The Bitt On Media

How to Make and Spread Rumors

Dan Zarrella — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:53:25 -0500

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In 1940, the British military formed an organization as a part of the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, called the “Underground Propaganda Committee” or UPC whose mission was to create and disseminate rumors as defensive weapons against the expected Nazi invasion of the the English mainland. They code-named the rumor weapons “sibs,” short for siblare, latin word “to hiss.” During the war they developed the craft and science of designing rumors and developed international networks of agents to spread the sibs. (Psywar.org has a great history of the UPC.)

During World War II the Americans, under the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which eventually became the CIA, began cultivating their own rumor-weapon technologies with the help of the UPC and scientist Robert Knapp, who also wrote about rumors in an academic context. Knapp’s work was adapted by the OSS in 1943 to create a sort of manual for rumor engineers during the war. This document was de-classified in 2004.

Criteria for a Successful Rumor

» The successful rumor is easy to remember.
» The successful rumor follows a stereotyped plot.
» The successful rumor is a function of the momentary interests and circumstances of the group.
» The successful rumor exploits the emotions and sentiments of the group.

The manual says rumors are made memorable by being simple, making concrete references, using stereotypical phrases and utilizing humor, many of the same characteristics possessed by the Homeric poems and the rest of the oral tradition.

A stereotyped plot, according to the manual is “the oldest story in the newest clothes.” Old structure, typically derived from local myths, stories or legends, filled in with new content makes the best rumors.

Academic work on rumors suggests that they are “collective sense making,” they are a society’s attempt to understand something that is happening where official or formal information is scarce or non-existent. The OSS paper says that good rumors are “provoked by” and provide interpretation or elaboration on a current event, filling a “knowledge gap.” If the locals heard a big boom earlier in the day, a rumor could easily be constructed to explain it if the authorities did not.

If a group is known to have a pre-disposition to mistrusting a certain other group, like Diggers disliking Microsoft, rumors about the evils of Microsoft are easy to spread. The manual says that successful rumors justify or articulate an emotion (such as hatred, fear or desire) widely held by the target population.

Targeting Rumors

The OSS/Knapp report sketches those people or “targets” that make good vectors for rumor spreading and what sorts of rumors will spread most virally amongst them.

1. Those people who are most eager for information about events which affect them are the best targets for rumors supplying such information.

2. People with fears, hopes and hostilities stemming from their involvement in the war are most affected by rumors that feed on those feelings.

The report also detailed certain kinds of information that should be gathered prior to designing a rumor for a specific group, including:

» What kinds of information the group is eager for.
» What information the group already has and what it lacks.
» The current fears, hopes and hostilities the group already has.
» The customary and traditional ways the group deals with those fears, hopes and hostilities.

Obviously, the information about the knowledge and emotions of the group should be gather in respect to what the rumor will be about. To use the Digger example again, if you wish to start a rumor about Microsoft, you should find out what Diggers want to know about Microsoft, what they already know and what they don’t know, how they feel about the group, and the traditional ways they express themselves about Microsoft.

Spreading Rumors

The British UPC developed specially designed networks around the world through which they could seed rumors for maximum effectiveness. Each individual rumor was not seeded into every active network, as that would have appeared too obvious; rather, the networks were chosen for their appropriateness to the specific sib.

From psywar.org:

SOE’s whispering network in Turkey was a typical example of how the machinery for spreading rumours worked. A Chief Whisperer was appointed who then recruited ten Sub-whisperers, each of whom was chosen because they had specially good contact with certain classes of people from politicians and Army officers to waiters and barbers, for example. Each Sub-whisperer was conscious of the fact that he, or she, was working for SOE, but although they knew the Chief Whisperer, they did not know the identities of any of the other Sub-whisperers. Each Sub-whisperer then recruited ten to twenty unconscious agents to whom they passed on rumours.

The OSS manual also gave a little detail into how rumors should be spread:

» Design different rumors that reveal the same “information.”
» Plant such rumors in different suitable places.
» Design them so as to appear as of independent origin.

The OSS and the UPC both used a tactic where several rumors were constructed and seeded in such a way that they appeared to come from different sources and took different “routes” to expose the same information to the targets. This way when a person heard more than one source tell complimentary rumors, they were more likely to believe them.

Have you ever tried to start a rumor? I’d love to hear some stories.

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Why People Forward Chain Letters

Dan Zarrella — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:41:10 -0500

Chris Garrett asked a question on twitter this morning:

Anyone know why people forward chain letters?

And since I’ve been doing some research on exactly that question recently, I thought I’d write a post detailing some of what I’ve found.

Probably the most important point is the idea that email chain letters are “virtual urban legends” and as such many of the motivations that cause people to spread urban legends are the same that make people forward those emails.

Many urban legends function as warnings, if you break with social rules and roles you will be punished. Go to lover’s lane with your boyfriend and a crazy serial killer will come and kill you or him (or both of you). Disregard your parents’ dislike of unhealthy fast food and you may end up eating a rat.

As I mentioned briefly in a post last week humans evolved with strong rewards to develop imitation and social learning skills. Evolutionarily, people have a motivation to be susceptible to social warnings and pass them on to their family and community.

In 1998 Edmund Chattoe published a paper for IRISS titled “Virtual Urban Legends: Investigating the Ecology of the World Wide Web” in it he studies traditional chain letters and virus warnings, and in it he cites an earlier paper by Woolgar and Russell (called “The Social Basis of Computer Viruses” I can’t find it on the web) when he says

users are rather inclined to believe in computer viruses as just ‘punishment’ for electronic promiscuity

Here the urban legend similarity is clear, if you disregard careful computer-based chastity and network with unsavory types (like downloading pirated music or programs) you’ll be punished with a computer virus.

Before email existed, chain letters propagated via snail mail and while they were still very virulent then, with the advent of the internet several factors changed which accelerated their spread. Obviously the speed of transmission and the ease at which someone can create and pass on an email is a lot greater than for traditional paper mail, and the anonymity of email reduces the risk to those who craft and continue the chains online.

Two of the key criterias of a successful meme are copying fidelity and fecundity, that is the less a message changes each time it is transmitted the greater the chance it has to retain the effective parts and continue spreading, and the more people it can be transmitted to the more successful it will be. Online emails are copied verbatim and all the sender has to do is click “forward” and it an exact copy is sent to all of their friends.

In the paper mail chain letter world, most people had become immune to the over-the-top promises and demands so their effectiveness started to drop. With the ease of spread and the high copying fielding available to mental email viruses, they’ve been able to evolve into more subtle and unfalsifiable variations. The chances of a person passing the email on is great online, so the messages themselves need to require less instructions about their own replication, making them less obvious and more trustworthy. Chattoe says:

More generally, chain letters have increasingly stressed intangibles like ‘good luck’ rather than more concrete rewards. They thus render themselves immune from obvious falsification and tap into a human tendency to ’superstition’, spotting patterns where none exist. If I fail to pass on a chain letter and shortly afterwards something bad happens, I may connect the two events and be more susceptible in future.

And while many (if not most) of these emails are debunked on sites like snopes, preliminary data from my survey shows that those who typically forward chain letters are typically less savvy users and may not know about snopes.

Perhaps the most subtle and powerful viral element of chain letters in email is the social proof that comes with many of them. Every time someone forwards one to his or her address book, another list of recipients and senders is attached to it, creating essentially a list of people who implicitly give authority to the message. If one person sends an email to another, the source may or may not be cited, and the sender’s reputation is the only real social authority the email carries, with a huge list of hundreds of others attached it, it suddenly appears that the message is common knowledge and the receiver is perhaps the only person left on the internet who wasn’t warned of the danger.

The social proof factor goes back to information cascades and the understanding that humans base many of their decisions on the choices of others, it just makes good evolutionary and survival sense to do so. Even if you may think an email is a hoax, who are you to think that you know better than hundreds of your peers? And on the off-chance the email was true, and you didn’t pass it on you didn’t do your best to protect and enrich your friends and family.

Radio Survey Finds Audience For Podcasting Up 87%

James Lewin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:18:56 -0500

According to the most recent Tech Poll from radio research firm Jacobs Media, the audience for podcasts is up 87% year to year among rock radio listeners.

Here are some of the highlights of their research:

New technology continues to rapidly move into radio listeners’ lives. This year, the “big gainers” in terms of occupying their time includes streaming video, iPod ownership (and podcasting), and text messaging. Almost the entire sample now owns a cell phone and has access to a hi-speed Internet connection.
In-home radio listening is declining, as respondents continue to utilize other media in their residences.
A variety of things are cutting into people’s time listening to radio:
- Reading news online
- Social networking sites (continuing to grow)
- iPods/mp3 players (getting bigger every year)
- Podcasting (up 87% year to year)
- Streaming radio
- Music sites like Pandora, iTunes
- Video games (which was trending down last year)
- Cell phones (which continue to be huge)
- DVDs
- TiVo/DVRs (which leads to more television viewing)
- Video sites like YouTube
Nearly six in ten respondents own a iPod/portable media player, an increase of 23% over last year’s poll. And the iPod’s presence in cars continues to rise.
HD Radio is going nowhere fast - awareness is limited to about 1 in 100 people surveyed.
Three in ten (28%) respondents (whether they own an iPod or not) say they’ve downloaded/listened to a podcast.
Two-thirds (69%) of those listening to podcasts are very or somewhat willing to access a free podcast that contains an introductory commercial from a sponsor.

The survey also found that iPods and podcasts are replacing traditional radio listening at key listening times:

40% say they never listen to the radio while walking/working out.
At-work listening has also shown some erosion. While nearly one-fourth (23%) say they never listen to radio on the job, an additional 16% say they’re listening a little/a lot less at work. While three in ten (28%) report more listening in the workplace, that figure is down from the ’07 survey (31%).

This year’s study was conducted from February 26-March 5, 2008. Data was collected from 27,029 respondents from a total of 69 Classic, Mainstream/Active, and Alternative stations in markets as diverse as Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Grand Rapids, and Greenville, South Carolina.

Image: tanakawho

Podcasters: Don’t Rely On Social Networking Sites For Promotion

James Lewin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:51:35 -0500

Edison Research’s Tom Webster, who has been researching and reporting on podcasting for years now, has some interesting thoughts on promoting your podcast through social networking sites like MySpace and Twitter:

Change occurs at the margin, and it would be unwise to ignore the increasing popularity and utility of the various social networking sites.

However, as a researcher of that big ole’ middle of the bell curve, I am compelled to add here that this means that the vast majority of podcast users–and of Americans, period–do not maintain social networking profiles. This means that if you confine your marketing and promotional efforts to getting the word out on social networking sites, you are depriving your podcast of a potentially much greater audience.

If you produce a podcast on restoring and customizing automobiles, for instance, the number of auto aficionados on Twitter is a rounding error compared to the vast size of this potential affinity group.

If you are creating well-written, well-produced quality content on a topic or subject, you have as much right to the big fat middle of the tail as you do the long part, so think big–and market your content accordingly.

What do you think? Are social networking sites over-rated tools for promoting your podcast?

Podcast Ads 7 Times As Effective As Television Ads

James Lewin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:19:30 -0500

New data from Podtrac and TNS suggests that podcasts may be a much more powerful advertising platform than television.

The companies studied podcast advertising from February 2006 to March 2008 across multiple product categories and ad types. Unaided awareness for podcast ads was 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television.

““The studies showed a 73% increase in likelihood to use or buy an advertised product,” said Velvet Beard, vice president at Podtrac. “The studies showed that 69% of audience members have a more favorable view of in-show advertisers.”

“Podcasting delivers a level of end-user engagement that is rare in today’s multi-format world,” said Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer.

There are many reasons why podcasts could be more effective than television. People are sick of the barrage of ads on television, so they routinely tune them out. Podcast advertising is typically much less intrusive than television advertising. It also has the potential to be much more targeted and relevant.

Because these stats come from Podtrac, a company with a vested interest in podcast advertising, marketers are likely to want to see these numbers independently reproduced.

The three-fold view of the social media user experience

adrian chan — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:24:16 -0500

Because I have an enormous white paper in the works on this one that I know I won't complete any time soon, I want to appeal to like-minded social web thinkers on this with a short post. I spent much of the winter drafting a grand theory of social media practices, and when it came to exploring the user experience I spent a couple months trying to observe my own use of social media, and observe others, to see I could intuit core principles. I nearly went nuts doing it. Everything I was doing on facebook for a while I was doing as a self-observing participant, that is, I didn't allow myself to "get into" it with friends and colleagues but instead tried to dissociate my actions from my agency in order to be able to reflect on my own motivations and inner dialogue.

I don't know if this has happened to others, but I began developing self-reflexive loops and circuits that accompanied what I was doing. Even silly things like Poke. I wanted to know what Poke was, and what it might be to different people, so I tried being a different user when I poked. Poking to flirt, poking to reply, feeling a poke as an expectation, or as an annoyance, leaving a poke un-repoked to see at what point I felt obliged to poke back, or even to see if I thought my poky friend had noticed that I hadn't poked back.

I was documenting all of this in order to flesh out a psychologically-oriented framework for the user experience. One that would replace straight ahead user "needs" and "goals", which work for user-software interaction design, with a self-reflexive set of user interests -- better suited for user-software-user, or social interaction design. It seemed to me obvious that user intentions, motives, compulsions, obsessions, fantasies, interactions, expectations, anticipations, preoccupations all played a part in the user engagement. That each user would probably have habits and routines of use that were a direct manifestation of his or her sensitivities in different areas of a) sense of self, self-presentation, and self image; b) perceptions of friends, unfamiliars, and audiences; and c) interpersonal communication, relationship handling, and interaction styles.

In short, it seemed that a rewriting of user experience approaches to social media would require a wholistic and integrated, and deeply psychological, approach.

The work is mostly done, in a frightfully intricate and bejungled draft. But it's all in the noggin and there for easy access at all times.

I'd like to share a couple inventions that fell upon me through the process of structuring my experience as an observant participant and participating observer.

The first was that the user experience is structured around three axes: self/self image, other, and relationship. This now seems so clear to me that I don't know why it took so long to see. The user experience of social media is not a direct interaction of user to medium. But rather one that involves the user's self-understanding of his/her own activity, and in which s/he has ideas about how s/he is, looks, and appears to others. The reason is simple: all social media show the user an image or presentation of him/herself. There's a doubling, if you will, of the self, because it's represented.

Then there is the other (user), who's not "there" in presence, but is represented. So any interaction with another user requires interpretation. You could say that we have to interpret what we each mean to each other, and in conversation, in everyday reality. But it's different online and we know it. And interpretation is only possible if we know something about the medium and the other person -- something requiring what I call "interpretive schemata" and which vary incredibly and are contingent on the site, users, activities, content, and much more.

Then there is the relationship, which is a real unfolding of interaction by means of digital recording/capture and re-presentation. So there are similarly numerous variations in the kinds of interactions handled online, and their meaning to users. What they mean to users is in part a reflection of their relationship tendencies. Any psychologist would support that.

The mental image that came to mind for this was a cool discovery. Software designers talk about transparency -- that the software's functionality and UI should be transparent. Ease of use suggests the goal of transparency (that the UI not get in the way or be something the user has to "think about" while using it). But I decided this isn't the case with social media. The visualization was that the screen is three screens. Each ties to the three core axes: self, other, and relation. The three screens are mirror, surface, and window.

Users are in a relationship to themselves, through their self-reflection as mirrored by social media (think facebook profile). Or users are engaged, by means of interpretive schemata, with what's on the screen, as videos, news, search, whatever. And thirdly, users see through the screen, as it provides a direct window onto another user, as in chat, im, email etc (where the "screen UI" really isn't material to the user activity).

That's it. Chan's three-fold view of the social media user experience.

Buzznet receives $25 million from Universal Music Group [Music]

Jackson West — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:40:00 -0500

Los Angeles-based social network Buzznet finally confirmed a long-rumored investment from Universal Music Group, which PaidContent earlier reported to be around $25 million, brining the total invested in the company to over $32 million. The social network, which has been focused on music fans from the start, has also become quite acquisitive, picking up popular music blog Stereogum and, most recently, Gawker Media title Idolator. And they may be looking to add more, according to an email published by The Daily Swarm. (Via Tech Confidential)

NBC Universal, ad agency to create product-centered programs

halfpress — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 08:30:30 -0500

bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by halfpress to twimideas - more about this bookmark...

Odeo Back In Beta

James Lewin — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:27:12 -0500

Odeo, an early podcasting startup that has long struggled with its direction, is back, in beta and looking for feedback.

While the original site focused on podcast creation, the focus of Odeo’s latest incarnation focuses on viewing and listening to Internet media.

Give it a look and let me know what you think of the makeover!

Exposé Highlights The Problem Of Indentured Blogitude

James Lewin — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:42:44 -0500

Last week, the venerable New York Times blew the cover off the shocking world of 24/7 blogging, where bloggers blog until they drop…….if not sooner.

Now, BarelyPolitical has gone undercover to reveal the tragedy of indentured blogitude, a problem that until now has gone completely unnoticed.

And if it’s happening in the world of blogs, can bet that there are tyrannical podmasters creating cast systems that turn innocent podcasters……..into untouchables.

Taking The Books-On-Demand Business Quite Literally

Michael Masnick — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:43:23 -0500

It would appear that Philip Parker has taken the concept of "the long tail" to heart. He's created a publishing company that has a bunch of computers search the internet and come up with books on various topics in a nearly totally automated fashion. The details aren't at all clear from the article (and I'm surprised there's no discussion at all of potential copyright issues), but it almost sounds like a sort of madlibs -- where someone just need to fill in some blanks, and the computer automates the rest of the book writing process. As a result, Parker reportedly has over 200,000 books published and available on Amazon to date (though, oddly, my own search turned up many fewer), which are all available for "print-on-demand." From the sound of things, you get the feeling that he could take it back one step further to: generate on demand. In the article he provides an example, creating a new "book" in about 13 minutes. That way, a single sale of each book is pure profit. Of course, you might be wise to question the quality of such books. The reviews I found on Amazon of his books are almost universally quite negative.

In the meantime, if anyone has more info on Parker or Icon Group, and how it deals with copyright issues, I'd be curious to know more. Parker has a video on YouTube which (by title) suggests he has a patent on this whole process (a quick search turns up this patent on a method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing as the likely patent). The video makes a bunch of claims, but does little to explain how any of this is actually done. Actually, you could say the same thing for the patent itself. It makes a bunch of extremely broad claims, that don't actually do anything to explain how it actually works (which, we had thought, was part of the requirement in getting a patent).

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Why The Web Platform Matters: It Enables Innovation

Michael Masnick — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:12:18 -0500

While I've been talking up the importance of "the web platform" for years, some folks here were a bit confused about my recent post concerning the launch of Google's AppEngine. Some couldn't see how it was different than basic webhosting and asked for clarification on why this could be a big deal. So I wanted to dive a little deeper into why a web platform really is so important. Just as I was starting to write this up, I spotted Rich Skrenta's fantastic post on AppEngine where he says it's (finally) the web equivalent to Hypercard. That's the perfect analogy. Hypercard was a true enabling platform. It suddenly made it incredibly easy to create quick apps and be able to share them and make them useful. It bundled everything you needed in one system and made it all "just work." It turned app creation into something almost anyone could do with a little training -- and applications, ideas, companies and (eventually) industries grew out of that. The same thing can happen with a true web platform, but to an even greater level (and, I'll state here that it's too early to call AppEngine that true web platform, but it looks like it has the potential).

In a way, it's related to the other holy grail we've discussed in the past: situated software. This is more personal software. Basically, it's software that anyone can create for their special needs. It takes the programming out of the hands of the few and gives it to the many, which allows many new ideas to flow and totally unexpected and useful applications to come out in the end. When we first talked about situated software, we noted that it didn't need to scale -- but if it can also scale, then things get even more interesting. This isn't to say that AppEngine suddenly makes it easy to program. Not at all. But, it's heading in that direction. Purists will complain (of course they'll complain) that this will lead to a ton of crap, but that's the same argument made by journalists slamming bloggers. Of course it'll lead to a ton of crap, but it'll also lead to a ton of really interesting, fascinating and useful things that'll rise up out of that crap. It'll also lead to a lot of innovation and, potentially, totally unexpected and different ways to use the internet. And that should be exciting.

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NBC Universal Now Says It Should Be Apple's Responsibility To Stop Piracy

Michael Masnick — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:24:13 -0500

Sometimes you wonder how the folks at NBC Universal get anything accomplished, when they seem totally unable to accept responsibility for the market challenges they face, and demand that everyone else fix NBC Universal's business model problems. Remember, NBC Universal has been the main supporter of the idea that ISPs should be responsible for stopping any unauthorized transfer of content. But why take chances on having just one outside party prop up your business model?

Now, NBC Universal's "chief digital officer," George Kliavkoff, is saying that it should be Apple's responsibility to stop unauthorized usage by building special antipiracy filters into iTunes. Yes, iTunes -- the service that plenty of people use in order to legally purchase content. However, since iTunes is also the connection that most people use to manage their iPod content, NBC Universal thinks Apple should somehow block the ability to get non-authorized material onto the iPod. How would they do that? How would they know that a song is authorized vs. legally ripped? Don't bother asking tough questions like that. After all, if NBC Universal actually knew how to answer them, it wouldn't be telling everyone else that they're required to fix NBC Universal's broken business model. And, of course, it apparently hasn't occurred to NBC Universal execs that if Apple actually agreed to this (which seems extremely unlikely), it would just push people to jump to other solutions to manage their music, such as Songbird.

Kliavkoff then goes on to say: "It's really difficult for us to work with any distribution partner who says 'Here's the wholesale price and the retail price,' especially when the price doesn't reflect the full value of the product." Note the careful choice of words here. Remember, we were just discussing how the entertainment industry is trying to appropriate all value that is associated with content (even if that value is because of some other vehicle) back to the content owner. Kliavkoff's statement also shows a confusion over the difference between price and value -- and because of that he seems to be assigning all the value to the content and almost none to the service and technology Apple provides (sound familiar?). Coming from a "chief digital officer" that seems troublesome for the company's digital strategies. Then again, perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise. Companies that have a "chief digital officer" are already in trouble because they're sectioning off "digital" as if it's some separate function, rather than a key component that will impact all aspects of the business.

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Warner Brothers Warns Guy Who Named Harry Potter A Decade Before JK Rowling

Michael Masnick — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:36:00 -0500

In something of a followup to the story of JK Rowling's testimony over a guide book to the Harry Potter universe, Petréa Mitchell writes in to point us to the news that moviemaker Helmer John Buechler is planning to make a remake of his 1986 movie Troll. What's that got to do with Harry Potter? Well, it just so happens that the lead character of the movie happens to be named Harry Potter. Rowling's first Harry Potter book came out over a decade after the movie. While I'd be willing to bet the whole thing is a coincidence (or, at the very least a totally unintentional/subconscious reuse of the name), that isn't preventing Warner Brothers (who owns the rights to Rowling's Harry Potter) from making some vaguely worded, but ominous sounding warnings to Buechler, telling him "If these producers intend to remake Troll they'd better tread carefully not to infringe on our rights." Funny how they say that about a character that was invented over a decade before WB's own Harry Potter, isn't it?

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New ways to tell stories

Jeff Jarvis — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:56:25 -0500

At an event last week, Disney head Robert Iger talked about technology providing new ways to tell stories. I came home and found a link from Springwise to this intriguing project at Penguin, the publishers in the UK, trying to do just that. The first in the series tells a tale via Google Maps. And here’s a story written live. Who says that stories must be books and that books must be books?

Guardian: The value of this blog

Jeff Jarvis — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:38:59 -0500

For my Guardian column this week, I put a price on my blog:

* * *

Some people think I’m nuts for blogging when I could be doing real work (as if writing newspaper columns were the only real work). They ask me how much money I make directly from my blog and the answer is: not much. But to me, the blog is worth a million dollars - or more - for it brings me value in many other ways. So I thought I’d give you an accounting of that worth.

Last year, Buzzmachine.com, which has been in business, loosely speaking, since 2001, made $9,315 (£4,655) from two blog ad networks, $1,866 from ads on my RSS feeds, and $2,674 from Google ads, for a total of $13,855. Though I’ve written many a blog post and column lamenting that there aren’t better, richer ad networks to support grassroots media, when I add that up, I’d say it’s not too shabby. Nonetheless, you’d still be forgiven for thinking I shouldn’t have quit my day job.

When I did quit that day job - as president of an online division of Condé Nast’s parent company, which I left in 2005 - I got my next job thanks to the blog. If I hadn’t been pontificating about the state of the news in the internet era, I wouldn’t have come to the attention of the City University of New York, which appointed me to the faculty of its journalism school - a job I love. But I must confess that my teaching post pays a fraction of my prior salary. So you may still think me a fool.

To make the money I don’t make teaching, I consult and speak for various media companies and brands. The only reason I get those gigs is because companies read the ideas I discuss at Buzzmachine and ask me to come and repeat them in PowerPoint form and explore them with their staff. I’ve also been asked to teach executives how to blog (a class that should, by rights, take about two minutes). That work and the teaching get me to a nice income in six figures. So I’m not looking quite as idiotic now, I hope.

It was also because of the blog that I got this column. The MediaGuardian editors asked me to take some of the topics I write about online and turn them into columns; the newspaper is an aftermarket for the blog. It pays a bit, a few hundred dollars a column, but that’s not why I do it. I enjoy the discipline of taking the lumpy clay of a blog post and moulding it into a column. I like discussing column ideas with my community before I write them. And I quite like having you readers as an audience. So please don’t tell my editors that I like doing this so much I would do it for free.

I just got a book contract because of a notion that began in the blog and that I kneaded over and over for about a year. As I write What Would Google Do?, I continue to explore ideas on my blog, helping me to think them through. The US contract roughly doubled my consulting income last year; international contracts may add more.

If I add all that up over the past five years and the five to come, to me the blog is worth a few million (dollars, not pounds, sadly). But it’s worth even more than that. Buzzmachine has taught me about the new architecture of media; I wouldn’t have learned that without jumping into the new world myself. The blog has stoked my ego, getting me on TV and on conference stages to blather to audiences far and wide.

It has also checked my ego, as my readers never hesitate to challenge and correct me. It has forced me to be more open to new ideas. It has given me a second career playing with new toys; professionally, it keeps me young. Personally, it has made me countless new friends and reconnected me with old ones, owing to a blog’s ability to give a person a strong identity in Google searches.

People ask how I have the time to blog on top of everything else. But the real question is, how could I not blog when it leads to so much more? Finally, for a proper accounting, I should also give you the other side of the ledger: the blog costs me $327 a year for hosting. So this is one web 2.0 venture that is profitable.

Any and all media

Jeff Jarvis — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:52:00 -0500

I think this is a big deal: LA Times editor Russ Stanton said the paper will “train all editorial employees in new skills in every medium in which we work (print/web/TV/mobile/radio).” I hope that also means training everyone in new opportunities: collaboration, networks, opening up the process… (By the way, I was honored to be included in Stanton’s reading list.)

The Google economy

Jeff Jarvis — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:14:08 -0500

I think there’s something more fundamental happening in Google’s rousing quarterly report yesterday than we’re seeing in the news reports about it (which are mostly eating crow over predictions to the contrary).

I think we’re seeing a new definition of “the economy.”

The old definition meant and measured the performance of big companies and their impact on each other. This was especially the case in media and advertising, which served only companies of a certain size because only large companies could afford to advertise in large outlets. But Google’s marketplace for advertisers of all sizes represents the small-is-the-new-big economy: no limit of small enterprises that can now add up to a critical mass. The fact that it is an auction marketplace also means that this economy is more fluid; it fills in voids.

So for example, when there’s an economic downturn that affects, say, travel, that will affect a magazine like Condé Nast Traveler; airlines and hotels of a certain size will advertise less and there aren’t new advertisers to fill in that void at Traveler’s price. But on Google, if American Airlines and the Ritz aren’t buying the keyword “Paris” this month, there are no end of advertisers who will step in to buy the word. The price of that keyword may decline. But in Google’s very broad economy, the prices of other keywords (e.g., “credit”) may rise.

And because this is a pay-per-performance marketplace and Google is motivated to continually improve relevance and performance, it is not a market driven by scarcity of space or audience. That makes it hard for old measures of the economy and media to figure it out. It doesn’t march to static metrics like fuel costs affecting prices and dollar conversions affecting passenger miles, all of which affect paid ad pages.

This is apparently what threw Comscore’s measurements into a tizzy as it tracked what it thought was a drop in clicks on Google ads while Google said it was tuning its ad placement to improve relevance and performance. There was another variable in there that old economic measures could not predict. Were we clicking less because we were poor and depressed or because Google tuned an algorithm? No way to know. After causing a storm with this measurements, Comscore tried to back up and say that it wasn’t necessarily saying that Google would earn less; the market didn’t listen and punished GOOG by 100 points but last night it punished Comscore’s stock in retaliation.

This is also one of the many factors making old-style media — and, in some cases, economic — measurement inaccurate and irrelevant. I’ve been saying that measurement by sample is useless because you can’t possibly get a big enough sample to measure all the niches; Nielsen, Comscore, and the entire industry will fail in a small-is-the-new-big economy because they can never measure and add up all the smalls. They will also fail because measuring how big a media outlet is has become almost irrelevant: An advertiser buying in Condé Nast Traveler cares how many people read the magazine because the assumption is that everyone who sees the magazine sees that ad. But online, a sponsor buying ads at the magazine’s site, Concierge.com, cares only about the specific people who saw the ad when it was served on specific pages, and so the size of the overall site is largely irrelevant except as a filter to decide where to consider buying ads or as a bragging right for the site. (This is why, when I served on committees for the Audit Bureau of Circulations in the mid ’90s, we discovered that audits of total site audience were meaningless — nobody wanted to pay for them — and all sponsors wanted audited was the serving of their own ads.)

But the pity is that ad agencies and stock analysts, reporters, and stock buyers still pay attention to these outmoded measurements and the companies that push them. That’s why GOOG went down 100 points while the company’s revenue soared 30 percent. They were selling on the wrong measurements that led to the wrong assumptions. But mere methodology won’t help. Why?

The Google economy is just different.

(Disclosure and caveat: I bought GOOG at 512 and now don’t feel quite so stupid for it, but I did feel stupid in econ class.)

: LATER: The NY Times headline this morning said that “Google defies economy.” Perhaps that’s a typo. Should it be “Google defines economy”?

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(author unknown) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:35:00 -0500

Ríona MacNamara / Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
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(author unknown) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:40:36 -0500

louisgray.com:
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