Category Archives: Media ecology

Free lunches still elusive on MySpace

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Nice comment by Don Dodge…

MySpace has blocked Photobucket content again. Robert Scoble reminds us when you host your content on free services nasty crap can happen. TechMeme is flooded with blogs angrily protesting MySpace’s actions. The lesson is this; Free services always come with strings attached, limitations, service outages, advertising, and rules that can change at any time without notice.

Consumers sometimes forget the bargain they made in exchange for the free services. Sometimes it means your personal information can be sold or marketed. Other times it means your content is not really yours anymore. Sometimes it means you get to pay for additional services once you are hooked. Or maybe that the rules change over time and the service is unreliable. Most times things work out OK and consumers don’t complain too much.

Consumers will put up with hassles and uncertainty in exchange for a “free” service. Businesses will not. Business customers require solid, reliable systems and they are willing to pay for them.

Both markets, consumer and business, are important and potentially profitable. However, the economics and expectations are different for consumers. As an example, Microsoft has 260 million Hotmail consumer users and over 500 million Outlook business users. The terms of service and feature sets are different and so are the business models.

MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, and other Web 2.0 free services get lots of attention. They are held up as examples of innovation and the new way of doing things. I agree they are fun services but innovative? Depends on your perspective…

Nick Carr gleefully pitches in:

It’s worth remembering that the business model of Web 2.0 social networks is the sharecropping model. After the Civil War, when the original sharecropping system took hold in the American south, the plantation owners made money in two ways. They leased land to the sharecroppers, and they also leased them their tools. It’s no different this time. The payments for land (Web pages) and tools (video widgets et al.) don’t come directly, through exchanges of cash, but rather indirectly, through the sale of advertisements. But the idea is the same. If there’s a widget that can accommodate advertising, that tool will be supplied by the plantation owner, not by some interloping varmint. Whine all you want, but that’s the way it’s going to be.

Blog spam

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According to this,

A recent study by WebmasterWorld found that an estimated 77% of all blogs on Google’s Blogspot service were spam. Similarly, AOL Hometown, had well over 80% of its results turn out to be spam. Even MSN Spaces, which as not mentioned in the report, is claimed to host an estimated ten percent of spammer Web site.

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s WordPress.com. Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, WordPress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

Though there have been spam attacks in the past, the spammers have been easily shut down and, overall, the service remains relatively free of the splogs that seem to choke up its competitors. Though paid services such as Typepad also enjoy a relatively spam-free existance, what WordPress.com does is very rare for a free service…

Those numbers are very interesting. Wonder how they affect the Technorati figures about 71 million blogs (as of now) and two new ones being created every second. Also: what is Google doing about the Blogspot problem?

Footnote: Memex runs on WordPress.

Yo Blair!

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Hmmm… New Labour has decided that it must “use” the “YouTube channel”. Somehow, I don’t think it’ll catch on. Especially when it’s up against stuff like this.

When is a ‘friend’ not a friend?

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(Answer: when he’s Rupert Murdoch.) This morning’s Observer column…

Tom Anderson, the founder of MySpace, had – as of 9.42am on Friday 30 March – 167,144,385 ‘friends’. This is not because he is exceedingly sociable, but because anyone who signs up on MySpace automatically becomes one of Tom’s friends. By the time you read this, he will have another 500,000. (MySpace is adding 250,000 users a day.)

The MySpace concept of a friend may seem contrived, but is much closer to what a businessperson would describe as a ‘contact’. This may be why the corporate world is gazing anxiously at the social networking phenomenon and wondering if it has anything to offer. Two studies – by Forrester Research, a market research firm, and McKinsey, a consultancy – offer conflicting views…

What’s wrong with Viacom?

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The question is John Dvorak’s — and it’s a good one.

BERKELEY, Calif. — I’ve been looking for analogies to describe Viacom Inc.’s recent demands that 100,000 short clips be removed from the YouTube video site. These clips, to me, represent 100,000 moments of free publicity for various Viacom properties, such as the “Daily Show” starring Jon Stewart.
It finally dawned on me that there was no good analogy, since this unprecedented act of stupidity was unlike anything I knew.

It wasn’t like someone finding a pot of money on a cab seat and making sure the rightful owner got it back. It was more like finding the pot of money, then suing the rightful owner because you were inconvenienced by the whole thing.
Make no mistake: Viacom’s decision was more like the person in the cab than it was “protecting copyrighted material,” which is the company’s claim.

First of all, what is an old 3-minute clip of the “Daily Show” worth on the open market? Seriously, what is its value?

Answer: zilch.

Second thoughts about old and new media

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Ed Felten’s having second thoughts about his reactions to the famed New Yorker article about Wikipedia…

It turns out that EssJay, one of the Wikipedia users described in The New Yorker article, is not the “tenured professor of religion at a private university” that he claimed he was, and that The New Yorker reported him to be. He’s actually a 24-year-old, sans doctorate, named Ryan Jordan.

It’s a long and typically thoughtful post. In the end, Prof. Felten reaches this conclusion:

In the wake of this episode The New Yorker looks very bad (and Wikipedia only moderately so) because people regard an error in The New Yorker to be exceptional in a way the exact same error in Wikipedia is not. This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read.

Statistic of the day

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More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

[Source]

Blogging and journalism

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Nice post by Dave Winer on the symbiotic relationship between blogging and mainstream journalism.

By now it should be obvious that bloggers are part of the landscape of investigative journalism. If you doubt this, do a little investigation yourself into how the story about Alberto Gonzalez and the US Attorneys is being managed. You’ll find that this time it’s a group of bloggers playing the role of Woodward and Bernstein — the Talking Point Memo people, doing really kickass work. I’ve been reading Josh Marshall every day as the scandal has been developing. And he’s getting credit from some of the professional reporters I respect. Paul Kiel from TPM was a guest on this week’s On The Media, and Josh was a guest on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

I was proud of the Powerline guys when they brought down Dan Rather, not because I agree with their politics (I don’t!) or because I dislike Rather (ditto!) but because the pros had gotten sloppy and careless, and they need the help we bloggers get from the communities we’re part of, they need someone watching over their shoulders asking how they know this or that, or if maybe this reporter has a conflict of some sort. They often do.

A grisly ‘first’

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From today’s edition of The Register…

Police are investigating the unexplained death of a man who appeared to commit suicide in front of an audience of webcam chatroom users.

Kevin Neil Whitrick, 42, from Wellington in Shropshire, was found at about 11.15pm on Wednesday by officers who went to his home following a report from a fellow chatroom user.

Resuscitation attempts failed, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. A post mortem was carried out on Friday morning, which confirmed the cause of death as hanging. A Coroner’s inquest will open on Monday.

Mr Whitrick was father to 12-year old twins. His ex-wife said he suffered a very serious car accident in July 2006, and had never fully recovered.

Lead investigator Detective Chief Inspector Jon Groves said: “Our enquiries to date have revealed that Mr Whitrick was using a chatroom with a number of other people at the time of his death.

“We are liaising with the internet service provider at this time to contact other users who were online at the time of this incident and who may have information that could assist our enquiries.”