Category: Web/Tech

MORE BLOGGER ETHICS THOUGHTS

Women_and_workjpg THIS IS FROM MORRA’S  VERY FINE AND ALWAYS THOUGHTFUL WOMEN AND WORK BLOG, IN A POST ENTITLED:  "With all due respect Cindy."  Comments are closed on this post so I’m quoting her post here and then posting a response. 

MORRA:  "First off, I don’t have a Typekey account, so I am going to do a trackback instead.
Cindy Samuels, who is brilliant, is wrong on this post:"
“One of my favorite bloggers sent me a note asking my opinion about a service that pays bloggers to  write about client products.  It’s not secret, the writers disclose their contracts.  Even so, I told her that as an old newsie, I thought that, unless she was desperate for money, she shouldn’t go near the idea.  WHY?”
AFTER THE QUOTE, SHE ADDED"Journalists do endorsements, why can’t I? Not that anyone’s asking, of course."

Morra, who unlike me really IS brilliant, asks a fair question.  But I don’t think reputable journalists endorse products.  They don’t do commercials and use their own language to sell products.  If they are busy selling in the context of their coverage – or we are, in the context of our blogs, then why should anyone believe us about anything?  How do they know which things are paid for and which are not?  When is a blog a blog and when does it become solely a marketing tool? 

I may be showing my age, since I was trained as a reporter long ago, but I shudder to think of the consequences of putting PAID ad copy into a post.  Let’s keep this conversation going – I respect Morra too much to do anything but think harder about this…..

USE BASIC NEWS ETHICS AND HELP SAVE BLOGGING

Dollars_2 One of my favorite bloggers sent me a note asking my opinion about a service that pays bloggers to  write about client products.  It's not secret, the writers disclose their contracts.  Even so, I told her that as an old newsie, I thought that, unless she was desperate for money, she shouldn't go near the idea.  WHY?

Understand, this is NOT selling ads on your blog or being part of a syndicate like BlogHer, my favorite entity on the planet, or Federated Media, founded by the amazing John Battelle.  That's an advertiser paying for a separate, discrete place on the page.

This entity, and others far more insidious, including sub-rosa corporate and political efforts, threaten the credibility of the writer and, even more important, of the medium.  I was reminded of this after reading a speech on the dangers faced by legitimate blogs and bloggers, given by the early Internet pioneer Jason Calacanis.  In it he reminds us what happened to e-mail because of spammers and urges bloggers to fight such developments in our thrilling new medium.  Here's what he says about what spammers did to e-mail "Many of you built this city — this trusted medium — with hard work and good intentions.  Then, along come the spammers, and they piss in the well, ruining it for all of us."

Yeah I know it's a real guy image but the fact remains, there's a thin line between talking about or reviewing material and taking money to sell it.  Usually, by the way, not what it would cost to reach the same people some other way.  And almost inevitably, taking blogging closer to the diminished credibility so much a part of my former world of "mainstream journalism.  

You’re It!

SO my friend Liza tagged me with the following: 

Find the nearest book.
Name the author & title.
Turn to page 123.
Post sentences 6-8.
Tag three more people.

Here’s what turned up: 

Naked_conversations Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations. "He advises those who will listen: "If a blogger has enough passion, the blog becomes the central place on the Internet for that topic.  Companies understand the importance of Google but they don’t yet get how blogging fits in.  If the corporation doesn’t do this for themselves, then someone else will." 

I’m reading the book because a client suggested it; I’m usually more fiction/politics but I have to admit it’s pretty interesting.  Scoble is a big friend of BlogHer.  He was at last year’s convention.

And I tag Liz, Ronnie and Cooper.  Post here or on your own blog.

LIVING ON THE EDGE – FUTURE TENSE

Edge_question_2Some radical thoughts about the future from people who actually might know what they’re talking about:  I have always been fascinated by the smart, smart people who live from the center to the edge of the cyberthinker world.  Because I was present in LA for much of the early conference/thinker gatherings when they weren’t so exclusive and you could get a press pass if you knew your way around reporter vocabulary, I met many of them — often humbling but exhilarating experiences.

Over the years one of their most resourceful thinkers, John Brockman, has built a foundation called The Edge, where thinkers gather to "ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."  The annual question founder Brockman has asked this community of thinkers (albeit more than 6 times more men than women) is "What Are Your Optimistic About?  Why?"  It’s worth a look.  Some of those I know the most about, and respect, whose ideas might intrigue, include Whole Earth Catalogue publisher Stuart Brand, Microsoft pioneers Linda Stone and Nathan Myhrvold , Jaron Lanier, the man who named "virtual reality, Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor who has had such an impact on how we see learning differences and help the kids who have them, and one of the earliest Web thinkers, Esther Dyson.

Take a look; you might actually find a route to some optimism yourself!  I was surprised by how much "good news" these people deliver.  If we can just get some political leadership to follow up on it we’ll be better able to leverage these possibilities but either way, it’s nice to get some good news once in a while.  Happy New Year.

GOOGLE ME THIS

ThesearchI worked for Excite when it was a brand new search engine. The idea was to write 20 word descriptions of every site and differentiate Excite as the search engine with quality descriptions to help guide the searcher. I wanted to learn about the Internet (it was around 1995 – near the beginning of search) and they were paying $5/review. It was a blast. Why am I telling you this?

I just finished a book called THE SEARCH: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle, who is a remarkable pioneer – one of the founders of WIRED, the late INDUSTRY STANDARD and blog advertising syndicator Federated Media Publishing, Inc. among others.

As the title suggests, it’s about considerably more than the brilliant and turbulent birth and ascent of Google. Battelle makes the very good case that the rise of search as a web application was essential to more than the future of the Internet as the universal tool that it is. In addition, says Battelle, “Search is no longer a stand-alone application, as useful but impersonal tool for finding something on a new medium called the World Wide Web. Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it. It’s how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge.”

In other words, search is changing us, our culture and our world. It’s a very exciting examination of something that’s become so automatic and familiar that it’s easy to forget just how transforming a force it is. The book is out in paperback and if you’re a web rat like me, you’ll really enjoy it.

ALL POWER (or at least MORE power) TO THE BLOGGERS!

I_want_you

Yesterday I went to a briefing on political blogging held by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet and mega-PR agency Edelman Associates.  It was pretty interesting.  Among the findings: (Read to the bottom – you’ll be glad you did)

  • 27% of the US population reads a blog in any given week (@60,193,913 folks – larger than the adult pops of CA, NY, TX combined)34%+ American influentials (people who influence others – logical, right?) read a blog at least once/week
  • 28% of American adults that have read a blog have taken action on based on in- formation they received on that blog. 

The US age breakdown is kind of interesting too.

  • 18-24s are largest blog users, as you’d imagine.  They report reading a blog an average of 1.6 days/week. 
  • The next highest isn’t 25-34 (many of whom fell into a kind of "gap" in school computing access and average 0.8 pages/week) but 35-44s who average around 1.05 days/week.
  • Then there’s another surprise – the next age cadre, 45-54 is lowest so far at around 0.7 days/week
  • Those early Boomers 55-64 are higher, matching the 25-34s at 0.8. 
  • 65+ averages only around 0.5.

And gender – are we traveling the blogosphere less intensely than the guys?  Well the only stats the report had were for political blogs and their researcher says the numbers were pretty much in the margin of error: 

  • Blog readers who read political blogs:  24% female – 30% male
  • Take action from political blog info: 26% female – 30% male]]

A second study, released in October 2006 by IPDI and @dvocacy Inc. showed:

  • Daily political blog readers were 75% male and 25% female
  • Daily “all others” blog readers were 60% male and 40% female

OK NOW here’s why you read to the bottom:  women don’t do their politics exclusively on “political” blogs – not at all!  Read Been There or Mom-101 or Lizawashere and see for yourself.  As usual, we don’t fit into anyone’s categories – combining family, food, politics and love into the total life we all live.  Good for us — we just have to make sure the pundits know this too – so they can find some of our brilliant sisters as they think, write and provoke us to do both better.

AUDREY HEPBURN AT THE GAP

OK.  I have six deadlines in the next week and I shouldn’t be writing this but I’m struggling with my loyalties here.  I have loved Audrey Hepburn since I was a kid.  As only a short, kind of rounded young woman can look up to a sleek icon with a heart.  AND I love the Internet.  And technology.  And sampling.  And now, I don’t know what to think.

The Gap has taken a scene from Funny Face, when Audrey Hepburn, the young existential book store clerk turned model, on her first trip to Paris, runs off to a smoky coffee house where her philosopher hero (of course he’s a fake and a bit of a cad) hangs out – and decides to dance.  The Gap has taken this essentially sweet scene and sampled it, mashed it up, stuck it into hip hop and multiple-image edits and generally made a cute little commercial about black pants.  It isn’t disrespectful to her – just jazzed up.  And it isn’t in bad taste.  Or anything.  It’s even clever.  It’s also the first time I’ve been this ambivalent about altered images.  I hate colorized movies.  I love sampling in music.  I’ve heard Larry Lessig speak and think he’s right about a lot of his Remix theories.  But this one seems to bring out all of the above.  Here’s the link – what do you think?

TRY TO REMEMBER — THE FANTASTICKS, JERRY ORBACH, THE INTERNET AND ME

OK – so I should be used to it by now.  I’ve been — as I often say, a walking demographic Baby Boomer as long as I can remember.  But on this morning after the re-opening of THE FANTASTICKS*  – which ran off-Broadway for 42 years, I read "adults 55+ adapting online."  Of course they are — sooner or later whatever I’m doing becomes part of a generational wave.

Don’t worry – there IS a connection.

I saw THE FANTASTICKS  with my college room mate and her mother during fall vacation of my freshman year.  That was 1964 – four years after it opened.  At the end, all of 18, I was crying so hard that the woman sitting next to me – probably 25 or s0 – handed me the rose her date must have given her at dinner.  I kept it on the wall of my room for years. 

El Gallo — the irresistible seducer  and originator of the "hurt’ without which "the heart is hollow" —  was first played by Jerry Orbach.  [hear him sing Try to Remember here.]  I met him when I was close to 50 – and told him I’d seen the show when I was 18.  His face just changed – not a trace of Lennie Briscoe but a combination of affection, nostalgia and pleasure.  We spoke a bit more and then I apologized for approaching him at a reception and acting like a groupie.  He replied "You saw the Fantasticks when you were EIGHTEEN!  That wasn’t an interruption that was a pleasure."  So I guess the story had the same impact on the cast that it had on girls like me.  "Please God please," the young girl ("the girl") cries out – "don’t let me be NORMAL!"  That was me alright.  Please let me be singular – not like the others! 

Well it hasn’t turned out that way.  Whatever I come to, my peers hit within a year or so.  It made me a great talk show producer – never a visionary too far ahead to be relevant, just enough ahead to know what story to do next.  I guess that’s why I accommodated to my role as close enough to normal but with an edge — rather than the downtown woman I had once wished to be.

I knew about this headlong Boomer journey online because my older son, in the industry, had read a similar study.  Last weekend I told him that I seemed to be getting a lot more online consulting work and his theory was that companies need boomer consultants more because more "civilian" boomers are finally hitting the web.  I always knew we would; the tribe that is the baby boom loves to be connected.  The web was a perfect home for us.  Just like THE FANTASTICKS.

*OK Feminist friends, there’s an element of sexism in this original fairy tale (they’ve rewritten the only really troubling song) but I have chosen to ignore it.  It just can’t trump the wonder and poetry.

OF COURSE IT COULDN’T LAST – RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE WEB

I just spent an hour listening to NYT reporter Kurt Eichenwald on a talk show describing the current state of Internet child pornography.  It’s just so sad. 

I remember as far back as 1998, when I helped launch an Internet safety campaign called America Links Up. We organized teach-ins, a TV program, a family website and a lot of other material to help parents keep their kids safe on line.  I, stupidly, thought people were a little overwrought about the whole thing.  If you were honest with kids, they could be trusted.  [ASIDE: I am, I often observe, a walking demographic… here for the George Lakoff nurturing parent.]  How could we deprive them when the Internet was, as John Perry Barlow said, "the most important discovery since fire?"

I was so besotted that I was incorrigible.  My boss at iVillage, whom I represented at American Links Up, used to call me a Web rat.  But it’s a sign of my eternal naivete that I never thought it would get as bad as it (apparently) is. AND that so many kids would log on when parents weren’t looking and participate. ( If the stories are true, it’s not just toddlers and preteens being exploited, it is also older teens getting sucked in and abused as well. )

We raised our kids in a style very similar to that described by long-time Wired writer Jon Katz, writing as Wired’s Netizen.  In 1996 he wrote a kids’ bill of rights on line – linking web rights to responsibilities met.  I wonder how that would play just ten years later.

In addition, I still don’t understand – when there are so many Law and Order SVU and a dozens of other programs portraying the dangers of these people – why young people would engage in this stuff to begin with.  Either too many kids are too lonely to care or we just aren’t paying enough attention.  Parents have to work and if they want decent housing they often have long commutes.  They need help.

So what do you think?  Is the Web as scary as Eichenwald portrays it?  Is some of it hype?  How do we keep kids safe and still help them to savor the Internet in all its wonders and opportunities?  Holler out some ideas….