Clay Shirky on Power Laws and the Web

Useful for T214
And for Blogging paper and ecosystem essays.

[Link]

Excerpt:

The basic shape is simple - in any system sorted by rank, the value for the Nth position will be 1/N. For whatever is being ranked -- income, links, traffic -- the value of second place will be half that of first place, and tenth place will be one-tenth of first place. (There are other, more complex formulae that make the slope more or less extreme, but they all relate to this curve.) We've seen this shape in many systems. What've we've been lacking, until recently, is a theory to go with these observed patterns.

Now, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in network theory by researchers like Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Duncan Watts, and Bernardo Huberman among others, breakthroughs being described in books like Linked, Six Degrees, and The Laws of the Web, we know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot.

A second counter-intuitive aspect of power laws is that most elements in a power law system are below average, because the curve is so heavily weighted towards the top performers. In Figure #1, the average number of inbound links (cumulative links divided by the number of blogs) is 31. The first blog below 31 links is 142nd on the list, meaning two-thirds of the listed blogs have a below average number of inbound links. We are so used to the evenness of the bell curve, where the median position has the average value, that the idea of two-thirds of a population being below average sounds strange. (The actual median, 217th of 433, has only 15 inbound links.)

Freedom of Choice Makes Stars Inevitable #

To see how freedom of choice could create such unequal distributions, consider a hypothetical population of a thousand people, each picking their 10 favorite blogs. One way to model such a system is simply to assume that each person has an equal chance of liking each blog. This distribution would be basically flat - most blogs will have the same number of people listing it as a favorite. A few blogs will be more popular than average and a few less, of course, but that will be statistical noise. The bulk of the blogs will be of average popularity, and the highs and lows will not be too far different from this average. In this model, neither the quality of the writing nor other people's choices have any effect; there are no shared tastes, no preferred genres, no effects from marketing or recommendations from friends.

But people's choices do affect one another. If we assume that any blog chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past.

Think of this positive feedback as a preference premium. The system assumes that later users come into an environment shaped by earlier users; the thousand-and-first user will not be selecting blogs at random, but will rather be affected, even if unconsciously, by the preference premiums built up in the system previously...

Reflections on the revolution in telephony

Some reflections by Marko Ahtisaari
What made this growth possible? Where did this massive scale come from? What was the structure of the mobile industry that made reaching this two billion mark possible? Three features stand out:
1. An object with a social function tied to a service. The primary human benefit driving the growth of the mobile industry was that of social interaction, people connecting with each other. Initially this meant calling people - a familiar activity at the time - but with a new twist: the cord had been cut. Over time this began to also mean sending short text messages.
2. Service providers - mobile operators - subsidizing price. To compete for customers those providing voice and messaging services subsidized - in markets where this was legally possibly - the price of the mobile devices in exchange for a longer term customer relationship. As a result end customers rarely saw the full price of the device and the infrastructure combining both devices and networks was rolled out at unprecedented speed.
3. The shift from a familiar collective object to a personal object.The last, and often overlooked, feature of the mobile industry is that it was based on a shift from a familiar collective object - the family phone - to a personal object, the mobile phone. The idea of a personal phone simply did not exist in the popular consciousness 20 years ago.
With this growth, this bigness, came a new communications mass market, some of the most valued brands in the world, and massive economies of scale. And with it came perhaps the strongest example of a hybrid consumer product. The mobile platform - because of it's scale and it's focus on the big human fundamental of social interaction - is a center of gravity for other familiar benefits and functionalities. Think of the clock. Imagine how many people wake up to a phone each morning, how many have stopped using a wristwatch. Or, to take a more recent example, the camera is now moving onto the mobile platform...

More patent trolling

Online auction house eBay goes to the US Supreme Court on Wednesday to prevent one of its core services being shutdown over a patent dispute. It is up against small US technology firm MercExchange, which successfully argued in a lower court in 2003 that eBay had infringed two of its patents.

The dispute relates to eBay's continued use of its popular "Buy it Now" tool. eBay argues that judges should be able to deny injunctions in patent cases and instead choose to fine the perpetrator.

The auction house says the current threat of firms having their services immediately closed down if they are found guilty of patent abuse is unfair.

It further adds that it leaves large technology companies such as itself open to victimisation and attack from small "patent trolls", who use the threat of immediate shutdown orders to force out-of-court settlements for huge sums of money.

[link]

Why Yahoo bought Flickr

Newsweek quotes a Yahoo! exec on why they bought Flickr: "With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content. That's a neat trick."

From a sardonic Slate piece about Web 2.0.

Glenn Reynolds on blogging-media symbiosis

You asked whether the independent media can be trusted as much as existing Big Media. This is a case of conflict between the real and the ideal. When it comes to journalism, the ideal is a strong, dedicated, and fair media establishment that just wants to get to the truth and is willing to spend a lot of money and effort to do so. Compared to this ideal, bloggers, with their minimal resources and strong opinions, don't look so good.

The real, however, is nothing like the ideal. The media today is an often flaccid, lazy, and unfair establishment more interested in selling advertising than in anything else. Compared to this reality, bloggers don't look so bad. I've long said that the relationship between Big Media and blogs should be more symbiotic than adversarial. On the other hand, blogs are actually better at some things than Big Media—note the Iraqi document translation effort, for example. And as Reason's Julian Sanchez noted regarding the Ben Domenech plagiarism affair at the Washington Post (in which a new Post hire was quickly found by bloggers to have been a serial plagiarizer, something that had eluded the folks who hired him), "The truth at the core of much often-tiresome blog triumphalism is precisely that the Post probably couldn't have vetted anyone as effectively as a blogospheric swarm." As Sanchez continues:

The same task would have taken a committed body of researchers days, but because the task was what Net theorist Yochai Benkler would call highly modular and granular—capable of being broken up into highly fine-grained microtasks—a distributed swarm of bloggers was able to accomplish it incredibly quickly, turning up many more instances in a matter of hours. The blogosphere's virtues on this front are not necessarily the Post's defects, any more than it's a problem with the blogosphere per se that it's less well suited to producing intensive, sustained investigative reporting on stories that aren't similarly modular and granular. They're different kinds of information systems with different comparative advantages.

That notion of differential competences seems to me exactly right. The question—discussed at some length in my book, of course—is whether the folks running many Big Media outlets will be smart enough to take advantage of this symbiosis and of their natural strengths in newsgathering. So far, the matter is still in serious doubt.

One good sign: The Washington Post is including links, via Technorati, to blogs that discuss its stories, allowing readers to quickly get multiple perspectives. The next step would be for the Post to assign some staffers to read those blog posts and look for errors in the story, correcting them and offering credit to bloggers when they're discovered. That would transform an army of kvetchers into a powerful squad of unpaid fact-checkers. (And the word "unpaid" must surely ring sweet in the ears of today's newspaper management.)

The next step would be to turn trusted bloggers into stringers, reporting on events in their areas (whether by geography or by expertise). As we've seen with news events like Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the Columbia disaster, there are lots of people with digital cameras and Internet connections who can provide useful reporting on short notice when something happens in their vicinity. There are also lots of people with deep expertise in particular topics who would be happy to share it when something happens. Maintaining a roster of these people in advance would be a smart move.

It would also address your concern (that bloggers are too weak to resist pressure from governments) as well as mine (that Big Media is out of touch). Instead of sniping at one another (OK, a more accurate formulation might be in addition to sniping at one another), bloggers and Big Media could become mutually supportive—helping to resist the pressures for censorship that your book describes. I think that would be a good thing.

From an email exchange with Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu.

[link]

Patent trolling

Lovely example -- from Tech Review...

Have Patent, Will Sue
A company makes its money by enforcing long-uncontested patents.
By Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- While most technology companies make money by developing software, building hardware or providing services, Forgent Networks Inc. has taken a different route: It produces threats and lawsuits that try to cash in on ideas.

Forgent and other companies with similar strategies -- often called ''patent trolling'' by critics -- amass intellectual property portfolios and file suits against other businesses, accusing them of infringement.

With a skeleton crew of 30 employees and the help of a law firm, Forgent has built a business out of suing -- or threatening to sue -- companies, even though it offers no related products and does no development of the technology itself.

Though critics say such tactics curb innovation and drive up costs for consumers, Forgent CEO Dick Snyder insists he's merely providing maximum value to shareholders.

''This country was built on innovation, and in the Constitution there is a provision in there to protect innovation through patenting,'' said Snyder, a former executive at Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. ''It's the American way, and we're just doing what we believe is the right thing to gain value from what we own.''

For Forgent and other companies, the business model is paying off.

In the quarter ended Oct. 31, 80 percent of Forgent's revenue came from licensing deals on just one digital image patent it obtained years ago in an acquisition.

Elsewhere, Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the popular BlackBerry e-mail device, this month settled its long-running patent dispute with NTP Inc. for $612.5 million (euro503 million). The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is expected to consider a patent dispute between eBay Inc. and patent-holder MercExchange this year.

Forgent's biggest earner -- generating $108.4 million (euro89 million) in settlements and licensing fees in the past three years -- has been U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672, issued in 1987 and obtained years ago in an acquisition. At the heart of the so-called 672 patent is something ubiquitous in the technology world: the JPEG format for digital pictures.

Though used in countless electronic gadgets and software programs since the 1980s, it wasn't until two years ago that Forgent sued 44 companies, including some of the high-tech industry's largest players. It claimed they were using the patented compression technique covered in the 672 without paying a licensing fee.

Thirteen companies have settled, including Yahoo! Inc. Over 50 others not involved in Forgent's lawsuit have agreed to pay unspecified royalties for using the patent, including RIM, and Forgent has notified more than 1,000 other companies they may owe royalties.

Though a dollar figure wasn't disclosed, RIM spokesman Mark Guibert said negotiations with Forgent resulted in a ''reasonable agreement.''

The trial for the remaining defendants -- among them Apple Computer Inc., Dell, Hewlett-Packard, International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft -- is still pending in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

Dan Venglarik, an intellectual property attorney with Davis Munck Butrus in Dallas who is not involved in the case, said Forgent's tactics have far-reaching impact. Many smaller companies especially will be more likely to settle than dispute Forgent's claim because of the high costs of litigation, which could easily top $3 million (euro2.5 illion), he said.

''If the numbers make sense, companies are going to be inclined to settle to avoid the risk,'' he said.

The issue has led some lawmakers to call for changes to the nation's patent system.

Last year's Patent Reform Act, sponsored by Reps. Lamar Smith and Howard Berman includes changes that seek to cut down on lawsuits by people who take out patents on products, methods or ideas just so they can sue a company for infringement if it eventually produces something similar.

A draft proposal remains under review by a congressional subcommittee chaired by Smith, a spokeswoman for his office said.

Forgent's legal attacks haven't come without a fight.

The New York-based Public Patent Foundation Inc. recently won a request to have the validity of the 672 reviewed by the U.S. Patent Office, a process that could take years. The group claims Forgent's patent was incorrectly granted and should be revoked.

''I think it's stupid that this type of policy is legal and profitable,'' said Dan Ravicher, the group's executive director.

Forgent dates to the mid-1980s, when it was VTEL Corp., a maker and designer of videoconferencing equipment. VTEL performed a series of acquisitions, culminating in 1997 with Compression Labs Inc., which created and owned the 672 patent.

In 2001, the company was renamed Forgent, and executives decided to focus on intellectual property.

''At that juncture we really decided it was best from a shareholder perspective to at least for the foreseeable future, focus ourselves around being a patent company,'' Snyder said.

Forgent's earnings, largely dependent on revenue from the 672, have fluctuated wildly over the years. The company's stock has ranged from $1.10 to $3.27 a share in the last year and recently posted a second quarter loss of $500,000 (euro410,340).

Forgent, which has about 30 other technology patents waiting in the wings, is already moving ahead with its next potential profit generator: U.S. Patent No. 6,285,746, which relates to how digital video recorders to allow playback during recording.

EchoStar Communications Corp., Motorola Inc., TiVo Inc. and 12 other companies have been named as defendants in the case. A federal judge has set a mediation date for next month in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas.

On the Net:

http://www.forgent.com

http://www.pubpat.org

See also.

Uploading and publishing pictures via 3G phones

Interesting column by Vic Keegan in today's Guardian.

It is difficult to avoid the hype about citizen journalism, the process whereby bloggers and people with cameraphones can report news from the grassroots that old media cannot reach. I thought it was time I tried it myself and what better way than with 3's new service, which enables users to take photos on their 3G cameraphones and share them with others while getting 1p every time a clip is downloaded...

Brittanica fights back

Good report on OnlineBlog.

Notes on self-organising systems

2. Definition of Self-Organisation

The essence of self-organisation is that system structure (at least in part) appears without explicit pressure or constraints from outside the system. In other words, the constraints on form are internal to the system and result from the interactions between the components, whilst being independant of the physical nature of those components. The organisation can evolve either in time or space, can maintain a stable form or can show transient phenomena. General resource flows into or out of the system are permitted, but are not critical to the concept.

The field of self-organisation seeks to discover the general rules under which such structure appears, the forms which it can take, and methods of predicting the changes to the structure that will result from changes to the underlying system. The results are expected to be applicable to any system exhibiting the same network characteristics.

3. What is a system ?

A system is a collection of interacting parts functioning as a whole. It is distinguishable from its surroundings with recognisable boundaries. The function depends upon the arrangement of the parts and will change in some way if parts are added, removed or rearranged. The system has properties that are emergent, that is they are not contained within any of the parts, they exist at a higher level of description.

4. What is a system property ?

If we connect a series of parts in a loop, then that loop does not exist as a property of the parts themselves. The parts can have any structure or form and yet the loop persists. If the loop shows an additional dynamic behaviour (maybe it oscillates) then this is an example of an emergent system property.

5. What is emergence ?

The appearance of a property or feature not previously seen. Generally, higher level properties are regarded as emergent - a car is an emergent property of the interconnected parts. That property disappears if the parts are disassembled and just placed in a heap.

6. What is organisation ?

The arrangement of parts in such a way as to be non-random. The restriction of the options available to a system in such a way as to confine it to a small volume of its state space.

7. What is state or phase space ?

The total arrangements (or combinations) available to the system. For a single coin toss this would be just two states (either heads or tails), but the possible states grow rapidly with complexity. If we take as an example 100 coins, then these can be arranged in over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different ways. We can view each coin as a separate parameter or dimension of the system, so one arrangement would be equivalent to specifying 100 binary digits (each one indicating a 1 for heads or 0 for tails for a specific coin). Generalising, any system has one dimension of state space for each variable that can change, mutation will change one or more variables and move the system a small distance in state space. State space is frequently called phase space, the two terms are interchangeable.

8. What is self-organisation ?

The evolution of a system into an organised form in the absence of external constraints. A move from a large region of state space to a persistent smaller one, under the control of the system itself.

9. Can things self-organise ?

Yes, any system that takes a form that is not imposed from outside (by walls, machines or forces) can be said to self-organise. The term is usually employed however in a more restricted sense by excluding physical laws (reductionist explanations), and suggesting that the properties that emerge are not explicable from a purely reductionist viewpoint.

10. Isn't this just the same as selection ?

No, selection is a choice between competing options such that one arrangement is preferred over another with reference to some external criteria - this represents a choice between two stable systems in state space. In self-organisation there is only one system which internally restricts the area of state space it occupies. In essence the system moves to an attractor that covers only a small area of state space, a dynamic pattern of expression that can persist even in the face of mutation and opposing selective forces. Alternative stable options are each self-organised attractors and selection may choose between them based upon their emergent properties.

11. What is an attractor ?

A preferred position for the system, such that if the system is started from another state it will evolve until it arrives at the attractor, and will then stay there in the absence of other factors. An attractor can be a point (e.g. the centre of a bowl containing a ball), a regular path (e.g. a planetary orbit), a complex series of states (e.g. the metabolism of a cell) or an infinite sequence (called a strange attractor). All specify a restricted volume of state space. The area of state space that leads to an attractor is called its basin of attraction.

12. How do attractors and self-organisation relate ?

Any system that moves to a fixed structure can be said to be drawn to an attractor. A complex system can have many attractors and these can alter with changes to the system interconnections (mutations). Studying self-organisation is equivalent to investigating the attractors of the system, their form and dynamics.

13. What is criticality ?

A point at which system properties change suddenly, e.g. where a matrix goes from non-percolating to percolating or vice versa. This is often regarded as a phase change.

[link]

The London Business School concept map

A nice idea. Could use the same idea for Systems teaching.

The ten things VCs care about

The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

Problem
Your solution
Business model
Underlying magic/technology
Marketing and sales
Competition
Team
Projections and milestones
Status and timeline
Summary and call to action

[link]

The Wealth of Networks

Yochai Benkler's new book is on the Amazon.co.uk database, but they're not shipping it yet. Growl.

Er, just noticed that it's not published until April 3 :-(

The TAKEAWAY Festival

The User-Generated Content movement continues to grow. There's an interesting event coming up at the Science Museum -- TakeAway: DO it yourself media. Blurb reads:

More and more people are transforming themselves from media consumers to producers - using the new tools, software and technologies now at their disposal. From the expanding realm of free and open source software (FLOSS), to peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution and 'pervasive' mobile and locative technologies, the possibilities exist as never before to create and disseminate our opinions and experiences through our own media. TAKEAWAY, the Festival of do it yourself Media, will help you to understand what it's all about and how to take part in the revolution.

Record companies getting smart? Surely not.

According to this NYT report, record labels are now delaying the release of tracks on forthcoming albums to iTunes to create pent-up demand for the CD. An interesting case of ecological adaptation, if true.

William Fisher's OECD lecture

Full text available (pdf) here. I was struck by this passage:

Suddenly, in the past few years, the trend toward concentration has reversed – and the tide is now running strongly in the other direction. Partly this is due to a remarkable decline in the cost of high-quality digital recording equipment. In 1980, the equipment necessary to make a high-quality album cost aprx. $50,000; today, a laptop and less than $1000 of software can do better. Partly it is due to the malleability of those digital recordings, enabling them to be modified, edited, recombined. And partly it is due to the increased availability of software (like Final Cut Pro) that enables such modifications, and the declining amounts of skills necessary to operate that software.

The net effect has been extraordinary. A rich stew of examples may be found in Henry Jenkins’ forthcoming book, Convergence Culture. Here are a few: Last year Shane Faleux, along with over 100 unpaid collaborators, produced an amateur 40-minute film, Star Wars Revelations. (To be honest, in my judgment the acting is so-so, but the special effects are very impressive.) Released for free on the web, more than 1 million people downloaded it. During the first week in which they were available on Amazon, DVDs of the extremely low-budget amateur parody, George Lucas in Love, outsold those of The Phantom Menace. A 2003 Star Wars Fan Film Contest, run by AtomFilms, attracted 250 entries. Hundreds of amateur filmmakers are now using Fisher-Price Pixelvision cameras to make avant-guard movies, making a virtue of their grainy images. Other examples are explicated in Yochai Benkler’s, The Wealth of Networks. He describes, for instance, the increasingly rich art form known as “machinima,” in which characters and stories are created within computer games, recorded, and then distributed on the Internet as short films. Many more examples can be found in the music industry. For instance, thousands of amateur musical webcasts are now available through Live365.com, offering an enormous variety of both mainstream and esoteric fare. The data from the 2005 Pew survey that John Horrigan summarized in his presentation here today is consistent with these anecdotes. One of the central findings of the Pew Study, for those of you who could not attend, is that broadband Internet users produce and share content at a high rate, not merely consume it.

David Weinberger on folksonomies

Find it here.

Key ideas from TU120 meeting

Audience: widest possible

Make use of podcasts: e.g. kids talking about how they use search

Key marketing point: students get access to the expensive online databases to which the OU subscribes.

Three 'story-lines' or themes: Amazon, Google, Wikipedia
(But how to weave them in while keeping the structure simple?)

Rupert Murdoch gets it too. Well, maybe.

From Guardian Unlimited...

"Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry - the editors, the chief executives and, let's face it, the proprietors," said Mr Murdoch, having flown into London from New York after celebrating his 75th birthday on Saturday.
Far from mourning its passing, he evangelised about a digital future that would put that power in the hands of those already launching a blog every second, sharing photos and music online and downloading television programmes on demand. "A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it," he said. Indicating he had little desire to slow down despite his advancing years, he told the 603-year-old guild that he was looking forward, not back.

"It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy - not just companies but whole countries."

The owner of Fox News added: "Never has the flow of information and ideas, of hard news and reasoned comment, been more important. The force of our democratic beliefs is a key weapon in the war against religious fanaticism and the terrorism it breeds."

Having now read Murdoch's speech in full, I'm not sure he does get it entirely. He's still convinced that "content is king" and that so long as media companies continue to create attractive content and serve it up in the ways that consumers want then everything will be hunky dory.

State of the News Media -- the PEW report

Sobering report on the state of print media in the US.

Summary:

Tough Times for Print Journalism - and In-Depth Reporting

March 14, 2006

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which will become a part of the Pew Research Center in mid-2006, issued its annual report on the state of the news media this week. Here is an excerpt from the report's overview.

Scan the headlines of 2005 and one question seems inevitable: Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die?

The ominous announcements gathered steam as the year went on. The New York Times would cut nearly 60 people from its newsroom, the Los Angeles Times 85; Knight Ridder's San Jose Mercury News cut 16%, the Philadelphia Inquirer 15% -- and that after cutting another 15% only five years earlier. By November, investors frustrated by poor financial performance forced one of the most cost-conscious newspaper chains of all, Knight Ridder, to be put up for sale.

Adding to the worry, industry fundamentals, not the general economy, were the problem -- declining circulation, pressure on revenues, stock prices for the year down 20%.

It wasn't only newspapers, either. Magazines like Newsweek, U.S. News and Business Week were suffering, too. The largest company, Time Inc., advertising and circulation falling, cut 205 people and promised to transform itself from "magazine publishing" to a "multiplatform media company." The former dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Tom Goldstein would conclude, "Unless they urgently respond to the changing environment, newspapers risk early extinction."

Is it true? From here on will the delivery of news in ink on paper begin a rapid and accelerating decline? Newspapers are the country's biggest newsgathering organizations in most towns and the Internet's primary suppliers. What would their decline portend?

For two years, this report has tracked the major trends in the American news media (link to 2005 and 2004). What is occurring, we have concluded, is not the end of journalism that some have predicted. But we do see a seismic transformation in what and how people learn about the world around them. Power is moving away from journalists as gatekeepers over what the public knows. Citizens are assuming a more active role as assemblers, editors and even creators of their own news. Audiences are moving from old media such as television or newsprint to new media online. Journalists need to redefine their role and identify which of their core values they want to fight to preserve --something they have only begun to consider.

In 2005, change intensified. The shift by audiences to other delivery mediums accelerated print's problems. Things that seemed futuristic two years ago, such as watching network news on a PDA, began to arrive. The role of new aggregators like Google grew. And new scandals in the old media seemed to confirm worries that some news people are more concerned with their careers than the public interest.

We believe some fears are overheated. For now, the evidence does not support the notion that newspapers have begun a sudden death spiral. The circulation declines and job cuts will probably tally at only about 3% for the year. The industry still posted profit margins of 20%. Measuring print and online together, the readership of many newspapers is higher than ever.

[And while the public continues to be troubled about the news media in some areas, including heightened concerns about bias, criticism of the military, and whether the news media really protect democracy, Americans have a more favorable view of the press generally and considers the news media more professional and moral than they did before September 11, 2001, or in aftermath of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.]

On the other hand, the most sanguine reaction to all these changes -- that they simply reflect an older medium's giving way to a newer one, and that citizens will have more choices than ever -- strikes us as glib, even naïve. Even if newspapers are not dying, they and other old media are constricting, and so, it appears, is the amount of resources dedicated to original newsgathering.

Most local radio stations, our content study this year finds, offer virtually nothing in the way of reporters in the field. On local TV news, fewer and fewer stories feature correspondents, and the range of topics that get full treatment is narrowing even more to crime and accidents, plus weather, traffic and sports. On the Web, the Internet-only sites that have tried to produce original content (among them Slate and Salon) have struggled financially, while those thriving financially rely almost entirely on the work of others. Among blogs, there is little of what journalists would call reporting (our study this year finds reporting in just 5% of postings). Even in bigger newsrooms, journalists report that specialization is eroding as more reporters are recast into generalists.

In some cities, the numbers alone tell the story. There are roughly half as many reporters covering metropolitan Philadelphia, for instance, as in 1980. The number of newspaper reporters there has fallen from 500 to 220. The pattern at the suburban papers around the city has been similar, though not as extreme. The local TV stations, with the exception of Fox, have cut back on traditional news coverage. The five AM radio stations that used to cover news have been reduced to two. As recently as 1990, the Philadelphia Inquirer had 46 reporters covering the city. Today it has 24.

In the future, we may well rely more on citizens to be sentinels for one another. No doubt that will expand the public forum and enrich the range of voices. Already people are experimenting with new ways to empower fellow citizens to gather and understand the news -- whether it is soldiers blogging from Baghdad, a radio program on the war produced by students at Swarthmore College carrying eyewitness interviews with Iraqi citizens, or a similar effort by young radio reporters in Minnesota to cover local towns.

Yet the changes will probably also make it easier for power to move in the dark. And the open technology that allows citizens to speak will also help special interests, posing as something else, to influence or even sometimes overwhelm what the rest of us know. The worry is not the wondrous addition of citizen media, but the decline of full-time, professional monitoring of powerful institutions.

Those are just some of the questions and conclusions in this, the third of our annual reports on the state of American journalism. The study, which we believe is unique in depth and scope, breaks the news industry into nine sectors (newspapers, magazines, network television, cable television, local television, the Internet, radio, ethnic media, and alternative media) and builds off many of the findings from a year ago.

This year, the study also includes a distinct content report, A Day in the Life of the News, in which we examine one day's events as they course through the media culture in print, television, radio, online, and blogs, magazines, both nationally and locally in three American cities.

Read the full report at journalism.org

[link]

Media ecology references

Casey Man Kong Lum and Lance Strate (Eds):Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication: The Media Ecology Tradition, Hampton Press Communication, 2005

Synopsis
This book is an introduction to media ecology as a theory group that encompasses a coherent body of canonical literature and perspectives on understanding culture, technology and communication. It examines the various facets of media ecology's development since the turn of the 20th century as an intellectual tradition and how it has evolved into being through an interlocking network of researchers from multidisciplinary backgrounds, such as behavioral sciences; classics, cultural and structural anthropology; information and systems theory; history of technology; media and culture; and so on. Specifically, the volume clearly explains some of media ecology's defining ideas, theories or themes about the interrelationship among culture, technology and communication; the thinkers behind these ideas; the social, political, and intellectual contexts in which these ideas came into being; as well as how the reader may use these ideas in our times.

Contents

Notes Toward an Intellectual History of Media Ecology, Casey Man Kong Lum. The Humanism of Media Ecology, Neil Postman. Lewis Mumford and the Ecology of Technics, Lance Strate and Casey Man Kong Lum. Jacques Ellul: Technique, Propaganda, and Modern Media, Randy Kluver. Ellul as Theologian in Counterpoint, Clifford Christian. Harold A. Innis’ Legacy in the Media Ecology Tradition, Paul Heyer. Marshall McLuhan: The Modern Janus, James C. Morrison. Neil Postman and the Rise of Media Ecology, Thom F. Gencarelli. James Carey: The Search for Cultural Balance, Frederick Wasser. Symbols, Thought and Reality: The Contributions of Benjamin Lee Whorf and Susanne K. Langer to Media Ecology, Christine Nystrom. Susanne Langer’s Philosophy of Mind: Some Implications for Media Ecology, John Powers. The Orality-Literacy Theorems and Media Ecology, Bruce Gronbeck. Typography and its Influence on Culture and Communication: Some Media Ecological Interpretations, Joseph Ashcroft. Epilogue: The Next Generation(s), Casey Man Kong Lum. Author Index. Subject Index.

Year: 2005 Pages: 424

Finite attention spans

There are only 168 hours in a week, no matter how you calculate it, of which only about 58 are not taken up by sleep, eating or work. Those 58 hours are what everyone is now competing for.

Reuter's CEO gets it.

Some selected quotes from Tom Glocer's Online Publishers Association Keynote address delivered March 2, 2006.

About this time last year I stood up in front of a room like this at a Financial Times media conference. I talked then about the personalization of news – how technology was allowing consumers to filter exactly the news they wanted to receive. And how it was allowing content organizations like Reuters to multicast individual streams of desired content, not just broadcast a single feed.

In a nutshell, it was about the consumer as editor - you get the news you want when you want it, either pulled by something like an RSS feed or a Tivo box or pushed by the media company – in this instance filtered by your profile.

Well, 12 months on, media companies are catching up with this demand, but you guessed it, our audiences have already moved on – now they are consuming, creating, sharing and publishing.

The consumer wants, not only to run the printing press but to set the linotype as well.

[...]

My message today in this opening session of the OPA’s “Forum for the Future” is simple – our industry faces a profound challenge from home-created content – everything from blogging and citizen journalism to video mash-ups

[...]

How if we create the right ”Crossroads”, provide consumers with the appropriate tools and use “old” media skills like writing and editing, we can harness the upside in what at the outset looks and feels very much like a punk revolution.

It is becoming clear that our media world is fundamentally changing again only a decade after the internet attracted the first wave of online publishers.

As media historians look back on this period, they’ll probably identify News Corp’s recent acquisition of Intermix Media, parent company of MySpace.com, as a turning point.

Looking at the numbers cold, $580 million was a lot of money to pay for a company with barely $20 million in revenues.
But sites like MySpace are redefining our world and providing an online forum for kids, music groups, their promoters and basically anyone with anything he wants to share.

Look behind the weirdness of some of MySpace’s inhabitants and Murdoch has now gained access to 54 million users (including one called Tom Glocer) - all potential customers for News Corp’s content.

More importantly he has the kind of market data that would make consumer industry bosses giddy - an early warning system of future trends and brand choices for the world’s youth market.

[...]

What we are seeing on-line now is almost a continuous talent show, with media-savvy consumers using digital technology to express themselves and stand out as individuals in their virtual communities, as well as appeal to the Harvey Weinsteins and Simon Cowells of the world.

[...]

If users want to be both author and editor, and technology is enabling this, what will be the role of the media company in the second decade of this century?

I would argue that there are three distinct attributes:

1. First, the ‘seeder of clouds’.

What do I mean by that?

Well, if you want to attract a community around you, you must offer them something original and of a quality that they can react to and incorporate in their creative work – just like Warner’s music to enable video mash-ups. Being authentic in what you create and deliver to your audience is essential for success.

But it’s no good hoping that new content creators will magically be drawn to us – we need to attract them. That means making the most of the content we already produce and setting out our electronic stall.

If you attract an audience to your content and build a brand, people will want to join your community and interact. They’ll be inside your tent.

This is as true for traditional “letters to the editor” on the op-ed page as it is for MySpace.com.

2. The second role media companies need to adopt to maximise the opportunity from new content is that of ‘the provider of tools’.

Maybe the French will create a better Google or a CNN a la Francaise, but I don’t see a lot of private money lined up behind this lot.

We need to promote open standards and interoperability to allow a diverse set of consumer-creators to combine disparate content types. We must enable our content to be at the Crossroads of our audiences’ consumption – and realize that no one fully “owns” audience anymore.

Let’s not make the same mistake that newspapers did with the protectionist online strategies that characterised Internet One: The Web was not created to merely display a replica of yesterday’s newspaper with a few banner ads.

As an aside, I think that the growing mood amongst European publishers to rebel against search is exactly this type of ill-considered, rear-guard action that will fail.

3. Third, the final role that media firms will play in the emergence of the two-way content pipe is that of ‘Filter and Editor’.

In my mind, media has always had these two functions – to allow and to filter – one without the other is death.

I believe that the world will always need editing just as consumers place value in others making decisions about what is good and what is not.

Just because everyone now has the potential to publish their own blog doesn’t mean they’re all worth reading.

[...]

So… we are now at our Crossroads. Old media (and ironically enough) that now means on-line publishing as well, has a choice – adopt these three roles to prosper or risk becoming less relevant.

1) To be the seeder of clouds;
2) To provide the tools for creation and;
3) To filter and edit.

Time spent watching TV in internet-using households

Google survey claims that:

Minutes spent online each day in internet-using households: 164
Minutes spent watching TV in internet-using households: 148

Cited in Guardian 13.03.06

Cost of TV broadcast, by genre

Drama: £505,400
Film: £280,300
Sport: £199,800
Entertainment: £196,100
Music & Arts: £151,000
Current affairs: £116,800
Factual & learning: £110,600
Children's: £110,600
News & Weather: £42,800

These are all BBC figures

Source: Guardian 13.03.06 page 19

BlackBerry blackmail

March 06, 2006
RSI treatment industry hails BlackBerry settlement
The BlackBerry saga, which discomfited CTOs and confounded legions of compulsive thumb typists, is finally over -- now little more than a memorial to the contemptible state of intellectual property law in the U.S. With a court-ordered shutdown of Research in Motion's U.S. business a very real possibility, the BlackBerry maker on Friday struck an 11th-hour deal with NTP, settling its long-running dispute with the patent holding company. For a one-time payment of $612.5 million, NTP agreed to drop its patent infringement claims against RIM and permit the company to continue its BlackBerry-related business without interruption. That's a high price to pay for any patents -- especially largely discredited ones (see "RIM to NTP: Appease you we tried, now screwed you all will be.") -- but perhaps a reasonable investment to bring these pitiable shenanigans to an end. "It's a lot of money for patents that will not survive, for sure, but that doesn't do us any good if there's a court that doesn't wait," RIM Chairman and co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie said during a conference call after the announcement. "No question, we took one for the team here. It wasn't a good feeling to write this kind of check."
Link: http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2006/03/the_blackberry_.html

Postman on the limitations of media

Smoke signals implicitly discourage philosophical argument.

Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even it they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.

In the same manner, the form of television works against content that is substantial and significant. The medium of television suggests that everything should be amusing, which, in turn, makes everything trivial."
Link: http://www.afirstlook.com/docs/mediaecology.cfm

Firstlook on McLuhan and Postman

"McLuhan's probes stimulated others to ponder whether specific media environments were beneficial or destructive for those immersed within them. Neil Postman founded the Media Ecology Program at New York University with this question in mind. But, unlike McLuhan, Postman believes that the primary task of media ecology is to make moral judgments about media environments. "To be quite honest about it," he once proclaimed, "I don't see any point in studying media unless one does so within a moral or ethical context."20
According to Postman, a new technology is never simply an addition to culture. It always presents us with a Faustian bargain?a potential deal with the devil. As Postman was fond of saying, "Technology giveth and technology taketh away....A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided."21 His media ecology approach asks, What are the moral implications of this bargain? Are the consequences more humanistic or anti-humanistic? Do we, as a society, gain more than we lose, or do we lose more than we gain? ??To answer these questions, we must consider the distinction Postman makes between technology and medium:
Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is the use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.22
A medium is a system. It's not an object but rather a way of thinking, expressing, and experiencing. Postman amends McLuhan's famous aphorism by stating that "the medium is the metaphor." A medium doesn't make a specific statement about the world, rather it colors everything we see around us. Like a metaphor, it unobtrusively suggests what our world is like by offering us meanings through a particular form.23
According to Postman, the forms of media regulate and even dictate what kind of content the form of a given medium can carry.24 For example, smoke signals implicitly discourage philosophical argument.
Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even it they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.25
In the same manner, the form of television works against content that is substantial and significant. The medium of television suggests that everything should be amusing, which, in turn, makes everything trivial.
Contrary to McLuhan, Postman believes that the medium of television is detrimental to society because it has led to the loss of serious public discourse. Television changes the form of information "from discursive to nondiscursive, from propositional to presentational, from rationalistic to emotive."26 Sesame Street, Sixty Minutes, and Survivor all share the same ethos?amusement. The media environment of television turns everything into entertainment and everyone into juvenile adults."
Link: http://www.afirstlook.com/docs/mediaecology.cfm

McLuhan on tools

"We shape our tools and they in turn shape us."

The ecology ten years from now...

Good piece in today's Observer. Excerpt:
"The year is 2016 and Chloe is 16. She keeps up with text and video messages by unrolling a paper-thin screen wherever she is. A tiny camera beams images from her day to a video diary on her personal website, which interacts with those of her friends.
Chloe has never heard of CDs or DVDs. When it comes to television, she knows she can access millions of hours of programmes, in high-definition picture quality, whenever she likes. She is the viewer of the future and her choice is, literally, without limit.

In Chloe's world, there are no TV listings because there are no TV schedules, and there are no TV schedules because there are no TV channels. Instead, sitting at her PC, she logs on to a website geared specifically to teenage girls. She watches programmes sold there by independent production companies, or even fellow teenagers - not broadcasting, but narrowcasting.

Gone are the days of racing home because she forgot to set the video; gone, too, the chat with friends about last night's universally watched big episode. The notion that television should require her presence at a particular time or place seems quaint, as does the concept of the commercial break. Chloe has come to expect TV on demand. Television's role in British culture has almost entirely changed."

Link: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,1729018,00.html

Herb Simon on attention

As Herbert Simon wrote in Computers, Communications and the Public Interest in 1971, "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."