Archive for October, 2006
The Blog Herald has a post about the Blog Honour Pledge, which basically amounts to saying you’ll be honest and transparent about whatever you write. I think the motive is to ensure that bloggers adhere to a high moral standard, and that you can trust that their comments are not paid for out of an advertising budget (unless they say so). Funnily enough, it sounds like an attempt to codify the existing sentiment of the blog world (and put a cool badge on your page to boot).
One of the great benefits of never writing anything of substance is that I never have to worry about being transparent. But here is an example for you, to illustrate why I think pledges are good in theory, but bad in practice…
I am a blogger and I take the Blog Honour Pledge. I stick some badge on my sidebar so everyone knows I’m a good boy. And then I proceed to write a blog post entitled: Kevin Rose Keeps Kitten Corpses in Kitchen for Midnight Snacks!*
Now once that gets out, three things will happen. First, feline fetishists everywhere will (mistakenly) get a new poster boy.
Second, people who have brains and read my entry will think to themselves: he’s obviously stupid, and I won’t read his blog anymore. Some of those will write their own blog entries calling me out for being stupid, and the web in general will start to look at me as something of a freak. And eventually I won’t have any credibility left at all, because the word will be out that I make up extremely silly stories because I’m lonely and want attention.
Third, it will come out that I wrote that story while under the employ of someone at Netscape, in a sneaky attempt to subvert and destroy Digg. Not only did I say something horribly untrue, but I WAS PAID TO SAY IT! Suddenly my vicious lies are even more disgusting, and whatever people still thought I was a somewhat good person will start mailing me rotten eggs and dried squid**. My blog will be banned from every reputable news aggregator, my name will be mud, and I will have nothing to show for it but a few hundred dollars and a Netscape t-shirt.
Somewhere in there, the folks who make the pledge site will tell me they revoke my badge, because I’ve obviously broken all their rules. But it doesn’t matter to me because I copied the badge to my own server and I’m not gonna take it off my sidebar! Nyah nyah! Look everybody, I’ve still got honour, cause I’ve taken the pledge!
Everybody?
Anybody?
Ah, that’s right. Everyone already left. Because the web tends to discover untruths, exposes them, and then beats them with a stick for so long it makes everyone ill just thinking about them. There’s no journalistic oversight here, no code of ethics, nothing like that. You don’t need it, because there’s always someone on the other side ready to tear you to shreds if you misstep. It may take a little while to do, but it’s fair, balanced and transparent via trial by fire. Sure, a pledge may announce that you’re ready and willing to undergo such an ordeal, but it won’t help reduce the skepticism with which people treat you.
Bloggers should aim for a high level of quality, truth and transparency while writing… but we shouldn’t try and lock those ideals down in some kind of accreditation, because I suspect it will just make us all lazy, and then we’ll have given up one of the great quirks of the blogging world.
* Note to anyone with a less-than-inspiring IQ: I have no reason to believe Kevin Rose keeps kittens in his kitchen, for any purpose. This title was for illustrative purposes only.
** If you want to send dried squid, that’s actually okay. My kids love it. I don’t know why, but they do,
Techcrunch is reporting that Condé Nast has acquired Reddit. And Google acquired Jotspot. For the longest time I thought this whole idea of DotCom 2.0 was just people being pessimistic, but now I’m starting to worry that the bubble’s going to burst before this next generation of too-crazy-to-be-true ideas really finds its footing.
Reddit is a great site (I keep meaning to add it to my sidebar) but I really wonder how it can operate as part of a bigger traditional-media company. Making it a sub-element of the Wired site (for instance) kinda deflates its value, but they wouldn’t outright replace Wired either. So what’s the value of having something that just acts as an aggregator for the stuff they produce? The thing I worry about is that they’ll start to give their own content a special spotlight in the system, which undermines the philosophy of Reddit, and would start the user bleed, possibly over to Digg. And then they’ll have bought something that doesn’t have much value.
The thing I wonder about is this: in this crazy world, with an online code of ethics (mainly unspoken), can the creators of Reddit ever really move on to their next big project (if they even want to), or is the fact that they’re selling a community site to a big corporation going to hurt their chances of making another “grassroots” site in the future?
I wish companies would stop acquiring each other today. I’m not getting any work done.
Blog Maverick has the guts of an email that was posted to the Pho list yesterday which gives a peek into the mechanics of the Google/YouTube deal. And calling it Google/YouTube is a bit misleading, because it’s really Google/YouTube/Big Media…
The bit that I love the most is this snippet:
The media companies had their typical challenges. Specifically, how to get money from Youtube without being required to give any to the talent (musicians and actors)? If monies were received as part of a license to Youtube then they would contractually obligated to share a substantial portion of the proceeds with others. For example most record label contracts call for artists to get 50% of all license deals. It was decided the media companies would receive an equity position as an investor in Youtube which Google would buy from them. This shelters all the up front monies from any royalty demands by allowing them to classify it as gains from an investment position. A few savvy agents might complain about receiving nothing and get a token amount, but most will be unaware of what transpired.
Now I don’t pretend to know anything about anything, but it seems to be that this particular bit of news, broadcast nice and wide (like the Digg story is wont to do) will mean the big labels will be getting lots of tense phone calls from nouveau-savvy agents looking for their share. And I would say they deserve it, because after all the labels are protecting artists, right? They’re certainly not purposely trying to find loopholes to deny money to the content producers that made them rich. Certainly not.
What I also find interesting is how Viacom is nixing Comedy Central clips from YouTube, despite this sort of a deal. They must either be very tough negotiators or fantastically stupid, because they’re kicking their viral network in the face. They don’t lose any money letting Stephen Colbert play on YouTube, but the less he’s there, the less free promotion they’ll get. If I were them, looking at a $50 million peace offering which (in a roundabout way) would be compensation for their clips being online… hell, it’s like THEY’RE getting paid for someone ELSE doing their promotion, and they’re STILL not happy.
I can’t yet tell what’s going to come of this, but I have a feeling it may hurt the Google deal, and end with YouTube going under. If the various agents eat the settlement pie from the labels, then the deal with them may start to fizzle. If it starts to fizzle, Google may call it off (because they’re really just buying a big liability machine at that stage) and leave YouTube with a bunch of cranky, angry big media companies that are pissed they lost their $50M. And that, as they say, is that.
Mark Cuban didn’t set this up, and he didn’t even write the email that exposed it, but by putting it out for the world to see, I think he’s gone and proven himself right about YouTube being a bad acquisition.
Comedy.
Note to all Swedes: The Swedish Pig book is already done, so you don’t need to start on it! I haven’t been able to post it because of computer issues, but it IS coming. Thanks to everyone that’s been offering to help, but the deed is now done. Mostly done.
I hope to have this covered off today, if not sooner.
Ze Frank is in the middle of a nerd fight about download stats, and it all boils down to Rocketbooming. I’m not going to get into the issue of whether or not Rocketboom’s reaction to this is justified or not, because the baseline issue is actually more interesting.
It’s about the metrics, really. Here’s the thing: when I wrote the blurb for the back cover of the Crow book, I said 225,000 people had downloaded the Pig book. I got that number by looking at the download stats of the original files (in all languages), and running a few filters. We started at something approaching 375,000. Take out bots and other such nonsense, and it drops a good amount. But then you look at the downloads and you see that someone downloaded it three times in the space of a minute… maybe their PDF viewer was wonky, they hit reload a few times to make it work. Whatever it was, I tried to filter by IP based on timeframe, so that I could arrive at actual downloads. After a lot of that, I trimmed the number down to about 225,000, which is still fantastically large.
I know if I wrote my initial stats (375,000) on the Crow book, it’d be much more impressive, and people would think I was super-1337. But I know in my heart that’s not a valid number (even 225,000 is iffy to me), and all it does is set up a standard that is unhealthy. People have to be dishonest or suffer the consequences.
Let’s say I, the author of the Crow book, am a different person. That book’s been downloaded less than 50,000 times (with filtering). Without filtering, about 70,000. So as an author of a similarly-targeted product, what do I announce as my stats? 70,000? If I don’t, I’m a small-fry, and advertisers will shy away from me (not that I’m looking for advertisers, but y’know). But if I say 70,000 and some advertiser wants to see results for that kind of audience, they won’t get it, because my actual number is likely only 50,000! I’m setting myself up for a fall, but I don’t have much choice because my competitor (the Pig book) is going around yelling huge numbers from the rooftops.
The thing is, Rocketboom needs to filter down their numbers not because they’re being dishonest (I don’t think you’d call it dishonest anyway). They have to do it because they’re pushing metrics in the wrong direction… we have the power and intelligence on the web to at least improve on the TV model, which is a lot of silly guesswork and extrapolation. We should be able to say: our downloads are X, and our likely real audience is X-Y. You don’t get numbers that compete with Grey’s Anatomy, but you get a better ROI. Advertisers will get more actual bang for the buck because your bang is reasonable. And if Rocketboom tapers their numbers, it will put less pressure on their competitors to fudge numbers to apppear to be in the same league.
What will happen in this kind of arms race is that one day, a vidcast that has a so-so audience will distribute it via every possible outlet, claim 1 million downloads a day (of which 10,000 are actually watched) and push the overall value per download on the web so low that Rocketboom, with their 300,000 downloads a day, will start to lose money. And then they’ll have to inflate their stats, and so on, until the only people that can play professionally are the ones that can sign deals with big distributors to help boost their download stats.
Transparency and admissions of imperfection are key to internet life, and it helps everyone to admit that their download stats are flawed. If we trim them back and try and present REALISTIC numbers rather than “competing with TV” numbers, advertisers will end up a lot happier.
