MediaVidea

Ronald Dworkin: 'We have a responsibility to live well'

Labels: books, ethics

posted by Pramit Singh @ 2:19 PM 0 Comments

Revisiting the Ethics for Blog Network owners

Exactly 1 year ago, on December 2006, I wrote a short piece titled Ethics 101 for Blog Network Owners, covering the Spat between Sam Sethi and his erstwhile Boss Michael Arrington. 1 year onwards, Sam Sethi started his own Blog Network BlogNation and now has decided to shut down Blognation’s operations owing to a funding crunch.

I work in a country where the media rarely chooses to review and point mistakes with each other, where there is nothing like the CJR, and where most Big Media are chums and have an unwritten ‘I don’t talk about me, You don’t talk about me’ pact between themselves.

I suppose things are relatively new in the Blogosphere where new media startups are being formed on a daily basis and people are still exploring the boundaries of what’s right and what’s wrong at this bleeding edge of media publishing, and where many owners can cover a lot of Gray Area as the general course of business.

The path to Media Moguldom is almost never pretty and ‘Citizen Kane’ is the timeless story about it.

What makes the New Media so special is the sheer number of potential New Media Mogul wannabes and thus many bloggers and site owners’ fear to write anything bad about others – this being the age of Digg Friends and all…

There are two ways of looking at the Sam Sethi’s story, vis-à-vis Blognation:

1. Taking it as the latest Deadpool story, looking at where Sam went wrong while running Blognation. I suspect that bloggers taking this route including this one here are being supposedly objective just to be in the right books of the powerful Michael Arrington.

2. Put yourself in Sam Sethi’s shoes. First, you disagree with your Boss (Arrington) and run a story anyway, leave the company, start a new company. Your former boss (Arrington, in case you are not keeping up) is so powerful, monied and connected that he has easy access to the latest happenings/troubles at your new startup.

Any new startup has troubles but I think Arrington did not cover any of those stories with the zeal he covered Blognation.

Do I believe Sam Sethi’s accusation that his VC funding was denied because Michael Arrington scared the VC away by choosing to publish confidential documents sent to him by a disgruntled Blognation Employee?

My answer: WWNYTD?

What would the New York Times Do?

Labels: Blog networks, blogging, controversey, ethics, techcrunch, web 2.0

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:44 PM 1 Comments

How Facebook's Social Ads system is evil and what you can do about it

The Social Ads-Social Graph-Facebook nonsense rolls on and on. At the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City, Steve Jobs-wannabe Mark Zuckerberg again tried to justify absurdity with some rather suave statements.

We heard some real gems from the new Pied Piper of Social Media:

"Nothing influences a person more than the recommendation of a trusted friend,"

"Once every hundred years media changes."

Even the New York Times, which has become a Facebook Fan of late, has given objectivity a boot, and now parrots the “Any social innovation that only Facebook is fit to bring” party line.

The Times says this about the new Social Ads system:

"Facebook now will give advertisers the ability to create their own profile pages on its system that will let users identify themselves as fans of a product.

But, the User as Brand Fan is not new.
Google introduced a similar (and patented) user-led Ad Recommending system/user-to-user advertising system some time back.

In Mark Zuckerbeg’s world, and Nick Carr has noted this brilliantly, 'Media and advertising are synonymous.'

Nick explains,
‘Editorial is advertorial. The medium is the message from our sponsor.’

In Mark Zuckerbeg’s world, ‘Marketing is conversational... and advertising is social.’

But alas, Mark is not new to jump to this sort of idiotic phraseology.
Some months back, if you remember the Spokesbloggers scandal, John Battelle tried to pass the ‘Marketing is Conversation’ shtick when Microsoft paid many top bloggers to carry puff pieces about Microsoft product.


So, it comes to pass that Facebook the Pied Piper and the social rats have decided that today’s generation of 18 year old, who don’t know who Bob Dole was and who use the mobile like Engineers use drawing pencils are the stupidest ones around.

They know for sure that the kids are totally okay with trusting Facebbok with all their data, which Facebook will duly sell to advertisers, who in turn will bombard them with ads.

It sure is a swell deal, and instantly joins the ranks of 500 channels, customization, personalization, portals and assorted other fantasies of these 15-odd years of the web.

Some note on the Social Ads nonsense:

1. Stop adding the ‘social’ prefix to every other word (and while we are that, I hope we also stopped adding “Open” before every other word, Google, take note)

2. Social Ads System is just another name for a Behavioral Targeting System and Tacoda.com is doing it for a while now.

3. Segmentation of audiences based on profile data can bring a too narrow data for advertisers and may not be worth all that trouble. Google Adsense does a better job with the long tail and will have a wider reach.

4. Is there such a beast called Brand Enthusiast?
When I could afford, I started wearing Levi’s because I wanted to be cool among my friends, none of whom wore Levi’s.

It may sound cussed but I did not want to be the same as everyone else and I am sure you would be thinking the same.

Maybe, a brand enthusiast is another name for ‘paid blogger/paid focus group member/give- me- money- to- watch- type -unemployed guy/PR intern’ and other variants.


5. Social Ads system will be the new spam:
it will clutter users’ profile pages and inboxes with ads - banners, buttons, advertiser communities, homepage takeovers, brand wraps, TV shows in form of advertorials and assorted other hoohahs.

6. Facebook’s Hotmail problem:
Also known as Ad Blindness Problem. Seth Godin writes, “When someone goes to FaceBook, they're not looking for stuff. They're looking for people. But people don't buy ads, stuff does.”

If you didn't know Seth wrote the book on Permission Marketing, and Facebook's Social Ads system blows the whole idea to bits.

7. There is no more Privacy on Facebook:
And by association on all sites that Facebook partners for its Social ads system.
For example, Facebook will monitor what you buy on Amazon and then spam you to death.

By the way, take it for granted that Facebook employees, right from the janitor up to Mark Zuckerberg is looking at your profile and your activity.

Unlike Google, Facebook is not heavy with faceless bots so far.

8. You can’t opt out of all the ensuing spam:
A least, Hotmail and all other free service providers had this facility. Is this a coding problem with an outfit that has its own developer platform?

So, What can the user do?
Early signs are that the new Social Ads system will make the same mistakes Google’s Adsense does, and mistargeted advertising will be a common excuse from advertisers caught spamming.

However the social networking addicts can use the Adblock plugin to block all ads coming from whatever domain Facebook uses.

If ads still filter through, the ‘new college generation’ of today can do what generations have done before with intrusive advertising: Ignore them.

Update: Umair has written a brilliant strategy note on Facebook's Social ads and has this ti say about Facebook's partner brands:

on the whole, not exactly brands consumers luv

Labels: advertising. online advertising, ethics, facebook, social networking

posted by Pramit Singh @ 5:07 PM 2 Comments

Whose rights online 2.0?

When a user-generated Web 2.0 site such as Livejournal.com says that users are responsible for content of their submitted links, many might say Livejournal is being hypocritical. Some blog owners should modify Livejournal’s /any web 2.0 site's ToS and put them on their own blogs.

The background of this story : Recently, Livejournal deleted by mistake hundreds of users’ accounts as suspected pedophiles.

This ‘responsibility clause’ raises two important issues:
1. Livejournal is not the only web 2.0 site that has clause. You can find variations, if not exact copies on other web 2.0 sites as well. Here is Digg’s ToS, for example.

2. While one might argue that web 2.0 sites are making handsome advertising profits from user-generated data, without bothering to share, we must not forget the underlying economic realities of any web 2.0 outfit.

Batting for the web 2.0 sites' cause, a commenter on Slashdot explains it best:

This is not about "your rights online". LiveJournal is a private company, not a govenrment agency.

Their web site is private property, and it is not a monopoly.

To speak of 'rights' on their web site is sort of speaking about rights at K-Mart. You don't have any. If you don't like what K-Mart does, you leave and go to their competitor.

If LiveJournal does something that you find intolerably stupid, then quit and go post on their competition's web site.

Labels: controversey, ethics, online rights, web 2.0

posted by Pramit Singh @ 2:35 PM 0 Comments

How far blogging has come #7: Bloggers’ unions

Techcrunch writes about an initiative reported in the Wall Street Journal about a group of left-wing bloggers who are trying to form a union in the hope that they are able to force their New Media paymasters to provide health insurance, adhere to professional standards and most importantly, create a body with aggregated bargaining power.

Some perspectives:
1. Opponents of this move will say that we should leave pay and benefits to the markets to decide, which presumable takes into account demand, supply and the quality of supply. 95% of professional blogosphere is a grey market, with each player using the economics of cheap web space to run millions of basically rewritten posts, supported by Google adsense.

It is obvious what the focus of blog owners/blog network owners is: make adsense money on the side with help of rewriting inputs from bloggers who presumably moonlight at it.

2. I do not know how long will the rewritten blogosphere go. Maybe forever but even that doesn’t warrant government intervention into what is for all purposes a cottage, mom and pop, geek-and-pundit kind of business. You regulate one blog and the owner shuts it down and starts another blog. The same goes for a blog network – damn, this splogging business is so easy.

Nothing more enlightening can be said about blogging/splogging outfits in India and China. I will put it simply- many of my friends depend on these rewriting factories to make a living.

Besides, enforcing regulations across borders is a difficult task.

3. In many ways, all this New Media talk is sheer nonsense. New Media bosses are no different from Old Media bosses. While there will be some honest folks who don’t find sharing the spoils fairly, and I have yet to come across one, most operators are out to make a quick – keep most ad money to themselves, thinking one blogger goes, there are thousands to fill his space, and some are building swanky houses from VC money

4. Many owners tout revenue sharing policies and unions can do little when supply of bloggers is more than the demand. Duncan Reilly says,

...many smaller networks tended to favor a revenue sharing model that rewards popular topics over effort. They do so whilst the network operators keep the majority of profits for themselves.

5. Among the remaining 5% of the professional blogosphere, there are few Conrad Blacks. David Krug of Telegraphik writes,

While some bloggers in networks are making pennies per the hour the network CEO’s and support staff are raking in huge salaries and getting VC Money to help furnish their homes. I don’t like it. It smells funny.

But these are too few and they don’t make a case for wholesale blogger unionizing.

I don’t know how much bloggers at prominent blog networks Weblogsinc, Gawker, Techcrunch make but I sure do hope the bosses pay the bloggers well enough to set a benchmark for other owners, most importantly setting an informal yardstick ratio of salaries and revenue.

Labels: Blog networks, blogging, ethics, trends

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:15 PM 1 Comments

Why Comment when you can start your own blog

Joel Spolsky suggests that if all anonymous posts disappeared from his site's discussion group the quality of the site would definitely go up. He quotes a post from blogging pioneer Dave Winer who as you know does not have comments on his blog. Winer has said:

The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you're looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones.... That's what's important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment.

There is some truth in this, and fellow bloggers will attest to this: if you say something that is against the prevailing wisdom, something unpopular, you can be sure you will have at least one commenter who would bring you down bad. That in Dave Winer's, and Joel's book is an 'infringement on our freedom of expression'.

The tyranny of comments, if that is what you want to call this phenomenon. I fear this keeps many of us keep our views and ideas to ourselves, lest any self-important commenter comes around with his vitriol.

On a blog like Techcrunch, comments make the blog post much, much better and that is the strength of Techcrunch.

People like Seth Godin who use blogs to push their reputation as a marketer/author, don't bother putting comments.

The Iron Triangle of Rubel, Scoble and Arrington (of Techcrunch) are reduced to zilch if they did away with comments. For these A-listers and wannabes, comments are the currency of blog success.

For a small blog, like this one here , turning off comments would help, especially since few people comment anyway.

Then there is the problem of spam comments which are a strain to your resources.

Some mainstream media outfits such as The Guardian have made a virtue out of comments. Recently, The Guardian updated its Comments policy.

For newspapers hungry for web 2.0 flavors, comments are necessary.

As for people who love commenting, I humbly propose this: there are other benefits of starting a blog instead of commenting on, say an A-lister's blog:
Why must the A-lister have all the cake and eat it too? Sometimes, you can do the sharing thing on your blog for a change.

The downside is, who will read you blog in this case? Well, you can always reproduce your blog post as comment.

Labels: blogging, ethics

posted by Pramit Singh @ 12:39 PM 1 Comments

7 Perspectives on Andrew Keen's hatred for User Generated Content

What makes Andrew Keen so angry at the 'ameteurish' web 2.0 people? There was this Indian film from the 80s and I paraphrase, in Hindi: "Andrew Keen ko gussa kyon aata hai?"

The top reasons, in no particular order:

1. Some say Andrew Keen still hasn't gotten over the failure of Audiocafe.com, a casualty of the 2000 web bubble burst.

2. Some say Andrew Keen is unhappy because someone deliberately posted this on his bio entry on Wikipedia, which incidentally is one of his favorite hate objects: "he was also "a child actor who found fame in a series of soup commercials" (not correct)

3. Some say because his blog is not as famous as others, he has gotten around to saying that "bloggers don't read enough". Don't tell this to Robert Scoble. I wonder what the people at Google Reader, Feedburner and Bloglines make of this gem.

4. Others point out that maybe Andrew Keen does not consume mainstream/old media fodder and that is why he can't find any fault with it, despite of Fox news, Jason Blair and other old media luminaries.

Or maybe someone paid him well to ignore the corrupt and compromised part of old media and do a hatchet job on new media instead.

5. Or, maybe Andrew Keen was a librarian or an editor in his previous life.

6. Some say Andrew Keen wanted to become a gatekeeper, ala Old Media, but no one put any grass before him.

7. Finally, Andrew Keen knows the truth but will deny it, for there is no money in truth : "Amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic"

Labels: blooks, citizen journalism, controversey, ethics

posted by Pramit Singh @ 2:51 PM 0 Comments

Jeff Jarvis' advertising policy/code for bloggers

Responding to the recent case where some top bloggers allegedly took ads for singing praises of Microsoft, Jeff Jarvis has made his stand clear - he is against the practice however smug the accused bloggers may be.

You can almost see them smirking on the other side of your monitors.

Mr. Jarvis has posted his 10-point advertising policy:

1. My voice is not for sale.
2. My editorial space is not for sale.
3. When I am paid to write (as in a freelance article) or to speak, I will still determine what I say and I will disclose that relationship.
4. I will attempt to disclose relevant financial relationships so you are free to judge me and my words accordingly.
5. In some cases, such a relationship will prevent me from speaking on a subject (as in talking in detail about an employer). However, I will not be compelled to speak because of such a relationship.
6. If I say something openly and freely here, it may be quoted by a commercial entity (the blurb) but I will not be compensated for that.
7. My acceptance of advertising here does not constitute an endorsement of the advertiser. However, I will at times turn down advertising I find unacceptable.
8. I recognize that many blog, vlogs, etc. do not pretend to live by editorial standards and that is their right and freedom. But when they say some things, I will need to take when they say with appropriate salt.
9. I have financial relationships with others who do not follow these rules and in many cases I do not believe these rules apply to them (e.g., entertainment). I enjoy and respect many sites and products that do not follow these rules, but I expect to be able to find out what rules they operate by. I believe one’s rules and relationships should be disclosed.
10. I do not believe I have a price at which I would sell out. But if I did, I can say I certainly haven’t seen it yet.

Labels: blogging, ethics

posted by Pramit Singh @ 2:23 PM 0 Comments

A-list Bloggers, ReviewMe, PayperPost…what’s the difference?

A group of A-list bloggers, including Michael Arrington, Om Malik and others stand accused of writing paid for/ad-supported praises of Microsoft latest campaign.

Valleywag writes that John Battelle's Federated Media, who manages advertising support for the named A-list blogs got them to write puff pieces.

Puff pieces are common in the print and TV media, with even the best casually reporting Press Releases as actual news worthy events, often praising below-average products from big companies as life changing offerings.

News blogging was meant to change this muddy scenery with intelligent and honest analysis.
However, we all seem to have slipped somewhere down the line of evolution.

Balancing the demands of honest reporting and making money often puts the blogger/entrepreneur on a slippery ground; many publishing upstarts across all medium know this. That said this ‘A-list slipping’ doesn’t help the beleagured cause of intelligent and useful blogging.

Mike Arrington of Techcrunch has often been accused of traversing a grey line on objectivity.

All this leads one to debate where there is indeed any difference between paid- for reviews done by ReviewMe and PayPerPost and so-called elite bloggers.

This post by Michael Arrington covering a Microsoft product release is symptomatic about the issue on hand.
You can gauge how fawning the writeup really is.

+

A quick response by Om Malik, who is a seasoned and respected journalist, when Valleywag broke this story.


A collection of MediaVidea posts on A-Lists, ethics and related matters:

5 Questions for Bill Gates (re: When Bill met a group of fawning bloggers)

Ethics 101 for blog network Owners

The Attention Economy is an A-lister's Economy

Rules of the Superstar Economy

Downsides of the A-list Phenomenom

Update (24.6.2007)

Jeff Jarvis' analysis of the episode:
While some top bloggers in questions have responded with "I am shocked",or "I am amused" statements, Jeff Jarvis says this episode is a cautioanry tale for bloggers everywhere:

I tried to warn Federated when I adamantly turned down two prior similar campaigns, telling them that this would reflect poorly on the bloggers who do it, possibly on bloggers as a whole, on the network itself, and in the end on the advertisers. But they kept trying to push the boundaries, because that’s what advertisers and thus sales people do.

So ultimately, this is a cautionary tale for all bloggers who take ads: You must set your own boundaries and not let them be pushed. When you do — whatever those boundaries are — that is the very definition of selling out.

In each of these cases, the advertiser’s effort is to get more closely associated with us, our content, our reputations, our brands. They’d like get into our pants mouths. They want us to speak their names. Nicely.

Labels: Blog networks, blogging, controversey, ethics

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:53 PM 1 Comments