentication. I followed this UW tutorial. Copy and paste instruction set failed here, too.

Syntax error in UW instruction set

So, one more time, delete the mysql installation.

Catalyst Call Thursday
Thursday I’ll get on the phone to Catalyst and see if they can figure out what went wrong. Fingers crossed.

[1] I was right to identify the problem as being permissions.

The instructions say “type these commands” when issuing mysql commands. But I was still “copying-and-pasting” like I’d been doing with the UNIX commands. However, in mysql, the backspace key kicks you “out” – you go back into shell prompt. So when I’d try to backspace to change “password” to the password in order to grant permissions … I’d get kicked back to shell prompt. However, I wasn’t “seeing” the difference. Hats off to Nick, who spotted it!

Other notes:

• Syntax for using secure Terminal: “ssh YourUWNetID@UWHost”
• Fugu

Update: more details at FlipTheMedia. From the YouTube business blog:

• MyPosterous: The Economist on music piracy: flawed article, but still worth a read
• MyPosterous: The Economist on blah CEOs
• GoogleReader: themes from COM546, evolution of digital communication technologies – Slideshare – Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)
• GoogleReader: if you’re not tired of the vilification of Google by media moguls – (1) TechCrunch – How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google and Shift the Balance of Power In Search (2) Inconsistent policy at WSJ does not “make sense” (3) My piece from last week: Murdoch on Google, Copyright and Pay-To-View
• Media Transformation: Up for grabs, the nature of “authority” (Clay Shirky, Yale confab)
• Politics + Media: Should reporters have to “ok” taping (and subsequent transcript release) of an interview with a public official? IOW, should such recordings be exempt from “thou must get permission to record” laws? I think these interviews should be recorded as a matter of course – by both sides. Case involves former CA Gov Jerry Brown. See The Slow Death of Off-the-Record
• Ethics In Media: Washington and Lee should not have invited Jason Blair to talk ethics. (via Romensko) Amen.
• Read the small print: John Grubot at Daring Fireball reads Joe Wilcow the riot act on Nokia v iPhone profitability claims
• Politics + Economics: How to prevent the next financial crisis
• Politics + Twitter: I said last year that Obama’s tweets weren’t his: “I’m too clumsy for Twitter” (Mashable)

We’ll see if I can turn this into a quasi-daily habit. Some of these were seeded individually via Tweets.

Summer 2010, I’m going to teach a class on designing smartphone applications. This is in the University of Washington MCDM program, so the focus is audience, goals, UI, technical spec (not actual code). And the goal isn’t necessarily to build the best application, in the historical sense of the word (think PhotoGene, for example). Rather, what sort of iPhone applications should businesses and organizations be developing to connect with their customers.

We’re calling it the “iPhone” class (shorthand), and since that’s the smartphone that I own, it’s where I can experiment with applications. I prefer to experiment with free! So I’m looking for nominations… and starting to collect resources. The first is this review of Chipotle at MakeUseOf.com.

I’m Never Gonna Give You Up, from Pearl Jam’s official YouTube channel. What is Rickrolling? See widipedia, Wired.com.

In an interview with SkyNews Australia, Rupert Murdoch continued to insist that Google (and other search engines) are “stealing” his content and that newspapers should never have “given away” their content for free. And he hinted that News Corp. would soon block search engines from indexing their web sites and would successfully challenge the “fair use” of links in court. (YouTube interview clip embedded below.)

Like many other executives in the newspaper business, Murdoch trots out the claim that readers have always “paid” for their news by purchasing a newspaper. This is false; readers pay for the convenience of having the content delivered — advertisers have footed the bill for content creation. Subscription fees don’t cover the cost of printing and distribution! How long are these men going to be allowed to make such false claims? When will reporters act like something other than stenographers?

Murdoch asserts that search engines like Google, Microsoft and Ask.com “steal our stories – they just take them.” This claim suggests a wholesale copy-and-paste, not a headline, link and sentence or two. Murdoch agrees that search engines drive traffic, “but what’s the point of someone who comes occasionally,” he continues. “We’d rather have fewer people coming to our website, but paying.”

Murdoch is extremely dismissive of search traffic, so why is it that only about a third of the stories on the WSJ home page today were blocked by a paywall? Could it be that “you can’t charge for exclusives that will just be repeated elsewhere” or maybe “don’t charge for the most popular content on your site”? Those observations, by the way, came from Alan Murray, executive editor of the WSJ, at a Neiman Labs talk in April.

The only content that you can charge for is content that can’t be found elsewhere, content on which you hold a monopoly, in other words. That’s why I think Murdoch is bluffing, although I’ve no idea why he’s bluffing.

The SkyNews reporter asked why NewsCorp hasn’t blocked search engines with something as simple as a robots.txt file. Danny Sullivan made this point last month, when Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson made similar claims at an east coast conference.

“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” Murdoch responded.

He then went on to describe the quasi-wall in place at the Wall Street Journal, but according to Staci Kramer at PaidContent, he doesn’t understand how the WSJ and Google work. (Kramer’s description matches my experience with WSJ links off of GoogleNews. Of the top 36 stories/videos on today’s home page, only 12 were pay-to-view. Of the three of these that I found on Google News, I could read the entire story via the RSS feed link.)

The BBC is a “scandal,” he says, accusing the BBC of “stealing” content from newspapers. “We’ll be suing them for copyright.” He compared the BBC’s alleged copyright infringement with uploading a TV show to YouTube. Earlier (~4:45), he asserted that “we believe [the doctrine of fair use] can be challenged in the courts and barred all together.” Claims like these suggest that the man is demented, if he indeed believes the words coming out of his mouth.

In an abrupt reversal of his diatribe about intellectual property theft amongst search engines — and contrary to the rhetoric of many in the entertainment business — Murdoch said he believed the piracy is under control in most countries. Why, then, would there be a need for a “three strikes” copyright law (he lauded the new French law) and why would he suggest it as a world standard? (Was anyone from NewsCorp on the secret U.S. copyright team?)

The second half of the interview focuses on FOX News and political reporting in the U.S. You are warned.

My comment on a MediaShift article on Net neutrality, Why the Future of Online Speech Depends on Net Neutrality:

Google and Microsoft already pay “metering” fees — that is, they pay more for bandwidth than a firm with 1/1000th of their bandwidth usage. No one (that I know of) is saying that network neutrality means that the cost of transmitting 1GB of data should be the same as the cost of 1TB.

What network neutrality means is that Comcast can’t privilege its bits over bits from Blip.TV.

“Network neutrality” would be better framed as “non-discrimination” — just like Verizon, for example, can’t privilege Verizon phone calls over T-Mobile’s or AT&T’s. (Geeks should not name things.)

We need all infrastructure owners (cable, fiber, copper) to be considered “common carriers” — not just the telecos. This would mean that they would have to lease their infrastructure to other organizations and they would not be able discriminate based on the origin of a bit.

That’s not the case in the U.S. today. The cable industry has successfully convinced Congress that they should be exempt from common carrier law. The resulting law — someone probably has calculated how many millions in lobbying it cost — gives them an economic (competitive) advantage over telecos as that “last mile wire” becomes our pipe to our connection with the rest of the world: “television” and “movies” and “phone service” and “newspapers” and “radio” — and-and-and.

We have to separate content (the bits that represent text, photos, sound, moving pictures) from the delivery channel. That’s in part because we (society) can’t afford to have competing infrastructure: multiple “cable” or “fiber” wires on each-and-every neighborhood street. That sort of competition is economically inefficient: infrastructure is characterized by very high fixed costs and relatively low marginal costs (the cost of attaching the line to one-more-house).

For those of you who are in the Twitter “retweet” beta test, I have a word of advice: proceed cautiously.

Here’s why. Currently, retweets that are executed via the Twitter web “retweet link” are visible to your followers who are using the web interface to read your tweets but are not visible to popular third party clients.

Let me say that a different way: popular third party applications are currently not displaying RTs executed via the Twitter web interface “retweet” link. In other words, these retweets are MIA in a follower’s timeline in popular third-party clients. The exception: Tweetie2.

This may be a “cart before the horse” problem. In other words, third party applications may not have had a chance to integrate the new API. Or it may be that Twitter privileged Tweetie2 developers. I don’t know.

But if most of your followers read your tweets using third party desktop clients, this “bug” could have a serious impact on your personal retweet rate in the short-term. Experiment wisely. And mindfully.

The Story In Pictures

People who are part of the beta test will see a familiar-looking “alert” on their Twitter home page:

Twitter Alert Shows You Are In Beta Test

Sending A Retweet With The New Feature

Twitter has made it very easy to send a retweet via the web interface. This may be an attempt to make the web interface a more pleasant experience for people who follow a lot of accounts. Certainly, the ability to easily retweet has been a mainstay of third-party Twitter clients.

(1) Read your tweets via the web interface. When you find a tweet that seems interesting enough to share with your followers, mouse-over. You’ll see the “retweet” link to the right of the familiar “reply” link.

Twitter Retweet Link - Web Interface

(2) After you retweet, this is what the tweet looks like from your home page: it bears the avatar of the original account (instead of your avatar) and includes information about who retweeted it as a tagline. Thus, this new feature might make it easier to discover interesting people to follow.

The Result from the web: New Twitter retweet shows the originating avatar, which may not be an account you follow.

versus

Traditional Retweet: You see the avatar of person you follow who sent the RT

(3) On your profile page, the visual difference starts with an icon instead of initials (RT). Again, the Twitter ID that shows is the original author, not the person who retweeted. Note that there is an “undo” option. I haven’t tested it to see how long this “delete” feature takes.

The Difference In Appearance On Your Profile Page

(4) In addition, Twitter tells you how many other people have retweeted a specific tweet. That’s an incentive, of sorts, to use the new feature.

Twitter shows you how many others have RTed the same tweet.

Receiving A Retweet With The New Feature

If you are in the beta test, when you receive a retweet from someone else in the beta-test, you’ll see an alert when you are reading your tweets from the web. But if you aren’t reading them from the web, you won’t see those retweets in Seesmic, Tweetdeck or TwitBirdPro.

(1) If you are in the beta test, Twitter gives you a heads-up to explain why you are seeing a new avatar in your timeline. This is a smart move for the part of the Twitter community that follows a small-ish number of accounts; for them, the new avatar might be visually jarring.

Twitter Alert For New Retweet

(2) If you are not in the beta test, your retweets look exactly like they always have, in the web interface. (This is how my “new retweet” tweet looks in my kegill_uw account. Yes, I follow myself there.)

For Non-Beta Testers, No Change In Web Retweet Appearance

(3) However, the problem comes for your followers who do not use the web to read your Tweets. The Twitter-powered retweet simply falls into a black hole.

First, see the Barbara Clements retweet in context (the tweets before and after it, web interface). Then look at Seemsic, from the desktop, and Tweetdeck and TwitBirdPro, from the iPhone. Notice that the Barbara Clements retweet is MIA in all three instances.

The New Retreet In Context (Tweets Surrounding It)

The Retweet Does Not Show Up In SeesmicDesktop

The Retweet Does Not Show Up In Tweetdeck

The Retweet Does Not Show Up In TwitBirdPro

(4) One exception appears to be Tweetie2. My @romensko retweet from the new interface does show up in my kegill_uw account in Tweetie2, just like it did on the web interface.

Tweetie2 Shows The New Retweets

So there you have it.

Be judicious in your use of the new retweet link if you think most of your followers read your tweets from a third party client, unless that client is Tweetie2. I’ll update this post as I test more clients.

Update: 10.30 pm Saturday
Here is the “base” tweet we’re looking for:

Another Test: New Retweet

And how that retweet “looks” at the kegill_uw account, in context:

Retweet in context at @kegill_uw.

(1) No Go: Twitscoop:

Twitscoop does not display retweets from beta interface.

(2) No Go: Twitterrific:

Twitterrific does not display retweets from beta interface.

(3) No Go: TwitBirdPro
There was an update for this application at the iTunes store, but it didn’t enable this functionality.

TwitBirdPro does not display retweets from beta interface.

Presentation at Convergence and Society: Changing Media Landscape, 6 Nov 2009, Reno NV

Consumers want to control their media consumption. This is a major shift in power that mainstream media organizations are still struggling with or, in too many cases, simply ignoring.

What’s annoying to those of us who have been involved with the evolution of online news for a while was illustrated by Thom Baggerman’s timeline of online newspaper research, from shovelware (1999) to “basic needs” (2003) that included interactivity and involvement by readers. By 2004, researchers were pointing to the need for a new form of storytelling. Baggerman was speaking at the Convergence and Society: The Changing Media Landscape (#cconf09) in Reno.

I mean, it’s not like the forces facing news organizations simply appeared overnight!

Baggerman examined the LasVegasSun – a joint operating agreement between the Sun and the Review let them focus on the website. They have won a public service Pulitzer and “best of class” awards for their class (usually based on readership numbers). LVS makes it very easy to share multimedia content – unlike most news sites.

Baggerman examined newspaper websites for best practices (including WaPo and NYT), and then used those heuristics to analyze “television” websites. His conclusion: the TV sector should look to newspaper sites to learn how to share the content where they are supposedly the expert: “video.”

Major media owners in Canada are “crying poverty” to get regulatory concessions, according to Mark Edge, speaking at the Convergence and Society: The Changing Media Landscape (#cconf09) in Reno. And yet … they’re still making money.

His timeline of convergence in Canada, which limits foreign ownership:

See what happened to the over-leveraged firms before ….

… they went on a buying spree:

Their response to today’s recession:

Next month’s CRTC hearings will be interesting to watch, since CTV is threatening to close 10 stations, claiming that they are “not profitable.” And yet (1): analysis of their financials show that they made almost 10% profit last year. Moreover, most of the losses are “paper losses” because CTV has written down the value of their assets by as much as 75%. And yet (2): bidding for popular US programs has soared (up 43%) at the same time that TV owners are crying about being in the poorhouse.

Virtually every urban newspaper in Michigan has moved to a “hybrid” delivery model, based on the one introduced by the Detroit Free Press/Detroit News, according to Dennis W. Jeffers, speaking at the Convergence and Society: The Changing Media Landscape (#cconf09) in Reno.

The hybrid model introduced by the Detroit Free Press/News:

• Th/Fr/Su home delivery
• “e-press” (PDF-like) only the other days.

Detroit News and Detroit Free Press circulation have (each) declined 5.7%; contrast this with a general decline of 10%. There has been a small shift in revenue from advertisers to readers.

Evidence of the financial challenge (from today’s Editor&Publisher): “Clients [advertisers] have moved away from ROP [run of paper] because of the cost.”

There does appear to be a slow shift in newsroom behavior in Detroit daily newspapers. However, one problem: the average newspaper reader is 55 years old – behavioral change is predictably slow.

Community newspapers — as defined by geography or shared interests — are smaller (circulation 25-30K) and may be weekly, daily or online-only. This class of papers is losing advertising at a slower rate. In Michigan, there are about 250 newspapers (every county but one has a community newspaper) in this category; 200+ are weeklies, according to Carol McGinnis. Readership percentages appear higher than in the urban dailies.

Their emphasis on local news means that they have a unique product – something key to audience in our increasingly competitive information space.

Moving to “online only” papers: Lori F. Brost provides examples including AnnArbor.com, AnnArborChronicle, AnnArborUpdate, LeslinWeeklyGuardian, GrossePointeToday, TheRapidian, DomeMagazine, SustainableFarmer (MSU), Midland Issues on the Web, MichiganMessenger, MyBayCity.com, MyAntrim, RainbowMittens, RapidGrowth, ModelD, YpsiNews.com, LansingOnlineNews, AbsoluteMichigan, GreatLakesEcho, SouthwestLansing, WestMichiganNews (IRE), MichiganLiberal.com and RightMichigan.com.

AnnArbor.com “river of news” design (most recent first) that mixes local news with traditional newspaper content (such as Dear Abby). It serves as a portal for Ann Arbor neighborhoods (or it hopes to) with local bloggers. Business model remains an issue.

Sean Baker then turned to radio and television – “broadcast to bandwidth.”

The papers will (unsure of when) be posted on the conference website.

Back in March, Declan McCullagh reported that the Obama Administration cloaked its draft section of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) under “national security” wrappers — for the general public. At the same time, the document had supposedly already made the rounds of “corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S.”

Today, someone has leaked information about the U.S.-authored draft chapter on internet “counterfeiting” — a document scheduled for discussion among participating nations in South Korea on Wednesday.

According to PC World, under the treaty Internet Service Providers would become liable for copyright infringement. This is like saying that the telephone company is liable if criminals (or terrorists!) use the company’s assets to plot a crime. How absurd. But don’t be lulled into thinking that absurd means “won’t happen.”

ISPs around the world may be forced to snoop on their subscribers and cut them off if they are found to have shared copyright-protected music on the Internet, under an international agreement being promoted by the U.S. [...]

In a summary of the U.S.’s position shared orally with trade officials at the European Commission in September, signatories of the accord must “provide for third-party liability.” The Commission informed all 27 countries in the E.U. of the U.S. position in a memo seen by IDG News service. [...]

This provision would mean that every country that signs up to ACTA must allow content owners such as record companies and Hollywood studios to sue ISPs for failing to stop their subscribers from illegally sharing copyright-protected material such as music and movies.

In Canada, Michael Geist writes:

If accurate (and these provisions are consistent with the U.S. approach for the past few years in bilateral trade negotations) the combined effect of these provisions would to be to dramatically reshape Canadian copyright law and to eliminate sovereign choice on domestic copyright policy… If Canada agrees to these ACTA terms, flexibility in WIPO implementation (as envisioned by the treaty) would be lost and Canada would be forced to implement a host of new reforms (this is precisely what U.S. lobbyists have said they would like to see happen). In other words, the very notion of a made-in-Canada approach to copyright would be gone.

And at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow summarizes the leak, in part:

[T]he whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

Past time to be screaming bloody murder. (“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more,” comes to mind.)

• Call your Senator (most treaties have to be ratified by the Senate; don’t know about this one)
• Write the White House

Tell them in no uncertain terms that the the U.S. government does not have the right to make the ACTA negotiations immune to public scrutiny, especially when said negotiations are being coordinated with titans of global capitalism.

Then tell your friends, too.

This article also appeared at The Moderate Voice and Newsvine

Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and producer, is on UW campus today for the Danz lecture at Kane Hall tonight. He’s talking to students from two journalism classes this afternoon. Live blogged notes:

Three trends in media that are important:

(1) Changing economics “assault” of new media. not just delivery system. “Google” delivering free of charge what we spend money in producing. Lawsuits against Google. “Simply making it available” as advertising shrinks, the news hole shrinks. new way to pack it.

(2) Decline in news standards – specifically verification. Driven by cable and bloggers to produce “psuedo” information which is dominating the information flow. Lots of unverified information – rumors and allegations. Important for democracy.

(3) Open to new kinds of news. Not so government-driven, politics/economics/business. more cultural news now, acknowledges that life is more varied than we used to think.

I don’t know where we are going. That’s going to be your generation.

Traditional standards of jrl are every bit as important as delivery mechanism.

“Retreat” from new media by the audience. It’s chaotic – so much going on. We’ll need someone to help us sort it out, what is quality. A lot of people are going to demand general flow of news.

We’ll be in turmoil for at least another decade.

When I get on the Internet, it’s like taffy – I get stuck! That’s awful. If you start communicating with someone they answer. Immediately. A lot of time and energy and words go back and forth but not necessarily a lot of understanding.

More and more corp and institutions are having internet “ban” days. (who has heard this???)

Challenging j-students to work with scientists on campus to get info about about science in a way that makes sense to lay people. “Translator.” This is hard work. Big gap between what scientists know and what general public know – very important. Break down the silos – that’s our job as communicators.

It’s not dumbing things down – it’s changing the pacing of information. What we do over the period of an hour is to give people new levels of knowledge every 4-5 minutes. Introduce at a pace where people can absorb it.

Kathy: future of public interest journalism?

We have to make judgments about the difference between opinion and knowledge. Talk radio is full of talk but not a lot of information. I’m tired of seeing “news” that is the equivalent of Kool-Aid and watching people pretend it’s good for them. Just sugar and water.

Why do German toasters last longer than ours do? Because German consumers are more discriminating. Then we’ll affect the market.

Q about FOX v CNN. Smith notes that CNN ratings started dropping when they left their core business – which was 24-hour news, not opinion. If we as consumers are willing to veg and tune-off, that’s what we will get.

Makes argument for Anderson’s “freemium” concept by focusing on the niche willing to pay for quality content.

“I remember when the NYT was thrown off its pedestal by TV.”

Listening to Google CEO Eric Schmidt talk about the importance of a “new platform” while noting that “enterprise-focused” engineers are a small percentage of the company’s engineering team, I flashed back to 1984.

When Apple introduced the Macintosh with that Ridley Scott commercial, the company was making a statement about the “cultural implications of personal computers.” Apple’s deliberate shunning of IT departments, Steve Jobs’ goal of democratizing technology, the 1984 slogan “The Computer For The Rest of Us”, the 1998 slogan “Think Different” — each are examples of a company positioned as the alternative to “the enterprise.”

For most of the 25 succeeding years, that positioning has been an uphill battle. The protagonists? First IBM, then Microsoft — which replaced IBM as “the enterprise” platform-of-choice — because most computers were bought by “the enterprise” not by the consumer. Last year, global laptop sales exceeded desktop sales for the first time, thanks in large part to consumer (not enterprise) demand for netbooks. Apple, which announced a shift in focus to laptops in 2003, has 75 percent of the laptop market for machines costing at least a grand. Yes, some of these machines are in “the enterprise” but they represent another cultural break on how personal computers are perceived and used.

Then there are smart phones.

In 2008, we bought 173.6 million smartphone ‘units’, according to PhoneMag. We’ll buy 159 million laptops this year, says The Guardian. Analysts right and left point to smartphones and mobile devices as the future of the Internet (and thus the future of computing).

Mobile is clearly computing’s next phase, and Google’s introduction of Android (a “platform”) and Chrome (a “platform”) might be viewed, one day, in the same historical light as Apple’s introduction of the Macintosh: paradigm-shift time.

Its rise has been phenomenal and, some say, unmatched. In 10 years, Google grew from being the new kid on the blog to “number seven in global brand power,” according to Gartner analyst Whit Andrews. Inquiries about Google from IT professionals are at an all-time high, according to Hung LeHong, even though Schmidt says Google doesn’t think about the market segments like the analysts do, because the line between “enterprise” and “personal” is disappearing.

Google is on track to dethrone Microsoft, which seems caught by incumbent organization paralysis in the face of disruption (Christensen). MSFT today: $27.60, trending down. GOOG: $536.71, trending up. Oh, IBM? $123.53, trending down. And AAPL, $188.85, trending down.

Listen to this snippet, where Schmidt talks about Google and “the enterprise”:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt At Gartner Symposion – Full Interview

Last week, Amsterdam hosted the eComm – Emerging Communications Conference and Awards, a twice-a-year global event launched in 2008. This “community focused” event focuses on convergence: telecom, cellular and Internet-based communication.

And even though GoogleWave is barely out of alpha, organizers put the architecture in place for collaborative notetaking for every session of the three-day event. Their experience foreshadows how GoogleWave could function as an incredibly disruptive super-application.

So what happened?

People shared. The gift economy at work.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given the nature of this community-focused event or because GoogleWave is so new and shiny (also clunky). But I have attended (and helped manage) community-focused events, and my experience is that it’s hard to get community note-taking, even on easy-to-use wikis with geeks in the house. Twitter stream? Sure. Individual blog posts? Of course. But one central place for notes? Nada. Can’t even get all speakers to upload notes and slides to Slideshare.

Did folks share “alike”? Nope, some sessions have more notetakers than others. Some summaries are more “discussion” than “notes.” [See the screen captures in the Slideshare embed below.]

But. This is very early in the GoogleWave game. And while the interface is a little clunky, it’s also very memorable/learnable.

Skype In Wave
Nevertheless, one of the biggest ah-ha’s from this conference came from a blog post and Blip.tv video. The blog post was linked in session notes; I found it on Wave. (Heck, I found this conference on Wave; I’d not heard of it before.)

In this demo, we see a Skype call (ID not telephone number) launched from within a Wave (no stand-alone Skype client). As the two men chat, something is automagically recording the conversation as snippets, each associated with the speaker. As Phil Wolf at Skype Journal notes:

[It] deconstructs a long talk into directly referenceable snippets… This means you can annotate live calls with transcripts, pictures, etc. So the call’s Binary Large Object becomes binary tiny objects.

Third, because the snippets are referred to by a wave, other gadgets and bots can enhance the archive. Add or remove background noise. Translate and provide voiceovers in your language. Highlight statistically improbable phrases. Detect stress in a voice. Visualize the data in a timeline or a relationship scorecard (who talked more?). Add tags to help you find this wave again.

Of course, I immediately started thinking about recording “telephone” conversations, making the private public. How recording is illegal in the U.S. without explicit permission. How, once again, technology outpaces legal institutions. Here is another nail in the “off the record” coffin and yet another place for “private” conversation to be released into the wild, intentionally or accidentally.

Maybe Wave is going to be more disruptive than I’ve thought on first blush, particularly in the realm of perceived privacy.

Orwell was wrong. The tools of Big Brother are in each of our hands (our cellphones). Big Brother really is us, and GoogleWave might be the platform.

See how eComm participants used GoogleWave:

Last night in my econ class, I introduced students to the “amateur” v “professional” debate by talking about the 2007 Super Bowl, the first time any major brand had engaged fans in a contest where the winner got a Super Bowl slot. At the time, the contest spurred discussion of “professional” versus “amateur”. Note that most of western science in the 1800s and even early 1900s was conducted by, you guessed it, amateurs.

For example, from a Washington Post story, January 2007:

“What this means is: You’ve got some kid with a video camera and he’s playing on the same field as everyone else, and he did the whole [ad] for, what? A hundred bucks?” said veteran adman Kipp Monroe, with Herndon’s White & Partners.

Also, it was in 2007 that Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen wrote The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. He’s still a critic.

My Fave:

Kristin Dehnert, who created the “Check Out Girl” spot, has a degree in Speech Communications from the University of Illinois. She wrote on her bio that she was “Location Manager and Scout for commercials as my paid ‘day job’ but my true passion is writing and directing. My dream is to make directing commercials and feature films my new ‘day job’.” She won 11 awards for a short film, “Underground.”

A Close Second:

The Dorito “Live the Flavor” ad was created by Weston Phillips, 22, and Dale Backus, 21, in North Carolina. They spent $12.79 … plus a lot of hours … and their existing investment in technology, of course. From their website (at the time):

We were trying to get into advertising in mid-October, a month or two before we saw the Doritos contest,” Phillips said. “When we saw the prize — $10,000 and your ad gets aired in the Super Bowl — we really didn’t think about the repercussions of having an ad in the Super Bowl. We were looking at the $10,000 and thinking, ‘That would be pretty nice.’

P.S. I don’t remember which one won!

Twitter search now has a FriendFeed-like boost that will enhance its usefulness while providing context: you can see a “conversation”. This enhancement suggests Twitter isn’t going to roll over and play dead even though Google and Microsoft are elbowing their way into real-time search. It also shows us how many Tweets are one-offs (not conversations), but that’s another story.

Here’s a screen capture of an expanded conversation between Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) and Laurent (@imau):

Conversations are toggled – open/close – by clicking a cartoon-like “talk” bubble. The result looks a little like a FriendFeed conversation:

Although this conversation toggle seems to appear only in search (for now), extending it to your home page would be a logical follow-on.

What’s next? A ‘like’ button?

This post also appears at FlipTheMedia.

I just posted this to my motorcycle/geek mailing list. Really quick, high-level thoughts. I’m working on some tips posts.

• Not surprising, your gmail ID becomes your googlewave addy
• It’s more alpha than beta
• Mac folks need to remember to install Gears, which will give you drag-and-drop functionality (among other things). WaveBoard is a better client for Macs than FF or Safari, but Snow Leopard folks will get drag-and-drop functionality only with FF Gears. That’s because Google hasn’t updated Gears for Snow Leopard; there is a hack that gives WaveBoard that functionality but I haven’t added it.
• PC folks may prefer Chrome to FF. Dunno. I haven’t decided.
• Right now, everyone seems to be TALKING (think chat or forums or mailing lists) rather than trying to do something. Not a surprise, either. New. Shiny. :-)
• I’ve started two directories: one for higher ed waves and one for UW people. Interesting exercise.
• To search “public” waves … put “with:public” in the search box. You will soon be overwhelmed (I think Matt said “drown”) because Wave keeps the blips you’ve *read* in your inbox! Eeek! You can make them go away (not sure if it is forever) by clicking “mute.”

TAFN!

Goldman Sachs bonus pool estimated at $725,000 per employee

This week, business reporters told us that Goldman Sachs 2009 third quarter profits swelled, compared with 2008, to an estimated $3.19 billion. The bonus pool stands at $16.7 billion, and, by the end of the year, it could hit $23 billion, according to reports. However, Goldman reported first quarter profits (net earnings) of $1.81 billion; second quarter, $3.44 billion. Thus end-of-year net earnings should be about $11 billion.

How can bonuses be twice as much as profits?

Yeah, I get that the “cost” of the bonuses must have been deducted from quarterly reports. But that’s not how most businesses determine end-of-the-year bonuses. At least I don’t think it is.

To be dumped in a pool and calculated quarterly, these payments sound more like contractual obligations (”salary”) than “bonus.” Bonuses are “extras” that the employee can’t count on or expect to get. Yet, for Goldman, there appears to be a tax benefit to calling these payments “bonuses”:

Bonuses are considered taxable to employees, but are considered an expense of doing business and are, in most cases, a tax benefit to the employer.

On some level, it doesn’t matter if this is bonus or salary: the numbers are too huge to comprehend.

In October, Goldman employed 31,700. If the bonus pool hits $23 billion and the number of employees were to be constant, that’s $725,000.00 (rounded) per employee. (But the number of employees isn’t constant; Goldman employs about 4,000 more “staff” today than in March, which means the average “bonus” is much greater for those employed the entire 12 months.) And you and I know that every employee at Goldman isn’t going to get a bonus, much less one that is 28 times greater than average per capita income in the U.S. (26,178).

The men (mostly) who brought the world’s economy to its knees are getting millions in “bonus” payments … for what? The governments of the world kept them from falling apart. In response, they have lobbied vociferously against Congressional reform and continue to gamble with derivatives ($95.6 trillion in December 2005 to $190.0 trillion as on June 2009) while jacking up credit card interest (Citigroup hits 29.99%) and watching foreclosures grow. (The financial sector also doesn’t seem to want to do much about “toxic” assets either; a friend tried for six months to buy a house where the owner was upside-down.) Maybe we shouldn’t have bothered — at least this culture of entitlement would have been busted.

Goldman Sachs is in the digital information business. With computerized trades and computer-generated-products (CDOs and the like), they are reaping the benefits of collapsed time and geographic boundaries (space). They must also be reaping monopoly rents, given that there are only a handful of firms in the world that do what they do.

Where are the citizen’s watchdogs? They’re not in the U.S. Treasury department: it’s populated with Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street used-to-bes, and many took home thousands from Wall Street last year (emphasis added):

The advisers include Gene Sperling, who last year took in $887,727 from Goldman Sachs and $158,000 for speeches mostly to financial companies, including the firm run by accused Ponzi scheme mastermind R. Allen Stanford. Another top aide, Lee Sachs, reported more than $3 million in salary and partnership income from Mariner Investment Group, a New York hedge fund.

As part of Geithner’s kitchen cabinet, Sperling and Sachs wield influence behind the scenes at the Treasury Department, where they help oversee the $700 billion banking rescue and craft executive pay rules and the revamp of financial regulations. Yet they haven’t faced the public scrutiny given to Senate-confirmed appointees, nor are they compelled to testify in Congress to defend or explain the Treasury’s policies.

[...]

Goldman Sachs paid Sperling the $887,727 for advice on its charitable giving. That made the bank his highest-paying employer. Even Geithner’s chief of staff Patterson, who was a full-time lobbyist at the firm, did not make as much as Sperling did on a part-time basis. Patterson reported earning $637,492 from Goldman Sachs last year.

Where is the watchdog press? Where are the 21st century trustbusters? Where?

I had not thought about the long-term viability of advertising until Tuesday night’s Net Economics class. I think in my lifetime ads will not disappear, but they will continue to change. Maybe we’ll have more sponsored content, like early radio (and PBS), instead of interruptive adverts. And there will be more “free” content like Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2009 Emmy, wikipedia).

Three tidbits that I’m keeping in my toolbox to help explain what’s happening today:

• The internet connected hard drives, social media technologies connect minds.
• Skill sets have a topple rate (half life is getting shorter) just like businesses.
• We no longer have to till the soil every day in order to survive. Today, most of us till information instead. That is our job, to make decisions about information.
  

Some interesting links since Tuesday:

• Guy Kawasaki held a “revenue bootcamp” in July. In this video of the first session, panelists (two high school students, two recent college graduates, youth culture expert) explore the question: Will Anyone Pay For Anything? Data from WeWorld on what teens would pay for: (1) things that are really fun, 34%, (2) expressing themselves and their passions, 22%, (3) getting more access and making themselves look good, 13%, and (4) exclusivity, 11%, (5) things that they could send to their friends, 8% .
• Chris Anderson also spoke at “revenue bookcamp” about Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
• Game publishers worry about the iPhone putting downward pressure on prices.
• Danny Sullivan dissects WSJ managing editor Robert Tomson’s indictment of Google. I’m being kind with both verbs. I’m also cheering Danny’s post.
• Life beyond print. Northwestern University surveyed 3800 journalists at 79 newspapers about the digital transformation of the newsroom.

Just this afternoon, I advised my communnication students that if a story seems “too” … much … to retain their skepticism.

I remembered my admonition when the following tweet crossed my timeline tonight:

Wow, crazy story. RT @kingharvest: “Wave of staff suicides at France Telecom | World news | The Guardian” http://j.mp/3EHilk28 minutes ago from TweetDeck @semmerson

I stifled any “retweet before reading” impulse and clicked the link. In the nut graph, I read: “more than 20 workers take their lives in the past 18 months.” After reading The Guardian story, dateline 9 September 2009 by the way, I learned the following from the next-to-the-last paragraph:

• In 2003, 22 France Telecom staff committed suicide.
• In 2002, 29 France Telecom staff committed suicide.

I knew that I couldn’t in good conscience retweet. Why? I did not know how many people France Telecom employed nor the suicide rate for France. I vaguely knew that suicide rates vary significantly by country and culture. So I started poking around. Was this, in fact, news?

According to WHO, in 2005 the suicide rate for French men was 26.4 per 100,000; for women, 9.2 per 100,000.

But I still didn’t know how many people work for France Telecom.

A second Google search led to this 15 September 2009 report from the Wall Street Journal: France Telecom employs 100,000 and “the number of suicides is less than the national average.”

Moreover, the WSJ article was more precise: 23 suicides among France Télécom in an 18-month period. They had more recent WHO data, as well. Today, a WSJ article reports 25 deaths in 20 months. This is significantly less than the national suicide rate.

How long had I invested in research? Less time than it has taken me to write this article, probably less than 5 minutes.

But why did I have to? The original Guardian article — published on the web with minimal length constraints — failed to provide basic contextual information. Moreover, it buried key information in the foot of the story.

I want to know what else is going on. Why is this a story? For example, that first WSJ reporter noted:

France Télécom is having more trouble than others cutting costs: 65% of the 100,000 people at the company have civil-servant contracts — dating to the time when the company was owned by the French state — and therefore can’t be fired.

What news organization other than the WSJ provided this context? And if the WSJ is providing this framing argument, what are they leaving out?

I am not saying that suicides are “OK” but I would like reporters to demonstrate an understanding of risk and statistics before writing stories that result in wringing hands, bleeding hearts and demands for someone’s head.

Mainstream media keep telling us that they are the guardians of “the truth” (whatever that is). But far too often, when I start trying to find answers to questions that should have been addressed in a story, my experience mirrors this one.

It’s enough to make your head explode. No wonder normal people escape to the sofa and the tube.