Network(ed)News

Gladwell’s article is a good read, and his prose is as tightly threaded as ever, even if it sometimes colors itself purple come paragraph end. Gladwell is the prince of grand one-liner metaphors that bring down the curtain on his sections’ endings, and I don’t mind that one bit.

Stop reading this, and go read that. A duplicative summary is a waste.

I read Mike Masnick regularly and consistently enjoy his writing on the nature of innovation and how it happens. But I’m not sure about one of his main criticisms of Gladwell’s piece—that, “if these ideas are the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer?

So let me make a surprise leap to the defense of Gladwell. Let’s suppose, probably correctly, that the purpose of intellectual property is to stimulate innovation.

Sometimes this premise gets misunderstood. Lessig explains how this misunderstanding works in Free Culture:

Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy. … This view runs deep within the current debates. It is what NYU law professor Rochelle Dreyfuss criticizes as the “if value, then right” theory of creative property—if there is value, then someone must have a right to that value.

This concept of “if value, then right” gets causation exactly backwards. In these terms, the statement formulated correctly would look more like “iff right, then value.”

What does that mean? It means that there should be this set of intellectual property rights if and only if there would not be the value without them. Of course, this works on the margin and actually looks something like this: The actual world should be the possible world with some set of intellectual property rights if and only if that set of rights means greater value than what’s in some other possible world that’s identical but for lacking that set of rights.

In other words, we ask, Is the value of the stimulated innovation greater than the deadweight loss from monopolistic price-setting of the innovation that would have happened anyhow?

“Multiplicity,” however, seems to make for stark evidence against the need to stimulate. It seems to say that the value would be around even in the absence of the right: “The sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing,” Gladwell writes. “Scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.”

Multiplicity says that possible worlds that are like ours but that don’t have something like our set of intellectual property rights probably have about as much value—if not more.

But why is this so? The mere fact that people in our actual world tend to have the same ideas at the same time surely doesn’t imply as much. So what if nine people invented the steam engine and two invented the telephone at once?

They were all presumably looking to create value for the world and keep a part of it for themselves—probably enough, on average, that they could consider themselves rich. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray worked within the same legal incentive structure. As Gladwell writes, “the two filed notice with the Patent Office in Washington, D.C., on the same day.”

Even if the ideas themselves are inevitable, it’s not at all clear that the pace at which we as humans arrive at them is also inevitable.

Do patents speed up that pace? How much? Enough, on average, to compensate for the deadweight loss they create at any given time-slice T compared to T-1?

And what about pure scientific discoveries? Gladwell quotes William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, who compiled one of the first lists of “multiples”: “The law of the conversation of energy, so significant in science and philsophy, was formulated four times in 1847…. They had all be anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842.”

That’s all fine and good, but none of them was chasing a Nobel. Had the prize been around in the middle of of the nineteenth century, is it possible that one of them, or someone else, would have endured a few more sleepless nights, hustled a bit more, and put together the law earlier?

Of course it’s possible. But the way to know about whether intellectual property regimes, or fancy academic prizes, stimulate creative and innovative thinking must be comparative. It must be measured across possible worlds.

In the end, Masnick helps me make my point: “Yet, if Gladwell’s premise is correct (and there’s plenty of evidence included in the article),” then inventors’ “efforts shouldn’t be seen as a big deal. After all,” he continues, if it weren’t for some inventors, “others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner or later.”

I take no position on whether our set of intellectual property rights is ultimately helpful (though I doubt it is). The point is that there probably is some set of rights that is helpful—precisely because other inventors really would come up ideas later without it.

There isn’t a better account of all sides of an episode—any episode—of this “uncharted” thing Jay Rosen calls “citizen journalism.” Superlative.

Wrong: Our attention spans are hopelessly on the fritz.

Right: The internet has brought our world more information choices. Sure, we give the average choice less attention because it’s competing with a larger number of alternatives. But we abandon reading one newspaper article not because it bores us to death but because an alternative article in some alternative publication presents itself as more interesting.

So we may read less of your newspaper article before we decide that another one looks better. The switch results from a marginal cost-benefit judgment between alternatives, not from a stunted conclusion that whatever in front of us is beneath us.

In other words, a fancy counterfactual: Imagine a possible world much like the one in which you posit that people still have healthy attention spans—a world circa 1958, for example, fifty years ago. Now imagine that your possible is world is different from the actual 1958-world only insofar as the people who inhabit it have as many (analog) sources of information at their fingertips as we do (analog and digital) sources of information. I claim that the people in your world give their average information choice about as much attention, not much more and not much less, as we do ours in our actual 2008-world.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for inspiring this post.

Consider entertainment on television. People watch sitcoms or dramas, more or less, as ends in themselves. People want to laugh, cry, or just ogle the actors and reality-show personalities. Not much more, not much less. Seinfeld is an end. America’s Next Top Model is an end. Again, more or less.

Quite the opposite, however, news is the beginning—and always has been. People watch the news or read the news to learn about something else. People want to know about the war-torn country, the gridlocked school board, or a high-flying stock. News is a means to something else.

But to reflect on the history of the news broadcast or the broadsheet—or to see the news media’s foray into the interwebs—you’d never think it. The poised anchor with a firm grip on reality comes to mind. “The first draft of history” does too. Current exhibits A, B, C are undoubtedly the embarrassing lack of outbound links. Journalists want to have the last say, and the historical lack of comments further illustrates the point.

It may be loosey-goosey at best, or unfair at worst, but it’s nevertheless my sense that the public’s twenty-odd-year-old sense of the news media’s “self-aggrandizement” and attempts to hand down opaque (bogus?) neutrality from on high underscore the point. Walled gardens are haughty.

News appears to be an end. In a dead-tree world, in which craigslist was a far-off cyber dream, cultivating that appearance may have made sense. Scarcity, borne by high production and distribution costs, prompted the temporary mirage.

But, in a digital world, that’s largely why Google is running away with all the interwebs’ advertising dollars. Google realized what seems like long ago that advertising sitting idly on a page that has attracted the user for unrelated reasons isn’t valuable. If you’re already where you want to be, you’re not going to click to go elsewhere. The valuable ads actually help you get to your end; they don’t greet you, or blink and scream from the periphery, once you’re already there.

So it is in this context that a very grave report (PDF) has concluded, “The crisis in journalism…may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising,” which “isn’t migrating online with the consumer.”

And it is, furthermore, in this context that the same report exhorts the news media to shift away from being a product and toward being a service. “How can you help me, even empower me?” This vision “broadens the agenda” from “story telling.” Instead, “journalism must help citizens find what they are looking for, react to it, sort it, shape news coverage, and…give them the tools to make sense of and use the information for themselves.”

The report says, news web sites “must move toward also being stops along the way, gateways to other places, and a means to drill deeper.”

Ultimately, the first question is whether you can put your ad in places where users are hunting for something, and the second question is whether you can make your ad relevant to what the users are hunting for. For google, a search engine is the obvious answer to the first question, and looking at the content of the user’s search is the obvious answer to the second.

For the news media, the answer cannot be quite so simple. But neither must it absolutely be so hard. Journalists must remember that people come to their work because they want something else. Journalists can help them on their way, helping them figure out where they’re going, informing them about the facts en route.

Of course, it will still be harder for the New Yorker to monetize an in-depth article about Abu Ghraib than it is for google to monetize a search for “new camera.” But the point is that maybe it shouldn’t come as such a surprise that News As A Service is extraordinarily valuable.

I read an awful lot of RSS feeds. Not a record-shattering amount, but enough that it’s hard for me to keep them all organized in Google Reader.

Despite my efforts to keep them in “folders” of different kinds—some organized by topic, others by how frequntly I’d like to read them—I lose track of feeds for days or weeks on end sometimes. Then, when I do get a firm grip on all my feeds, I find that I’ve spent several hours of time I could’ve spent actually reading. That maintenance is getting to be a pain.

I’m hopeful that Twine can help me add a permanent smarter layer of organization to all my feeds. That smarter layer could be sensitive to my evolving reading habits. I’m also hoping that Twine can help me groups of topically similar posts across scattered blogs on the fly.

So early access to the beta would be awesome!

Caveat user: RSS lava lamps

So be good at long-term trends, not just short-term ones. And situate your visualization in the user’s context—different users see different visualizations depending on their differences. Also, make it easy, not difficult, to combine different data sources. Finally, make them actually social and easy to share.

Wow, sounds hard.

From Tim O’Reilly:

But professional publishers definitely have an incentive to add semantics if their ultimate consumer is not just reading what they produce, but processing it in increasingly sophisticated ways.

In the past and present days of the web and media, publishers competed on price. If your newspaper or book or cd was the cheapest, that was a reason for someone to buy it. As information becomes digital, and the friction of exchange wears away, information will tend to be free. (See here, here, and here—and about a million other places.) That makes competing on price pretty tough.

Of course, publishers also competed, and still do, on quality. As they should. I suspect that readers will never stop wanting their newspapers articles well sourced, well argued, and well written. Partisan readers will never stop wanting their news to make the good guys look good and the bad guys look bad. That’s all in the data.

The nature of digital information, however, changes the what information consumers will find high-quality. Now readers want much more: they want metadata. That’s what O’Reilly’s talking about. That’s what Reuters was thinking when it acquired ClearForest.

Readers won’t necessarily look at all the metadata the way they theoretically read an entire article. Instead readers might find the article because of its metadata, e.g., its issues, characters, organizations, or the neighborhood it was written about. Or they might find another article because it shares a given metadatum or because its set of metadata is similar. Or, another step out, they might find another reader who’s enjoyed lots of similar articles.

The point is that, if your newspaper has metadata that I can use, that is a reason for someone to buy (or look at the ad next to it).

Actually, it’s not that simple. The New York Times annotates its articles with a few tags hidden in the html, and almost no one pays any attention to those tags. Few would even if the tags were surfaced on the page. Blogs have had tags for years, and no one’s really using that metadata, however meager, to great effect.

When blogs do have systematic tags, the way I take advantage of them is by way of an unrelated web application, namely, Google Reader. I can, for instance, subscribe to the RSS feed on this page, which aggregates all the posts tagged “Semantic Web” across ZD Net’s family of blogs. Without RSS and Google Reader, the tags just aren’t that useful. The metadata tells me something, but RSS and a feed reader allow me to lump and split accordingly.

Google Reader allows consumers to process ZDNet’s metadata in “sophisticated ways.” Consumers can’t do it alone, and there’s real opportunity in building the tools to process the metadata.

Without the tools to process the metadata, the added information isn’t terribly useful. That’s why it’s big deal that Reuters has faith that, if it brings forth the metadata, someone will build an application that exploits them—or that slices and dices interestingly.

In fact, ClearForest already tried to entice developers with a contest in 2006. The winner was a web application called Optevi News Tracker, which isn’t very exciting to me for a number of reasons. Among them is that I don’t think it’s a good tool for exploiting metadata. I just don’t really get much more out the news, although that might change if it used more than MSNBC’s feed of news.

My gut tells me that what lies at the heart of News Tracker’s lackluster operation is that it just doesn’t do enough with its metadata. I can’t really put my finger on it, and I could be wrong. Am I? Or should I trust my gut?

So what is the killer metadata-driven news application going to look like? What metadata are important, and what are not? How do we want to interact with our metadata?

I’ve been reading a lot about copyright for a while now. Intellectual property. Does something analogous to a property right make sense in a digital world?

It’s hard. As near as I can tell, we’re seeing two fundamental changes.

First, what are we to make of scarcity just vanishing? What’s a newspaper to do when I don’t have to buy their paper or watch their program because I can find the same information ten or twenty other places online? Or, just as importantly, when I can find other information that’s just as interesting to me hundred or thousand places online? This is important, for when I hit a paywall or am obnoxiously prompted to log in, I close the window or click a link and find something else that suits my tastes at least nearly as well in twenty seconds. Sure, your article about Barack Obama would haven been great, but I can find others elsewhere, and I like reading about Hillary Clinton too.

Second, what are we to make of the plummeting costs of duplication? What’s record label to do when I don’t have to buy their music because I can download it? What’s a newspaper to do when I can easily replicate their content in my feed reader by scraping their site? Or when a splogger does something actually harmful?

There are maybe some answers.

To the first, many propose inventing new business models around goods and services that are necessarily scarce. Bands, for instance, should let go of making money off CDs and embrace concert tours and t-shirts. Kevin Kelly writes about eight other ideas, which he calls generatives. Make your goods and services premium or easier to find or personalized, etc. Good ideas.

To the second, there’s something like Attributor, which could let us track our copyrighted material and force re-publishers to share the monetization. Copyright is still the basis here. Well, without copyright, there would be no basis for technologies like Attributor anyhow.

Are there more problems? I’m sure there are. But fighting ubiquity is a losing battle. Why not encourage it, track it, add up the duplications, and create something that tells us what’s most duplicated? Aggregate the publishing and the re-publishings. Then we’d know what to read or watch—that something is more duplicated indicates some kind of relevant popularity and interestingness (one hopes).

Re-publishers can each have some slice of the pie they helped grow. They keep a share of the ad revenue, and original authors get the rest. This should make everyone happy as long as the copyright owner’s slice of the new, larger pie is larger than the whole of the original, smaller pie. It’s win-win.

So, yeah, I suspect copyright’s still a useful legal construct. It can still promote economic efficiency. But it’s foolish to rely on copyright to enforce scarcity. Instead, embrace ubiquity and monetize it.

There are more than a few ways to remind yourself to read something or other later.

Browsers have bookmarks. Or you can save something to delicious, perhaps tagged “toread,” like very many people do. You can use this awesome firefox plugin called “Read It Later.”

But I like to do my reading inside Google Reader; others like their reading inside their fave reader.

So what am I to do? My first thought was Yahoo Pipes. It’s a well-known secret that Pipes makes screen-scraping around partial feeds as easy as pie. So I thought I could maybe throw together a mashup of del.icio.us and pipes to get something going.

My idea was to my to-be-read-later pages to delicious with a common tag—the common “toread” maybe. I could then have pipes fetch from delicious the feed based on that tag. The main urls for each delicious post point to the original webpage, and so, with the loop operator, I could locate the feed associated with each of the urls in the delicious feed. Original urls in hand, I was thinking I could have pipes auto-discover the associated feeds and then re-use those urls to locate the post within the feed corresponding to the page to be read later.

Well, I don’t think it can be done so easily. (Please! Someone prove me wrong!)

Meantime, I’ll just use my handy grease monkey plug-in that let’s me “preview” posts inside the google reader wrapper—so that I don’t have to hop from tab to tab like a lost frog.

Meantime, someone should really put together this app. Of course, it would really only work simply with pages that have rss analogues in a feed. But if, through Herculean effort, you found some practicable way to inform me that a given page doesn’t, but you could parse out the junk and serve me only the text, you’d be a real hero. Otherwise, just tell me that the page I’m trying to read later doesn’t have an rss analogue, give me an error message, and I’ll move on…assured in the knowledge that it will soon enough.

Jeff Jarvis writes about the coming economics of news:

When the packager takes up and presents the gatherer’s content in whole and monetizes it—mostly with advertising—they share the revenue. When the gatherer just links, the gatherer monetizes the traffic, likely as part of an ad network as well.

I think this is right. In the first case, the content is on the “packager’s” page or in its feed; in the second, the content is on the “gatherer’s” page or in its feed. In both cases, advertising monetized the content (let’s say) and readers or viewers found it by way of the packager’s brand (a coarse but inevitable word).

To me, however, the location of the user’s experience seems unimportant—in fact, the whole point of disaggregating journalism into two functions, imho, is to free up the content from the chains of fixed locations. Jarvis writes, “The packagers’ job would be to find the best news and information for their audience no matter where it comes from.” I agree, but why not let it go anywhere too—anywhere, that is, where the packager can still monetize it? (See Attributor if that sounds crazy.)

Couple this with the idea that rss-like subscriptions are on the move as the mechanism by which we get our content, replacing search in part. (As has been said before, there’s no spam on twitter. Why not? Followers just unsubscribe.) The result is that the packager still maintains his incentive to burnish his reputation and sell his brand. After all, that’s what sploggers are: packagers without consciences who get traffic via search.

So I agree with Jarvis: “reliably bringing you the best package and feed of news that matters to you from the best sources” is how “news brands survive and succeed.” That’s how “the packagers are now motivated to assure that there are good sources.”