As we know, factual errors are rife and central to the legitimacy debate surrounding all media today. Internet based media are particularly vulnerable to misinformation and redistribution of errors due to the fact that the traditional chain of trust between news media has been extended to the websites of these organizations.

Search engines, syndication technologies and aggregators are decoupling the editorial content from its context of “the publication” and are creating a new reality of editorial uncontrollability.

Error correction, on the other hand, is lagging considerably behind, and it is indeed true that a lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on. This post is an attempt to define an ideal standard for website error correction, while knowing full well that there can be practical, technical, political or economical reasons for not following parts of such a standard.

The challenges

There are more or less as many ways to build and structure a website as there are websites and web media networks, even though genres and standards have emerged over the last 15 years or so. This means that very specific technical guidelines of how to handle errors are difficult to define and each content management system and each editorial process will need its own interpretation of how to actually go about such a practice.

In a global political environment where media organizations are more and more frequently finding themselves the target of formal or informal regulation, this kind of agenda is difficult. The answer is simple and tested by tradition: News media should create a best practice framework before some other actor decides to create laws.

Real-time redistribution is unavoidable. The very second a news item is published; someone will redistribute it along a different channel outside the range of control of the original publisher. Such channels are developing very rapidly these years and there is simply no way all modes of redistribution can be thought into a general digital strategy. This leaves a very short – if actually non-existent – window of corrigibility as opposed to the more or less 24 hour long window as seen from a traditional newspaper perspective.

Syndication takes many practical forms and more often than not the original publisher has no influence on the editorial prominence auto-syndicated or quoted content is given on a different media platform.

Globalization and a world that in a digital sense really is almost totally flat means that content published by a news organization on one continent in one of the global languages (typically English) can be republished only seconds later by other news media that do not have full insight into local conditions with regards to self-censorship, political pressure on the media or the trustworthiness of a given news organization.

Cross-media publication of text, audio and video along with dynamic websites mean that tracking a specific piece of information paradoxically becomes more difficult when using computer-based media platforms.

The different philosophies behind publishing multimedia such as podcasts or video archives are also creating challenges. Some media organizations see online multimedia publication as a documentation of the “real” broadcast, others see the digital distribution as an actual broadcast in its own right.

The very definition of the terms “publication” and “broadcast” is in flux. How do we define the physical object of an editorial product and whether or nor something is a part of it? How do we define the time of publication? If a user sees an articles on a website two weeks after the release date, is that a new publication? It is after all served from the technical platform of the editorial organization that originally published it.

These are only some of the challenges facing publishers that have not yet crystalized into industry-wide practices; probably because that industry itself is rather busy fighting for its very existence in the first place. However, the credibility of media institutions is probably the most dangerous currency for them to let float, and if they do not take on the ever-complicating challenge of error reduction and correction, they will pay a hefty price for this oversight.

Here follows an attempt to lay down The Rules:

Errors and unlawful disclosures more or less require the same treatment, so they are regarded as synonymous through most of this policy proposal.

• All web articles quoting or referring to a news item from a different web site should contain a link to the original and its possible corrections.

• On all news web sites users should have easy and fast access to reporting errors and a clear ticketing process including mandatory feedback to the reporting user.

• Once a publisher is made aware of a potentially grave error on a web page or in Internet-based multimedia content, this should immediately be quarantined until further investigation can clarify the matter.

• Quarantined content should not be accessible in any way for users outside the news organization and any attempts to access it should result in a notification stating that a claim has been raised and that the content has been quarantined. Alternatively quarantined content could be made continuously available based on an editorial judgment balancing the potential damage to a wronged party with the importance of distributing the information to the general public. If this is done, it should happen alongside prominent disclaimers and a warning that a third party has disputed the content. Continuing publication of quarantined content might not be within the allowable of traditional editorial ethical rulebooks and is definitely an issue that needs clarification.

• Content flagged by the original source as containing grave errors should be immediately quarantined without exception until a correction can take place.

• An error should be corrected at the original URL where it appeared. The destination document should always contain notification of this correction.

• The original error should be available for verification with a clear indication that there has been a correction. Exemption from this rule is only allowed where the repetition of the error will result in grave consequences for the wronged part or when removing content that has been subsequently restricted by legal means. This verification copy should not be indexable by search engines, it should be copy-protected and direct links to it from outside the website should be redirected to the corrected version. In all cases users should be notified that a change has taken place from the original content.

• After correcting an error or removing content, a publisher should always notify any search engine in its crawler access logs that a page has been changed, if possible automatically and always as soon as possible.

• Errors that have been propagated across a website or website network and that have been present in the headlines or teaser texts used in distribution should be corrected in any spot where the error has been shown.

• A correction of a serious error should always be presented with at least the same editorial prominence as the original information, for at least a similar duration and at least to an audience of the same size as the error was.

• All content objects containing errors should be corrected and marked as such across the website – even if objects like snippets, fact boxes or quotations are used as parts of other digital products or pages.

• A publisher should always attempt to correct an error in front of the largest possible share of the original audience that was exposed to the error. This involves using cookies and user logins to trace article readership and notify any users that an article they have read contained errors upon a later visit. Of course this approach must take into consideration the privacy of the user and not result in abusive data collection.

• A publisher should always during a legal dispute be able to fully document what content has been published at a given time and date, including the context on the web site, the time and duration of the publication, and the number of users that have been accessing the content.

• Unlawful disclosures or distribution of information that has subsequently been placed under legal restrictions (like trade secrets or the name of a suspect that has been restricted after publication) should be removed and any reachable aggregator or distributor should be notified. A compliant publisher should always respond favorably to such a notification.

The news industry should define a series of standards that public service broadcasters and major news institutions can choose to comply with:

• A standard for version control and a definition of the concept of publication time and periods
• A standard for how to handle claims of serious errors – including process, quarantine rules, turnaround time and feedback requirements
• A standard for how to publicize errors and corrections to both the general public and to other publishers as in Pingback, a standardized top level document or parallel documents such as “/corrections” on all news websites
• A standard for how to mark content objects with the fact that they contain errors or have been corrected
• A standard for tamper-proof publication archives for documentation purposes
• There should be a dialogue between major news organizations and major aggregators/distributors like Google or Twitter on how to notify them of corrections

What is not covered here:

• Subsequent removal of old sins that can be related to a person or party, for which they have atoned.
• What should be the legal status of information that has been removed from the public domain?
• How to handle abusive use of the error handling process by third parties including corporations or state agencies?
• How to handle the dilemma of notifying a third party that a given unit of information should be decommissioned from their ecosystem without spreading that information even further?

Final thoughts

We are treading dangerous ground here. The above guideline should be seen as a proposal for a standard, any suggestions, challenges or thought are welcome. However, I do insist that the basic assumption here is valid:

If news organizations do not improve the way they handle errors and corrections on their websites considerably, they will continually lose credibility, and political forces wishing to restrict the general freedom of the media will eventually clamor for new legislation. The news industry must wake up, face this difficult set of problems, and fast.

Further inspiration (kudos to Jacob Mollerup):

• Corrections to online content – the latest set of best practices from the CAJ
• Best practices in digital accuracy and corrections
• Where’s Page Two Online?

Today is harbors a lot of unique features that capitalize on this core content and gives not just the users bat also companies a lot of new and hugely useful communication tools.

I will attempt to give a brief overview of some of the more important ones that can help companies with getting in touch with possible customers, partners and employees. They are particularly useful when combined and used as part of a social media communications strategy.

Whether or not all of these tools are relevant to your specific organization is something to be left for a more in-depth evaluation, but mot companies and similar institutions will be able to use some of them – and the greatest part of it is that most of them are free.

In general, Linkedin gives you the ability to get into a dialogue with people in a non-binary way, in the sense that people are not necessarily customers or prospects, they can be somewhere in between, as can potential employees. Letting people get a little closer to you or your company without commitment is easy with Linkedin – especially since the service has now embraced the Twittery “follow” concept, in a few cases to the extreme.

It might be a bit over-the-top to postulate the your company’s Linkedin presence is as important as it’s web page, but in a few cases it might. While there is only very little flexibility in the sense of corporate visual identity, you get a huge amount of gratuitous functionality, once you start working with the platform.

The 7 tools I have selected from the Linkedin toolbox for a treatment in this post are:

Employee profiles

It might surprise the avid reader that I am bringing up the employee pages as part of a company communications strategy, but it is very important to remember, that they are the critical component inside the Linkedin social ecosystem.

An employee chooses totally on own discretion whether or not to signify that he or she is working for a specific company and whether or not to connect with other employees, including managers. While the debate surrounding the social protocols about connecting (or not) will take up an entire article, it will have to suffice to say here that there is no way a company can reasonably expect to manage employee’s individual profiles in detail. They take them with them when they leave.

The only actual physical tool that a company has in this regard is the ability to signal that a person is not working for the company any more, or actually never did.

However, it is a great idea to make friendly suggestions to you employees that they update their pages with: A portrait image, their work experience history and their education. The important reason for this is that these data will appear on the company page and becomes a central part of the social capital that you can demonstrate there.

Individual member profiles can be followed and listed on a shortlist in your Linkedin account.

Company page

The company page seems to be one of the areas where Linkedin is focusing development attention currently. You can now publish company status updates in a tweetoid manner, enter products and services, promotions and contact data and link to your RSS news feeds. Very few people are aware of the fact that you can actually modify the products page so it shows different content based on what audience is accessing it.

The company page has a very extensive “insights” section that presents statistics for external users like potential employees or customers about the general level of experience, who do you know inside the company, what kind of education do people have etc. – all based on the employee profiles, and this is the primary reason for the abovementioned friendly suggestion to update these.

If you enter your products and services, customers can leave testimonials and recommendations right there signed with their Linkedin profiles – a very powerful and trustworthy tool.

You can follow a company, which will give you notifications in changes of management, product portfolio or posted jobs. You will also figure on that companies page administrators list of followers, another example of the semi-committed implicit dialogue between a company and an individual, who could some day become a customer, an employee etc.

Groups

Linkedin Groups looked for along time like a total waste of effort as a community platform. Then about 2-3 years ago, Groups took off in a major way feature-wise and they are today one of the most versatile and comprehensive features in the service.

Anyone can create a group, but be advised to make sure that you will put the time and effort required to curate it into the project. Making real use of a Linkedin group is not like creating a Facebook group for “People who think pandas are evolved from fish”. It takes years of careful nursing and curating, but can be highly useful in the end.

Groups are created for all sorts of purposes – alumni groups for educational institutions or companies, groups that connect specialists across nations or inside corporations, groups that connect people after an event and help them keep in touch etc. There are a lot of groups that have been left for dead after futile attempts to build huge marketplaces inside the platform. Once groups get too large, they often lose their relevance.

Companies can use groups as extranets, can endorse alumni groups created by ex-employees and use them as brand ambassadors, can create groups to bring customers together around products or services etc. Just remember that the actual ownership of a group is not linked to the company, but to the individual who created them. A group that becomes an indispensable part of you company communications effort should have a number of co-administrators and restrictive security policies.

One of the major benefits of the groups system is the flexibility in permissions and usage, the biggest drawback (which is an endemic issues with the system) is the fact that there is very little chance of getting any feature changed or added like you can do on your web platform.

Events

One of the most overlooked Linkedin features is the Linkedin Events section, and the companies that have discovered it are really getting a huge benefit out of it. Anyone can create an event, typically a conference, an after-hours networking session, a free lecture etc.

When you choose to signal that you attending the event, your profile and company information is added to the event page. This means that someone else who wants to get in touch now knows where to show up to meet you – and vice versa. A company promoting an event can contact attendees ahead of time, get an overview of the audience and tailor the program to their needs.

This is a great tool for getting closer to potential customers and employees. If you have inhouse experts that have the gift of public presentation, it is a great way to get people to come to you. Remember, that by creating an event and getting people to signal that they are attending it, you are getting valuable exposure on those user profiles.

Events can be followed in a way similar to companies – also without attending them.

Web Widgets

On LinkedIn’s developer site you can find a very advanced API that can integrate with your web site but there is also a very simple toolbox of web plugins that anyone can use to build bridges between your web site and your company’s Linkedin presence.

There are “Follow company” buttons for your site, product recommendation buttons, member profile elements for employee listings on your site and much more. They are very easy to generate and integrate – don’t get scared by the “developer” label.

Advertisement

The ad platform on Linkedin is mindboggling. It’s another one of those ill-kept secrets in the system, probably so little known because of the sheer size and complexity of what Linkedin has become.

For a B2B marketer, it offers a level of targeting precision second to none. You can narrow down your ad campaign to a small number of people like “VP of tech in startup companies in Kiruna, Sweden at age 35-45”. The only hassles are that Linkedin does not allow too small target groups (the one mentioned above is an example) and that a lot of European languages are not currently allowed in ads, though Linkedin’s customer service assures me this is underway in 2012.

Companies who have used this feature to target campaigns and ads towards lists of known individuals – you can even advertise towards people in a specific company. And yes, you can choose between CPC or CPM ratings – thought the system is nowhere as advanced ad Google Adwords, it doesn’t need to be, because of the incredible targeting options.

Recruiting

So how do they make the money? Well…recruiting must be a part of it. Linkedin is a career-focused social network, after all, and access to people is at the core of its business. It is. Linkedin offers a number of enterprise level (both price- and featurewise) services and tools that allow companies to build career centrals on the company page, to use Linkedin as a hunting ground for hidden talents and to advertise in unlikely places like employees profiles in order to attract new talent.

I have no direct experience with these tools, though I have had them demonstrated and am in no doubt, that the next time I am looking for a rare and highly specialized skill set, the Linkedin recruitment products are going to be in my toolbox.

The magic

But the real deal here is in the choice and combination of all of the above. Using events combined with ads and a company page can work wonders for some, while a group presence is fantastic for others. The key to success in to understand the platform and combine its elements – believe it or not, there are even a lot more parts of the platform I have totally glossed over here that might be of use in a corporate setting. If you can live with the drawbacks and the inevitable fact that Linkedin is a platform that must somehow constantly adopt to a common global denominator, it is a treasure trove of undiscovered contact points between your company and the people you want to get in contact with.

One of the casualties so far is the highly expected and very innovative Portal 2 brainteaser/strategy game that will (if the network permits) deliver a first in the shape of a true cross-platform multiplayer game in highly complex 3D environments, across the globe, across hardware platforms and operating systems.

What is worse is that SONY is indicating that they are unsure that credit card data of its members might be at risk due to a new incursion on the network.

On the other hand tech blog sources claim that the networks has not been hacked as such but is down due to a technical fumble that leaves it highly vulnerable if not fixed and that this vulnerability was exploited for some hours until the network was shut down. All we really know is that SONY is claiming to rebuild the entire network infrastructure due to some kind of an emergency and that we have no actual time frame for the fix.

Why is this even remotely important?

In the digital age, this kind of downtime is very serious, and analysts and business people alike are closely watching the reasons behind it as well as the way it is handled. No-one is claiming that it can in any way rival the real physical problems that are facing people around the globe, but it is critical to the digital sector for a number of reasons:

The ability to run a network business

It has been estimated that Sony is losing a couple of million dollars a day on keeping its network down, and that is only counting direct revenue, on top of that comes the tremendous badwill from customers, the loss of investments in new titles like the Mortal Kombat, SOCOM and Portal editions that was slated to be Easter hits, and on top of that everyone is expecting SONY to compensate its irate users somehow when it is all over.

This is mostly about the ability to run a business over the global network and the legitimacy of content ownership. If SONY is denied these, a lot of other companies, big and small, are potentially in danger, as well as the hopes of an entire generation of entrepreneurs that are building network businesses as we speak.

Social capital is real capital

But network downtime is not only about cash, it is also about the enormous amount of social capital that PSN users have built up in the shape of highscores, trophies, friend relations and actual purchases on the network.

People are losing the contact to their friends, the ability to take part in a pastime that – even if ridiculed – is recognized as more or less the future of media. We have an ambivalent relationship with digital games, while on the one hand claiming that they lead to obesity, violence and social indifference, we also claim that they lead to new intellectual, social and motor skills, new global business models and narrative disciplines. Games are rivaling the movie industry in economical terms, they are here to stay, and online games it where it’s really at.

More than the PSN membership, other very diverse networks like World of Warcraft, XBox Live, Everquest, RuneScape or Club Penguin number even other millions, so what is being attacked here is a primary global social activity of the 21st century.

Whoever (or whatever) is the reason for this outage, they are definitely frustrating the potential fanbase of any political hacker group with an “information must be free” message.

SONY is not handling it with elegance

On top of this annoyance, SONY is reacting with what is perceived by its customers (who are not just spoiled teens but also families all over the world who also happen to buy TV’s) as typical arrogance and disinterest. Yes, we realize that the engineers are most probably working frantically to restore service, but very little information has come out via the Playstation Blogs, SONY/PSN Twitter accounts or even traditional press releases. The fans are really up in arms for days now and they are getting no love.

For all the talk about community management being a crucial part of online gaming, this is puzzling, and if nothing else it will be yet another example of how not to handle your customers during downtimes, which unfortunately has become part of the PSN trademark. Customer service in the gaming industry does generally not reflect the customer’s investment in the products in terms of money, time and emotional and social capital. This has to change, and soon.

The global payment system might be compromised

Seen in old-world terms, the worst part of it all might be the fact that 72 million high-value targets in the shape of credit cards are potentially in danger. Hackers have attempted politically motivated attacks on the global payment infrastructure in the shape of VISA before, and the very thought of the kind of havoc that could be created with 72 million valid card numbers and a botnet is very scary, particularly in a world economy that is still balancing on a thin knife edge and is daily submitted to freak earthquakes, impending state bankruptcies and new wars over oil fields.

A history of over-reaction

If we assume that Anonymous is behind this, and even if they aren’t, then they and anybody else sympathizing with their interpretation of the “information wants to be free”-cause need to study history some more. The very idea that anyone will change from a closed to an open policy at gunpoint is naïve. Even if the hackers are just disgruntled techies taking a grudge over the edge, they are bound to be viewed by some people in some government, not as digital pranksters but as terrorists, attacking the infrastructure of business at a time and place where it really hurts.

Governments have a millennia-long history of overreaction to this kind of transgressional threat, and cyber warfare is the current hyper-buzzword in military leadership circles all over the world. Any major government with respect for itself is currently building a cyber warfare center or some equivalent. And they do not necessarily define warfare as being waged against states. On top of that they can pair the ability to hack you with the very tangible ability to knock down your front door at night.

IF this is even remotely hacker-related, it will most certainly not lead to more openness, but to more police-state-like measures, more oppression and maybe even less fun.

CODgamerGirl:
I miss pwning n00bs on #BlackOps, I need you #PSN!!!! COME BACKKKKKK!!!!!!

Trolls would call the interface a blatant iOS ripoff, but everybody simply adores it, including yours truly. MetaLab is totally striking the fine balance between simplicity and usefulness, it is a great tool for the current tablet generation and they deserve every bit of good PR they can get, even if a lot of essential features are still underway including, strangely enough, the iPad app and a number of obvious mobile features. The tool site is very impressive, informative and detailed. There’s an updated project blog, a great support center, a personal touch and they have been taking their own medicine in terms of great web design, if a little Maccy Applish.

So what is the problem?

This is startup heaven, right? The problem is the price and the users’ perception of it. Flow has been running in a free beta for a while, but now was the time to get some paying customers. MetaLab is charging $9.99 for a month and offers a yearly plan for $99. That is a lot of money for a task managing app. MetaLab have in full confidence that they have a great, practically irresistible offering here opened the floodgates in the shape of a beautifully designed customer feedback community site, and they are getting a steady flow <sic> of emotional user complaints, on the hour, every hour, all the time, basically more or less all on this template:

“We simply love your product. It is beautiful, smart, useful and potentially revolutionary. We want to pay you for it, but you are charging way way way too much. And while we are at it, I didn’t realize that when I invite others (friends, family or customers), they also have to pay. Product X doesn’t do this evil deed to me”

This goes on in the comments below the abovementioned news items, on the product blog and in the support center under the threads “Your pricing model is really expensive”, “Payment Plan”, “Monthly subscription“, “Free or limited account“, “Pricing before signup“, “Any idea what the pricing structure will be?” and the less germane “Pricing is wildly unreasonable” and many more – the support center states that “The Flow staff has started a conversation to resolve this discussion.” – you betcha. These are entire threads, not just posts. And new threads restart the discussion all the bloody time, when the old ones drop below he “Recent discussions” threshold.

In the forums, users are openly comparing Flow to its competitors on a feature by feature basis, naming names and quoting prices, they are debating pricing models and marketing strategies, and almost all of them are very careful to state the fact that “I love the product, but……” – so even if this is a s***storm of Customers From Hell, MetaLab are some very lucky gentlemen to have this kind of passionate, engaged customers.

MetaLab must be having a very bad week. And, after some hours, and most probably some very careful deliberation, the founder Andrew Wilkinson has been replying, first in the forums and later in the company blog (see “Flow’s pricing”)

And while the reply is in perfect style and in no way hints at calling anyone ungrateful bastards, it carefully, meticulously and very publicly paints MetaLab into a corner. The message that appears over the day is more or less this – my interpretation:

“We did do the research, we have compared our product to competitors, this product does so much for you and by the way, the pricing closely reflects our cost base, we have invested money in this and need to make a profitable company, and okay, there will be a discount based on how many licenses you buy (starting with 5% for 5 users, progressing up to 25%), and there will be some special free collaboration feature for non-paying users, but that’s it, and we think that is reasonable.”

In a reply to this, user Mark writes:

“@Andrew, what you’re saying is you want your customers to be your investors, as you want them to sustain a product that is still in development.  You want me to go to my boss, ask him for a 1000 bucks, and tell him we have to give up some features we’ve grown used to, because this one is cooler, and if we wait long enough, it’ll be really good.  I love Flow. I never loved a productivity product so much so fast, but I don’t invest in products unless I am promised revenue.”

Why is this important?

What the folks at MetaLab are currently experiencing is user-created transparency, as genuine a Market Conversation as can be. Every tech/service startup currently under way should pay close attention.

I think one of the major mistakes here is lack of synchronization between the product and the way is has been marketed. Look at the compulsory cool video on the site. We have four young urban mobilites living their ad-hoc lifestyle using Flow to get a party together. Four. That’s 40 Dollars! Per month! Andrew’s response just barely hints that the complaining customers are misunderstanding the product, that it is a tool for everything in your life, not just small business project management. I would claim that MetaLab just might be misunderstanding their own product, or at least who they need as early adopters to make it big eventually.

In a normal world, you would have one (1) shot at fixing something like this, but Flow exists outside normal space. People love it so much that MetaLab probably gets one more chance to win the minds and wallets as well as the hearts of its customers.

What should MetaLab do?

1. Accept the fact that they are in a serious, urgent, possibly even existential crisis and that previous efforts have not ameliorated it (this is the difficult part, and it does not require apologies or losing face)
2. Buy themselves some time by extending the Beta grace period indefinitely or at least 3 months, since you can’t start charging before the killer features are there – even if it means eating humble pie and porridge for breakfast, lunch and dinner
3. Launch a volley of the most sought-after features (like collaboration with non-paying users) that will convince people to invest their personal process capital in Flow
4. Come up with a new, very different pricing model
5. Conquer the world of task management, since that is what everyone (really) thinks they can do

And Bob, as they say, will be your uncle

May the Flow be with you.

——————————-UPDATE————————————-

MetaLab has now posted a new team discount:

• Use Flow with a team of 3 or more and receive a 30% discount: $6.99/mo or $69.30/yr per account.
• Use Flow with a team of 10 or more and receive a 50% discount: $4.99/mo or $49.50/yr per account.

User reaction are mixed:

Thomas Richards says.

For something I’m locked in to pay year over year, needs to be about $45 a year for consumer SaaS. Am I just cheap? Maybe, but I bought premium Evernote and Dropbox accounts. $10 a month for task management? Wow. Ask yourselves: can your employees afford this?

Jeff says:

Okay. Sold. Thank you for listening, folks.

Why have podcasts been overlooked? Basically, podcasting came too early. The complicated and expensive business of quality audio recording, encoding and hosting, along with the arcane distribution formats made it a very technical, very kludgy, very male and very grown-up thing to do. Not at all a tool for the Convenience Generation of spoiled Millenials (no offense intended, just making a point here). But the conditions for media consumption have changed radically with the introduction of the modern smartphone, and the re-emergence of podcasting is one of the most interesting examples of what smartphones really are and the value they can offer.

They are not just teleputers (or telephone-pc hybrids), they are so damn convenient because they also plug in to a business ecosystem like (love it or hate it) iTunes. Smartphones are personal online computing systems that are specialized towards media consumption, messaging and social interaction. Some people even claim that a consequence of the smartphone is that The Phone Call Is Dead (or soon will be).

Today, podcasts represent the epitome of convenience. Synchronization via the PC is taken out of the loop, and finding and updating your podcasts on a daily basis over a wireless network has become extremely easy. The ability to listen to professional and amateur radio shows, university lectures and documentaries from all over the world, in your time, might just revolutionize talk radio eventually.

What can they do for me?

This is where the headline comes in. The subject of History happens to be one that offers a large amount of frequently updated, high quality entertaining and enlightening podcast content, so I use that as an example here. Some of the absolutely best podcasts available today in this category are university lectures, available through iTunes U, (though you don’t have to own an iPhone to listen to them). Others are published by sponsored independent podcasters, and yet some are published by traditional national broadcasters like NPR or the BBC. Below is a list to start your adventure into the past and near present of humanity:

Hannibal and the Alps

Possibly, no general has intrigued the world like the Carthaginian Hannibal Barca, the lightning son of Baal, who harassed the mighty Roman empire to a degree that it feared for its continued existence. But if you really want to understand him by walking in his trail, books are not going to do that for you. The most fascinating way to experience Hannibal’s life and achievements is by listening to Patrick Hunt the eloquent and passionate alpine archeologist from Stanford University, who bases his research of the ancient historian sources Polybius and Livy. Listen to his accounts of the expeditions in Central Europe and the intriguing mystery of the Hannibal Pass. This podcasts gives you many hours of entertaining enlightenment. Find it here: How Hannibal Crossed the Alps.

The Ancient Greeks

Listening to Yale University’s Donald Kagan in his  lecture series on Ancient Greece just before actually visiting Athens myself was a great experience. Kagan will (among a lot of other things) show you why the development of the concept of the ancient Greek city state, the “Polis”, is so significant. Democracy and a lot of other important institutions of our modern civilization had their roots there. And along with the intellectual discourse, you’ll of course get a constant stream of wisecracks, the mandatory swashbuckling and many sobering reflections on the nature of war. I listened to his voice on my iPhone as I stood alone on the Pnyx one hot October morning.

European Civilization (and why it would be a good idea)

John Merriman’s intellectual passion when describing the developments in Europe from 1648-1945 will grab your attention and not let you go before you arrive in the middle of Twentieth Century. Merrimans political views are “virulently anti-establishment”, so be prepared to have some conventions challenged. But even if you disagree with him on some (or all) issues, the lecture series will have you coming back for more stimulation and insight in the development of the civilization that for better or worse has dominated the world for centuries. It maight also help you understand its current challenges. This podcast is available for free download or through iTunes U.

History 130 B – The United States and the world since 1945

You might think that anything going on in the last 70 years cannot really be considered History. Be prepared to be proven wrong by Berkely University’s excellent lecturer Daniel Sargent. If you have lived under the shadow of the Mushroom cloud, this guy will expose a lot of why the Cold War went like it did. It might even make some kind of sense. Be ready to get unforeseen and surprising insights into subject like Nixon’s immense foreign policy heritage or the absurdity of tactical nuclear weapons (I will never forget the Davy Crockett). Can be downloaded through iTunes U or at Berkely.

History in the making

The non-partisan (as they say in the States) think tank Council on Foreign Relations, headquartered in New York, might kind of fall out of category; nevertheless, I choose to mention them here. Among many other important activities (like advising the American government on how to deal with the ROW), they publish podcasted lectures and interviews by diplomats, heads of state, generals, leading economists etc. – the people that are shaping our historic times right now. If you want to understand world politics, basing your views on the information you get here is not a bad idea – whatever your personal political basis is. CFR gives you insight into history in the making, if you will. Check out the audio feeds on the CFR.org website.

Hardcore History

Last, and very much not least: If you enjoy history-based entertainment, nothing really can compete with Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast. This American podcaster will take you back to the last stand of the Führer or the end of the Assyrian empire and give you a visceral feeling of life during the Punic Wars. Dan Carlin will pervert history itself (his critics claim) in order to give you a real feeling of what it is like to have 37 war elephants or 100.000 roman legionnaires on your back. Carlin, who is not a historian, but a “student of history”, who explores crucial moments in the history of civilization and in that process gives you a perspective that helps in the search for a meaning of it all. No kidding. And they are so much fun, pure and simple. Even if he sometimes drinks too much coffee and goes completely off the rocker. Personally, I look forward to his much to infrequent Hardcore History podcasts (at the time of writing covering the Death Throes of the Roman Republic) as an absolute highlight in my media landscape. Dan Carlin also publishes the “Common Sense” political podcast column. Be warned.

If these podcasts don’t change your life or at least your view of it, don’t blame me, but they really are some of the greatest stuff you can get for free on the podcasting web these days. There is so much more than this out there, so consider this post a starting point.

However, the community has had a history of being probably the most boring website in the known universe for long periods of time. Its smartphone application was also measurably lame, and it seemed that LinkedIn forewent a host of opportunities to grow the business and expanding the engagement of the user base. Months have passed without any new feature launches and a lack of community dynamism.

Two specific areas have been of concern: Community creation/management and external feature integration. Groups was a part of LinkedIn for years without taking off, most probably due to the fact that this feature was launched without the most basic and obvious community management features. On Facebook we are used to people launching groups in frenzies as a kind of overpowered opinion statement, on LinkedIn, it almost felt like they didn’t want civilians to mess up the platform. It took years before the important features were launched, and now LinkedIn Groups are growing rapidly in what is definitely a well-balanced and highly empowered community ecosystem. So they got it right the second time around.

Getting an application on Facebook is a matter of a few clicks, getting one on LinkedIn requires being a Silicon Valley startup hottie with the ability to make serious integration deals. LinkedIn’s very powerful API is fully focused on distributing the platform all over the web, while not allowing innovator to do what they want the most and create feeder business inside the platform itself. It is fruitless to speculate about the motives behind this decision, but the fact remains that is seems over-prudent and counterproductive. Hopefully this will change soon.

On the other hand, it is understandable that these development areas have been approached with caution. LinkedIn does not want to become Facebook. Facebook is fun, personal and vibrant, but also an overloaded, spammy and comparatively downright insecure environment. Few parents worry about their kids on LinkedIn. Few people think that Facebook might help them get their next job – quite the contrary, in fact. So in place of “boring”, read “sensible” and in place of “lame” read “reliable”. Anecdotal evidence suggests this: it is still the only business community service I have consistently been a paying subscriber on for years. And it IS the de facto standard for knowledge specialists, business developers, job seekers and headhunters alike.

However, it remains a fact that LinkedIn is slow in development, impersonal and remote and seems to launch the right features with the wrong implementations. LinkedIn is one of the biggest banks of social capital and it requires a very fine sense of balance to capitalize on this without alienating the millions of people who create the value; the account holders. That means optimizing rather than revolutionizing, tweaking rather than changing. But that just might change, and there are signs that it already is, even as we speak.

In what seems an innovation frenzy a steady stream of new basic research projects and strategic moves have recently been seen coming from LinkedIn. They indicate that the social networking giant might be awakening from its slumber and is shaking of the moss, trees and occasional villages that have settled on its skin.

LinkedIn Signal
A river-of-news web application that gives you a configurable, filter-enabled overview of updates and shares from your network. Like Twitter or the Facebook news feed. Highly useful.

http://www.linkedin.com/signal/

The Inmap
A cool interactive social graph visualization and navigation tool that gives you an extraordinary overview of your network.

http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network

LinkedIn Swarm
A search based tag cloud generator that visualizes user search behavior on the platform

http://swarm.linkedinlabs.com/

The CardMunch acquisition
The company bought CardMunch recently, now owning a human-powered iPhone application that can smoothly scan business cards and upload them and connect via LinkedIn. While this application only is available in the US iPhone App store (bummer), it is still a step in the right direction mobilewise.

http://www.cardmunch.com/

The platform and its combined technology, critical user mass and accumulated data wealth has the potential to become a true infrastructural component in global business. What remains to be seen is whether or not the current heightened activity level is the forerunner of something great or just the giant turning around to fall sleep on the other side again. A good place to follow what is going on is the LinkedIn Blog, which has also been picking up lately.

http://blog.linkedin.com/

The most important element in Little Big Planet is the Play, Create, Share ethos. The idea is that once the user has played though a story as represented by levels in the traditional manner of video games, a new kind of playful gaming evolves, where the user can create his own games and share them with other players all over the world.

At the time of writing this, more than three and a half million game levels have been created and uploaded by users of the original Little Big Planet in a flood of pop culture reference, wild untamed creativity and realization of impossible visions. Little Big Planet 2 is truly a user-empowering digital tool for creative gaming and self-expression, a kind of YouTube-LEGO for gaming with a long list of tools that enables anyone to create games that are actually worth playing.

New elements in the second generation of this game include

• The ability to create not just levels, but entire games with their own integrated game mechanics including single- and multiplayer shooters and shmups, adventures, racers, puzzles, arcade and of course platform games and much more.
• Intelligent and programmable characters, vehicles, objects
• Embedding of electro-mechanical user-created logical objects in “Curcuit Boards”
• The ability to compose and integrate music in the games
• Cinematic tools like cameras and video editing that lets the user create movies inside the game (a tool that is becoming a new default for major games)
• All game creations have their own web page, creators have web-based social streams etc.
• A fun, easy, user-friendly interface to do it all with lots of great content (a personal favorite is the funkificated cover version of Also sprach Zarathustra composed by Richard Strauss in 1896 and known by most people as the opening theme for ”2001 A Space Odyssey”)

So, what are the important gaming trends that LBP2 represents?

Powerful Casual Gaming.
The hardware-, software- and network-based ecosystems around the current major console gaming platforms (specifically the PS3 and the Xbox) are enabling users to take part in enormously empowering digital experiences. The balance between technical power and playability is one of the strengths of this particular platform. Creating, expanding, connecting, downloading is so easy that most people – and not just kids – should be able to have a good time.

And yes, there are already lots of creative community gaming platforms out there, but with this new generation it is like the difference between a real spaceship, where even a brief glance at the controls could baffle you to death, and the ones in the movies, where anyone can just run onto the bridge and follow the space pirates or boldly escape to places where no-one has gone before.

Many games in one
Besides the obvious variations of singleplayer/multiplayer and play/create, the game platform opens the possibility of specialized community roles like the ones we see in the Wikipedia community. There are creators, curators, reviewers, explorers etc. that develop their own style of community interaction. And even if you want to stay offline and just play a game, there are 50 levels with very different gameplay, some of them even worth playing over and over again.

The Forever game
As World of Warcraft has shown us, Emergent Gameplay is no longer unusual, it is the gameplay. The game is now a lifestyle, an ever-developing narrative, an ongoing relationship as opposed to a discrete media production that is published. New version of a game offers increased playability and empowerment, but is experienced by the user as part of a continuum. The idea of a conceptual franchise that only has a brief annual (or even sparser) interaction with the consumer does hardly have a future in this and other content industries.

Creation as gameplay
This one is rather obvious, but central to present day gaming – creativity is not just a trend, it is a central human trait that gets empowered and released. For many years games have come with modification add-ons etc., and the tricky bit is to build a platform that has as much creative potential as possible but still remains a game, or at least a toy.

Game Movie Creation
Creating movies inside games has been something that has been the subcultural reserve of enthusiasts and hardcore players in many platforms, often since they mostly have played the role of meta-creations, bragging about individual gaming prowess or in some cases budding into exotica. But now we should expect this particular feature to be a part of most major console and pc-based games, wherever it makes even the remotest kind of sense.

Cross-Platform Spillover
No game is an island, and the Internet and mobile apps are becoming companions to games, even if the exist in exclusivity on specific platforms. Some might claim that the playfulness and creative power of a game like Little Big Planet cannot be ported to another platform, but LBP has made a debut on the PlayStations little sister, the PSP, and if nothing else, then the pressure of sheer marketability should drive LBP to other platforms eventually. Until then we will still see large amounts of websites and videos spilling over from the PlayStation network and onto services like YouTube.

Socialness
Social Gaming is a post-buzzword and as a concept has been abused to smithereens. However, it is a fact that the social interaction component will be central to any multiplayer game as far into the future of gaming as we can possibly see. And we are not just talking Facebook integration or tweets, but real internal social dynamics, the accumulation of social capital and possibly emergent business model driven by users.

It is truly intriguing to watch this space, and anyone with an interest in content industries; online media and communities should pay attention to what is going on here. LBP is far from the only creative social gaming universe, and we should expect more of them to appear on any gaming platform soon.

See More LittleBigPlanet 2 Various at IGN.com

Between flashes of euphoria and claims that we have finally been given a digital ecosystem that can persuade the unfaithful hordes of digital content consumers to break away from the free model and start paying to ensure the survival of the media corporations and the plethora of digital agencies that provide them with development services, small cracks have appeared in the shiny surface.

Complaints that Apple is taking a lions’ share of the profits, of the anti-Flash hegemony, of blatant content censorship have been met with circumvention attempts and new platforms are rising rapidly, the most notable like the Motorola Xoom are based on the Android Honeycomb operating system, Googles bid in the tablet game and still an unsure ecosystem as opposed to the Apple app store that has made millions if not billions of dollars for developers.

So a new platform war is on in full force and 2011 is going to be an extraordinary year for digital content business. However, something has happened recently that should make the digital directors in all the publishing houses a bit less self-assured, and it probably does exactly that, even if everyone seems to be in denial: Report of slow content sales on the iPad have been replaced by reports that sales are dropping drastically.

Obviously, the industry is not getting it. However, it is not clear what it is that they are not getting. Seen from a perspective over the developments since the advent of the iPad, there are a number of possible indicators (but not necessarily always errors) that are worth considering, and several of them have their root in plain old groupthink or a feeling that “now we are finally getting the worth from digital publishing that we deserve”.

1. Shovelware
The original deadly sin of digital publication is to just take what you have and shovel it from one platform to the other. It took 15 years of kicking and screaming to make publishing houses understand that this was a bad idea on the Internet. They have, if not completely, then largely forgotten this lesson with their tablet products. Many first-generation iPad newspapers are basically PDF versions on steroids.

2. Pseudo-magazines
A lot of the current solutions are using the mindset from the paper-based world. The iPad magazines (even the ones that are produced specifically for the platform) often come in “issues” and are structured in much the same manner as traditional magazines. It is as if the publishers are forgetting than only very few people actually start with page 2 and then slave their way through the entire product.

The tablet is not a replacement platform yet, it is just as often a supplementary platform. Yes, it might replace books in very few years, but the laptop PC, the TV or the gaming console – maybe even the magazines are not being fully replaced by the iPad. They are being supplemented by it – at least for the next 3-5 years. This means that shifting the entire product now could be a bad move in some cases. Users are not stupid, and any attempt to just repackage the same content and then expect the entire market to change is naïve.

3. Hideous pricing
Scared by the mistakes from the dawn of the desktop and mobile web products, a lot of publishers have insisted that prices should match (or at least aim for) those collected for paper-based products. The logic is naturally that if the tablet replaces paper, the same revenue is needed, and Apple (or other middlemen) are already taking their hefty share. This is way out of line. The consumer is not concerned with your business case. He compares your paid product to the free ones available and makes a decision on a value-for-money basis.

The daily newspaper that I subscribe to is offering a full shovelware edition on the iPad for free as long as I subscribe to the newspaper. However, I am considering scrapping the subscription altogether, since I never have the time to read the newspaper in the old way, so that would mean that the price is the same regardless of the distribution format. That is unacceptable.

4. Badly balanced paywalls
A lot of the initial experiments have been marked by very poorly balanced paywalls. To ask the user to pay a high-end fee up front for a news app is one thing. But to then charge the same amount of money for a single magazine edition that you normally spend on a game or a utility app that will last for months – that is plain stupid. If the user has to pay twice before he gets any content, you are effectively asking him to go away, and stay away.

5. Misunderstanding the attractions of the platform
The tablet is not about gestures and zooming (a lot of successful application don’t even support these features), it is about stuff like integration, ease of use and utility power. The fact that you can turn it on in a second and then be on the web with a decent screen size is a killer feature. The app store is a killer feature. Always-on connectedness is a killer feature. Social media is a killer feature. Yet a lot of iPad magazines and newspaper apps are working against the grain.

If anything, it is a good idea to work on top of these and create good story-telling, playful interaction and smooth, hazzle-free experiences with high added value. FlipBoard has done this and has become the super-showcase. Not because of the page-flipping but because of seamless social media/google reader/rss feed integration, is my guess.

6. Un-socialness
By definition the closed platforms are very anti-social, sharing links on Facebook or Twitter does not make sense when the content you are linking to is behind both a paywall and a specialized app download. The new web is social. Most news apps are not. Bad form and bad for business.

7. Going it alone
A lot of media companies are highly allergic to cooperation with their peers – that must be the reason why everybody and his dog want their own app. They seem to want to control the billing relation, the user experience and to create a closed garden inside the walled community. This makes for a bad user experience overall, since an iPad rapidly gets crowded with apps. If more media companies got together, they would be able to decouple their content from brands and focus on relevance for the users instead. That is the only way to fight the RSS readers and keep people paying. No single medium can supply the information a modern citizen needs and by fragmenting the app market, they are forcing the user towards aggregators and free content.

8. Lack of powerful innovation
Last but not least is the fact that very few publishing companies have taken this highly innovative platform and done something groundbreaking with it. Where are the services based on geodata, augmented reality, QR codes, ad-hoc communities, gamification or social integration? Where are the funky business models, the groupons etc.? Basically most of the apps are content archives and the most killer of the features is search.

Some of these problems have been recognized by a number of publishers and met with assurances that they will eventually be fixed, right now it is all about just getting a product out there, etc. etc. Well, the myth of the first-mover advantage is still thriving, even if we often see that the successful people are the fast followers, not the first movers. However, users are unforgiving and even if you think you can feed them second-rate products and expect them to stand by for the real thing “very soon”, don’t forget that there are a LOT of very attractive free alternatives on the very same platforms that you are trying to win them over with.

In fact, several studies have shown that news consumers more often use the web browser or a content aggregator like Reeder or FlipBoard for news consumption on the iPad than they use dedicated paid newspaper or magazine apps.

Repeating the same mistake over and over again in the hope that it will work out eventually is not smart business, and that seems to be what a lot of publishers are doing here in an attempt to crack the general nut of digital publishing that has been plaguing them for more than a decade now. Smart publishers who want to survive in this space for real need to follow the users attention, not try to force the user to do something he does not really want to do and then pay for it on top of that.

A piece of advice cold be: Start adding value. Consider focusing on the business opportunities in the periphery instead of the center. Consider the ready-made publishing platforms carefully before jumping on a bandwagon. Consider advertisement as a central business model or add value that is not purely content-based. Content is King, yes. But Context is the kingmaker. And there are such things as kings without castles.

However, when you look at the universe of mobile devices, search is not central to the user experience at all. If it is, it is because it is integrated with other ways to use the devices. Central to this is the fascinating fact that the information you want to access with your smartphone is not necessarily always available on the web, and the user experience for mobile websites still leaves a lot to be desired – we are practically still at WAP 2.0.

This is because we are not just using our phones to make calls (in fact we do this less frequently – see The Phone Call is Dead) , but also for many other purposes (see 23 devices my iPhone has replaced). The teleputers in our pockets connect to many other systems, also by Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and dock connectors. The extensive software applications on the replace many small everyday things like sticky notes, and it is within these core functionalities, we should expect to see search finding new ways for the user.

Some of the best examples of search applications that actually use the capabilities of this new platform in a way that is practically usable, are based on geodata and a map interface. Honestly, the Augmented Reality applications we have see so far, are really just tech demos or showcase tools. We all have them installed on our phones, but nobody really use them.

Have you ever tried actually searching for something with the iPhone search screen? It doesn’t search inside the data from the apps that are not part of the operating system. So what we essentially have on a sate-of-the-art smartphone is 1) A desktop search app that does find all the data and 2) A Google OEM deal search field in the Safari browser.

Searching n the App Store is not really that great, and each search experience on the iPhone exists in an isolated closed garden. Yeeees, you can download a cool Google App that does some impressive tech demoing on image search, but it is not available in several languages and the actual usefulness is rather limited.

Another issue is online-ness. While we now have data plans that makes it fairly safe to assume that the user does not count minutes, coverage and particularly battery life still is not sufficient to rely on use cases that assume ubiquitous connectivity with a reasonable bandwidth all the time. So building applications that are based on frequent searches or integrated web search still means that the user has to decide whether to search on the web or not.

So, what are we like to see soon when it comes to mobile search:

1. Obviously, cross-application search on the same device. This should be a no-brainer for the likes of apple and an easy and fast way to add value for its customers.
2. Better integration of reference, even ones with paid content. If I subscribe to some App magazine, why should its data not be available on my general search and why should online resources not enrich that search straight away?
3. Cross device-search is an intriguing idea, why should my iPhone not be able to search on my iPad, MacBook Pro, Apple V etc. straight away and stream the results to my phone? And does this have to be limited to a closed ecosystem? What if my smartphone became the default search machine for all my devices and storage spaces? That would be cool, especially on the road.
4. Searching in the data that matters instead of trying to get me to buy the “Minority Report” experience.:

• Why can’t I search in my phone calls? That is after all supposed to be my primary application. If not in the actual content yet (though we will see that someday), then at least in the metadata. Who called, when, how long, did I tag the call with anything, did I take any notes etc.
• Let me save web pages for easy access and search
• Help me find peoples names an phone numbers – fast and easy.
• Help me find good, relevant podcasts in iTunes by indexing the content or better metadata at least.
• Search faster when online or in the app store or in iTunes etc.

These kinds of applications would greatly improve the user experience, and search technology has already gone a very long part of the way. Let us hope that some folks out there soon realize that the fusion of the smartphone and the search metaphor can be a great cocktail of usefulness and personal empowerment.

”Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made”

This quote, which, according to WikiQuote has long been wrongly attributed to Otto von Bismarck, comes from the American poet John Godfrey Saxe. It tells us, as does the vision of Bismarck frowning at the concept of political science, since he really did say this; that politics is not a science, but an art.

In that case is Julian Assange a political performance artist? And why is everybody very busy calling him a terrorist, even while they at the same time claim that he hasn’t really done any serious damage, but that he could, maybe?

The more important question isactually : What will he and the rest of the elusive WikiLeaks organization really achieve with the latest spate of releases of so-called “diplomatic cables”?

Well, after the leaks, we now know these things for sure:

• Our political leaders are not all bulwarks of integrity and knights of the Camelot
• Some world leaders are crooks, some are jerks
• Standards applied abroad are not the same as at home, even if they are both practiced by the same people
• War is terrible and unfair
• Nobody can keep a secret

None of these insights are new. Politics in the 21st century is like politics in ancient Greece or Rome. Or like sausagemaking, a dirty business, not for those with a weak stomach.

And after all, it seems that what WikiLeaks is exposing really is the nasty sausage-making, not the earth-shattering proof of Who Killed Kennedy, knowledge of where the Führer really went after WWII or that Obama is actually a Hindu/Buddhist/Maoist.

So what is really happening here?
The mightiest army the world has ever seen does not run on secret Tony Stark-developed equipment only, a lot of the time it actually runs on off-the-shelf hardware and software, since the military-industrial complex, even in the modern American Security State, is not capable of following the times, as we all know.

The G.I.’s use commercial grade iPhones, WiFi, binoculars, you name it. One such example is the fact that the US drones have been serving double duty as spy planes for the enemy due to eavesdropping by the Taliban in Afghanistan, by insurgents in Iraq And by the Hizbollah in Lebanon. The US military had used unencrypted commercial radio systems to broadcast the video feeds from the drones!

What is really happening is that by providing us with a leaked snapshot of human political folly and attempting to expose the futility and nastiness, WikiLeaks is really exposing the fact that digital governance is in the hands of blundering amateurs.

How can this even happen? How can this amount of sensitive information even leave the bloody building in the first place? Julian is not saving the world, he is just annoying it, and he and his supporters are doing a commendable and useful, if rather naïve job.

And by doing it he is exposing the extreme technical incompetence of the people who have set up the secure communications systems for international political relations. No wonder everybody is trying to take the guy down with personal stuff (with or without due reason is entirely up to the Swedish courts). No wonder that “WikiLeaks ditches Swedish web host”. No wonder that WikiLeaks allegedly was exposed to a massive DOS attack just before the latest release (a tremendous PR resent to WikiLeaks, by the way). No wonder that “White House condemns WikiLeaks document release”.

The man is exposing the cross incompetence if the IT Department of the World! That is not something that will go unpunished. And in spite of what many Digital Fantasts have claimed, transparency will not be the new default. This is not a democratic revolution. The world will not be a better or more open place. It will be more closed and encrypted. And if WikiLeaks hadn’t prompted these changes, some other exposure would have, but maybe not as publicly.

It is already happening: Pentagon details security changes prompted by leak

Julian, you cannot stop the windmills or the Global Sausage Factory. They will still be making Realpolitik 10 years from now. Nobody (but yourself) knows if you are clean enough to throw the first stone, but neither, apparently, (you have shown us) is anybody else.