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| Wednesday, October 18, 2006 |
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Drowning in silage 
| | She concludes, Meantime, I'm going to have to struggle along with the Treo, which is now sometimes working, and sometimes not, but always a pain in the arse. |
That's entertainment
| | These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable. |
| | This kind of appalling moral blindness, a sort of high-functioning, sociopathic stupidity, has been a consistent characteristic of the numerous Republicans indicted during the Bush era. Like all revolutionaries, they seem to feel entitled to break rules in the name of whatever the hell it is they think they're doing. And when caught breaking said rules with wads of cash spilling out of their pockets, they appear genuinely indignant at accusations of wrongdoing. Former House Majority Leader and brazen fuckhead Tom DeLay, after finally being indicted for money laundering, seemed amazed that anyone would bring him into court. |
Hey, I'm addicted to my house too
| | Stanford School of Medicine: ...these patients' strong drive to compulsively use the Internet to check e-mail, make blog entries or visit Web sites or chat rooms, is not unlike what sufferers of substance abuse or impulse-control disorders experience... |
In the Garage
| | [Later...] Joe Andrieu responds. "Markets without marketing" is really just sales. It is nothing new. |
Theology vs. Democracy
| | And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains. |
Buearocracy vs. Blogocracy
I second that promotion
| | Dave: I am looking for a job as CTO or Chief Scientist at a professional publisher that wants to make a strong transition to the new environment. So here I practice what I preach, I'm floating ideas in advance of using them. |
| | I nominate the San Jose Mercury-News. This is Silcon Valley's own paper, for gosh sake. No paper needs help more, or is in a better position to benefit from the mountain of clues Dave will bring to the table. Hey, MediaNews Group, bring Dave in to show how it's done with the Mercury, leverage the model and watch your value climb. |
| | Bonus question: Does anybody who writes for the New York Times like having their goods locked up behind the Times Select paywall? I bring that up, because I keep hearing the Times, which is massively unlike every other paper on Earth, brought up as an example of how locking up "content" behind paywalls "works". Thesis: No matter how much money the Times makes by charging for fishwrap (old eidtorial that comprises most of Times Select's inventory), they're losing more money by making that inventory linkproof and off-Web. |
The payoff in being yourself
| | Many years ago, when I was a Silicon Valley PR guy, a reporter once said a client of mine — one who schmoozed reporters unusually well — "abused the principle of instrumentality". Meaning that reporters often serve — to their sources — as instruments. And that there is a principle involved that can be abused. That principle has to do with a reporter's own integrity. |
| | This is a touchy issue in the journalism biz. Bob Woodward and his work as a Washington insider/reporter serves well as Exhibit A. |
| | The principle of instrumentality acknowledges that reporters need to maintain integrity while also serving, in some ways, as instruments. Integrity can mean many things (see that last link for an extensive unpacking of them), but most basically it's a form of personal solidity that others can depend on. |
| | This, I think, is what's at issue with PayPerPost. It abuses principles of instrumentality for bloggers that are no different than the ones for paid reporters — which are no different than ones for any human being. Those principles have to do with speech, and voice. Nothing is more personal than either. |
| | Blogging is speech. Personal speech. When we blog we speak for ourselves. Yes, we may bite our tongues at the tonsils on occasion (say, when we want to avoid or protect an employer, a spouse or a friend), but we do that in everyday speech as well. People who know us make allowances for that. |
| | But PayPerPost doesn't just pay us to shill for advertisers. It actually controls what we say: |
| | This isn't just a back-slapping "Nice job, thanks, and here's a few bucks for your trouble." It's using you as an instrument. |
| | the fake blog thing pretty brings home the point that all the dark forces of human mediocrity ultimately force any medium to broadcast the reality of reality television. In other words, fake reality. |
| | Or to put it less delicately, you can refine technology 24-7-365, but you still can¹t create an algorithm, program, or metawhatever that takes the place of the good old-fashioned cerebrum-mounted bullshit detector. |
| | Yesterday I said PayPerPost makes you an asshole. Your job is to serve shit. You reduce yourself from a human being to an orifice for excreting messages. That may have seemed extreme or unkind; but hey, what's the difference between that and showing up on a bullshit detector? |
| | I'm trying to help here. "Companies come and go" David Sifry just said to me on the phone, "but you only get one reputation". |
| | You may believe, as PayPerPost pitches you, that You've been writing about Web sites, products, services and companies you love for years and you have yet to benefit from all the sales and traffic you have helped generate. But there is something wrong with the thinking here. All of us, online and off, have said good things about countless manufacturers and retailers without being paid for it. And isn't the sphere of Who We Are and What We Do bigger than What We Get Paid For? |
| | In fact, blogging is a great way to participte in any market's conversation — which is increasingly becoming any market's economy. Becoming a producer in a category is a great way to derive benefits from that production, even if you don't get paid directly for it. If you blog about a subject — with authority and conviction and originality and integrity and good humor (or any combination of those and other virtues) — you are producing work that will pay off in reputation. Your reputation may not itself be fungible, but that reputation will make what you do sell a lot more valuable. |
| | Here's where it gets personal. Yesterday Xial and DrumsNWhistles both took issue with my, um, characterization of PayPerPost bloggers (which the company calls "posties"). Xial is new to me, but I've known DrumsNWhistles for awhile, and I like her a lot. She has a great blog and she's an outstanding photographer, to name two of many more things. What's more, she has principles, which she details at length at that last link. |
| | Both Xial and DrumsNWhistles are upfront and open about their dealings with PayPerPost. DrumsNWhistles is clearly on PayPerPost's side of this thing (pointing to this video calling Jason Calacanis bad names, among other things). All of which is fine. The problem is still instrumentality and the integrity people's mental bullshit detector sees, automatically, as compromised by PayPerPosting on blogs. |
| | To put it mildly, a lot of bullshit detectors are going off. And I doubt that all the integrity and disclosure that Xial and DrumsNWhistles bring to the market's table will compensate for that. |
| | Sure, there's a freedom-of-association principle. And a principle around doing business with well-intended folks who have a new idea that deserves to be tested. But why put your reputation on the line for something that BusinessWeek calls "polluting the blogosphere", CNet calls "how to kill blogs", and TechCrunch calls "selling your soul"? |
| | Somebody said to me recently that PayPerPost and others like it are just "the latest SEO moves". SEO is "Search Engine Optimization", or the practice of doing things to raise your PageRank and get more Google advertising money, basically. |
| | There are two approaches to SEO. One is to raise your PageRank with tricks. The other is to write useful and interesting posts about subjects you know and care about. Show me a blog with a lot of Google juice and I'll show you a blog that didn't need SEO tricks. |
| | Erich D, wondering who the fuck I am, says All blogs are inherently commercial. If we didn¹t have somehting to sell, we wouldn¹t publish it publicly. This is wrong, unless you think everything you do in life is inherently for sale. |
| | As I pointed out in the post below, the real frontier on the networked market's table is relationships. For the stuff Erich D, Xial and DrumsNWhistles care about, that means relating directly with the companies that make the stuff they want to support. |
| | Maybe PayPerPost is in a position to remediate those relationships. But I'm sure there are lots of better ways that grow your reputation without posing risks to it. |
Remediation
| | Dave says, The Internet is The Great Disintermediator. |
| | Everywhere you go, it's taking out the middle man, the intermediary. You see it with real estate, travel, car buying, every kind of commerce. When I went down to Magnolia to buy a fancy Denon all-in-one home theater sound system last week, I went in armed with certain knowledge that I could get the product I wanted on "the Internet" for 30 percent less than they were asking for it, in-store. So they took 20 percent off the price (I felt it was fair to pay for their overhead). A win-win. I could have bought the product without going to the local store, but I wanted the service they offered, so I paid a fair price for it. |
| | This illustrates two things that are happening in the Net-supported marketplace. One is the reduction in distance between first sources and final customers. The other is the opportunity for new and better relationships based on factors other than price. |
| | What happened in Dave's case was not disintermediation, however. It was remediation, in more than one meaning of the word. |
| | There is still mediation involved: Dave has a choice between between click (online) and mortar (offline) retailers. Both still come between him and the first source of his gear. But the mediation is changing. Thanks to the Net, the distance between Dave and Denon is reduced. It's far from zero, but the gravitational pull is in the direction of zero. The Net is remediating Denon and Dave in the most literal sense. |
| | There is also remediation in the remedial sense. It is corrective. It causes healthy adjustments in the marketplace. The Net supports all kinds of markets and market formations, including private silos and walled gardens (such as eBay and the Apple iTunes store). But because the Net is broad, and supports more than silos alone, there are ways of getting around the silos, and around the old ways of getting first sources (makers) and final customers (buyers) together. In the old industrial tiered-distribution world, makers and buyers of gear like Denon's were isolated, and almost completely lacking in direct communication. Now they can be in touch. What's more, they can relate. |
| | This is to the advantage of stores that continue to thrive in "meet" space. Earlier this year I bought my Canon 30D and its lenses at the local Samy's. I paid a higher price than I could have paid online. But the decision to buy there was based on something deeper and more meaningful than price alone. The Samy's in Santa Barbara is staffed by photographers who are good at what they do, and who love helping customers. The photographer who sold me the Canon gear is the same one who shot a photo I love — of cactus and mountains in Owens Valley — and whose work was going up the next week in an art museum in Los Angeles. I could, and did, relate to him and his work. More than that, my relationship with the store came in handy in August when so much dust had accumulated on the sensor of my Canon that the camera had to go back to Canon for cleaning. The dust came from using a cheaper lens than the L-series one this salesman had first recommended. When I can afford an L-series lens (they're not cheap anywhere), Samy's is the store I'll buy it from. |
| | The next step in the zero-ing of markets will be openings to direct relationships between manufacturers and their final customers. Denon and Canon are surely more open to those relationships than they used to be, but far from as open as they will be once the advantages become clear. Too many manufacturers continue to rely on distribution and retailing to insulate and isolate them from helpful direct relationships between the human beings who use gear and the human beings who make them. Too much of that relationship continues to be mediated on the supply side by marketing, legal and other departments that like to keep engineers isolated from markets. That will change. The engineeers will break out, and the customers will break in. Both will be helped by customers who also manufacture. In the case of photography, we have a world where everybody is a producer as well as a consumer. In fact, the ratio of production to consumption, across the market is higher than ever. |
| | There will always be mediation in markets. And we have a long way to go before the zero-ing force of the big broad Net finishes remediating a hundred and fifty years of industrial-grade distance. Even then, the results will still be what Dr. Weinberger calls "lumpy". But they'll be healthier than what we've had for far too long. |
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