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Welcome to the "fakeosphere." Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs - or flogs - fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it's a $500 million-a-year industry - and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago.

"I don't think people realize how big this has become, and how quickly," said Weintraub, adding that a popular top flog campaign can generate 10,000 daily sales. --MSNBC

I certainly realize it. Now that a lot of the conversations that used to take place on blogs are taking place on Twitter, I'm getting far more comments from spammers than from visitors. I'm glad to see someone's writing about this advertising trend.

Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What's most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that's a good thing for citizens. Government: We can turn XML into PDFs. We can't turn PDFs into XML.

Flash isn't off the hook either. Government has spent lots of time and money developing flash tools to allow citizens to view charts and graphs online, and while we're happy the government is interested in allowing citizens to do this, Government's primary method of disclosure should not be these visualizations, but rather publishing the APIs and datasets that allow citizens to make their own. Only after those things are completed to the fullest extent possible should government be working on its own visualizations. While Adobe may say in their open government whitepaper:

"Since the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology."

This is nonsense. --Sunlight Labs (via)

What can be learned from Fitzgerald's tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger--as if he were a grocer--a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money--at least until his wife Zelda's illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue. --William J. Quirk, The American Scholar

Movie critics are sometimes asked why all movies cost the same to view, even though some may have cost $100 million to make, and others $500,000. It's a reasonable question. I suppose the reasoning is that you get about two hours of movie either way. Now 3-D has provided exhibitors with a subterfuge to force consumers to subsidise their upgraded projection facilities -- which is deceptive, because most theatres are upgrading to digital projectors anyway. This could be called the 3-D children's tax.

Do kids really care? --Roger Ebert, Spectator

The AP recently raised eyebrows last year when it announced its intent to charge bloggers who quote from an AP story, and again more recently when it announced vague plans to track the spread of AP stories through secret embedded codes.

The AP's position is that if search engines are making money delivering customers to AP content, then the AP should get a piece of the action.  Here's a suggestion that might actually work, without trampling the fair use doctrine in the dust, and without relying on magic digital pixie dust tracking technology.

Financial wires have long charged higher rates for the timeliest delivery of such information as stock quotes, so the approach is not without precedent. As more and more news organizations wrestle with the need to create premium products, the AP's experiments will emerge as valuable case studies in high-stakes bets.

Time-based pricing could take any number of forms, including early access to an index of stories that would enable participating search engines to begin crawling the news sooner than the other guys.

Another option under discussion is the earlier release of actual stories, in effect setting up some AP customers as places that users would come to rely on for the earliest look at AP content.

What's interesting about these ideas is that they could generate much-needed revenue without jeopardizing journalism's civic purpose of wide distribution of news. --Bill Mitchell (Poynter)

Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of "newsgroup" postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters.

In February 2001, Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based Deja.com, and with it a Usenet archive going back to 1995.

[...]

Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins.  --Kevin Poulsen, Wired

On Wednesday, a federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed Brown's claim against Electronic Arts for the use of his image in its Madden NFL series. Judge Florence Marie-Cooper essentially found that video games are "expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment." Such works are protected by the First Amendment. --Kotaku

I've been a journalist for 27 years, and I love that romantic old notion of the newsroom as much as the next guy. But I recently canceled my two morning papers--The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal--because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without even looking at them. Fact is, I only care about a tiny percentage of what those papers publish, and I can read them on my computer or my iPhone. And I can rely on blogs and Twitter to steer me to articles worth reading. --Daniel Lyons, Newsweek

When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. --Fox News

Videogames may be economically formidable, but they remain a byword for crass, shallow thrills. A game, it's understood, can look spectacular, but it will have little to offer its audience in the way of values, insights or craftsmanship. It's a curious and increasingly untenable situation, given that, to the increasingly large percentage of the population who play them, games are rapidly establishing themselves as the single most exciting and vigorous creative industry around: a sector able to boast not only booming revenues and growing audiences, but a melting pot of talents and new ideas that is increasingly attracting some of the biggest-hitting figures in film, television and the other arts. --Tom Chatfield, Guardian

In all media that boasts your byline remain impartial, and don't do anything stupid. But is it in the best interests of the paper? Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander points out the the Post (along with just about every other mainstream publication) has at times come under fire for being partisan. These guidelines aim to cut off those accusations before they can be made (and already senior post editor Raju Narisetti has closed his account). But in this age of self-branded journalists, where power and readership loyalty is often the result of an audience's personal connection with the writer is it really a good idea to remove all evidence of personality from the reporter's product? --Glynnis MacNicol

Interview with Stan Lee (comic guru, creator of Spider-Man)

If you were starting out now, do you think you would have started out in games rather than comics?
If I were young now and I wanted to do stories, I would very much want to get into the videogame business because it's the most exciting. Videogames and movies are the most exciting forms of entertainment. But a videogame in a way is more imaginative, it has more variety. In a movie you stick to the plotline, in a videogame you go in a million different directions. I have no idea how they're able to do that. It's like a miracle.

What advice would you give to a newcomer?
Well it's like anything else, if he or she wants to be a writer they should first study writing. Don't study comic writing, study writing - read literature, read the best writers you can find. Learn the language, learn how to use it. If you want to be an artist, you've got to study the best artists in the business and try to draw as well as they do. But too many people try to become artists in comics and they're not as good as the ones that are presently drawing the comics. --UK Guardian

Katie Couric's annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric's salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news. --Michael Massing, Columbia Journalism Review

Of course, the situation was just as bad when the top three anchors were all men, but Massing does have a point.

It's a transparent ploy to get Google rank via incoming links, but it's also a great piece of investigative reporting. By Chandler Phillips.

"We would hire you here at Edmunds.com. Then you would go out and get a job as a car salesman and work for three months."

"Selling cars?" I asked unnecessarily.

"Right."

"Where would I work?"

"Wherever you can get hired. That would be up to you. We were thinking you should work at two dealerships. The first would be a high-volume, high-pressure store. Then you could quit and go to a no-haggle dealership. You could tell them you didn't like the pressure at the first place and you'd probably get a job on the spot."

The editor explained that they wanted me to write a series of articles describing the business from the inside. Of course I would learn the tricks of the trade, and that would better prepare me to write advice for Edmunds.com. But the benefits of the project would be greater than just information. I would live the life of a car salesman for three months. That would give me an insight and perspective that couldn't be gained by reading books or articles or interviewing former car salesmen.

"So what do you think?" the editor asked. "Interested?"

[F]our-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn't have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual--hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. "It sounds like a scam," Solvig thought--she'd run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. --Kevin Carey, Washington Monthly

In many ways, the Times' blogs are no different from anyone else's. But there's one organizational trick they employ very effectively: Division of Labor. Times bloggers don't work on their own. They don't handle every aspect of their blogs. Who does what is divided up to bring specific expertise to bear on different parts of each post. The result is I can crank out more posts, and those posts are better overall, than if we writers did everything ourselves. I know, not everyone wants to have other people involved in their blogging. But there's a reason people work in teams. --Paul Boutin

The economic reality of working in journalism in the present economy: good people are losing their jobs.

For the past several years, largely as a result of free news and classifieds on the Internet, ad revenues and circulation have been sinking for newspapers nationwide. Sun management and their bosses at the Chicago-based Tribune Company, which owns the paper, have responded with repeated rounds of buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in print content. A newsroom staff that numbered 500 in 1992, when The Evening Sun was still being published, had been whittled down to about 200 before the April cuts.

As a result, staffers lived in a state of fear, mostly keeping their heads down, trying to do good work under less-than-ideal conditions. "Everyone is miserable," says one writer who has survived all the cuts and asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. "Whatever shred of morale there was has disappeared." --Evan Serpick, Baltimore Magazine

It's not easy teaching journalism classes in this climate. I am sure to emphasize how journalism skills transfer to other careers, and I've been considering ways to beef up the "new media" component of our "new media journalism" major.

"The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook -- and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent -- the more Facebook can and does abuse us," Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. "It is not 'your' Facebook profile. It is Facebook's profile about you." -- Virginia Heffernan, New York Times

As US newspaper publishers mull charging readers on the Web, a Pennsylvania daily announced plans on Monday to put some content behind a pay wall.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said "PG+" would be a "members-only website with interactive features and exclusive content" available to subscribers for 36 dollars a year or for 3.99 dollars a month. --AFP

In the 90s, consumers declined to pay for the same content as the print edition, shoveled online. We'll see whether professionally-produced extras are worth the money to consumers.

Is your Spidey-sense tingling?

Disney will take over ownership of 5,000 Marvel characters, such as Spider-Man and the X-Men.--BBC

Okay, so it's after midnight on a Friday night... but surely someone's awake in a call center, somewhere in the world.

After following the maze of links for getting contacting Verizon by telephone, I get this screen, which dead ends.

I presume there's supposed to be a phone number or a chat applet or a dancing teddy bear in that box, but it's empty -- both on Firefox and Safari. So my quest to get Verizon to undo its URL hijacking is not over. On the upside, I learned how to do a screen capture on my new MacBook Pro.

I'm blogging the Verizon tech support number so I can find it again -- it's very hard to find it on the website..

1-800-837-4966

 

 

Tonight on Channel 4 Action News at 11, Seton Hill University students reflecting on what they learned by watching a half hour of local Channel 4 Action TV News.  We go now to Channel 4 Action News at 11 reporter Dennis Jerz, with this live Channel 4 Action News at 11 report.

I had my news writing students watch the local "Channel 4 Action News" last night.

My sympathies to nearby Carnegie-Mellon U, which is dealing with the aftermath of yesterday's student suicide.

The news report positioned the CMU story as the central piece, first noting that Channel 4 doesn't usually cover suicides, but then proceeding to just that. The reporter, live on the scene hours after the suicide was reported, had to report that the university had no comment, and filled up her time by summarizing general info that anyone could have found on the school website.

The closest thing to an eyewitness report was a guy who said he saw some stairwells roped off, though later that same fellow stopped himself just before he admitted that he could understand a student wanting to commit suicide at a more stressful time of year.  

I was most stunned when the reporter transitioned back to her live presence on campus by saying, "Slowly the news spreading."   (I just checked the audio recording I made... there was no "is" in her statement.)

News of a campus suicide is spreading slowly, she says, while reporting live from that campus... so presumably she's speaking about the spread of news on that campus.

Spreading slowly? That's hard to believe. Unless, of course, the CMU community is an internet-free, anti-internet, no-word-of-mouth zone.

Last term, when an off-campus shooting led to the death of a Seton Hill student, news spread very quickly indeed.

Today, I was careful to explain that TV news was a powerful force that had a tremendous impact on life in the 20th C, noting that in the 50s people were as excited about TV as we are today about the internet.  I have on several occasions admitted to students that, because I am a textual learner, I don't find the TV news very valuable. More often than not, if I hear something of interest on the TV, I will walk away to the computer and look it up for myself online, where I can control how much time I spend on this story.

Cynical as I am about TV, I was nevertheless surprised when I came across the text of this advertisement for a WTAE-TV reporter. The language emphasizes the emotional, ratings-driven nature of television.

Do you have a track record of delivering high-impact, highly promotable pieces? Do you have the skills to plug in to the biggest issues in our viewers' lives and produce and tell that story so that it becomes appointment television? WTAE-TV, Pittsburgh's Hearst Television station, is searching for an experienced and creative reporter for our Call 4 Action franchise. You should have a vision for ambitious special projects stories AND the flexibility and ability to drive "day of" consumer stories and lead story sidebars. If you enterprise stories that have production sizzle and get results, we want to see the proof on tape. You must be able to work weekends, holidays and various shifts as needed, plus hold a valid driver's license.  Motor Vehicle Record check required.

Nothing about fairness, depth, knowledge of the community, or writing ability. Of course, it's a given that good reporters have those skills, so the ad is focusing on what's harder to find in the applicant pool -- the ability to "enterprise stories that have production sizzle."  And clearly, the ad is telling people who don't already understand what those buzzwords mean, and who don't buy into the existential value of such an activity, not to bother applying.

Last week, I spent a little while doing the rounds, trying to drum up some advertising customers for the student paper. Ordinarily there's a student who carries the role of business manager, but when we're in between student workers, or outside of class time, I try to push things along.

There were twenty different things I'd rather have been doing at that time, but the money goes directly to support the school's educational mission. We recently replaced our six-year-old hand-me-down computers with a couple of new ones, and over the years we've students to training workshops and conferences in New York and elsewhere.

So here I am, going door to door, mentioning that I'm trying to sell ads, and watching eyes glaze over. 

"I can give you two minutes," said a guy in an apron.

It was a humbling experience -- being blown off by a guy wearing an apron.  I didn't even have two minutes of stuff to say -- I just mentioned that his competition down the street just bought an ad of X size, and leaving my contact information. 

But it was a good experience, too. 

I'm used to walking into a chattering room full of students who immediately settle down and wait for me to start talking. A small handful of students who feel very comfortable around me will politely mime a wristwatch check when I've run over time; most just sit there and wait for me to finish. Of course, it's my goal in the classroom to let the students do most of the talking, but on the first day of classes, the students are perfectly happy listening as I go over the syllabus. I also spend part of my week working on committees with other faculty and staff members, so it's not as if I expect the world to revolve around me.

I wasn't mad at the busy employees who didn't even look up from their desk during my pitch, who didn't give me their name or accept my card, who didn't take the copy of The Setonian.  Instead, I was feeling guilty for all the times I have blown off a sales representative, thrown a sales pitch directly into my spam folder, or avoided eye contact with someone wearing a "Vendor" nametag.

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed offers a gentle rebuke to the edupunk movement, which celebrates do-it-yourself technical solutions over the pre-packaged corporate products. If a few admissions and hiring decisions had gone a different way in the past, I might very well be peddling educational software or textbooks to busy professors.
 

The Golden Rule for Ed Tech Vendors

• Many of the people in the for-profit world in fact come from the non-profit educational world. You will be surprised that their backgrounds, interests, and passions will so closely match your own. For this reason, they tend to identify too strongly with their customers, and will be unhappy when they think their companies actions are not in the best interests of the colleges and universities that they work with.
• If you talk to your ed. tech. vendor representative you may be surprised to the degree that they believe in the profit-motive as a motivator for innovation. They have often left the slow and hidebound cultures of academia precisely because of the slowness of traditional institutions to change and innovate. They like that their success or failures can be measured by bottom line evaluations, in hard profit and loss numbers. They will believe, and they will be correct, that it is the for profit educational technology world that is responsible for much of the innovation in higher education. --Joshua Kim
  

TV news emphasizes the immediate and the emotional.  This screen shot shows how the NBC news affiliate in Miami allows readers to rate stories by emotions.

Notice that this mechanism does not reward stories for being fair, informative, accurate, or even newsworthy. 

I stumbled across this feature while reading a story about the 11-year-old reporter who got a one-on-one interview with the president. Miami is apparently "bored" with that story, though the city is "laughing" about stories on Cuba running out of toilet paper, an elderly couple starting a fire while doing the nasty in bed (illustrated by the image of a sexy young couple in bed, since apparently no sexy hidden camera footage of the newsmaking and whoopee-making elderly couple was available), and a man who pretended to be disabled so a hired nurse would change his dirty diapers.

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before. -- Fast Company

I'm happy to see open content and edu-hacking getting some mainstream attention. It's a little depressing to see the focus on the commercial potential, though given the source of the article, that focus is not actually surprising.

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables -- nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours -- and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it. -- Erica Alini, Wall Street Journal

Good luck with that, Rupert.

"We intend to charge for all our news websites," Mr Murdoch said. "If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media," he added, predicting "significant revenues" from charging for differentiated news online.

I think it probably makes sense to charge a bit in order to get unique content early, before it's released to the general public.  Maybe some tech and business bloggers would pay a little bit in order to get an advance peek at high-profile investigative reports, so that they have time to research their own localized version of the story, ready to be put on their own websites along with a link to the original story.  Maybe if Blogger Joe pays to access News Source X's premium content, Blogger Joe can post a permalink to the premium content, within some reasonable restrictions, so that spammers lose their license if they simply copy the entire stream of premium content and post it on their own site.

I think it's far more likely that Big Media as we know it will change drastically, rather than consumers the world over will ever get used to paying for content they've been used to getting for free.

The Associate Press has for some time claimed that people should pay for reprinting the title of an AP article and linking to the full text. I stopped quoting from AP stories when the AP claimed bloggers needed a license to quote more than 5 words from an AP story.  (Keep both of these things in mind, if you have students post research projects online!) 

Now they're announcing plans to do what looks to me like gaming the search engines. I hope Google and other search engines account for this practice, and penalize search results from organizations that trample on the principle of fair use in such an outrageous manner.

I can completely understand a position that states web authors don't have the right to copy the full text without permission. The fair use defense in copyright law does not apply if a critic or commentator reuses more than 10% of a work  But this new policy goes well beyond existing copyright law.

Each article -- and, in the future, each picture and video -- would go out with what The A.P. called a digital "wrapper," data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web. Newspaper executives have said that by taking the lead, The A.P. ensures a unified approach, saves publishers from having to design their own software and circumvents possible charges of collusion against the papers. -- Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times

Mark Bernstein (hypertext publisher and theorist) makes some good observations about the print-based newspaper industry:

I remember visiting the Chicago Sun Times/Daily News building as a kid, where my best friend's dad was a columnist. The place was huge! But it wasn't filled with middle managers; it was filled with compositors and pressmen and ad sales clerks. You didn't just need someone to mark up the HTML; you had to cast the letters in lead type. And, if you needed to make a change, someone had to go take the plates off the press, melt them down, cast new plates, and start the press up again.

Keep in mind, too, the problems of doing business without computers. Every little transaction generates paper, and that paper needs to be reliably filed and quickly retrieved. Every transaction: two bucks for the delivery boy, the rent for the Paris office, the fee for the department store ads. Every paycheck had to be computed and written out by hand, in duplicate. Even in the 70's, the fax machine was so new and faxes were so slow that Peter Gammons was able to write the story of a lifetime faster than the fax machine could send it.

If anything, the newsroom of old was notably short on bureaucracy. That was the whole point of the news room: you had a huge open office in which dozens of people worked because all those dozens of people reported to one editor. Some of those dozens would turn out to be idiots, some of them would be crazy, plenty of them were drunks, and all of them were prone to be unmanageable. Even so, there are remarkably few layers of bureaucracy.

This is a little late, but it's still the right way to handle the criticism. From Amazon:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com