Why Information Is Not Free: The Myth of Frictionless Capitalism...

Information is the lifeblood of markets - knowing what is available, where it's available, and who wants it are crucial. Internet talking-heads have long insisted that, in the Digital Age, information wants to be free. But is this really the case?

In his book, Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, John McMillan argues that, in fact, it is not case.

When we think of internet economics from a consumer-driven perspective, we think of comparison shopping. The search costs involved in finding the best price for a specific item have been greatly reduced by people's new ability to simply Google that item and see, within a matter of seconds, which seller is offering it at the lowest price. It's not rocket science to see how the balance of bargaining power has shifted to consumers.

And from the sellers' perspective, using information to match demand and serve the demand also creates positive economic externalities. This is what Bill Gates has referred to as "friction-free capitalism".

This all sounds logical in theory, however the results haven't always panned out as expected.

While it's true that the ease of comparison shopping on the internet has brought a perceptible lowering of prices, as economic theory predicts, it has failed to eliminate the dispersion of prices. What this means is that the same book might cost $19.99 on Amazon, but &16.99 on Barnes & Noble.com, and $12.99 on Books.com. In fact, if you perform a comparison shop on almost any item, it's striking how different prices on the same item remain despite the sellers' knowledge that many consumers comparison shop so easily on the Web. According to one study, the typical price dispersion was 37% for books and 25% for CDs. For books, there is actually more price variation among internet retailers than among bricks-and-mortar retailers.

Thus, the ready availability of "free" price information has not driven prices of identical items into alignment. This is something of a puzzle. McMillan says this can possibly be explained by 1) the laziness of shoppers to search for the lowest price, 2) the reliability of the seller, and 3) trust in the proprietor's judgment. Basically, the shopper is not simply buying a book, but a package of services of which the book itself is only a part. "Apparently, homogeneous items often are not actually homogeneous: it matters where you buy them".

This hardly paints a picture of frictionless capitalism. There are still clear search and transaction costs involved in the functioning of even the most modern digital markets, and that's a point worth remembering to those who tend to oversimplify E-business models.

What Stewart Brand once said still holds true... "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. [It] wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient".

  

How the Internet Fails to Redress Participatory Inequality in American Politics...

Since its inception people have touted the internet's potential as a democratizing force; that it would transcend issues like geography, income, and education levels, ultimately empowering more Americans to participate actively in politics.

Has it lived up to its promise?

This is the question asked in the article, "Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet" co-authored by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady, and published in the journal, Perspectives on Politics (vol. 8 no. 2).

In short, the answer is "No". The authors' extensive research study uncovered that, when it comes to political participation, the internet has failed to ameliorate the inequalities that have existed offline for decades. As any freshman student of Politics 101 learns, those who are disadvantaged are less likely to be politically active, and thus far the internet has failed to disrupt the pattern of association between that socio-economic disadvantage and the lack of political activity.

Even when only that subset of the population with internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline.

The are three reasons why people don't become active in politics: They can't; they don't want to; and nobody asked. The internet is certainly capable of lowering each of these barriers, however, rather than raising the level of political activity, it has instead simply "repackaged" it. The authors conclude that "instead of citizens undertaking political action that they ordinarily would not, people who would have participated anyway might simply be taking their activity online".

A convincing amount of data is presented in support of these conclusions (even if the multitude of charts and graphs require strenuous effort to decipher), and most potential criticisms of the research methodology, like the outdated 2008 time frame, is openly addressed and acknowledged by the authors themselves.

These results are certainly disappointing, but perhaps the most important finding is that, while the internet has failed to transcend the socio-economic inequalities of political participation, it has actually shown a real potential to mitigate a different participatory deficit - the youth. It's common knowledge that younger citizens, particularly those just joining the electorate, are notorious for being less politically engaged (especially when it comes to voting). The internet has indeed demonstrated a transformative shift among America's online youth as they are less underrepresented than they are offline. In fact, they dominate blogs and politically relevant uses of social-networking sites, and are more likely than their elders to receive and send requests for political activity by email.

So if the internet has virtually no effect on the political participation gap among socio-economic groups, but is showing some potentially significant effects on the political habits of youth voters, the original question remains unanswered...

To what extent is it a truly democratizing force?

  

ASCAP and the Copyright Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers...

One of the reasons why the digital copyright debate rages on is its often-overlooked complexity and the fact that there are no clear solutions. Both the copyright and copyleft have valid arguments, and to dismiss that haphazardly is to fuel fire to the extremists on both sides, ultimately hindering any efforts at badly needed legal reform.

Several days ago I had a long and thoughtful discussion with an employee of ASCAP - the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Their primary task is to defend strong copyright protection and collect royalties for artists.

ASCAP created a Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers a while ago. Taking the point-of-view of the artist, it lays out, what any serious observer would have to admit are, in most cases, very reasonable principles...

1. We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate.
   
   
2. We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.
   
   
3. We have the right to withhold permission for uses of our works on artistic, economic or philosophical grounds.
   
   
4. We have the right to protect our creative works to the fullest extent of the law from all forms of piracy, theft and unauthorized use, which deprive us of our right to earn a living based on our creativity.
   
   
5. We have the right to choose when and where our creative works may be used for free.
   
   
6. We have the right to develop, document and distribute our works through new media channels - while retaining the right to a share in all associated profits.
   
   
7. We have the right to choose the organizations we want to represent us and to join our voices together to protect our rights and negotiate for the value of our music.
   
   
8. We have the right to earn compensation from all types of "performances," including direct, live renditions as well as indirect recordings, broadcasts, digital streams and more.
   
   
9. We have the right to decline participation in business models that require us to relinquish all or part of our creative rights - or which do not respect our right to be compensated for our work.
   
   
10. We have the right to advocate for strong laws protecting our creative works, and demand that our government vigorously uphold and protect our rights.

Artists definitely deserve their just compensation. The problem is that hardly anyone disagrees with that point. Even the most staunchest advocates of the copyleft movement, including Lawrence Lessig himself, believe that the interests of artists need to be served - they simply seek to preserve the balance between those interests and the public domain.

In other words, where ASCAP goes wrong is not in the principles they lay out in their Bill of Rights; it's in their extreme and sometimes overly harsh attempts to protect copyrights at all costs.

For example, in the past, ASCAP has come under heavy scrutiny for threatening to sue the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts of America for not paying licensing fees when they sang copyrighted songs in summer camps. Also, ASCAP has pursued a strategy of cracking down by demanding royalty fees from any club that holds an open mic night (even if most of the songs performed are originals), and has even sued a Manhattan pub for playing Bruce Springsteen songs over its jukebox.

Thus, the same reasonable observer who can see the validity in the Artists' Bill of Rights can also see the perversity of ASCAP's tactics in sometimes trying to implement it.

All of which reinforces the urgent need for copyright REFORM. As I've said before in this space, to frame the issue in black-and-white as being between artists versus pirates is a gross oversimplification. Sure, there are extremists on both sides, and suing the Girl Scouts for singing "Happy Birthday" is just as ridiculous as those on the copyleft who try to justify straight-up piracy. But where this debate is actually occurring in serious circles is how to reform copyright laws in order to preserve artists' rights while simultaneously maintaining a healthy public domain.

Any ultimate solution will have to follow that path.

  

How Congress Communicates on the Internet...

Much has been written in recent years about how internet technologies are changing the ways in which members of Congress engage the public. However, what's been less frequently discussed is how such innovations have spurred Congress to alter the way it operates as an institution.

In a study by Colleen J. Shogun of the Congressional Research Service, and published in April's Political Science & Politics Journal (Vol. 43, No. 2), some statistical light is shed on this topic...

• In 1997, the last year without widespread email use in Congress, the House and Senate received a total of 30.5 million pieces of postal mail. By 2007, the combined total of emails and postal mail communications received was 491.6 million. That's over a 1500% increase in 10 years.
  
  
• As far as how members of Congress communicate with each other, use of the exclusive "Dear Colleague" system, which enables members to send communications to other members about proposed legislation, committee action, briefings, chamber procedural issues, etc., has gone from 5,000 messages sent in 2003 to over 17,000 in 2009. That's a 240% increase in 6 years.
  
  
• As members have quickly adopted Twitter as a favorite medium, a relatively small study of member tweets found that, in the summer of 2009, out of 1187 tweets, 69.8% originates from House Republicans, while only 14% came from House Democrats, and the remainder from members of the Senate.
  
  
  • Not only did more House Republicans use Twitter than their Democratic counterparts, they also tweeted more frequently.
    
    
  • Furthermore, out of those same tweets, 46.9% either provided links to other websites or or called attention to media activities of the member, such as being on a television show. 25% described an official action the member had taken on the floor or in committee, and 12.4% described the members position on an issue. Only 1.4% were direct replies to other tweets.

It's difficult to read too much into these numbers - the largest obstacle being that the statistics aren't current enough. Year-old studies may be fine for most policy research, but not for internet usage metrics (as any webmaster will tell you).

Nevertheless, the author lists a few possible ramifications of this dramatic increase in direct member-constituent dialogue: 1) that the trustee model of representation might wither, 2) that the "iron triangle" model of policymaking might need to develop into a four-sided structure to incorporate direct input from the public (meaning, interest groups could see their influence weaken), and 3) that congressional staff responsibilities may have to shift in order to handle the higher volume of constituent communications.

These points can all be debated, however, what seems to be indisputable in study after study is how internet technologies truly have altered some of our oldest and most fundamental institutions. But let's not go completely ga-ga just yet. After all, Congress still has standing bans on laptops, Blackberries, and cellphones on its different chamber floors.

  

The Internet-Versus-Books Debate...

In a very thought-provoking piece today in the New York Times, David Brooks argues that while the internet is good at helping people become more knowledgeable and well-informed, books are still better at making people more "cultivated".

What does this mean? Well, he begins by citing a number of research studies highlighting that 1) children reading books leads to significant educational gains, and 2) broadband internet access is not necessarily good for kids and may actually be harmful to their academic performance.

If this is the basis for his argument then it's not hard to question those assumptions and cast doubt on everything that follows. For starters, internet access and book ownership are hardly ever mutually exclusive - usually kids with broadband read books too. Having both would seem to render any conclusions about one or the other rather murky.

Second, as Brooks himself responsibly points out, there is also contrarian evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention.

Look, I'm not one of the zealots who believes the internet is a panacea for all educational shortcomings, and certainly don't deny its ability to reduce attention spans. But it's still an enormous leap to say that having internet access is actually harmful to academic performance. After all, does anyone really believe that their children would be more empowered for school and improve their chances of going to college by getting rid of all the computers in their home?

Where Brooks makes a more valid point is in his assessment of what it means to be "cultivated" and how to get there. He begins by reviewing the differences in approach that are involved in the internet-versus-books debate...

What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference... Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation...

And in a terrific description of the benefits of reading in general, he goes on to say...

The literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.

Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.

It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.

This is a potentially fabulous way of looking at the current dynamic. However, caution should, as always, be exercised here as well. Lost in this entire discussion is the importance of WHAT people are reading online.

And, yes, that matters.

  

YouTube and the 2008 Elections...

Here are a quick set of links to some favorite articles in this month's Journal of Information Technology and Politics - a journal that I am active in contributing towards, and all centered around a common theme... YouTube and the 2008 Elections.

Note: Not all of the articles are publicly accessible. For those that aren't, you'll need to login through an academic account or library.

• “Yes We Can”: How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements, and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon
  
  • by Kevin Wallsten
  
  
  
• Congressional Candidates' Use of YouTube in 2008: Its Frequency and Rationale
  
  • by Girish J. “Jeff” Gulati; Christine B. Williams
  
  
  
• Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization?
  
  • by David Karpf
  
  
  
• Online Video “Friends” Social Networking: Overlapping Online Public Spheres in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
  
  • by Scott P. Robertsonab; Ravi K. Vatrapuc; Richard Medina
  
  
  
• The Obamachine: Technopolitics 2.0
  
  • by Cheris A. Carpenter
  
  

Some of this research data is fascinating, as not all of it supports widespread beliefs about the relationship between politics and the internet. But for those of you non-academics with only a passing interest on the subject, if nothing else, this list is a strong indication of the many directions in which this burgeoning research field is heading.

  

Social Network Users' Bill of Rights...

One of the goals of the recent ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy was to collectively draft a Bill of Rights for online social-network users. They successfully did so, but to what effect?

The goals of this Bill of Rights were rather murky from the outset. As stated on the ACM blog before the conference took place...

A bill of rights sends a message to sites about what their users expect. With enough momentum, it can give user-focused commercial open-source projects an opportunity to distinguish themselves by adopting the rights — and highlight the sites who aren’t willing to. It’s also a way of providing input in the ongoing debates about legislation and regulation. And just as importantly, the discussions around a bill of rights are a great opportunity for education and debate about what kind of online society we want to create.

It's obviously well-intentioned; also, a little hokey.

Take a look for yourself at the final draft of the Social Network Users' Bill of Rights which was ultimately passed by conference attendees.

Of the 14 articles, 13 of them were approved by a unanimous vote. Unanimous! In a technology community defined by the fierce independence of its individuals, this is nothing short of extraordinary - and should have been the first indication that any real substantive issues had failed to be addressed in a meaningful way.

Additionally, the plan is to now present this document to the major social-networking companies. It doesn't take a Facebook power-user to recognize that those companies might have a wee bit of a problem with articles like #9 on Data Portability (which would make it easier for people to switch their profiles to a different social-networking website).

Also, article #12's "Right to Self-Define", which would guarantee people's rights to create more than one identity and use pseudonyms, seems like a recipe for disaster. Not only would that exacerbate problems like online sexual predators, but would greatly hamper law enforcement as well. And really, who even wants this? Reverting back to the early MySpace and Friendster days is hardly high on users' agendas. If anything, this may have been one arena where social-networking sites have actually been getting it right. Ah, irony.

Most of the remainder of the Bill of Rights, again, is well-intentioned and has its heart in the right place. But it's little more than a vague set of general principles. How anyone can think this document will produce meaningful effects is beyond me.

  

Google Adds SSL Encrypted Search...

Online privacy and security advocates have been quite busy lately going after Facebook, but Google is trying to throw them a bone and pre-empt any future and inevitable complaints about the search giant.

As the Official Google Blog reports, the company is now offering a service where users can search the internet using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Basically, this common form of security (you recognize it by sites that begin with https://) encrypts the information sent between your computer and their service. All communications, like your search terms and search results pages, are protected from the prying eyes of third parties on your network.

The new encrypted site, https://www.google.com, isn't foolproof, however, and, to Google's credit, they make that very clear...

Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.

A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode.

This is clearly a step in the right direction, but for those who are truly concerned about online privacy, the caveat about how Google will still maintain all of your search data only adds fuel to the fire that much more needs to be done. It's a great question for the Digital Age... Who do you fear more - the rogue hacker or the giant corporations who know everything about you?

  

How to Geotag Your Digital Photos for Flickr, Google Earth, etc...

On a recent overseas voyage, I was struck by a new technology that has apparently become commonplace... integrated GPS devices on digital cameras.

The idea is simple. New medium- and high- end digital cameras allow you to add-on a small GPS attachment that locks directly onto the camera itself. Its purpose is to tag all of your photos with the exact location in which they were taken, and that data can then be played around with on a myriad of websites and through programmable APIs.

It's a fabulous innovation for digital photography geeks. And there's still more. You don't even necessarily have to buy a GPS device for your camera. While that's still the most convenient way to "geotag" your photos, you can also use some online tools to do it for you after the fact.

For instance, take a look at this map of geotagged photos - created just for the purposes of demonstration, and in under 10 minutes. You can click on a location and see the pictures from that particular place.

How can you do this? The easiest way is to actually buy the GPS attachment. Check out this product list of reviews. Most cost between $75 - $125.

The other (and free) method of geotagging is to upload your photos to Flickr. I recommend this terrific step-by-step tutorial by MAKE magazine, which is a little outdated but still very helpful for newbies. It also explains how you can integrate your geotagged photos with Google Earth.

Once you're pictures have been uploaded, Flickr makes the rest super-easy by including a link for each photo labeled, "Add to My Map". Just click it, find your location, and you're done. For Google Earth, there is the additional step of having to include tags for latitude and longitude coordinates.

Geotagging might become additionally valuable looking forward as developers can engineer even more useful apps by programming with the relatively open APIs of Flickr, Google, and other websites. If you're a big photography buff, you probably stopped reading this post after the first paragraph because it's such "old news". But some of us - myself included - hadn't yet been clued in.

  

Does MG Siegler Write About Anything Except the iPhone?

The following article was written by an anonymous contributor and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Nerfherder.

Does TechCrunch's MG Siegler Write About Anything Except the iPhone? The answer is yes - he also writes about Google, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. But not a ton else. As of yesterday, May 24, MG Siegler had written just over 500 articles in 2010 for TechCrunch. Of that bunch, approximately 65% of his articles had some mention of Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and/or Foursquare (or some derivative of these companies) in the title. Here's the breakdown:

Surprisingly, at least to me, Google edges out Apple (iPhone, iPad, etc.). I could have sworn the dude wrote more about the iPhone than anything else, so it turns out this investigation was not all done in vain - I learned something new.

Probably the second stand-out point is the disproportionate attention paid to Foursquare, a startup who is building a mobile location-based social network. Sure Foursquare only occupies 7% of MG's mind share, but the company is only one-year old. Its significance in the tech world pales in comparison to the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and even Twitter. In his own words, MG Siegler is giving Foursquare a "big, wet kiss".

Numbers aside, here are some of my personal favorites served up by MG in 2010. He has a special knack unlike any other for smashing buzz terms into a title for the purposes of link-baiting:

• Google TV Vs. Apple TV Is Android Vs. iPhone Round 2
• Google Buzz Could Have Dominated Location. (And Snuck Up On Facebook And Twitter.)
• Report: Facebook Location Coming In A Few Weeks. But Is It Foursquare Or Twitter?

In fact today's article entitled To Top Off A Busy Day, Yahoo Acquires Foursquare — Well, The Asian Foursquare makes me chuckle. The article is about Yahoo's acquisition of Koprol, not Foursquare. But who cares? It's all about linkage.

I'll close out on one other favorite where MG wrote about Bloom Energy the day after a piece ran on CBS' 60 Minutes. The article garnered nearly 150 comments (and counting). Is MG an expert on green technology? Of course not, but his timing was impeccable. Web surfers were eager to read more about Bloom Energy on Monday morning, slamming the search engines for content only to end up at TechCrunch - the site with the latest and greatest article with information pertaining to Bloom. And MG made sure to mention "Google" in the article's title. Well done sir!

  

MakerBot Homebrew 3D Printer Products

About a year ago I had the pleasure of turning on the head Nerfherder on to the insanely cool world of 3D printers.

3D printers are one of the big "signs of the future" and they have the potential to completely alter the traditional production process for hard goods of all shapes and sizes.

One of the cooler 3D printer options available for home-use is the MakerBot, a DIY 3D printer that can get you in the game for around $1000.

A recent contest held by Make: Online resulted in some sweet designs, like these stereoscopic viewers:


(this is a guest post from David Title)

  

Mass Appeal vs. Cult Appeal :: Jay Leno vs. Team CoCo

Internet analysts and Web entrepreneurs have been arguing over this for quite some time. Is it better to have huge amounts of traffic or a significantly smaller, but more loyal, number of followers? Or, to put it another way, when it comes to your audience, is it better to have quantity or quality?

A lot of my readers, immersed in online social-networks and contributing to websites based on user-generated content, might assume that quality is the answer. The digerati wisdom suggests that 50 very loyal followers are more valuable than 5000 daily random page hits. But actual website owners and blog authors who obsess over their analytics each night and rely on Google Ads to make their money might sometimes disagree.

The late-night TV wars bear these arguments out as well. James Poniewozik writes in Time Magazine this week that Jay Leno represents "the last of the big-tent comics, dedicated to the principle of something for everybody". Meanwhile, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien and his "Team CoCo" have now come to embody the niche-media model, where success is measured by the intensity level of your followers, not the absolute number of them.

Conan and TBS are betting it is better to have a smaller group of fans who care intensely about what you do than a bigger number who care just enough to not change the channel. It doesn't apply only to comedians. More people watch Brian Williams every night than Glenn Beck; that doesn't make Williams more influential.

Indeed, it is certainly possible that the right cult audience can generate an outsize influence. But in the debate over mass appeal vs. cult appeal, let us remember that while the loyal cult audience is a highly romanticized notion, it rarely translates into greater monetization. We'd all rather celebrate the local microbrewery that doesn't water down its taste to the lowest common denominator, but nevertheless it's still Budweiser that rakes in the big bucks.

  

Ham Radio Versus ChatRoulette

There has been an endless stream of commentary about the explosion of popularity for ChatRoulette - a service which allows you to make brief, random connections with strangers all over the world. At first, it seemed likesomething wholly unique to this age of the internet but then I had a flash of recognition - ChatRoulette is really just a modern-day equivalent to amateur, or "ham" radio.

In the dark days before the internet shined its bright light into all of our lives, my cousin was an avid ham radio user.

Here is how Wikipedia describes "ham radio" -

Amateur radio, often called ham radio, is both a hobby and a service in which participants, called "hams," use various types of radio communications equipment to communicate with other radio amateurs for public services, recreation and self-training

.

In the early-1980's, when my cousin was in his teens I would watch in awe as he would send and receive morse code with people around the world. He had just passed his big license test - yes, you had to be licensed and prove your morse code ability - and had made up his own postcards which he would trade with other hams. Before long he had advanced to the level of actual voice communications and to this day I remember the call-sign since he would broadcast it in that special phonetic code - "Kilowatt Alpha Two Indigo Tango Sierra" or KA2-ITS.

All night he would sit at his massive rig and try to reach further and further around the globe, tweaking the dial to cut through the white noise and sonic glitches. Sometimes, if the sun-spots were just right he could reach all the was to Australia and beyond. Strange voices would crackle out of a tiny speaker (or over headphones if it was late) and call-signs would be exchanged. These conversations rarely lasted longer than a couple of minutes - it was all about making new contacts, seeing how far you could reach.

Sure, ChatRoulette has upped the ante with images (and appearance of male genitalia) but in many ways, the impulses driving users are not so different from what drove my cousin and his fellow hams.

The biggest difference, in fact, was that the bar for entry was much higher for hams - you needed special, often expensive, equipment and you needed to be fluent in morse code. This kept out the casual user and made for a more intense sense of community.

Ham radio persists even today and while ChatRoulette can offer you a 1-in-a-1,000,000 chance to see a topless girl, nothing can beat the mystical enchantment of a strange voice reaching out over the radio waves.

(this is a guest post from David Title)

  

The Political Habits of Blog Readers...

With the ascendency of cable news and the internet as political forums over the past 15 years, the buzz-phrase, "echo chamber", has become a familiar description of how people gravitate towards TV shows and websites that accord with their existing political beliefs. The thinking has been that liberals frequent liberal media outlets, and conservatives follow those that are conservative, as a means of reinforcing their positions, ultimately leading to people becoming more firmly entrenched in their views, and also, consequently, more polarized.

But is this characterization of political echo chambers accurate?

There is plenty of research in support of it. Most recently, in an article by Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell titled, "Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics", in the Perspectives on Politics academic journal, new data is presented that demonstrates the following...

1. Blog readers do, indeed, gravitate towards blogs that accord with their own political beliefs.
   
   
2. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum.
   
   
3. Those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart.
   
   
4. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as U.S. senators.
   
   
5. Blog readers also participate more in politics than non-blog-readers.
   
   
6. Readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively left-wing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs.
   

It's this type of data that has led pundits like David Brooks of the New York Times to wonder if, instead of a public square, we could end up with a collection of information cocoons, and others like Cass Sunstein to question whether the internet is really a blessing for democracy at all.

However, another recent study contradicts those findings, and with it, the conventional wisdom. Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, both of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, published a recent study on ideological segregation and found that, yes, a person who visited only Fox News would have more overlap with conservatives than 99 percent of internet news users, and a person who only went to The New York Times’s site would have more liberal overlap than 95 percent of users. But the core finding is that most internet users do not stay within their communities. Most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News.

Even when they leave these integrated sites, they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves. People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck’s Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times’s Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users. Even white supremacists and neo-Nazis travel far and wide across the Web.

It is so easy to click over to another site that people travel widely. And they’re not even following links most of the time; they have their own traveling patterns.

Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association — like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You’re more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood.

This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered...

If there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.

Blog readers as "ideological Jack Kerouacs"?! That fabulous line is nothing short of a complete re-characterization of this entire political dynamic.

I suppose the thing to take away from all of this, besides just a few interesting talking points for cocktail parties, is that the jury is still out. The truth is that there is indeed a "paucity" of research on political blogs, and a primary task for academics will be to understand the causal impact of reading them. But certainly, we should at least question our basic assumptions on this topic.

  

Justifying Limitations on Copyright...

In this ongoing digital debate, there are those who believe that the idea of copyright is sacrosanct, and that copyrighted material can never be used without the author's permission. Of course, those individuals are completely clueless about actual copyright law, which expressly allows the fair use of such material for a range of purposes including commentary, criticism, satire, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship.

One problem that Fair Use advocates always run into is how to quantify the value of such unauthorized uses of copyrighted works with a positive social value. After all, when the movie and music industries cite statistics on exactly how much money is lost to digital piracy, it would be nice to have some quantitative data to counter them.

Well, according to a new study by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, and reported on the Google Public Policy Blog, $4.7 trillion is the amount of revenue generated in the U.S. by the “fair use economy” -- industries that rely on fair use and other limitations on copyright. They account for 1/6th of U.S. GDP, one out of eight jobs, and $281 billion in exports.

Copyright law not only provides artists with certain protections, but also includes important limitations that promote innovation and legitimate re-use of information.

For example, without limits on copyright, search engines would not exist. Indexing the Web would be illegal, because that requires creating a copy of websites first.

The importance of well-designed copyright goes much further, though. iPods, Tivos, and any other digital media device that is capable of making copies depends on balanced copyright.

This is what is meant by calling for "copyright reform". It is not, in any way, a call for the abolition of creators' rights, but rather is a call for legislation that ensures that fair use remains possible. Digital technologies have been used in recent years both to enable individuals to pirate copyrighted works and to empower corporations to restrict the fair use "copying" of those works as well. Reform involves re-balancing the two, and having the law recognize a new equilibrium appropriate for the 21st-century.

  

Jon Stewart Rips Into Apple...

Fast-forward to 5:25. When even the Daily Show is blasting Apple for acting like a tyrannical Big Brother, you know that this is no longer an issue where only lunatics are taking up the cause.

Best lines...

“You guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes. What the f**k is going on?”

“Apple you guys were the rebels man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming The Man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man!”

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Facebook Fan Pages as Business Model...

A question recently came up in a conversation about marketing one's presence in cyberspace. It was regarding an individual whose public persona was also their business; similar to, say, a paid speaker.

The question... Is it better to use your Facebook Fan Page to drive traffic to your website; or use your website to drive traffic to your Facebook Fan Page?

To be honest, this question blew my mind a little bit. Call me old-fashioned, but I would have assumed that a person's or a business's website was their central hub, and that other marketing efforts would merely be considered supplementary - their entire purpose being to help brand one's product or service, ultimately driving traffic to their primary website. However, when my friend contradicted that idea (and actually put it into practice), it raised my curiosity.

Time for a little research. Using Facebook Fan Pages as the test case (since that is what my friend uses as his primary online marketing vehicle in place of his website), what we find are the not-surprising statistics that social media pages get far less traffic than websites, but they get more valuable traffic.

Facebook Fans are valued at an average of $3.60 a piece in earned media for big brands. Compare that to the approximate 20 cent value of each website visitor using a Pay-per-click (PPC) formula - although this number varies widely depending on the website.

Granted, one should be somewhat sceptical of this data, but it's at least a reasonable starting point for dialogue.

If we take a look at the overall most popular Facebook Fan Pages, what we find is that the number of fans is usually quite paltry in comparison to the amount of traffic that their website counterparts accumulate. Starbucks and Coca-Cola are among the leading brands and even they only have between 5 and 6 million fans. As far as putting this back in the context of our original question, the numbers can also be broken down by consumer product, by celebrities/public figures, by TV shows, and more. The data indicates that even the absolute most popular Facebook Fan Pages struggle to exceed a few million fans. And I guarantee that Megan Fox (currently the #2 celebrity on the list) gets more traffic to her website and through Google searches than is reflected by her 6.4 million Facebook Fans.

The great counter to all of this, however, revolves around monetization. Who cares, opponents say, how many people visit your site? What you really want is a loyal group of followers willing to promote you through the tight bonds of networking because that's what will ultimately lead to bigger and better things, including more money.

Frankly, I'm still not convinced. Is anyone really earning more cash from Facebook Ads than they are through Google AdSense? I'd like to hear if anybody can share some success stories about individuals who've actually converted their number of Facebook Fans into a reliable revenue-stream. I certainly haven't heard of any, and it's hard for me to imagine that scenario. Unless I'm missing something, there still doesn't seem to be any advantage in using a Facebook Fan Page as one's central online marketing hub.

Then again, I've been wrong before.

  

Netflix and Wii: A Match Made in Heaven...

The only reason online streaming video hasn't completely taken over the world is that, when you want to watch a movie or TV show off the internet, most of us have the unfortunate choice of either watching it on our small computer screens or else forgoing online video altogether and reverting back to physical DVDs.

Well, in case you missed it, Netflix has solved that problem. Following the path already taken by Playstation 3 and XBox 360, Netflix subscribers who own a Nintendo Wii can now stream thousands of Netflix movies and TV shows from the internet directly onto their large-screen family-room television. This doesn't replace getting physical DVDs in the mail; it is in addition to it, and at no extra cost.

If you're looking for a review, I'll give it to you. I set this up yesterday in my apartment, it took all of three minutes, and now it's the greatest thing in the world! Really, I haven't been so excited about a home technology gadget in years. Now, while I still churn slowly through my Netflix queue of getting 40 DVDs in the mail, I can instantly watch thousands of movies and TV shows without missing a beat. Last night, the Nerfherder Gal and I had a "Weeds: Season 1" marathon, because we've never seen the show and do not subscribe to Showtime, and it was all at no extra cost, on the big-screen instead of a computer monitor, and completely streamed by Netflix through my Wii.

This is one of those rare moments where you get a clarified glimpse of the future. Is Nintendo still even primarily a gaming console? Hulu first illustrated the real potential of online streaming video combined with high-production content. This Netflix-Wii partnership steps it up to another level. Honestly, if Netflix could make a deal with ESPN and the Food Network to stream its content as well, and if Hulu could be similarly delivered to my television, I'd feel comfortable cancelling my monthly cable subscription entirely.

It's coming.

  

Twitter Tries to Make Money (Finally)...

For a company said to be valued at around a billion dollars, Twitter still earns almost no money. Well, that's about to change. Maybe. The company announced yesterday that it would start launching "Promoted Tweets", or short advertisements, as a new method of bringing in revenue.

Some Twitter users are calling this a "sell-out" move. But really, Twitter is a business, and for one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web, how could they not reasonably try to capitalize on that success?

Moving towards a Google-style advertisement-supported business model, their plan is to, first, include Promoted Tweets at the top of search results, and, second, to then display them in users' personal streams. As Wired comments, this plan is also intended to have a few cascading effects...

While Twitter.com is a popular destination, millions of people use desktop and smartphone apps for the service and rarely use the site at all. Some of those apps themselves have ads which Twitter gets no cut from — including Tweetie for the Mac and iPhone, made by a atebits, a company Twitter bought last week. Because Promoted Tweets will appear in search results on Twitter apps too, the company will get a piece of the action on those platforms as well.

However, TechCrunch is a little sceptical as to how well the advertising model will ultimately work...

Quite frankly, counting impressions, clicks or retweets isn’t all that interesting. And there is nothing to indicate so far that clickthrough rates or other conventional advertising metrics will perform any better on a promoted Tweet than in a search ad. My guess is it will probably perform worse because there are just so many more commercially-oriented searches on Google than there will ever be on Twitter.

There is, of course, the inevitable user backlash to consider as well. 71% of users are apparently perceiving this development in a negative light. But that's a predictable initial reaction that I would expect to fade away over time - it's similar to how Facebook users held a boycott to protest the new "live feeds" feature in 2006, yet didn't slow the growth of their userbase at all. (Boy, does that seem like a relic now).

I say let Twitter try to make money from advertising. Why not? As long as it remains relatively unobtrusive users will grow to accept it, just as they did on Google, on other sites, and in other mediums.

My bigger complaint is with the changing culture on Twitter recently. Whereas it used to be a fantastic place to have conversations and interact with like-minded people, it's really transformed into a one-way broadcasting platform, mainly for already-established peronalities and news outlets. It used to be that if you followed someone they'd follow you back, almost every time. Now there are way too many accounts where people have thousands of followers but they're only following about a dozen people themselves. Or have staff writers controlling their twitstream for them.

It may be something of a rant, but forget advertising. If Twitter doesn't put the "social" back into the social-networking aspect of the site, that's the real threat to the continued growth of its userbase.

  

The Adobe-Apple Flame War...

Who says that computer programming is boring?

An epic fight is occurring right now between two corporate giants of the IT world - Adobe and Apple. It started last week when Apple decided that only apps written in the native programming languages of C, Objective-C, or C++ could be run on the iPhone OS. This meant that Adobe programs that use Flash were effectively banned on iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads.

Adobe responded first by created a clever workaround - a Flash-to-iPhone compiler, which for you non-programmers is a simple tool that sucks in Flash code and spits out iPhone OS code. However, Apple immediately changed its license agreement to prohibit such cross-compilers as well.

Now for the juicy part. Lee Brimelow, the platform evangelist for Adobe, blogged a scathing criticism of Apple that has since caught fire in cyberspace...

This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple’s devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe.

Brimelow's post concludes with the not-too-subtle statement, "Go screw yourself Apple".

Other big names have since weighed in as well. The Tao Effect's Greg Slepak replied to a missive by non-other than Steve Jobs himself by saying...

You didn't need this clause to get to where you are now with the iPhone's market share, adding it just makes people lose respect for you and run for the hills.... From a developer's point of view, you're limiting creativity itself... There are plenty of [applications] written using cross-platform frameworks that are amazing, that he himself has praised. Mozilla's Firefox just being one of them.

Now, of course, a Facebook group has emerged named, "I'm for Adobe". In its manifesto, it states, "There is no longer any debate as to who the “bad guy” is in this story — Apple has proven themselves to be anti-competition, anti-developer, and anti-consumer. I stand with Adobe."

Adobe's John Dowdell has even tweeted that Apple's policies are analogous to China's intolerance of religion, and even compared them to the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.

All this stink over which computer programming language to use.

My readers can guess where I stand on this issue. I've been arguing for years already that Apple's policies are anti-developer and a killer of innovation. Their decision to prohibit Flash and all languages other than those of the C-family isn't surprising. It's just the next step in the slippery slope they've been pursuing for quite some time now. When will anyone listen?

In the meantime, Megan Lavey is right when she says that most of the 85 million iPhone OS users "don't care how those apps are created as long as the app experience is compelling -- they wouldn't know an IDE from an SDK, or be able to tell Xcode from Flash on a bet".

For a topic filled with such geek-speak, this flame war has passions running mighty high. And it's only the beginning...