Techdirt. Stories filed under "experiment"

'Jonathan's Card' Raises Interesting Ethical Debate: Who Decides Which Uses Of A Shared Resource Are 'Right'?

Mike Masnick — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:46:51 PDT

Over the last few months, there was a fascinating "real" experiment going on. A mobile apps guy named Jonathan Stark opened up his Starbucks mobile app code to the entire world so they could give or take (if there was any money available) at will. He was pretty clear that it was a "social experiment" and he did it to see what happens -- not because he necessarily wanted something specific to happen. The info was available for a few weeks without much happening, and then some blogs, followed by the mainstream press, picked up on it, and suddenly it got lots of attention and a fair bit of usage. That's when something really interesting happened. A guy named Sam Odio heard about it, set up a script that would monitor the amount of money on the card and alert him every time it hit a certain amount. While sitting at a Starbucks, each time the card had enough money on it, he transferred money to his own cards. He sat for about five hours in a Starbucks and was able to effectively "skim" $625 from the card.

And while he noted that $625 is the price of an iPad, and provocatively titled his post "How to use Jonathan's card to buy yourself an iPad," in this case Odio took the $625 he got and decided to put the cards on eBay with a promise to donate any proceeds to charity (eBay has a system to confirm that proceeds are donated to the charities named).

Suddenly, the social experiment got even more interesting from a variety of angles. The general sense of "the internet mob" was that Odio somehow "abused" the system or did something wrong. People have called for him to be arrested or physically harmed. Apparently some have reported him to the FBI.

As this was going on, Odio reached out to Stark and asked him if he was okay with how this was going. Stark upped the social experiment another degree by simply posting Odio's email and responding publicly that:

My impression is not the one that matters. The impressions that matter are those of the people who have been touched by and participated in Jonathan’s Card. If you’d like to speak to them, you can do so on their Facebook page.

Again, the general community response is that Odio is somehow evil. Others are arguing that he somehow "ruined" the experiment. To be honest, I don't see the logic in most of these arguments, though I understand the emotional place from which they come. Part of the reason why people jumped in to support the whole Jonathan's Card experiment is because people really do seem to like supporting these types of experiments where it allows people to "feel" altruistic in some ways while supporting the view that humans are "generally good." Odio's simplified skimming presents a bit of a shock to the system to a bunch of people who have bought into the argument that "here's an experiment that shows people are basically good," because it feels like he's taking advantage of the system.

I'd argue that emotional feeling, while a legitimate feeling, is misguided. Stark set this up as a social experiment and part of that experiment is what happens and how people react when things don't quite go according to plan. To some extent, Odio was also just tweaking the knobs on the experiment to see how more people reacted (and, in the end, one could make an argument that what he did may have a better societal benefit than what Stark did). But, obviously, the point that many people are upset about is not that aspect, but just the fact that someone didn't use the card as those other users thought it was intended to be used. But, the important thing is that Stark made no such restrictions, and Odio doesn't appear to have broken any laws. He did exactly what Stark allowed when he made the card public.

If anything, part of the social experiment's results was a reminder that someone could do things like this. But the flipside to the experiment is how the community of supporters reacted, generally acting to express clearly to Odio that they did not like his actions. While that sort of response might not really matter to someone who just wants to take money for free, community pressure can be quite effective in other cases. The real issue, to me, however is that community pressure can be good in some scenarios, but can border on going overboard and creating a "burn him" pitchforks & torches mob at times -- and in a few instances seemed to border on that in this case. While I'm a big believer in the ability of communities to police behavior, I do worry about when a community makes an emotional response that isn't always completely rational, as may have happened here.

All in all, if you view this very much as an experiment, there's a lot to learn from it. You can see some interesting group dynamics. How people respond to opportunities to be altruistic or to benefit from altruism. And how communities respond when "unwritten" or even "unspoken" rules may be broken, even if they don't actually violate any real rules. I find it hard to "side" with Stark or Odio or the community here, as it's one of those cases where I think (and hope) both Stark and Odio have viewed this mainly from an impartial "this is interesting, let's see what happens" standpoint, rather than any big moral claim.

Either way, for now the experiment is over. Last Friday, Starbucks finally realized what was going on and shut down the card. Still, I imagine we'll be discussing the implications of this and similar experiments for a long time.

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Google To Newspapers: Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

Marcus Carab — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:11:00 PDT

The Google Public Policy Blog recently posted a summary of a speech by Chief Economist Hal Varian on newspaper economics. Alongside the we-are-not-your-enemy message that Google is hoping newspapers will someday listen to, it contains useful insights on the challenge of succeeding as an established print publication in the digital world. Varian suggests a few potential courses of action, but the real value of the piece is that it highlights the obstacles in a way that can be tackled by experienced insiders—especially marketers and salespeople, which newspapers employ in abundance but often fail to set free on experimental strategies.

One of the first things Varian establishes is the volume and value of online news readers, and then he looks at the difficulties of turning that value into revenue. The numbers may be discouraging for newspapers, but they could also become the basis of several important short- and long-term goals in an online strategy:

"Visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day. Not surprisingly, advertisers are willing to pay more for their share of readers' attention during that 25 minutes of offline reading than during the 70 seconds of online reading. So even though online advertising has grown rapidly in the last five years, it appears that somewhat less than 5% of newspapers' ad revenue comes from their internet editions, according to the most recent Newspaper Association of America data.

There's a reason for the relatively short time readers spend on online news: a disproportionate amount of online news reading occurs during working hours. The good news is that newspapers can now reach readers at work, which was difficult prior to the internet. The bad news is that readers don't have a lot of time to devote to news when they are supposed to be working. Online news reading is predominately a labor time activity while offline news reading is primarily a leisure time activity."

Varian talks about the need to increase leisure involvement with online news, and in the full speech, he lists ways this might be done: leveraging new technologies like smartphones and tablets, developing more engaging formats for journalism (like Google Living Stories, which recently went open source), and creating multimedia experiences.

These are all important ideas, but to some extent, they miss an opportunity by focusing on ways to get people reading at home instead of work: namely, don't at-work readers have value too?

For a long time, newspapers have used "business purchasing influence" as a prominent reader statistic in media kits. But we now live in a world where business purchasing influence is a much more distributed thing, hardly limited to managers and IT folk: employees at every level in every field make use of online services to expedite their work. Web services subvert the top-down model of corporate IT, allowing workers to seek out the tools that work best for them. These services usually have freemium models, with prices that suit small departmental budgets, and since there's no software installation there's no need to involve IT staff.

Think web lockers (plenty of companies still have laughably low email attachment limits). Think Flash-based presentation tools (graphics departments hate PowerPoint). These are bottom-up business services: a few employees get free accounts, a few more get on board, and before you know it a whole department is more than happy to pay a monthly fee for such a useful tool. These are the companies that want to reach people at work, during those 70 seconds they spend reading a news story while wondering how to transfer a 50-megabyte PDF.

There are some other excellent parts of Varian's post, including a look at the goldmine vertical markets which have traditionally sustained newspapers: automotive, travel, home & garden and the like (he oddly fails to mention real estate, which is a biggie). These are the same verticals that sustain Google's search advertising—the problem is that the end market is now specialty sites, not news publications. Though Varian doesn't discuss the possibilities, this is an area where newspapers still have a chance: they should be leveraging their community respect while partnering with specialty purchase sites through advertising and affiliate programs, ensuring that they continue to be an important link in the chain. TechCrunch recently reported on a Forrester Research study that estimates that web-influenced offline sales in the U.S. (purchases where the consumer made their decision online then went to a retail store) are worth nearly a trillion dollars, and news websites should absolutely be a part of that.

It's well worth reading Varian's post in full, but in the end, his core piece of advice is what counts:

"In my view, the best thing that newspapers can do now is experiment, experiment, experiment. There are huge cost savings associated with online news. Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and distribution, with only about 15% of total costs being editorial. Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet."

That really is the core of it. Newspapers must experiment with new ways to report the news, new ways to engage their readers and new ways to get advertisers on board, while embracing the fact that their readers are switching to a medium that costs them less. There are over 70-million Americans reading news online—if newspapers can't turn those eyeballs into money, someone else will.

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