Author: Mathew Ingram

If you’ve been following the newspaper industry at all over the past year or so, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that 2009 was the worst year in decades as far as advertising revenues are concerned. But the sheer scale of the declines over the past few years is staggering. Last year saw a drop of 28 percent from 2008 –- and that year was already the worst for the industry since the Depression. Over the past four years, print advertising revenue has plummeted by more than 47 percent, to $24 billion from $47 billion. Online advertising has been growing (except for last year, when it shrank by 11 percent), but it still amounts to just 10 percent of what papers make from print. If you’re interested, the full numbers in all their gloom are available here.

According to the New York Times, the last time advertisers spent such a small amount on newspaper ads was in 1986. But Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review notes that if you use inflation-adjusted dollars, the last time newspapers took in less in ad revenue was actually even further back — around the time John F. Kennedy died. Depressed yet? The head of the Newspaper Association of America, John Sturm, came out with this ray of sunshine in a response to Martin Langeveld at the Nieman Journalism Lab:

The velocity of the advertising decline for print classifieds continued to moderate, and adverse trends for national advertising and newspaper Web sites lessened considerably as last year came to a close.

While it’s great to hear that the velocity of the decline is moderating (remind me to tell that to someone the next time their parachute fails to open at around 10,000 feet), there are no signs that those figures are rebounding at all — and in fact, former newspaper executive Alan “Newsosaur” Mutter says that things could get even worse. Nor is there any indication that online advertising revenue is going to make up more than a thimbleful of that gap any time soon. If anything, online ad rates have been falling, at least for the kind of broad, mass-market reader that newspaper web sites cater to, because of the vast explosion of inventory from providers such as Demand Media and Associated Content.

So what are newspapers doing about it? Well, the main thing they seem to be doing is putting up walls. The Times of London said it will soon charge users for access to its web sites at the rate of 1 pound ($1.49) for a day and 2 pounds for a week under the mistaken impression that the way to determine the value of something is to put a price on it (the only way, of course, is to find someone willing to buy it). Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is turning to new technologies such as the Apple iPad — but is taking a distinctly old-school approach to the new device, saying it’s planning to charge $17.99 a month for the newspaper on the iPad (this interesting fact appeared at the very bottom of a story in the Journal itself, quoting someone described as “a person familiar with the matter”).

So will this plan help turn the WSJ into a money machine? Possibly, although CJR contributor Ryan Chittum argues that the proposed pricing “doesn’t make sense.” As he explains:

A WSJ.com subscription costs less than half — $8.62 a week. A print subscription delivered to your door costs just $9.92 a month. A print and online subscription costs $11.66 a month. But you’re going to charge $18 for the iPad app?

So if the iPad isn’t going to rescue the traditional media, what does the future hold for newspapers? Although it’s still too early to tell whether it will succeed, a model based on what David Weinberger has called “small pieces, loosely joined” seems to be emerging, with third-party sites such as GlobalPost and Politico and others filling in the gaps left by newspapers. And former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie suggests that non-profits can also help. Or do newspaper companies need to “burn the boats” and focus entirely online, as Marc Andreessen suggested recently? (Note: Please don’t beat me up about how Cortes didn’t actually burn the boats — that’s irrelevant for the purposes of the metaphor). Perhaps we should we just wait for Russian billionaires to buy them all.

The reality is that most newspapers simply don’t appreciate how different the online world is when it comes to content. Too many are still laboring under the misapprehension that the Web is just like print, except without all the tree-killing — you put your content on there just like it was in the paper version (except maybe you add a link or two, or a video clip) and readers line up to read it, and you go home. There are a few exceptions, of course, such as The Guardian — but even it has been struggling for profitability, weighed down by its legacy print operations. Too few mainstream media outlets realize that despite their similarities, the world of digital content is completely different from the world of print publishing, and needs to be thought of and treated differently. And walls don’t help.

For a great overview of the issues confronting traditional media in a digital world, check out this video of Clay Shirky speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School last year, in a talk sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy:

And the Poynter Insitute has a clever (and depressing) interactive timeline that tracks all the newspaper industry layoff notices going back to 2007:

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Are Sponsored Apps the Key for Traditional Media in Mobile?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Zarko Drincic

Facebook announced some changes to its privacy guidelines today, but that wasn’t what captured the interest of the blogosphere and other media outlets. The really interesting thing about the blog post by Facebook’s deputy general counsel Michael Richter was what he said about location, and the implications for potential location-based services and features that might be added to the social network. As anyone who has been following the tech sector (and particularly SXSW) over the past six months or so knows, location is the new black, and probably a bunch of other colors as well. And one of the big questions on the minds of many is: What happens to the location-services market when Facebook decides to enter? The company is expected to launch location features at its annual f8 developer conference in April.

The reality is that while Foursquare and Gowalla and Brightkite have well-established user bases and have built out many features — and arguably benefit from focusing on doing a single thing well, as opposed to being a hydra-headed monster like Facebook — there is too much fragmentation in the market for the current state of affairs to continue. Already, services such as Check.in (from Brightkite) are emerging to try and bring some semblance of order to it all, and others such as Digg architect Joe Stump’s SimpleGeo are providing tools that any company can use to add location-based features.

So what did Facebook say about location exactly? Well, not much. The blog post says:

The last time we updated the Privacy Policy, we included language describing a location feature we might build in the future. At that point, we thought the primary use would be to “add a location to something you post.” Now, we’ve got some different ideas that we think are even more exciting. So, we’ve removed the old language and, instead added the concept of a “place” that could refer to a Page, such as one for a local restaurant. As we finalize the product, we look forward to providing more details, including new privacy controls.

There are some interesting hints in here, which everyone is busily trying to parse, like ancient Druids pawing through the entrails of a chicken trying to foretell the future. It seems obvious that Facebook was originally thinking about simply tacking on location to status updates, so that you could tag your wall post or photo with location data — in other words, the same way Twitter apps do now. But instead, the company appears to be looking at how location can be integrated into the pages that users, and particularly businesses such as restaurants, are publishing on the network.

So when location becomes part of the features that Facebook offers businesses, what could users do? They could interact more closely with a fan page for a specific company, for example, by allowing Facebook to use their location to tag content such as likes, comments, photos, and so on. And they could make it easier for users to find their friends who also happen to be at those locations, and connect with them — and, most importantly, allow for extremely targeted advertising and marketing pitches. So the big question is: Doesn’t that kind of functionality make it harder for Foursquare and Gowalla and even Yelp to convince people to use their specific services? Why bother, when the one social network all your friends use offers something pretty similar? Badges and leaderboards and all of those features would be trivial to reproduce if Facebook wanted to.

It’s possible that Facebook might decide to make it easy for Foursquare and Gowalla and Yelp and Brightkite to integrate their services with the site and allow their users to check in or connect through Facebook as well. But that would still leave much of the power in Facebook’s hands, and as a result much of the potential for monetization too. Either way, it feels like Facebook becomes the one ring to rule them all where location-based features are concerned (although I should note that this view is hardly unanimous — Topix CEO Chris Tolles, for one, disagrees).

Apart from the location-based comments made in the blog post, meanwhile, Facebook also seems to be suggesting that certain corporate partners will be allowed to grab some of your details from your Facebook profile when you visit their website outside of Facebook, even if you haven’t explicitly allowed them to do so. All Facebook has a good overview of the potential implications and so does Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web, although the company’s exact plans are still somewhat of a mystery.

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As Cloud Computing Goes International, Whose Laws Matter?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user mosippy

Demand Media and AOL’s Seed project have been getting lots of attention lately, in part because they’ve both become poster children (although Demand more so than Seed) for the idea of a digital “content factory” — a virtual sweatshop filled with people toiling at terminals for pennies a day, churning out stories about algorithmically determined topics. While Demand has been described as “fast food” content by TechCrunch, Seed got some press recently for a high-profile attempt at “crowdsourcing” content around SXSW by finding people to write about all 2,000 bands at the Austin conference.

Meanwhile, hardly anyone talks about Associated Content, which CEO Patrick Keane notes has been around longer and is arguably bigger than either of its newer competitors. And make no mistake, Associated Content has been subjected to many of the same criticisms as Demand Media and Seed about low-quality, mass-produced content. Slate writer Farhad Manjoo, for example, described it as “a wasteland of bad writing, uninformed commentary, and the sort of comically dull recitation of the news you’d get from a second grader.” However, he also admitted that the site got more visitors than many other mainstream media sites, including the Washington Post, primarily because its stories were “bulging with hot search terms.”

As Manjoo noted in his piece, one of the unusual things about Associated Content is that former Google executive Tim Armstrong is an investor. Why is that unusual? Because Armstrong is also the current CEO of AOL, and as such has been pouring money into building Seed, thereby more or less duplicating the model that Associated Content has already built (and not doing all that well, according to reports about Armstrong criticizing the project). So I asked Keane whether this wasn’t a little, um…awkward. “You know — it kind of is,” he said with a laugh. “Tim is a friend and an investor in the company, so it has been interesting to see how they are thinking as far as Seed is concerned. With their scale and revenue base, they will definitely be a strong competitor.” (There have also been reports that AOL tried to buy Associated Content).

That said, however, Keane added that “I think Richard (Rosenblatt, CEO of Demand) would agree with me that it’s not an inconsequential task to build a platform for this kind of production of content, and Seed at the moment is more of a concept than an ongoing platform.” The Associated Content CEO (who also happens to be a former Googler) told me: “We haven’t seen much of them in the market, either on the advertising side or the content side.” He also noted that Seed seemed to be focused more on the journalism and news-driven side of the content business, including hiring “big-name, expensive journalists” like Saul Hansell of the New York Times , whereas Associated Content specializes in what he called “evergreen” content such as tips on how to diaper a baby.

In terms of size, Keane said that Associated Content — which has been around for about five years — has more than 350,000 contributors and over two million pieces of content (with north of 3,000 pieces produced every day), all of which generates about 30 million unique visits per month (Demand Media, meanwhile, uploaded its millionth piece of content last fall and reportedly has fewer contributors). “We are certainly the pioneers in this market,” Keane says. “But of course being first doesn’t mean you win, or that you succeed.”

And what about the accusations that Associated Content and its competitors are virtual sweatshops and digital content farms? “We’re not clubbing baby seals over here,” says Keane. “We’re not trying to exploit anyone, and we’re not putting a gun to people’s heads. We’re giving people an audience and giving them some exposure for their writing and we’re paying them a little bit of money along the way. You can call them factories or whatever you want, but we’re just giving people a voice.”

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Olivander

Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web site that publishes documents companies and governments don’t want released, is alleging that the U.S. State Department and possibly the CIA have been spying on the group and its volunteers, following them on airplanes and even monitoring their production meetings in an Icelandic fish-and-chip restaurant. In a blog post on the Wikileaks site, the group’s co-founder, Julian Assange, asserts that the spying “includes attempted covert following, photographing, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland.”

Wikileaks believes the surveillance campaign is driven in part by the fact that it has obtained “a classified military video showing civilian kills by U.S. pilots” in Afghanistan. The group has said that it plans to release details about the video in a press briefing on April 5. In the blog post, Assange alleges that a Wikileaks volunteer was recently detained by police on a “wholly insignificant matter” and was shown photos of Assange outside the Icelandic Fish & Chips shop in Reykjavik, where a production meeting had been held to review the bombing-run video. Wikileaks later described this incident on its Twitter feed, saying, “We have been shown secret photos of our production meetings and been asked specific questions during detention related to the airstrike.”

In another Twitter message, the group said, “If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film.” Assange also says in the blog post that after taking a flight from Reykjavik to Copenhagen to speak at an investigative journalism conference, the group got a tip that they were under surveillance and checked the records for the flight (he doesn’t say how this was accomplished) to find “two individuals, recorded as brandishing diplomatic credentials, checked in for my flight…under the name of ‘US State Department.’ The two are not recorded as having any luggage.”

According to the Wikileaks blog post, there are a number of possible reasons for the U.S. government to be spying on the group, including:

• the classified film “revealing civilian casualties occurring under the command of the U.S. general, David Petraeus.”
• the release of “a classified 32 page U.S. intelligence report on how to fatally marginalize WikiLeaks”
• the release of “a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik reporting on contact between the U.S. and the UK over billions of euros in claimed loan guarantees.”
• pending releases related to the collapse of the Icelandic banks and Icelandic “oligarchs”

Assange says that Wikileaks has been the subject of a number of suspicious government-related spying attempts, intimidation and harassment over the years, including what he describes as the assassination of two human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March and an “armed attack on my compound there in 2007,” as well as an attack by Chinese computers on Wikileaks servers in Stockholm after the site published photos of murders in Tibet. He also says that a Wikileaks member was “ambushed” in a Luxembourg parking garage by a “James Bond” character.

Wikileaks has recently been raising money to continue its efforts, and has also been working with members of the Icelandic government to try and create an “information haven” in that country.

Post photo courtesy of Flickr user alancleaver_2000, thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user practical owl

Wikipedia is close to rolling out a new design that it hopes will make the “user-edited” encyclopedia easier to use and navigate, and thus potentially appeal to new users more than the slightly clunky-looking current site. A note from the User Experience team at the Wikimedia blog says the new design — code-named “Vector” — will be launched on April 5 for all users who visit Wikimedia Commons, the media repository for the encyclopedia. If that goes well, the redesign will then be rolled out to all users of the English version of Wikipedia and then to versions of the site in other languages. As described by Naoko Komura of the user experience team, the main changes to the design are:

• “Editing pages will be easier, thanks to a new editing toolbar that makes it easier to insert links and tables, and a built-in “cheatsheet” to access help for the most commonly used functions.”
• “All users will also see that the site layout has changed noticeably. We’ve simplified the site navigation, relocated the search box to satisfy user expectations and to follow other web standards, reduced some of the clutter, and made sure that the new features work with different resolutions, browser formats, and window sizings.”

Early versions of the Vector design have been available to beta users of Wikipedia — in other words, anyone who creates an account and then chooses the “try beta” link at the top right of the home page — for several months, while the user experience group has been tweaking the design. Once the design is fully rolled out, even users who aren’t logged in will see it (logged-in users will be able to revert to the older design if they wish).

One of the parts of the redesign the encyclopedia has changed substantially is the view of a page that users see when they are editing it, with simplified tools that Wikipedia hopes will make it easier for people to figure out how to change information and add new information to a page. There have been concerns about slowing growth at the encyclopedia, something that was the subject of a presentation by journalism professor Andrew Lih at the recent SXSW conference. The user experience blog post says:

Our overarching objective is to make it easier to find and contribute knowledge in Wikipedia and its sister projects. Volunteer participation is the essence of everything we do; our job is to facilitate and support that volunteer work. Continually improving the experience our projects is now a core mandate of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The group has technical details about the redesign on its technical blog as well as a Q&A on its Usability wiki page.

The ongoing battle between Google and China sometimes reads like a spy novel, featuring a giant technology company clashing with a cadre of totalitarian overlords, attacks by hackers apparently aimed at pinpointing citizen activists and dissidents, and grandstanding speeches by senators and congressmen about the Chinese threat. Guardian political columnist and historian Timothy Garton Ash recently called it “a defining story of our time.” Here’s our take on the most recent news and what you really need to know about this epic confrontation.

• After a cyber attack that the company first revealed in January, which it said was aimed at identifying political dissidents in China, Google announced on Monday that it is now re-routing searches through Hong Kong, saying:
  

  Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach…is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced.

• The move by Google clearly leaves the field in China to domestic giant Baidu, which had been gaining on Google in search market share even before the U.S. company decided to leave — the Chinese company’s shares have climbed more than 50 percent since Google announced its decision in January. Other competitors likely to benefit include Microsoft, which has said that it continues to do business in China and is working with the Chinese government, as well as domestic Chinese players Tencent and Alibaba.
• The second-largest mobile operator in China — China Unicom — has said it won’t install Google search on its new Android handsets as a result of Google’s actions. The company is reportedly in talks with Microsoft to use its Bing search service instead.
• Domain name registration company Go Daddy has said that it will no longer register domain names in China. The company said that increased requirements for identifying registrants “appeared, to us, to be based on a desire by the Chinese authorities to exercise increased control over the subject matter of domain name registrations by Chinese nationals.”
• According to the Indian prime minister, that country has heard from Dell that the giant computer maker is looking elsewhere for some or all of the $25 billion in business it does in China (although Dell has since denied this).
• Google’s director of public policy, Alan Davidson, testified before a federal commission hearing on China on Wednesday, calling the decision to move servers to Hong Kong “a practical solution to the challenges we’ve faced — it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.” He also said that censorship of Google by the Chinese government was a trade issue, since it would favor local search companies. The Wall Street Journal has excerpts from the testimony, which is also posted in full on Scribd and embedded below.
• David Drummond, Google’s chief legal counsel, talked to The Atlantic about the connection between the hacking attempt and the decision to stop censoring results, and why the company decided to wait so long after the hack attack to shut down its China-based search site. Google has also posted an official notice on its Google Enterprise blog for users of Google Apps talking about the effect that its Chinese moves will have on corporate users.
• Sergey Brin has called upon the U.S. government and other countries to take action against China. But some have argued that Google isn’t really in the best position to offer moral advice to anyone about China, since it was the one who effectively caved in to the Chinese government and censored its search results for so long in an effort to build its business there. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, not normally a critic of Google’s practices, wrote:
  

  I’m no fan of Chinese censorship. I was greatly disappointed when Google caved into it. I’m glad they’re no longer doing it. But having done so, Google’s hardly the poster child to tell anyone else what to do. Not right now. Not yet. Not just because Google suddenly found it was no longer in its business interests to stay in China.

  Gawker called Google’s move “a clever way to dress up a security breach — and an embarrassing attempt to partner with China’s authoritarian leaders — as an act of nobility and courage,” a view that was echoed by author Sarah Lacy in a piece on TechCrunch entitled “Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil.”

• At the congressional hearing on China, a number of U.S. legislators praised Google’s move and at the same time bashed Microsoft for continuing to work with the Chinese government to censor search results.
• Sergey Brin told the Wall Street Journal that he pushed for the company to get out of China because that country’s dictatorial government and repression of its citizens reminded him of the totalitarianism of his youth growing up in the former Soviet Union. He said that he was always concerned about the censoring of search results that Google was required to do by the Chinese government, but that his concerns grew after the Olympics as the government became even more repressive.
• Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has a rundown of what is likely to happen as a result of Google’s redirecting of searches to a Hong Kong domain. Although the Chinese government could simply block access to Google.com.hk, that apparently is not happening (or possibly happening intermittently, according to Google).
• Since Google announced its decision to move its servers, the state-run Xinhua News Agency published a government bulletin that said:
  

  Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks. This is totally wrong…[we] express our discontent and indignation to Google for its unreasonable accusations and conduct.

• According to the New York Times, the overseas edition of the Chinese newspaper People’s Daily, an organ of the ruling Communist Party, carried a front-page opinion piece that said: “For Chinese people, Google is not god, and even if it puts on a full-on show about politics and values, it is still not god. In fact, Google is not a virgin when it comes to values. Its cooperation and collusion with the U.S. intelligence and security agencies is well-known.”
• However, the state news agency also published a piece calling the dispute a “shocking cultural clash between the West and the East” and said that the Chinese government “cannot afford to sit by and watch.”
• For a great overview of some of the reaction within China to the moves by Google, check out Global Voices Online founder Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Steve Webel

Crowdcast, which offers what it calls “collective intelligence tools” for businesses based on crowdsourcing ideas from employees, has launched a new executive dashboard that allows a company to track the predictions made by staff and compare them against official corporate targets. For example, a project might officially be scheduled to launch on a specific date, but Crowdcast’s game-based forecasts by employees who are actually involved in the project might show only a small chance of ever hitting that goal. Crowdcast CEO Mat Fogarty says knowing this can allow a company to either shift its priorities or devote more resources to a project. The company is based in Redwood City San Francisco and is backed by Alsop Louie Partners.

The new executive dashboard allows management to see the internal crowd-based forecast (or “crowdcast”) for any one of the questions or metrics the company has decided to measure through the service, Fogarty says. “By looking at the dashboard, they can compare the crowd forecast with the official internal forecast, and they can also see how the crowdcast has changed over time,” so they can tell whether the project or goal is getting closer to reality or further away. And they can look at the crowdcast by group — to see whether the prediction from staff in engineering is different from those in marketing, for example — as well as getting recommendations provided by employees.

Fogarty, who worked in financial planning at several big companies before launching Crowdcast — including as a game developer at Electronic Arts — says one of the big issues in his previous jobs was “getting accurate information about when a project was going to be finished, how much it was going to cost, and so on.” Companies usually have official targets for those kinds goals, he says, but they are often unrealistic for a variety of reasons, and the people working on those projects often know it. “Those kinds of official targets may be motivational, but to run your business on those metrics is very dangerous,” he says.

So Fogarty started Crowdcast as a way of trying to aggregate that knowledge from within a company and show it to those who needed to know it. The software sets up a kind of prediction market that allows employees to bet on a certain outcome using virtual currency (players start with $20,000). If their guess is the closest to the final result, they get a virtual payout. Over time, if their predictions are the most accurate, they get a prominent place on an internal “leaderboard” and can win other prizes such as Amazon gift cards.

Crowdcast’s prediction market-style forecasts are similar to other kinds of tools companies use for collecting ideas from employees and customers, such as Dell’s Ideastorm model, but Fogarty says the main difference is that Crowdcast is structured as a game, and as such can appeal to users within a company more than other approaches (for more on this idea, see our recent GigaOM post about why everything is becoming a game). Crowdcast did a Series A financing round in 2008 with Alsop Louie Partners, and is likely going to be raising another round sometime this year, according to Fogarty. The company’s software is used by a number of large companies, he said, including “a large retailer based in Arkansas,” as well as a major greeting card manufacturer, a video game company and a large investment bank.

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Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Matthew Field

Hey, did you hear that Facebook causes syphilis? It must be true — I read it on the Internet. Or to be clear, I read it on some mainstream media sites that happened to publish their stories on the Internet. And people say the web and social media are filled with questionable facts and salacious rumors aimed at grabbing readers.

The fact is that no one can beat a tabloid newspaper when it comes to that kind of thing, and the British tabloids in particular are the undisputed kings and queens of the salacious rumor story, or the titillating conclusion balanced on the thinnest of factual foundations. Today’s exhibit is the “Facebook causes outbreak in syphilis” story, which started in the British papers and has spent the day gathering steam across the web and various social networks (“going viral” has never been a more appropriate metaphor).

As TechCrunch and others have pointed out, this story appears to be based on a single interview with a British public health official in Teeside — a former industrial region in the northeastern part of England — who happened to mention that he thought lots of young people were having unprotected sex with people they hooked up with through Facebook (or “Facebook romps,” as The Sun gleefully referred to them in its headline). And what was this based on? The fact that syphilis rates were much higher than they had been in the past, that several people surveyed said they had met their partners through Facebook, and that Facebook use is high in the area. As one commenter on the TechCrunch post noted, this breaches a cardinal rule of constructing a logical argument, which is that “correlation does not mean causation.” In other words, just because lots of left-handed people are gay does not mean that if you are left-handed you will be gay, or that gayness is caused by the same thing that causes left-handedness.

When the telephone first hit the mass market, did people start writing stories about how the phone causes death and heartache? Undoubtedly. It seems to be human nature to take whatever new social behavior or technology happens to be popular and associate that with everything bad that occurs — even if those bad things have been happening forever. And so we have the “Craigslist killer” stories (which carefully ignore the fact that people have been using telephones and even newspaper classifieds to find people to rob and kill for decades now), and the “Facebook rapist” stories, and on it goes.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user krazydad/jbum

It may not be the nicest-sounding phrase, but “user-generated content” has come to be the term we use for everything from Flickr photos and YouTube videos to blog comments, Twitter posts and reviews on Yelp or Amazon. Building a business that relies on content from your users sounds like a great idea, and in many cases has turned out to be exactly that — it’s usually cheaper than professionally produced content, for one thing (depending on what costs you include, of course). And many users care more deeply about the content they generate themselves than they do about the stuff that comes from the pros, which means deeper levels of engagement.

The problem with user-generated content, however, is the loss of control it involves. We’ve seen it play out in a hundred different ways, virtually everywhere that digital content appears, from the fight many news outlets are having over blog comments (which I wrote about on my personal blog this past weekend) to the issues that YouTube has had with repeated uploading of copyright-infringing videos. How do you get your users to generate the kind of content you want them to produce instead of the kind they want to produce?

Two recent examples of the downside of user-generated content come from Amazon and Yelp. The latter has been hit by repeated lawsuits from businesses alleging that negative reviews of their companies or retail outlets appeared after they turned down an offer from Yelp to advertise with the service. Yelp’s response, in part, has been that users post negative reviews for their own reasons, and that this is simply a function of how the service works (the Yelp blog has an official response to the lawsuits).

Likewise, Amazon has come under criticism recently for reviews of books that appear to have been posted by users who didn’t even read the book in question. As prominent investment writer and market strategist Barry Ritholtz described in a recent blog post, negative reviews of Michael Lewis’s latest book appeared before the book was even available on the market. “Considering the 1 star ratings/complaints about the Kindle edition were posted BEFORE THE BOOK was even released, they are utterly absurd,” he wrote. “Amazon needs to step up and delete these non-reviews of books. At the very least, they should not count in the book’s star ratings.”

In the Lewis case, the negative reviews appeared to be aimed at the publisher of the book, as retaliation for the fact that the book wasn’t released in digital format for the Kindle at the same time as the hardcover version. Ritholtz and other observers say these types of reviews routinely occur. They don’t seem to have any real purpose apart from simply registering a protest, since (as Ritholz points out) the behavior they’re criticizing is that of the publisher, not the author (though it’s the author who is harmed by a negative review).

The loss of control involved with user-generated content has its humorous side as well, of course, something that is best illustrated by another popular Amazon phenomenon: namely, the bizarrely hilarious comments that seem to spring to life on the most prosaic product reviews, including a cheesy T-shirt with a picture of three wolves on it (“unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather”) and a jug of Tuscan Whole Milk (“I always find it important to taste milk using high-quality stemware — this is milk deserving of something better than a Flintstones plastic tumbler”).

For companies like Amazon and Yelp (and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and plenty of others), user-generated content has created the mother of all catch-22s: It causes them untold amounts of misery and headaches on a daily basis, and yet without those users and the content they produce, many of these companies would be severely diminished — and in some cases wouldn’t exist at all. For better or worse, they are married to their users, and divorce is not an option.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user James Cridland

If you haven’t seen the video embedded below, it really is worth taking the time to watch: It’s a virtual choir assembled from 185 individual YouTube video clips, conducted by Grammy-nominated composer Eric Whitacre and performing a piece called Lux Aurumque. It features singers from 12 countries including the U.S., the UK, Canada, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Austria, Spain and The Philippines.

Whitacre started the project last year by putting out a call for participants on his blog. He recorded a “conductor track” with a friend playing a version of the score on the piano, and a separate video in which he discussed the piece and what he was trying to achieve with it. Poet Charles Anthony Silvestri also posted a video talking about his translation of the text, in which he spoke each of the words that singers had to sing, and a producer put together videos for each individual part (soprano, alto, tenor, or bass) with the sheet music on one side of the screen and the conductor track on the other side.

Whitacre talks about his inspiration for this virtual choir in this blog post. The Lux Aurumque video is actually the second time the composer has put together such a virtual choir from YouTube clips — the first attempt is here. A recent post at Metafilter has more details about Whitacre and some of his other compositions.

Update: Thanks to commenter Thomad for a link to another collaborative music project that used YouTube clips, called In B 2.0, a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls. Solomon is a composer and musician based in New York who (among other things) played bass with Ray Charles’ band for two years after joining the band at the age of 19.

In the latest privacy-related skirmish between European countries and social networks, Swiss and German privacy authorities have told the Associated Press that they are looking at how Facebook — and possibly Google and other sites as well — allows its users to upload email addresses, photos and other content that either belongs to or includes people who haven’t given their consent to appear on the service. According to the AP story, this would likely include uploading pictures without getting the permission of everyone who appears in the photo, and could also affect the automated importing of email addresses that Facebook, Google and other social networks provide as a way of finding your friends when you join a new service.

“The way it’s organized at the moment, they simply allow anyone who wants to use this service to say they have the consent of their friends or acquaintances,” Swiss commissioner Hanspeter Thuer said of Facebook’s practice of letting users upload photos and email addresses. Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner in the northern German state of Schleswig Holstein, told AP that Facebook’s assertion that it gets consent for the posting of personal information is “total nonsense.” He said that the state has written to Facebook “and told them they’re not abiding by the law in Europe.”

Europe seems determined to play the role of wet blanket for social networks and social media of all kinds. Both Google and Facebook have come under fire from multiple countries and from regulators at the European Union itself over privacy issues. Google has been criticized repeatedly for its Street View service, and Italy recently took the unprecedented step of finding three senior Google executives guilty of privacy law violations for a video that was uploaded to YouTube. But Europe isn’t the only one criticizing the way Google and Facebook handle (or don’t handle) privacy controls: sociologist Danah Boyd gave a talk at the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference slamming both companies for their practices.

Want to help Facebook handle some of the privacy conflicts it’s running into in Europe? According to a couple of recent job postings, the social network is looking for a manager of privacy and policy in both Paris and Hamburg to “monitor legislative and regulatory matters at EU and member state level, participate in policy discussions, and lead the company’s interactions with the European Commission and governments in several EU countries.”

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Balakov

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably gotten a link to a new service called Sleeping Time that checks a user’s Twitter account and determines when they sleep. The application comes courtesy of Amit Agarwal, better known as the blogger behind the popular technology site Digital Inspiration. He says it analyzes the timestamp on the most recent 600 tweets from a particular user, and bases its analysis on the location and time zone information provided by that user in their Twitter profile. The result is a surprisingly accurate portrait (at least for those who are on Twitter a lot), as confirmed by some of the responses from users that Agarwal has collected on his blog. Agarwal has also put together a collection of reports from Sleeping Time on various people including Bollywood celebrities and tech-industry types, and indeed — the analysis of my sleep patterns is surprisingly accurate:

Is Sleeping Time creepy or interesting? A bit of both. The service joins a growing list of applications that create a picture of our behavior and habits from our social networking profiles and “lifestreaming” activity. One of the most celebrated (and criticized) ones to emerge recently was Please Rob Me, which called attention to the fact that many users of location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla — and even Twitter itself — regularly broadcast the fact that they are away from their homes, and even give their exact location at specific times (Foursquare’s new “celebrity mode” allows users such as Jersey Shore’s DJ Pauly D to only show check-ins to certain users). Another recent Twitter-based app is the Twitter Predictor Game from startup Hunch, which looks at who you follow and makes assumptions about how you would answer a number of questions — and is also surprisingly accurate (Hunch discusses the game here).

As a friend noted, Sleeping Time doesn’t really do anything that human beings aren’t already doing in a variety of ways — by noting when someone replies to their email, or when they answer the phone, etc. And if you know where someone lives, it’s relatively easy to get a pretty accurate picture of when they leave for work and when they return home, if you really wanted such information (according to legend, thieves used to comb through the obituary sections of newspapers looking for memorial services, and then stop by the homes of those who were attending).

All services like Please Rob Me and Sleeping Time do is make it easier to automate this kind of information-gathering process. At some point, however, making it easier achieves a certain scale that allows things to occur that would never have been possible — and that can have potential benefits and potential risks in equal measure. How long until someone puts all of these services together to produce the ultimate Stalker Report app?

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You’ve probably heard of Mensa International, that special society designed for extra-smart people (the name means “table,” in case you were wondering), defined as the top 2 percent of the population as ranked by one of a number of standardized IQ tests. So what do super-geniuses think are the top sites on the web? The U.S. division of the society did a little survey, and has come up with a list, one that contains some fairly low-brow humor sites, including I Can Has Cheezburger (home to many an LOLcat photo) and Cake Wrecks. Even more surprising, one of the top sites under the Science and Technology category is the Popular Science web site — a rather prosaic choice for such an exclusive group (the only other top site is Gizmodo). Shouldn’t there be at least one site devoted to astrophysics or quantum mechanics?

Also on the list are Drudge Report (under the “news and politics” heading) as well as Boing Boing and PBS. And apparently even geniuses need help understanding simple things: another site to make the Mensa Top 50 list was How Stuff Works. But if these selections suggest that Mensa is just too low-brow for you, there are several other organizations that try to be even more exclusive in appealing to the ultra-smart, including the Triple Nine Society and The Genius Society, both of which claim that they’re restricted to people who score in the 99.9 percentile on one of a number of standardized IQ tests (Mensa is accepts anyone who scores in the 98th percentile). Although I’m willing to bet that most of them probably like I Can Has Cheezburger too.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user PaDumBumPsh.

In a closely watched case involving Google’s sale of trademarks and brand names as advertising keywords, the European Union’s highest court has ruled in the search company’s favor — although the decision contains a handful of important caveats, which initially led to some confusion over whether Google had won or lost. The bottom line is that the European Court of Justice said the search company can sell trademarked terms through its AdWord service. But it didn’t give Google blanket protection from lawsuits by trademark holders, saying it could be held liable in future cases if it’s found to have encouraged AdWord buyers to engage in trademark infringement.

The confusion over the decision was likely caused by the fact that LVMH — the parent company behind luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, which launched the case that resulted in the EU court decision — put out a press release claiming victory in the case. In it, the company said that:

Google claimed that advertisers on its service did not commit any illicit use of registered trademarks when purchasing keywords representing such registered trademarks on its website without the consent of the trademark owner. Google further claimed that, in any event, a provider of a paid referencing service was merely hosting the service and therefore could not be held liable. The ECJ strongly rejected both claims.

As both the New York Times and the Financial Times explain, however, that’s only part of the story behind the ruling. LVMH wanted Google to be legally prevented from selling any trademarked terms as AdWord keywords to anyone, something the EU court explicitly did not do. Instead, it said that Google could continue selling trademarks and brand names through the service, provided it took action to remove those terms if a trademark holder complained — a system similar to the “notice and takedown” provisions for copyright infringement that YouTube and other providers are governed by under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Google has already been hit with a number of such lawsuits from trademark holders, both in the United States and in Europe, and maintains that it does its best to remove infringement when it occurs. The company noted in a blog post about the LVMH ruling that:

[C]ontrary to what some are intimating, this case is not about us arguing for a right to advertise counterfeit goods. We have strict policies that forbid the advertising of counterfeit goods; it’s a bad user experience. We work collaboratively with brand owners to better identify and deal with counterfeiters.

Some of those who have sued the search company have tried to argue, as LVMH did in the latest EU case, that Google is encouraging trademark infringement by simply suggesting trademarked words and phrases when an advertiser is looking for an AdWord placement. Unfortunately for the search company, the EU decision appears to leave that question unanswered, which could open the door to further lawsuits.

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Sunday was Twitter’s fourth anniversary, according to a tweet from co-founder Jack Dorsey (his first tweet ever is here). Just four short years, and already Twitter has become a significant part of our lives — to the point where people increasingly learn about news events first via the social network, and if a celebrity doesn’t have a Twitter account it seems unusual. The tweet clock recently clicked over the 10-billion-tweet mark, and about 50 million of them are posted every day. I don’t remember exactly when I first discovered Twitter (although according to this service, my first tweet was March 9 of 2007) but Om recalls that he first posted about it in July of 2006, after someone showed him a cool new mobile SMS service then called Twittr — a side project from the guys behind Odeo (a podcasting service that was later shut down sold).

Om said it was cool but also looked like it could be really annoying, and that it was really simple, and appeared to be going viral. All of those observations turned out to be fairly prescient: Twitter was cool but could also be annoying, was really simple and eventually went viral. But I would argue that of all those things, the most important by far is that Twitter was — and still is — incredibly simple. Simple to sign up and simple to use (I think being annoying also helped, but that’s an argument for another time). It’s true that there was some initial confusion around whether users should use text-messaging on their phones, and the whole “short code” thing was kind of a blind alley for some new users, but people figured it out pretty quickly, and most eventually used it through the website or through a Twitter app for their iPhone or Blackberry.

Simplicity is one of those things everyone says they really admire and respect and strive for, but very few really do — particularly when it comes to a new product or service. Gmail creator and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit hinted at this in his post about not letting “the good become the enemy of the great.” With a lot of new things, there is relentless pressure — in many cases from designers and engineers — to add features. After all, it has to have as many as those other services out there, or users will think that it isn’t as good. More features makes it better, right?

This is wrong, of course. In most cases, the best thing to do is to focus on what you think people might do with it, and then make it the best at doing that specific thing, and nothing else. Whether by design or by accident, or some combination of the two, Twitter did this brilliantly (Biz Stone talked about the process in this interview). In fact, the service was so simple that it was almost hard to explain to a non-user what the big deal was about this Twitter thing. “What do I do with it?” Type into the box. “But what should I say?” Whatever you want to say. “I don’t get it.” And so on.

Twitter is simple in much the same way that email or the telephone or the television is; so simple, and at the same time so broadly expandable in all directions that it almost defies explanation. And just as important, the company was also open to allowing its users to help determine what shape the service should take — and as a result, many of the things we associate with Twitter were developed or pioneered by users and third parties (the @ message, the re-tweet, and so on) and then integrated into the service itself.

Obviously, the fact that Twitter has become such a force in the lives of so many Web users is a sign that the service fills some fundamental need — a hole that existed between email and IM and blogging — and that explains a lot of the company’s incredible growth, and the influence it has even outside the geekosphere. But the company also kept things simple, and resisted what must have been pretty intense pressure to add features along the way (I know I’ve said many times when discovering new third-party services: “Why doesn’t Twitter do this itself?”). And I think that’s a key aspect of what allowed the company to make it to its fourth birthday.

Happy birthday, Twitter. Thanks for reminding us to keep it simple.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user arquera.

The fact that many people love games isn’t really that new. Retailers and even our own governments have used our love of games to sell us products and hook us on lotteries and whatever else they can think of to boost revenue. But the rise of online games such as World of Warcraft and the social and “casual” games popularized by Zynga and other companies on Facebook, such as Mafia Wars and Happy Aquarium, has arguably made gaming a far bigger part of our culture than it has ever been — not to mention location-based apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla, which have explicit game-like features built in. Online payment giant PayPal says that Zynga was its second-largest merchant last year, and PayPal does business with some of the largest companies in the world. And get ready for even more games: Flurry Analytics says that its research shows almost half of the apps that are being developed for the upcoming Apple iPad are games.

What is the impact of all that gaming on our society? One academic, Lee Sheldon of Indiana University, says the generation that has grown up with ubiquitous online gaming is bringing that culture with it into the educational system — and ultimately, into the workforce. “As the gamer generation moves into the mainstream workforce, they are willing and eager to apply the culture and learning techniques they bring with them from games,” Sheldon, an assistant professor at the university’s department of telecommunications, told ITNews. He said older managers will have to “figure out how to educate themselves to the gamer culture, and how to speak to it most effectively.”

It’s something with which Sheldon himself is already experimenting. Over the last year, he started grading two of his classes (both involved with game design) using a system based on “experience points,” or XP, similar to the way gamers in World of Warcraft and other massively multiplayer games award points for various tasks. Students started the year at level one, with zero XP, and then gained points — and higher grades — by completing “quests” and “crafting,” which corresponded to giving presentations and doing exams and quizzes. Students also formed “guilds” similar to the gaming groups that rule WoW and other multiplayer games. Sheldon says that his students seemed far more engaged than they had been before.

A similar phenomenon was the topic of a panel at the recent SXSW conference in Austin, where Christopher Poole, founder of the controversial discussion forum known as 4chan, and web historian Jason Scott discussed the site and its culture — which in some cases consists of offensive material, but also involves public advocacy through offshoots such as the Anonymous group. According to a description from Austin360, Scott compared the behavior at 4chan to a game, but one in which the objective was to come up with something more shocking and/or hilarious than your competitors.

Scott noted that another site behaves in almost the exact same way: Wikipedia. And he’s got a point — the “crowdsourced” encyclopedia relies in many cases on unknown and unpaid editors and writers to produce and structure and verify its content, people who to some extent compete for the recognition of their peers on the site, and in some cases wind up “levelling up” to become senior editors and members of the internal Wikipedia “cabal” of site managers. Although Wikipedia doesn’t explicitly award experience points, the concept is the same, and it motivates people in similar ways.

The moderation of comments at Slashdot is based on a very similar system. Users are able to gain “karma points” through positive actions such as posting sensible comments, voting on other comments and flagging abusive comments. When they get enough points, they are selected by the site’s algorithm to be official moderators, and can then “spend” the points they have removing comments. In such a system, it doesn’t ultimately matter whether someone is anonymous or not, because there is an incentive for them to follow the rules and behave properly (although there are always users who don’t care about the rewards and try to “troll” or disrupt any site).

The bottom line is that good games take advantage of people’s innate desire to compete with each other, but balance that with their need to receive rewards, including the approval of their peers — rewards that in some cases can be used to modify their behavior in certain ways. Those are principles that don’t just apply to games. Jesse Schell, a former creative director at Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, had a great presentation at the DICE 2010 conference last month in which he talked about the rise of social gaming and what we can learn from it, which is embedded below.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Stock Xchange and Flickr user chanchan222