Techdirt. Stories filed under "community"

Amanda Palmer On The True Nature Of Connecting With Fans: It's About Trust

Mike Masnick — Fri, 1 Mar 2013 19:39:00 PST

There's been so much talk about Amanda Palmer's TED talk this week, that the folks at TED rushed to get the video edited and up on the site within days, rather than the customary months. It is, not surprisingly, quite inspiring: The crux of the message: people are focused on the wrong question. It's not about "how do we make people pay for music" but "how do we let people pay for music," by making it such that people want to support the artists they love. And the way to do that is by building a real connection with a core group of fans. That is, it's not unlike core concepts we've discussed around here for a long time: Connect with Fans & give them a Reason to Buy, combined with the concept of cultivating your "true" fans.

And, as Amanda notes, one thing that she's learned throughout her life, from when she was a "human statue" working for tips to her massive success today, is that the whole thing begins and ends through the uniquely human connection -- and that this connection is not in one direction, but in many directions. It's the artist giving to fans, the fans giving to artists and, beyond that, the fans giving to other fans and artists giving to other artists. Whether it's crowdfunding or crowdsurfing, it's about building up a real relationship, and at the heart of that relationship is trust.

As Amanda notes at one point,

For most of human history musicians and artists have been a part of the community. Connectors and openers. Not untouchable stars. Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance. But the internet, and the content that we are freely able to share on it, are taking us back. It's about a few people loving you up close. And about those people being enough.

I'd argue, in some ways, it's even more than that. What the internet has enabled is for artists and creators to reach out to wider and different communities than they could in the past -- meaning that that ability to connect and to be both supportive and supported can come about in unique and different ways. That historical context that Amanda discusses, used to be mostly bound by geography. Artists would connect with people nearby. But now, many more artists are able to connect and build a fan base that is "enough" by finding and bringing together that special and unique community that is right for them and them alone.

It's a message that is unquestionably true and incredibly powerful for those who recognize it, rather than fight it.

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TechCrunch Admits That Using Facebook Comments Drove Away Most Of Their Commenters

Mike Masnick — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:00:00 PST

I must admit to something of a minor fascination in how other sites manage their comments. As we've noted many times, we've personally found that keeping our comments pretty wide open fosters the best sorts of discussions in the long run. Yes, like any sites, there are some users who are annoying, and some who exhibit trollish behavior, but most people can get past that pretty quick. In fact, at times, those people (while frustrating initially) can spur some really interesting conversations. One thing we've never quite understood, however, is the attack on anonymity that so many sites insist upon. As we've seen over and over again, many of our most insightful comments have come from anonymous commenters.

So I was actually surprised a few years ago when TechCrunch moved to switch all of its comments to Facebook comments, claiming that one of the good things about it was that it required you to provide your real name. Apparently that wasn't actually such a good thing for lots and lots of commenters -- as after nearly two years, TechCrunch has dumped Facebook comments and is pleading for commenters to come back.

Our comments are obviously far from perfect, but we've never been at a loss for having spirited discussions on nearly all of our posts. There's just something awesome about the community that likes to really dig into the various stories. That's part of why we've always viewed this site as a discussion site, rather than a "news" or "reporting site." We post stuff with our opinion because we expect people to respond -- good or bad, agree or disagree -- in the comments, and for some sort of discussion to ensue. That doesn't mean that we like to encourage trollish behavior, but we recognize that encouraging a real community has its benefits, and one key aspect to that is keeping the barrier low. Too many other sites seem to think the best way to deal with the messiness of some annoying commenters is to make it more difficult to comment. However, as TechCrunch has discovered, like chemotherapy, it's a solution that can kill off many of the "good" cells along with the "bad."

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First Word, Last Word And Letting Our Biggest Fans Help Shape The Conversation In Our Comments

Mike Masnick — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 12:12:34 PDT

With the launch of our new Techdirt Insider Shop, one of the new features we've enabled on the site is something we're calling First Word/Last Word, which you may have noticed appearing on the blog. The feature allows Techdirt Insiders with credits to help highlight key comments as either "The First Word" (on top of all the other comments) or "The Last Word" (beneath all of the comments, even if other comments are added after). You can designate one of your own comments, or feel free to designate a truly awesome comment from someone else.

Because this is such a new feature, I wanted to discuss a little of the thinking behind it. Despite blogging for well over a decade, I'm still amazed by how much controversy there is over blog comments. Some people insist that they're completely useless. Others spend many hours of their day engaging in discussion and debate in the comments. There are various attempts to try to "improve the quality" of comments out there, including banning anonymous comments, heavily moderating comments or doing things like having editors highlight the best comments. Others have integrated third-party platforms to manage comments, such as Facebook or Disqus. Gawker keeps pushing the bleeding edge with a series of commenting experiments that try to increase the importance of comments while decreasing the number of comments that actually get viewed.

Over the years, we've taken a very open approach to comments. We don't require a login to comment (though there are benefits to having one). We don't require people to identify themselves at all. And despite the default assumption some have that anonymous comments are bad, we quite regularly find that comments from anonymous users are some of our most insightful and funniest comments. To that end, we've always focused on trying to do more to highlight and encourage good behavior -- such as highlighting the comments voted most insightful and funniest, both with badges on the comments and in our weekly summaries.

With the First Word/Last Word feature, we're trying to take all of that a step further. We've seen how a single trollish commenter can sometimes (not always) derail an interesting conversation by getting in early and saying something completely brain dead, then watching (probably with laughter) as the thread disintegrates. Our expanded Crystal Ball may take care of that in some cases by giving insiders more early access to kick off the comments. But, not everyone's going to be able to rush in and be first. With "First Word/Last Word," Insiders with credits can help highlight one or two of the absolutely key comments on a story and put them in places of prominence to help define the overall conversation.

This is very much an experiment (and like all experiments could flop completely). But what fun is it if you never take chances? We've trusted our community for many, many years, and here's another attempt to trust those who become Insiders to help curate the absolute best comments for everyone to see. We hope you'll take part and help us develop an even more interesting and compelling comments section.

You can get your own First Word/Last Word credits at the Techdirt Insider Shop. Most purchases include at least one credit, and subscriptions like the Watercooler Package and the Behind The Curtain Package include a cache of credits that replenishes on a monthly basis.

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YouTube Wants You To Comment Under Your Real Name

Timothy Geigner — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 22:06:00 PDT

I've written before about the benefits of having an open commenting system on websites, complete with anonymity, and I still believe in that stance. I've also made the point that the comments and communities a site develops can often be as much the stars of the show as the original content. So, it goes without saying that the more you enable your community to provide awesome and relevant commentary, while not locking the system down, the better off you're going to be. I think Techdirt does this well, by still allowing for anonyous comments while providing benefits for having a profile with a comment history (participation in contests, credibility through history, etc.).

YouTube (famous for its often-awful comments) has never been completely open, but the majority of commenters use standalone accounts with pseudonyms. Now, according to a recent CNN article, YouTube is actively encouraging users to link their accounts with their real identities (via Google+, of course), not just by prompting them to do so but also by asking them to explain why if they decline.

"Try to comment on a video today and a window will pop up with the title "Start using your full name on YouTube," which will sign you in with your Google+ account. A YouTube spokesperson told BetaBeat that this option has been offered since June 29 and that users with a Google+ account will see the same thing if they try to upload a video.
If you don't want to use your Google+ account, you can refuse -- but then you're taken to a second prompt, which asks "Are you sure?" Then, like some kind of Internet degenerate, you must explain why you don't want to use your full name."

Now, this may be a tad irritating to anyone who insists on commenting anonymously, but I think if the strategy works to get more people to comment while being accountable then the benefits will outweigh the annoyance. Because if there has been any single great all-encompassing truth about the last decade, it's this: if you're looking for a reason to hate humanity, spend 20 minutes browsing YouTube comments.

Having said that, it's important that YouTube still allow the option to comment anonymously. Without that option, you may lose valuable comments from people with legitimate fear of reprisal if their name is associated with their words, whether that reprisal comes from friends, family, their employers, or the government. But being proactive in encouraging users to comment under their accounts is a good thing, which may very well breed a better commenting community.

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UK Community Gives Up Waiting For High Speed Broadband: Digs Its Own Fiber Trenches

Mike Masnick — Mon, 9 Apr 2012 21:06:00 PDT

Providers of high speed broadband love to talk about how they're providing private networks that shouldn't be regulated at all, but they tend to ignore the fact that they usually rely on government subsidies in the form of rights of way -- the legal ability to dig the trenches (or string cables on poles) to run the key infrastructure. Now, of course, we've heard of various muni-broadband projects, but one community in the UK apparently got so fed up with waiting for a big broadband provider to bring service to their village that they not only started setting up their own system, but they literally got dozens of residents to help them start digging the 51 mile-long trench where the fiber optic cable that connects them to the wider internet will lie. Talk about taking matters into your own hands...

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The Gutenberg eBook: Once Again, The Bible Is At The Forefront Of Publishing Technology

Leigh Beadon — Fri, 9 Mar 2012 00:00:00 PST

It's well-known that movable-type printing started (at least in the Western world) with the Gutenberg Bible, which all-but-singlehandedly ushered in a new era of literature distribution. To this day, the Bible remains one of the most-printed books of all time, and it's interesting to learn that it still plays a role in pushing publishing technology forward. The Christian missionary initiative Every Tribe Every Nation (ETEN) is working to make ebook Bibles available in as many languages as possible, on as many platforms as possible—and in doing so, they're solving technical problems that few others are addressing:

Now, it turns out, the old missionary impulse is being turned towards some extremely difficult technical challenges: as Mark Howe [who works on the project] has said, "For all the issues that are still to be solved, ETEN is trying to do things that the world's biggest tech companies haven't cracked yet, such as rendering minority languages correctly on mobile devices. There's a unity among Bible translators and publishers that stands in stark contrast to the fractured, fratricidal smartphone industry." And of course, once these technical challenges are met, it won't be Bibles only that people can get on their mobile devices: whole textual worlds will open up for them.

Much of the innovation has to do with niche languages (they have translations in Potawatomie and Hawai'i Pidgin) and the developing world: ETEN is tackling translation challenges that are of low priority for many businesses since they aren't interested in entering those markets—at least not enough, or not yet. But if ETEN succeeds in making this kind of mass-internationalization easier, it will be sure to have a ripple effect as others make use of the technology. The Bible may once again be responsible for driving a communications revolution.

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Sony & NBC Interfere With Fan-Funded Web Series, Accomplish Nothing

Leigh Beadon — Mon, 5 Mar 2012 12:27:01 PST

ChurchHatesTucker points us to yet another example of how the strictures of the legacy entertainment industry are at odds with modern attitudes towards culture and creativity, and the hypocrisy of those who rely on fair use but seek to limit it for others. First, a bit of background:

The NBC series Community (which is awesome, by the way) recently introduced a show-within-the-show: a parody of Dr. Who entitled Inspector Spacetime and shown only in a few short clips. Travis Richey, the actor who portrays the titular character for his few seconds on screen, and who is also an experienced web series producer, immediately saw the potential to extend the fake show into a series of real shorts. He approached the Community creators with a script, only to discover that, as he puts it, "Hollywood doesn't work quite that way." He then had his agent pitch it through official studio channels, but never heard back—so he took the idea to Kickstarter, planning to produce the series himself.

It will come as a surprise to no one that the lawyers made short work of that plan—but Richey isn't stopping, he's just changing the title:

Lawyers from Sony and NBC have contacted me demanding that I cease production on an Inspector Spacetime web series.

Though I firmly believe the law would be on my side in producing this parody, I have no wish or ability to fight a show that I love as much as "Community." I had hoped that they would embrace what is essentially a fan film and appreciate the value it adds to the character, and the audience that we would bring who are finding "Community" for the first time through this character, but alas, that's not the case. So, I will be removing all references to Inspector Spacetime from this series (it only happened in the title anyway), and altering the appearance of the Inspector so that he does not look like Inspector Spacetime. What remains is 100% the creation of myself, my writing partner, and you, the fans.

The title card on the video now reads "Untitled Web Series About A Space Traveler Who Can Also Travel Through Time", and the project is already more than half-funded, with the rest of the month still to go. Richey says the money is for equipment only: everyone involved is a volunteer, and the finished series won't be monetized at all. This is a case of someone who just loves to create, for its own sake, being blocked by problematic, hypocritical legal claims. Problematic because a name and a simple character concept, barely established with a handful of brief clips, should really fall on the idea side of the idea/expression dichotomy; hypocritical because that character is himself a direct parody of a much bigger cultural icon, and relies on that very same dichotomy for his existence.

Some will say that it's no big deal: he changed the title, and now he can make the series. Luckily, this time, that does appear to be the case—but there is no reason even that should have been necessary. As Richey says, he still thinks he is in the right, but has no intention of going to court: not just because of the expense, but because he doesn't want to. He wants to create, not have creator-fights with his peers. But somehow the industry that claims its every move is about protecting creators always manages to get in the way of people like that.

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Reddit Writes A Law: First Draft Of The Free Internet Act Emerges

Mike Masnick — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:59:00 PST

As we noted last month, the community at Reddit responded to the whole SOPA mess by deciding that they should collaborate to write their own piece of legislation that protects internet freedoms. The first draft of the Free Internet Act is now available as an open Google doc, where there are additional edits and comments going on as we speak.

The Free Internet Act: To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by preventing the restriction of liberty and preventing the means of censorship. FIA will allow internet users to browse freely without any means of censorship, users have the right to free speech and to free knowledge; we govern the content of the internet, governments don't. However enforcements/laws must also be put into place to protect copyrighted content.

Huffington Post has a good background article on how the bill was developed. Of course, as we noted when this originally started, there is something a bit naive about how they're going about it... but that's kind of what makes it exciting. It was that kind of naivete that actually enabled SOPA to be stopped. Most "experts" assumed it was a done deal and nothing could stop it. But along came folks such as the Reddit community who simply didn't know that SOPA couldn't be stopped... and they were instrumental in getting it stopped. So I'm excited to see what that same sort of open optimism can do on the proactive side, even if at points it feels naive or cringe-worthy.

Of course, at the same time, it's a little disappointing to see this:

"The idea is to aim high," the thread reads. "This is the same strategy employed by SOPA/ACTA pushers. We are aiming absurdly high, so that we can back down and reach a compromise."

The power of the Reddit community was that it aimed high and achieved. The fact that it stood by its principles rather than "looking for a compromise" was what worked. If you go into a process looking for a compromise, that's what you'll get. If you go into a process looking for the absolutely best solution then you're more likely to get that. People shouldn't be approaching a bill about internet freedom as if it's a fight between multiple parties and compromise is needed. This should be about creating a solution that is really important and really good for everyone. Then no compromise is needed at all.

Either way, this is an interesting process to watch. I'm not sure it will actually go anywhere, but I love the enthusiasm and the proactive initiative...

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Techdirt 2011: The Numbers.

Dennis Yang — Thu, 5 Jan 2012 14:22:00 PST

Happy New Year everyone! Last year's "The Numbers" post proved to be quite popular, so we decided to do it again. 2011 was yet another banner year for Techdirt.

We handled around 14.7 million visits last year (up from 2009's 11M). Those visitors checked out the 3,923 stories that we posted and submitted 205,129 comments. Oddly, the #1 story for 2011 was one that was actually written in 2010, about the ubiquitous "Free Public WiFi" mystery. It turns out that a lot of people remain curious about all those "free public WiFi" ad hoc networks you see. Two stories about SOPA/PIPA graced the top ten, as well as the harrowing censorship tale of dajaz1.com. It appears that you folks are concerned about government censorship.

2011 was also a great year for the comment voting system. Congrats to Marcus Carab and Dark Helmet, who garnered the highest cumulative scores for insightful and funniest comments, respectively -- and, amazingly, each came in second place to the other in the category they didn't come in first. I sense a growing rivalry...

The top browser used by Techdirt readers was still Firefox (35%). Chrome, which lost by a narrow margin to IE last year, blew past IE's 15% to 30%. And there are still nearly 100,000 that are, despite all of the best efforts of Microsoft to convince you otherwise, still inexplicably using IE6.

Mobile usage jumped up to 1.6M visits this year, which is nearly a 200% increase from 2010. 615k of those visits came from iPhones, versus 566k for Android and 322k from iPad. In aggregate, Apple devices did beat Android. iPhone beat out Android last year by nearly 2:1, so clearly that gap is quickly closing.

Where did this year's traffic come from? Reddit jumped in the charts this year, referring 2.1M visits, up 277% from last year's 557k. I'm a little saddened to see that Slashdot is definitely not what it used to be -- referrals from them dropped by nearly a third last year. I suppose getting Slashdotted is no longer what it used to be. Continuing to perform quite well, however, are both StumbleUpon and HackerNews. Facebook also sent a decent amount of traffic.

To hear some of Google's enemies (including politicians in Congress) tell the story, the only way sites get traffic is via search engines -- and Google specifically. They act as though, if Google isn't sending you tons of traffic, you don't exist. Google definitely does send us a fair bit of traffic, but only about 20% of our actual traffic came from searches. We certainly value that 20%, but it definitely shows that you don't have to rely on search traffic to get traffic. Even more telling, here are the top three search terms that brought people to Techdirt in 2011:

techdirt
sopa
tech dirt

Where are you all coming from? It's really not that different than in 2010. The vast majority of you are from the US. Canada is second, followed closely by the UK. After that, there's a pretty sharp drop off to Australia, then Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. France, India and New Zealand round out the top 10. Last year, we noted that Japan narrowly beat out China to follow India as the leading Asian countries. This year (despite stories of how we're sometimes blocked in China), China jumped into second place in Asia, followed by South Korea, who leap-frogged Japan. Brazil was tops in South America and South Africa was tops in Africa -- same as in 2010.

All in all, people from 230 countries or territories visited Techdirt. Just like last year, there was a single visit from Christmas Island -- though, last year, we had someone in our comments suggest that the single Christmas Island visit may have been him, and not really from Christmas Island.

Last year, we noted that the only countries that we appeared to get absolutely no visits from were... North Korea, Western Sahara & Chad. Western Sahara and Chad, once again, failed to send any visitors... but, in a stunning development, we got two visitors from North Korea. And, in case you were wondering, Belarus, whose new laws will make it difficult for people there to access many websites, actually sent over 1,000 visitors last year. Also, I have no idea why, but the nearly 1,000 visitors from Gibraltar spent the highest average time on the site of visitors from any other country/territory -- averaging nearly 20 minutes per visit. People from Macedonia actually visited the most pages (on average) per visit -- at just under 6 on average from over 3,500 visitors.

And, of course, this isn't just about the odd facts, but about the overall community -- with many of you being quite loyal, which we appreciate to no end. 1.5 million of the visits -- or just over 10% came from people who visited Techdirt more than 100 times last year -- and the vast majority of those (just under 1 million) actually visited the site more than 200 times. You people rock.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone for making yet another year of Techdirt awesome. Here's to a fantastic 2012.

Top Ten Stories, by Unique Pageviews, on Techdirt for 2011:

2011's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume

If You're Arguing That Someone 'Deserves' Copyright, Your Argument Is Wrong (823 comments)
Do A Little Dance, Make A Little Love...Get Bodyslammed Tonight (At The Jefferson Memorial) (457 comments)
Judge Bans Handing (Factual) Pamphlets To Jurors; Raising First Amendment Issues (429 comments)
TSA Agent Threatens Woman With Defamation, Demands $500k For Calling Intrusive Search 'Rape' (403 comments)
Revisiting The Question Of Who Deserves Copyright (376 comments)
PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America (376 comments)
Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos (374 comments)
Monkeys Don't Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos (372 comments)
Why Is The Justice Department Pretending US Copyright Laws Apply In The UK? (351 comments)
Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details... (341 comments)

* Note that only 2 of the most commented stories were also among the top 10 most visited stories, once again showing that traffic and the number of comments don't necessarily correlate.

2011's Top Users, by comment volume

The eejit - 3,963 comments
Jay - 3,433 comments
Marcus Carab - 2,255 comments
Richard - 2,209 comments
PaulT - 1,841 comments
Hephaestus - 1,662 comments
nasch - 1,456 comments
Dark Helmet - 1,426 comments
abc gum - 1,357 comments
HothMonster - 1,313 comments

2011's Most Insightful Users, as voted by the community

2011's Funniest Users, as voted by the community

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Reddit Turns Its Attention To Politics: Seeking Supporters Of SOPA & NDAA To Unseat

Mike Masnick — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:40:00 PST

Following its ability to build up enough grassroots support to get GoDaddy to change its position (if not its mind) on SOPA & PIPA, it appears the Reddit community wants to see if it can do the same thing with some politicians. Earlier this week, we had asked who would be the first politician to be "GoDaddy'd" and it appears that the Reddit community has already jumped onto that challenge. It's been rather fascinating to watch over the past few days as the amorphous crowd self-organized and set up its own rules over who to focus on and why. They've decided to focus on politicians who supported both NDAA (the controversial bill that crystallizes the government's ability to detain Americans without trial) and SOPA/PIPA. They also want to pick one politician from each major party, to keep this from being a partisan thing. Separately, they've been seeking out politicians who may actually be vulnerable... and trying to vet their opponents to make sure who gets elected in their place isn't even worse.

So far, the community has focused in on Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee as its main Republican target (there have been a few others listed as well), but doesn't seem to have settled on a Democratic target yet.

I still think that a lot of this will depend heavily on who is challenging these politicians, and if they're willing to make a campaign issue out of these free speech/civil liberties issues. It'll definitely be tough to unseat incumbents, but even if the internet community can make it into an actual fight, politicians will start to take notice. And, even if it fails this time around, watch out for what comes next. Like many "open" systems, the first version may not be pretty, the second version may be a little buggy, but once you get around to the third version and beyond, they often start being a lot more powerful than anyone expects. Politicians who underestimate the community of folks at Reddit and similar sites may be in for a surprise before too long...

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HP Tablet Fire Sale Lets Us Put A Price On The Value Of A Strong Development Community

Derek Kerton — Thu, 1 Sep 2011 15:13:33 PDT

A couple of weeks ago, HP made the significant decision to get out of the consumer hardware business, simultaneously shutting down their PC business and their mobile device business built around the WebOS purchase that came with Palm, Inc. When they abruptly did so, HP also announced they would be clearing out the supply chain by offering their very capable, $500+ TouchPad tablet for $100 (16GB models).

What followed was a mad rush of purchasing, with people clamoring for a cheap, but powerful tablet. This is by no means a bad device: remember that the WebOS was critically acclaimed, and this tablet had a 9.7" screen, webcam for video chat, lightweight, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and more. These are flagship-grade tablet specs, and although we've learned that UX is more important than specs, good hardware is a definite plus. The biggest problem with the device was the lack of developer support for the ecosystem, so there are "thousands" of apps available according to HP, but not the 'hundreds of thousands' that work with the iPad.

This fire sale has provided a fairly interesting experiment in the market clearing price for non-iPad tablets. The base iPad sells readily for $500, and is often sold out. This is the high-water mark for tablets, which no other has matched. Other vendors have built competitive hardware and tried to sell it in the same price range (Motorola Xoom, Samsung, Playbook) but were rewarded with lackluster sales. Some of those devices, on paper, are arguably better than the iPad, so the most likely reason Apple can extract a premium is the power of their App developer community. An iPad can do much more than a Xoom partly because of what Apple offers, but mostly because of the 'whole product' which includes 400,000+ apps.

Device industry executives must stay up at night wondering how to price their tablet. The HP experiment will prove useful. Now we know that at $500, buyers walk away from the deal. But at $100, they literally rush the store like Walmart on Black Friday. This tells us that the correct price for a good tablet with weak developer support is between $100 and $500. That's a fairly wide range. I wish HP had set the price higher, to provide a better test. Unfortunately, whenever an OEM company sets the price, what we get is their desired price, but not the market value. For that...we have eBay. Many of the buyers at HP's firesale were just arbitrageurs looking to flip the tablet to make a quick buck, and those tablets quickly showed up on the auction site. A look at eBay today reveals a high number of TouchPads on offer, and sold for a market price of ~$250.

If the hardware alone is valued at about $250, how does iPad sell for $500? Well, we'll have to attribute some of the premium to the "cool, sexy" mystique of Apple products. But I wouldn't go too far with that. The Samsung Tab or HP TouchPad are both very slick looking products. A chunk of the premium has to be allocated to Apple's excellent and easy UX. The mass market doesn't want to geek out, they want easy products. But Honeycomb and WebOS aren't so far behind...

No, the dominant reason that iPad can sell out at $500 (even as sales have tipped well beyond the fanboi segment) is the value brought by apps. Apple is making cake because it has the biggest developer community coding around the OS, and the value of that community is currently worth something on the order of $200-250 per tablet. It's going to be tough for any other tablet to breach this market, where Apple already has the supply chain dialed in, the developer community, the innovation lead, and the brand. Android may progress bit by bit, but for now Tablets are Apple's private playground. Competition will heat up if Android tablet versions of the Nook and Kindle go to market around the $325 range (making their profit on books instead). Note that the TouchPad has an estimated $318 Bill of Materials (BoM). In a few years, Moore's Law and steady Android progress will reduce the cost and app advantage iPad now enjoys.

HP will be emptying the supply chain in a couple of weeks with the final production run of TouchPads. I wish they would bump up the price to see if the market would bear $318 direct from the manufacturer (ostensibly, a more desirable seller than eBay members), but it seems that they will keep the current fire sale price.

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If Your Comment Section Is Awesome, It's Your Community's Fault

Timothy Geigner — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:12:00 PDT

Meek Barbarian informed us that veteran blogger Anil Dash wrote a piece recently discussing websites having open and anonymous commenting on their sites. I'll preface this with a quick anecdote. I discovered Techdirt some three years back when my boss informed me that, as a technology consultant, it would be useful to follow a couple of technology related blogs to keep up on what is occurring in the industry. I came across Techdirt, found an article I was interested in, and dove in. I was immediately drawn in by the comments section and the community. There were anonymous cowards bravely trolling the threads. There were other anonymous cowards offering up valuable statistics, links, and points of view. There were folks using funny names and cartoon pictures as their avatars, while others used what were apparently their real names and real pictures. Even the author of the article was diving into the comments and responding to some.

I saw information. I saw jokes. I saw supporting views and dissenting opinions. I saw trolls, academics, lawyers, techs, etc. etc. etc. It was true chaos theory at work, with the article setting up a comments section sensitive to the conditions discussed but open to the topological mixing of the wide open world. More than anything else, I think I was most amazed at how this tumultuous soup of free communication provided surprising and useful information, laughter, and references. I was hooked. This was the place for me to offer my view on stories I cared about, read responses from others, get opposing views, and most of all, make more phallic-related jokes than an Adam Carolla on meth.

So that was the background I brought when I read Anil's piece, which he conservatively and open-mindedly titled, "If Your Website's Full Of Assholes, It's Your Fault." Let's dive in:

"The examples are already part of pop culture mythology: We can post a harmless video of a child's birthday party and be treated to profoundly racist non-sequiturs in the comments. We can read about a minor local traffic accident on a newspaper's website and see vicious personal attacks on the parties involved. A popular blog can write about harmless topics like real estate, restaurants or sports and see dozens of vitriolic, hate-filled spewings within just a few hours."

I'll thank Anil here, because we immediately get to my baseline issue with this viewpoint. I read all of the above, hear all about how rudeboy knuckle-draggers will show up on the most innocuous article and scream racist nonsense, spout uninformed conspiracy theories, and call you the kind of names that would make Sam Kinison do that screaming thing he did, and all I can think to myself is so what? Words don't hurt unless you let them. I, as someone with an Irish background, can be called a dumb potato-farming mick, and I can ignore it. More importantly, the idiot that calls me that loses all credibility in the formed community. Even if he's anonymous, all such behavior does is provide a reason for the community to couch their faith in comments provided by ACs in skepticism. The community provides a reason to identify yourself, in the hopes that you'll be taken more seriously. In other words, from the chaos emerges order. And not an unnatural kind of order provided by head-in-the-sand policing and moderation. Assholes exist, both online and in real life. So what?

In any case, Anil prescribes us his wisdom-medication on how everyone should run their website:

"You should have real humans dedicated to monitoring and responding to your community."

I happen to agree. As does Techdirt, actually. You know who is dedicated to monitoring and responding to our community? Our community! As long as we aren't working from a supposition of "words can hurt," we see our community policing itself just fine. Trolls get called trolls, true. But I've seen dissenters stick up for Techdirt supporters. I've seen Techdirt contributors and those with like-minds stick up for dissenters and their opinions (I know this one in particular, because I make a point to do this, though I'm not the only one). ACs have a tougher road in the realm of credibility because of the way the community polices itself. Those with accounts and names have a tougher road because we have a comment history we have to own up to. It's as simplistic as it is beautiful. And it's all emergent behavior, meaning it's natural and not forced or faked. That's what open comments do: they create fertile ground for emerged behavior. And it's amazing how productive that is.

"You should have community policies about what is and isn't acceptable behavior."

Bullshit. And here's why: one man's asshole is another man's prophet. Who am I, or Mike, or anyone else to say what is acceptable and what isn't? Are there things that most can agree suck? Sure. Racism is just plain stupid and ignorant. What does a policy against racism do? Really? "Don't be racist, Techdirt community." Did I just end racism? Did I somehow change the minds of anyone who would read a racist comment and think of it as anything other than pure stupidity to be rebuked or ignored? No, I didn't. So why bother? Remember, words don't have any power unless we give it to them.

"Your site should have accountable identities."

No, it shouldn't. It should certainly offer that option. But I've seen value from both sides of the debate on this site coming from Anonymous Cowards. And I know that some of the folks that contribute anonymously here do so because they're afraid of real repercussions in having their names associated with their words. Does that make their words any less valuable? No, it doesn't. And would making some racist, trolling, or ignorant jackwad sign in with a name make his/her words any different? No, it wouldn't. So why bother with this at all? What's the upside?

"You should have the technology to easily identify and stop bad behaviors."

Again, unless it's just flatout illegal or automated annoyance, what's the point of this? I think we can all agree that a relatively intelligent spam filtering system makes sense, but that isn't the kind of "bad behavior" Anil appears to be discussing. He's talking about controversial speech. Who is getting hurt when someone exhibits "bad behavior"? And how do you define that? If the site is community driven, shouldn't they be the ones to decide what is "bad behavior" and respond accordingly?

"You should make a budget that supports having a good community, or you should find another line of work."

It isn't a matter of cost, it's a matter of reason. What's the point? You're killing off all the good you get from the anonymous and semi-anonymous chaos, and what are you getting in return? People don't have to hear certain words that make them itchy?

I apologize for repeating myself, but I can't say this enough: words do not hurt. They never do. When someone says something designed to inflict pain, you get to choose how to react and respond. If an anonymous coward calls me an idiot and my response is, "Nice argument there, captain logic", then what has that person accomplished? I'm not hurt, they've put themselves on display being a jerk, and the community at large will react accordingly.

Don't lock down your comments. Don't kill off anonymity. Don't pretend the trolls and jerks don't exist. Do the opposite. Open it all up and trust in your community to be smart enough to react accordingly. I know that's largely what occurs here at Techdirt and elsewhere.

And I can't tell you how thankful I am for it and for everyone here, from those that generally agree with us to those that don't. You're welcome here. Forever and always.

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Six Years Later, JK Rowling Realizes Ebooks Are A Good Idea... And She Cuts Out The Middleman

Mike Masnick — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:00:48 PDT

It's been six years since we first wrote about JK Rowling's confused refusal to offer an ebook, claiming she was worried about "piracy." Of course, as we explained back then, the argument made no sense, since others had already digitized her books, and the only choice for those who wanted ebook options was to go with an infringing copy. In other words, her moves actually encouraged a lot more "piracy." And while there have been rumors in the past of her growing recognition that ebooks aren't evil, she's now decided to embrace them in a huge way. She's setting up her own Harry Potter-themed site, Pottermore, which will offer ebook versions of all her books for a variety of platforms -- all direct from her. In other words, she's mostly gone around publishers and booksellers, and has decided to go fully direct to fan (while she retains the rights, apparently she is giving her publishes some cut). Wow. Oh, and no DRM (though it will have an identifying watermark).

On top of that, it looks like she's really trying to add more value, as well. The site is going to have social networking features to connect fans of the books, and will also include extra (and new) content (both written and graphical), which apparently will continue to grow over time. The whole thing is set up as an interactive and immersive experience. Basically, she's very nicely realized that she can do more beyond just the book. While I've had my problems with Rowling's approach to the online world in the past, this seems like a huge leap forward. And, yes, she's in a different position than most authors, but I think any author will be able to learn from this, if just to recognize that you can do more to connect with fans outside of just the straight book experience.

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One Man, One Stolen Laptop... And Twitter, Prey (And A Purple Sarong?) To The Rescue

Mike Masnick — Fri, 13 May 2011 10:48:00 PDT

A whole bunch of folks have been sending in random versions of the story of how author Sean Power recovered his stolen laptop despite being in another country, thanks to the power of social media, some open source software and some good samaritans. The "short" version is that Sean had his laptop stolen a few days ago in New York City, just a day before he had to go to Canada for a few days. He had some open source anti-theft software on there, called Prey. I'd never heard of it, but it gets excellent reviews. Anyway, after not being alerted to anything for a few days, Sean suddenly was notified that someone was using his laptop -- and he mentioned it on Twitter. From there, it helps to follow the story on Twitter, and thankfully Ryan Ozawa used Storify to post the relevant tweets: You really should read the story as it happens, but basically some girl got wind of the story (it's still not entirely clear how... since she's not on Twitter), and went to the bar where the guy with the laptop was. She befriended some of the bartenders and others at the bar and found out that the guy with the laptop had some sort of connection with the bar. Reading through the various tweets, there is some confusion over who's who in this story, but the nameless girl in the purple sarong was soon backed up by another guy, Nick Reese, who just saw the story unfolding on Twitter and (as a brand new NYC resident) decided to jump in. The girl in the purple sarong apparently flirted with one of the two guys (Max) with the laptop, and got his business card. Sean had called the police, but they refused to go, since Sean hadn't filed a police report (he claims he didn't have time before leaving for Canada). Eventually, Sean called the phone number on the card, leading Max to call the other guy at the bar (Paulo) just as Nick and Purple Sarong Girl (PSG?) were confronting him. After some back and forth, Nick pulled out his phone and showed Paulo the photo of Paulo on the laptop from the webcam that Sean had gotten from Prey and posted to Twitter. Not surprisingly, that quickly led to the laptop (and the laptop bag) being handed over...

Nick and the girl in the purple sarong then put up a video of what happened which is both mildly entertaining and mildly frustrating (and it's not hard to assume that the girl has consumed a fair bit of alcohol by this point -- and I think I have to agree with the Village Voice that she may be the most annoying woman in the world) Update: The video has been set to private. Reese is claiming it's to "protect the identity" of the girl -- which seems odd... All in all it's quite a story. There have been a few people suggesting this is just a publicity stunt for Prey, but plenty of folks are insisting that's not the case. To be honest, even if it is a publicity stunt for Prey, I gotta say that it's fantastically well-done, and amazingly compelling. I wouldn't care if it were a publicity stunt, because then the story would be about how to make brilliantly compelling marketing... But, again, most people are insisting that this was all real, and then the story is just about the wonders of modern technology combined with good people. A story of our times...

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The Future Of Journalism Involves Recognizing The Community Exists... And Talking With Them

Mike Masnick — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 PDT

One of my biggest complaints about the way some old school journalism folks view "the news business," is that they still have trouble recognizing they're in the community business. They're so focused on delivering the "news," they forget the bigger issue. The news business has always been a community business. It was a way of bringing together a community of people with something in common (usually locality), and then selling their attention to advertisers. The big problem facing the industry today is that there are many more ways for communities to form. They used to be one of the few games in town. These days, however, there are many, many more places for communities -- and most of them treat the communities much better, and provide a lot more value. And yet, too often we hear newspaper folks talk down to and insult the idea that they should ever be expected to actually rub virtual shoulders with their community. They don't like using comments. They don't want to talk to fans or critics alike. They just want to report the news and move on.

Obviously, there are many, many exceptions to this. And the number of exceptions are growing and that's a good thing, because eventually they won't be exceptions at all. For now, though, it's nice to highlight stories of journalists recognizing the importance of actually communicating with their community. Pickle Monger points us to a piece by a long-time BBC reporter, Paul Reynolds, talking about his experience embracing the community rather than shunning it, and recognizing that this involvement of the public really is "the future of news." He admits it wasn't always pleasant, and it did require establishing something of a thick skin, but he seems to feel that it's worth it.

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Community Is About Enabling People To Be Heard; And You Need Community To Succeed Online

Mike Masnick — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:34:56 PST

A bunch of folks have been sending in Paul Ford's recent essay entitled The Web Is a Customer Service Medium, which I've been thinking about the past few days. I think the title is somewhat misleading, and might have turned some folks off, but I believe there are (at least) three separate (but related) points that Ford makes that are worth highlighting and discussing. And they all touch on points that we regularly discuss around here. Let's take them in order. The piece starts off with a response to the standard Andrew Keen/Nick Carr-style elitism about how the web is so full of riff raff that it takes away from the value of the really smart people (i.e., the people who matter). He highlights how these people who play up some sort of cultural elitism as being important, and how it's missing the point of the web:

I call the people who say such things the Gutenbourgeois. They believe in the cultural primacy of writers and editors and they feel good--even a bit superior--about working in publishing. They believe it is their job to drive culture forward. The web, they are a little proud to admit, confuses them. They say: "We gave away all those short stories on our website but it sold no books." Or: "We built a promo site for our famous author who does the crime novels and it was just a total boondoggle with no traffic." Or: "The magazine can't get enough pageviews, even after we hired the famous blogger. Now management wants to make people pay for access."

"Look," I say, "maybe you're doing it wrong."

"But," they say, "we tweet."

This sounds all too familiar, though in other areas we deal with. We'll discuss a musician successfully building up a business model involving a huge following and community -- and we'll hear from someone saying "but I use Twitter and I didn't have the same success, so you're wrong." The problem is that they're doing cargo cult copying -- copying the superficial aspects (using Twitter, hiring a famous blogger, putting something out for free) without really understanding the underlying reasons why communities form online. They just see that others have done one or another of these things, and think that this single action is the key step, rather than recognizing what it takes to actually enable a community.

Why? Well, that's where Ford's second key point comes in. The web is often seen through the prisms of what came before. As each new industry jumped on the web, it tried to reinterpret the web in its own image. As Ford notes:

A medium has a niche. A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.

When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing.

Again, this is a point we've discussed before (less eloquently), in noting how the entertainment industry keeps trying to remake the web into a broadcast medium, when it's power is really in the fact that it's a communications medium that also does other things (such as broadcast). But if you ignore the communications element, then you're in trouble. Of course, too many people think that adding a communications element means "just add comments." But, that's (again) a form of cargo cult copying. Yes, comments can be a component of building a community, but comments alone do not a community make.

And that brings us to the third key point that Ford raises: the one thing that the web does really really well is answer the "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" question.

"Why wasn't I consulted," which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

This is such a good point that cuts through to the heart of why so many people have trouble understanding what makes a real community online. It's not just about turning on a set of technologies or "using Twitter," it's about actually enabling people's voices to be heard. I imagine some will still get this point confused, but there's a difference between allowing people to speak and helping people get heard, and I believe that's the key that Ford is getting at with his WWIC concept.

There's more in Ford's piece in terms of how people might go about setting up these sorts of communities, by thinking of the web as a customer service medium, rather than a publishing medium, but I actually think that point isn't as strong as these first three. Still, the whole thing is worth reading, especially all of his examples of sites that have succeeded by focusing wholly on the WWIC issue. While there were certainly a lot of key points in the article that I'd thought about separately, I hadn't really put all of them together, and it's definitely making me think about how best to enable successful communities online.

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A Look At Rupert Murdoch's History Of Internet Failures

Mike Masnick — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 07:46:58 PST

Ross Pruden points us to a neat little graphic that Mediaweek put together, highlighting all of News Corps.' internet failures over the years (pdf) as it gets ready to launch its iPad only publication called The Daily. If you look at the image (or click it to go to the original Mediaweek pdf), you begin to sense a pattern: The downfall in almost every case is about Murdoch focusing on using the internet as mainly a broadcast medium, rather than a communications medium. Delphi was all about community... and then News Corp. tried to turn it into a place to sell his magazines and newspapers. Fox Interactive was all about pushing content, and had little community. MySpace, of all things, which was really about community from the beginning, has completely faltered under News Corps' control, because they tried to focus on using it to sell music and stopped investing in any sort of real community features -- as services like Facebook and Twitter totally leapfrogged them on that front. It's the same story over and over again, and given that The Daily is so focused on platform, rather than users, it seems likely to be a repeat of the same mistake all over again.

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When The News Lets Everyone Really Participate, It Changes The Way News Works

Mike Masnick — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 01:01:55 PST

When we talk about things like "participatory journalism," or "news as a community," we've had traditional newspaper people insist they "get it." They say that they've "added comments" to their website, so it's now participatory. But that, of course, is cargo cult participation. They look at sites that have a lively community, and they see comments, so they think "well, if we add comments, we'll have community." They don't bother to understand what actually makes journalism participatory, or what actually brings a real community together.

Clay Shirky has written another of his essays, once again, building on the idea of "cognitive surplus," highlighting the difference between a "pipeline" model of journalism and a true community model. The pipeline model involves passing a story along a pipeline. Someone makes news, someone reports the news, someone edits the news and then everyone consumes the news. But the community model actually involves people who become a part of the story itself, in digging deeper, in adding their own input to the story, in shaping the further story. Shirky provides numerous examples of this, with the following being my favorite:

In 2005, the London transit system was bombed. Sir Ian Blair, the head of London's Metropolitan police, went on radio and TV to announce that the cause had been an electrical failure in the underground. Within minutes of Blair's statements, people began posting and analyzing pictures of a bombed double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, and in less than two hours, there were hundreds of blog posts analyzing this evidence and explicitly contradicting Blair's interpretation.

Seeing this, and overriding the advice of his own communications staff, Blair went on air again less than two hours later to say that it had indeed been a bombing, that the police didn't have all the answers yet, and that he would continue reporting as they knew more. When he spoke to the public, Blair had the power of all the traditional media behind him, but it was clear that merely having a consistent message on every broadcast channel in existence was no longer the same as having control.

This is not about just "adding comments" -- it's about enabling people who have the inclination to actually be a part of the overall process. It's not "the 4th estate" talking down to everyone, but it's about the press enabling those who wish to participate to do so. This doesn't mean that there is no role for traditional journalists or editors or publishers. To the contrary, those roles are still important, but in a different manner.

As Shirky notes, this is a big change that may be difficult for some used to the old "pipeline model" to full grasp. It involves a different conception of what it is a journalism outfit needs to accomplish:

What's going away, from the pipeline model, isn't the importance of news, or the importance of dedicated professionals. What's going away is the linearity of the process, and the passivity of the audience. What's going away is a world where the news was only made by professionals, and consumed by amateurs who couldn't do much to produce news on their own, or to distribute it, or to act on it en masse.

We are living through a shock of inclusion, where the former audience is becoming increasingly intertwined with all aspects of news, as sources who can go public on their own, as groups that can both create and comb through data in ways the professionals can't, as disseminators and syndicators and users of the news.

This shock of inclusion is coming from the outside in, driven not by the professionals formerly in charge, but by the former audience. It is also being driven by new news entrepreneurs, the men and women who want to build new kinds of sites and services that assume, rather than ignore, the free time and talents of the public.

This a change so varied and robust that we need to consider retiring the word "consumer" altogether, and treat consumption as simply one behavior of many that citizens can now engage in. The kinds of changes that are coming will dwarf those we've already seen, as citizen involvement stops being a set of special cases, and becomes a core to our conception of how news can be, and should be, part of the fabric of society.

Until the various media players begin to recognize that participation within journalism isn't about delivering the news, but enabling everyone who wants to to participate, they're going to continue to struggle with the changing marketplace.

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Felicia Day's Success With The Guild Highlights The Importance Of Authenticity With A Community

Mike Masnick — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:26:41 PDT

Just about a year ago, we wrote about how actress Felicia Day had turned her web production, The Guild into a big success, by building a community of fans, connecting with them, and then coming up with some interesting ways to make money from that, including a unique sponsorship deal with Microsoft. Reader tuna points us to a Fast Company profile that updates us on how the last year has gone, and it sounds like things have only improved over time.

One of the keys to the success is that she chose the sponsorship deal with Microsoft, in large part because it let her retain creative control over the project -- allowing it to remain authentic and true to what her fans wanted and expected.

As buzz built, Day and her company, Knights of Good Productions, signed with ICM new-media head George Ruiz. "At one point, there were 25 different offers on the table," Ruiz says, "including from some major studios and networks and even a director with several $100 million films."

Day turned down every one. "She said, 'George, don't make me take this deal!' " he says. So by the time Microsoft came calling, the agent had a new approach: The Guild is not for sale, but you can license it.

The Seattle-based behemoth bit. Microsoft pays an undisclosed fee to debut each season exclusively on the company's Xbox Live, MSN, and Zune platforms (season four debuted in mid-July). "There is a common perception about Microsoft," says Day. "Especially when we first signed with them, the fans had reservations." But she was impressed that it got what she was doing and didn't want to interfere. "Microsoft doesn't even give me notes [on scripts]!"

This is a key point that often gets lost in business model discussions. When we talk about different offerings, it's amazing how much people discount the importance of authenticity as a scarcity. We see it all the time with companies who want to sponsor something, and then have tremendous level of control -- losing all of the authenticity and, with it, much of the value (and, eventually, audience). It's nice to see a situation where a company (in this case, Microsoft) properly recognized when not to get too involved.

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Newscaster Continues To Use Twitter To Connect With Community

Mike Masnick — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:10:23 PDT

A few weeks back, I wrote about how a evening newscaster in Detroit named Stephen Clark was successfully embracing Twitter to break down the typical walls between newscaster and audience, and discovering some interesting things at the same time -- such as the fact that the community doesn't just want to talk to him, but to each other. One point I noted was that Clark still could go even further with his embrace of Twitter. He talked about how his use of Twitter had changed his perception from talking at people to talking to people -- and I wondered when it would reach the point of talking with people. It looks like it's getting there.

Clark himself alerted me to his latest experiment to better connect with viewers by asking them to pitch stories for the evening news -- and even to try to put together their own video and share it not just with him, but with the wider community that's come together:

Starting immediately I want you to find the stories that I will cover on Channel 7. I want you to find the good people doing good things in your community. I want you to tell me about the interesting characters and fascinating sights that make your communities special. I want you to stop complaining that all you see on TV is bad news and give me some good news.

That's it...pretty simple. Oh, there is one little catch. I don't want you just to tell me about it. I want you so show me. I want you to show the entire #backchannel. It doesn't have to be perfect and polished. Just take your flip camera or iPhone and shoot some video. Show us the pictures of why it is a compelling story. If you have a fascinating character that needs to be introduced to the #backchannel... and the Channel 7 audience... put him/her/it on camera and show us. If you can edit some sound, video, even your own narration into a short story, do it! Post the video on YouTube or Vimeo or wherever and hashtag a synopsis to the #backchannel.

When I first wrote about Clark, some of the usual skeptics scoffed that the nature of the conversation somehow wasn't substantial. But, of course, that missed the point. It's like the people who mocked blogging in the early days because they "don't care about your cat," or the folks who mocked Twitter because they "don't want to know what some stranger had for lunch." But the point is that all of this is totally voluntary. You don't follow the people whose lunch plans or cats you don't find interesting. But for all the cats and lunches you don't want to hear about, there's likely to be something or someone interesting that you do want to find out about.

In this case, perhaps the community sometimes came together over silly discussions -- such as the "Silverfish Hand Catch!" example we discussed in the first post, but it's those kinds of group bonding experiences that allows the community to build a relationship with each other, trust each other, and do something more interesting and compelling in the long run. I have no idea if this latest experiment will actually produce anything of value. And I already know that the same folks who complained about "nothing substantial" occurring in the #backchannel last time, will pop up to complain that now Clark is asking for "free labor" or something such as that. In the end, people who want to hate will always find something to complain about... and while they do, they'll miss the fact that some amazing new forms of communication have sprouted out right beneath their eyes while they were sneering about how beneath them it was.

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Detroit News Anchor Realizes How Twitter Has Changed How He Engages With Viewers

Mike Masnick — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:32:00 PDT

One of the key points we tried to hammer home at our Techdirt Saves* Journalism event in June was the importance of realizing that news organizations are really in the business of building community. So many in the news business focus on the belief that they're in the "news" business, but that's never really been the case. The news has always been the piece that brings together a community (and the business of a news organization has usually been to then sell that community's attention to advertisers). The biggest problem that news organizations face these days isn't scary "news aggregators," but that there are now many, many, many other communities that people can join, and most of them treat their members a lot better. Many traditional news organizations, in contrast, seem to have a rather condescending view on "community." They lock up comments, they complain about readers, and they focus on just delivering the news, not engaging with their community or enabling their community to do anything useful.

Thankfully, that's not true of all news organizations (or individuals within news organizations). More and more are recognizing this important point, even if they do so in unexpected ways. krharrison points us to a great block post from Stephen Clark, a newscaster for a local Detroit TV station, about his realization of how Twitter is changing the way he relates to the community of folks who watch the news:

As I've reported in this blog before I have had a very long one-sided relationship with the people who watch my newscasts. I talk, they listen. If they had something to say to me they yelled it at the TV screen like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Twitter changed all that. I can now hear you and I can now answer you...

I can't speak for the dozens of people who check in regularly every night... sometimes at 6 or 7:00.. but mostly 11:00. I don't know exactly what they get out of it except a kind of cool experience of actually conversing in real time with the guy on TV. But I can tell you what I get out of it. For the first time in years I actually feel like I'm talking to someone rather than at them. Frankly it's energizing!

Of course, the next step is to go beyond just talking "to" them and to talking "with" them. But that will come. In fact, getting to that point, Clark explains an amusing way that the community tried to connect with him, picking up on the recent Old Spice commercial meme of "Silverfish Hand Catch!", where some of his viewers started saying that if 100 people retweeted the request, Clark would close the broadcast by saying the line on TV. He didn't get the 100 retweets, and admits that he wouldn't have said it anyways (noting he probably would have lost his job), but he did do an "air" silverfish hand catch surreptitiously, to let folks know he was paying attention.

But, much more interesting was the realization he had while all of this was happening:

It was all a bit silly sure, but I realized something else was going on. The audience of our 11:00 newscast wasn't just talking to me... they were talking to each other! I felt like Alexander Graham Bell when he made his first call to Watson. The backchannel worked!

I know that many folks around here still like to mock and dismiss communications tools like Twitter, but many people are realizing what powerful tools they are for conversations and for building communities where none really existed before. And, in businesses where community and relationships are everything, that's quite powerful for those who figure it out.

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Rolling Stone's 'Print First' Mindset Shows How They Lost The Community

Mike Masnick — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:05:27 PDT

Last week, my brief remarks at the Techdirt Saves* Journalism event focused on the fact that the news business has always really been the "community" business. The point was that the way the journalism business used to work was that they built up a community of folks around the local news, and then sold their attention to advertisers. The problem that many in the industry are facing is that there were many competing ways to build community, and most of the "business model" ideas coming out of certain publications seemed to work against community building. Doing things like making it difficult to view or read stories, and even more difficult to comment -- such as putting up paywalls -- do exactly the opposite of what you need to do if you want to build community.

To some extent, part of this discussion is recognizing whether a publication is taking a digital-first strategy or a paper-first strategy. We've seen some publications really working hard to embrace a digital mindset, but others still appear to think that their entire purpose is to sell more paper copies, even if that hurts the digital community. A great example of this appears to be Rolling Stone magazine, which has the "big story" of the week, in doing a profile on General Stanley McChrystal, which resulted in him getting fired.

Whatever your opinion is of the story itself, an interesting sidenote is how Rolling Stone promoted the story. It apparently hoped this story would sell a lot more copies of the magazine, so it held off posting the digital copy, but instead, sent it around to other publications, allowing all those other publications to get the "scoop" and the traffic:

Rolling Stone didn't even bother putting it online before they rolled it out [to other publications]. In fact, despite the fact that everyone else's website led the profile, Rolling Stone's site led with Lady Gaga's (admittedly impressive) machine gun jumblies all day and didn't even put the story online until 11:00 ET.

On top of that, when Rolling Stone finally got around to putting up the story, it didn't actually get much community action. Nieman Labs notes that a day later, the story that kicked off this whole thing only had 16 comments. Stories on other sites had thousands of comments. Partly this was because RS was late. But, as Nieman points out, RS makes it incredibly difficult to comment on the site. Numbers of comments are certainly not the only factor in judging the popularity of a story (and, in our experience comment numbers and traffic numbers do not correlate well), but you would think that the biggest story of the week, from the publication that supposedly "broke" the story, could get a few more comments.

Basically, in an attempt to push people to the paper edition, it looks like Rolling Stone missed out on a huge internet opportunity.

On a separate note, since we were just talking about the Associated Press vigorously defending the whole "hot news" doctrine, it is worth noting that the AP was one of the first publications to run a story about the whole McChrystal situation -- well before Rolling Stone put the article online. Under the AP's interpretation of hot news, it certainly sounds like it it "freeloaded" off of Rolling Stone, making it more difficult for Rolling Stone to make money... doesn't it?

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Reinventing Book Publishing: Building Real Communities, And Only Holding Rights For Three Years

Mike Masnick — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:47:54 PDT

We talk about the economics and new business models impacting all sorts of industries from software to music to movies to newspapers to video games, but haven't talked all that much about book publishing. Certainly, we've discussed some aspects of ebooks (and the bizarre pricing decisions there), but there's really been so little that has come across as truly innovative, that I haven't spent much time digging in. Yes, there are things like Google books and print-on-demand and other such things -- but all of those seem mostly focused on just taking the old business and "making it digital," rather than looking at ways to rethink what the digital world really means for book publishing. There have been some one off cases -- with examples of individual authors like Robin Sloan and JC Hutchins doing some interesting experiments as novelists, but nothing larger. And... many people point out that with fiction writers, they just don't see the same scarcities that we discuss in other industries.

So I'm quite happy to learn about a company that really is experimenting in this space, and doing so in interesting ways. Ross Pruden clued me in to a project called Cursor, started by Richard Nash, that appears to be doing some rather interesting things. The key point is that, rather than just focusing on publishing books, it's really a community driven platform that produces books as one aspect of the overall experience -- and uses a tiered support model, similar to those we've discussed in so many other areas:

My business plan is now out with investors--I will spare you the P&L numbers and just offer the broad strokes. Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities. To start, this includes Red Lemonade, a pop-lit-alt-cult operation, and charmQuark, a sci-fi/fantasy community.

The business will focus on developing the value of the reading and writing ecosystem, including the growth of markets for established authors, as well as engaging readers and supporting emerging writers. Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors' books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions--and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Other revenue opportunities include the provision of electronic distribution services to other publishers; fee-based or revenue-share software modules, especially for online writing workshops or seminars for publishers, literary journals, teaching programs; fee-based linking of writers to suppliers of publishing services, including traditional publishers and agents; corporate sponsorships and site advertising; and events and speaking fees.

Now there are some things in this description that I think are great, and others that I'm not sure will work, but it definitely is a big and interesting vision, that really does seem to get the basic concept of both connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy, while also looking to build out complementary scarcities. My main concern are (as usual) the attempts to use infinite goods as if they were scarce, but given so many other smart aspects to this program, I get the feeling that after some experimentation, things will shake out in a way that works well.

But, fundamentally, the fact that this whole thing isn't even set up as a "publishing house with some community features," but rather as "communities that also publish," is a very, very smart way of going about things. It's a recognition of the power of community, enabled by modern communication technology, that gets so incredibly ignored by so many legacy business lines.

Beyond that, Nash is doing some other interesting things that many in the publishing world will consider horrifying -- but which really are extremely forward-looking. The reason Ross pointed this out to me is because Nash has decided that, unlike pretty much every other publisher in the world, to purposely limit the length of the contract away from "life-of-copyright." As he notes, traditionally, when you sign a publishing deal, the publishing house controls the rights until the work hits the public domain (long after you're dead). Instead? His deals are three years:

No more life-of-the-copyright contracts.

Instead: three year contracts.

Yup, from a contract that locks you in till seventy years after you're dead, to a three year contract. Renewable annually thereafter. Which means after three years you can walk. Or stay, but stick it to us for better royalties because there's gonna be a movie. Or stay with us because with all the additional formats and revenue opportunities we're creating above and beyond what any publisher has to offer, you're making more money than ever before.

You see, most publishers have accepted they're not going to make money publishing your book. They're publishing your book and a bunch of other books like it so they can have exclusive rights over as much intellectual property as possible. Such that if, three or five or nine years down the road, you win the NBA, or the Orange, or there's a movie, or an Oprah pick, your whole backlist starts to sell but they don't have to pay you one single extra red percent in royalties.

That's where their profits come from, from being able to NOT have to renegotiate royalties when your books start selling better than they expected.

I have no idea if Cursor is "the answer." In fact, I'd bet that it's not. But it is one answer that's experimenting in some very interesting and compelling ways. And that's the key point. There no longer is just one answer to the business model for any particular industry. Each of these industries is learning that business models change rapidly, and the way to succeed is in smart, focused experimentation that is most focused on providing greater value (rather than looking to limit participants). Who knows if Cursor, as an individual experiment, will work. But succeed or fail, it's an experiment worth watching closely.

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Escapist Website Mass Bans (Then Unbans And Guilts) Users Who Mention Adblock

Karl Bode — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:01:00 PDT

Chodelord writes in to note that the Escapist website recently decided it would be a good idea to ban users from their forums simply for mentioning Adblock. The thread in question started after a user complained that an add for Time Warner Cable was slowing down his computer. Apparently, users who responded to the poster by suggesting the user "get Firefox and AdBlock" found themselves banned from the forums. Users didn't even need to admit they even used AdBlock to get banned -- they simply had to recommend it as a solution to a seemingly-annoying ad. Looking at the forums recently amended posting guidelines does confirm that the folks at the Escapist believe that giving browsing preference advice is a "non forgivable" offense:

Do not confess, teach, admit to, or promote ad-blocking software that will allow users to block the ads of this site.

Indeed. Users quickly (and justly) started complaining about the fact that friends they'd had for years were suddenly being bashed over the head with the ban hammer simply for mentioning an incredibly popular and legal application. After a lot of complaints, the Escapist ultimately wound up unbanning the users according to a forum post, and instead just settled on trying to make the community feel really guilty:

I truely hope that everyone that reads this will consider turning off their ad-blocker for this site. If we have offended you or you don't deem this site to be worthy (and would like to have it shut down instead), do what you will, but don't pretend to be surprised if the site dies.

While it's nice that the Escapist listened to their community, saw reason, and backed away from their ridiculous decision, that doesn't make the decision any less ridiculous (and while they reversed course, the posting guidelines remain unchanged). It also doesn't justify telling your readers that they're responsible for the failure of your business model should users decide to block annoying ads. As Ars Technica recently found out, mandating what your users can and can't do with their own browsers doesn't exactly foster adoration within your community to begin with, but subsequently telling those users they should take a hike if they don't like your position (or in this case even mention ad blockers) isn't particularly endearing, either.

As we've mentioned previously in great detail, if you've got ads on your website that are annoying your users, that is your fault -- not your users' fault. The failure of your business model is also your problem, not theirs. It's up to you to develop a new model that doesn't involve your users being annoyed. Meanwhile, telling your users (essentially) that they're worthless if they don't directly generate ad revenue is misguided. Site visitors bring value to your website in other ways -- whether they block your advertisements or not -- through conversation, participation and links to your content. Of course none of that will happen if you treat them like escaped felons for simply discussing their browser plugins.

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Truncated RSS Is A Bad Business Decision

Mike Masnick — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:00:30 PST

A few years back, I wrote about why we had found full text RSS feeds to be much more powerful and useful than truncated RSS feeds. The reason that many sites push truncated feeds is the belief that it will force people to click through, and the ads on the webpage are worth a lot more than the ads found in RSS feeds. But it's a short-sighted view. Because what it's really doing is trying to push readers to do something that they don't want to do. Many of them use RSS readers because it's a more convenient way to organize and read the news they want. And, we found that by making life easier for our readers, we were able to get a lot more readers, and then that allowed us to put in place a better business model that didn't rely on trying to trick or force them to click through. This is the same debate as the debate over ad blockers. It's a question of whether or not you respect your community and want to add value for them, or if you just view them as dollar signs and feel you need to force or guilt them into doing stuff they don't want.

The full text vs. partial text debate is flaring up again as Gawker Media has just shifted all its blogs to partial feed blogs. From my standpoint, this makes it significantly less likely that I'll link to them, because I'm less likely to actually read through their posts to see if they're worthwhile. I'll stay subscribed, but whereas in the past I might read through an entire post before deciding it was worth writing about, now I'll only have a snippet to make that decision -- and that makes it that much less likely that I'll find their posts worth linking to. And that seems like a mistake.

Matt McAllister from The Guardian responded to Felix Salmon's blog post (the one linked above), and noted that when The Guardian moved to full text RSS feeds they saw their web traffic go up significantly. Admittedly, there may be other factors involved here, but it's yet another data point in favor of being open and making it easier for your audience and your community to engage.

What I think both this and the whole ad blocking discussion come down to is a question of how different sites look at and treat their audiences. If they feel they need to take a short-term view and "monetize" every interaction with them, or if they realize that there's a long-term value in building up a strong and loyal relationship. It's also quite similar to the constant debates over the music industry -- where the music industry feels that it wants to get paid pennies every time you hear a song. That's the short-term "we have to monetize every use" view, compared to the longer term view, which recognizes that free songs and building up a relationship between the fans and the musicians can lead to something much more lucrative that benefits everyone.

But the key point is made by Salmon in his blog post about this. Others like to accuse Salmon and myself of supporting things like full text RSS feeds, letting people use ad blockers and being against paywalls as "a sense of entitlement." Of course, since I'm on the publishing side of things, I don't see how that actually applies to me since I'm defending the rights of the community of readers over short-sited publisher decisions. But the real reason why we think these (well, for RSS and paywalls -- I don't know Salmon's view on ad blocking) things are important to understand is that taking the simplistic view of trying to maximize short-term monetization is a bad business decision in the long term:

At heart, my argument for full RSS feeds is similar to my argument against a NYT paywall, and neither argument has anything to do with a sense of entitlement on my part. Instead, both are simply bad business decisions. If you truncate your RSS feeds, you'll get less traffic than you had with full feeds, and you'll alienate an important minority of your audience. And if you implement a paywall, the increase in subscription revenues will fail to offset the decrease in ad revenues, even as you'll alienate lots of your audience. So neither makes commercial sense.

Exactly. All of these are decisions that don't take into account the bigger picture or understand the overall dynamic of a community. They assume that each transaction is a single impact: if this user doesn't "pay" a site now, it's "lost revenue." But it doesn't take into account that that user might "pay" in other means -- via a comment or by passing it along to others. And what if that individual is influential and passes it on to a lot of people? It blocking off that possibility because that individual doesn't "pay" by ad or paywall seems incredibly short sighted and quite disrespectful of a community.

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