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An anonymous reader writes in with this excerpt from Shirky.com. "The idea that 'failure is not an option' is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers. That sentiment was invented by a screenwriter, riffing on an after-the-fact observation about Apollo 13; no one said it at the time. (If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.) Even NASA's vaunted moonshot, so often referred to as the best of government innovation, tested with dozens of unmanned missions first, several of which failed outright. Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying 'Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.' ... Healthcare.gov was unable to complete even a thousand enrollments a day at launch, and for weeks afterwards. As we now know, programmers, stakeholders, and testers all expressed reservations about Healthcare.gov's ability to do what it was supposed to do. Yet no one who understood the problems was able to tell the President. Worse, every senior political figure—every one—who could have bridged the gap between knowledgeable employees and the President decided not to. And so it was that, even on launch day, the President was allowed to make things worse for himself and his signature program by bragging about the already-failing site and inviting people to log in and use something that mostly wouldn't work. Whatever happens to government procurement or hiring (and we should all hope those things get better) a culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news isn't well equipped to try new things.'"

giminy writes "Clay Shirky has a thought-provoking piece on depression in the hacker community. While hackers tend to be great at internet collaboration on software projects, we often fall short when it comes to helping each other with personal problems. The evidence is only anecdotal, but there seems to be a higher than average incidence of mental health issues among hackers and internet freedom fighters. It would be great to see this addressed by our community through some outreach and awareness programs."

newscloud writes "Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab sounds off on micropayments for news content, on the side of the argument that says they are a dangerous delusion: 'What does it mean for journalism? It could mean charging for different platforms, for early alerts, for special members-only access to certain premium or value-added content. But I'm pretty sure of one thing: It doesn't mean charging people fractions of a cent to read a news story, no matter how sophisticated the process.' The article provides good context on the debate over micropayments from a 2003 piece by Clay Shirky, to recent analysis and opinion by Masnick, Outing, Graham, and Reifman. Google's micropayment plans were recently discussed here."

We posted Jay Rosen's Call for Questions on September 25. Here are his answers, into which he's obviously put plenty of time and thought. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in the growing "citizen journalism" movement either as a writer/editor or as an audience member -- and please note that Rosen and many others say, over and over, that one of the major shifts in the news media, especially online, is that there is no longer any need to be one or the other instead of both.

1) Where do you see newspapers' role in this?
by Stick_Fig

First off, my credentials: I'm the former employee of an experimental newspaper, Bluffton Today, located in Bluffton, South Carolina. It's an exciting place, let me tell you. The focus has been on reverse publishing but at the same time tempering blogs with traditional journalism. The staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. They use the web only to the degree where it doesn't dip into libel and slander and builds on its strengths. My question to you is, do you think Bluffton is on the right track? It felt like, in the 15 months I was there, they definitely were, but I'm a biased party. I left thinking, "If only newspapers did more of this..." I know what I'm betting the farm on in my career, and it isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. Rather, I feel that it's important to look at both sides and find how they can work together, because God knows there's some 60-year-old editor somewhere who won't look at Bluffton as anything more than a gimmick. I'm gonna be that guy in the newsroom fighting the good fight to get more untraditional voices into the the paper in more places than the editorial page.

Rosen:

Bluffton Today (Bluffton, SC is near Hilton Head Island) did several things that were important to try in 2005. They said the editorial engine would be the online edition; it would "produce" the printed paper. This is the opposite of how newspapers did things for the first ten years of their Web lives. They just re-purposed the content from the print edition, and called that an "online newspaper."

By reversing what's primary in production you change head sets in the newsroom because a professional newsroom engineers everything--including the talents of its employees--around the production ordeal. The "daily miracle" it was once called, because making the newspaper required such a fantastic act of just-in-time coordination. Many things had to be routinized for the miracle to occur. (Including ideas about journalism and the user's place in it.)

Steve Yelvington of Morris Digital Works, who worked on the Bluffton Today site, called it an "inversion" because content would flow from the Web to print rather than vice versa. The editorial engine should be the more interactive one, in which more of the community can participate. The goal was a virtuous circle. "Community conversation feeds professional journalism. Journalism feeds conversation. And around, and around." I think there is something to that idea.

How well it works is for people in Bluffton to address. I like that Bluffton Today tried to go Lessig on the news industry. It ditched the read only platform and re-built on read/write. Yelvington said at the launch: "Everyone gets a blog. Not just staffers, but everyone in the community. LeMonde (France) and the Mail and Guardian (South Africa) are doing this, too." Giving everyone a blog may be an obvious idea. But it's a different track. "Everyone gets a photo gallery. Everyone can contribute events to a shared public community calendar...." The site was built on Drupal technology. It had free classifieds. It was different.

If the experience of doing Bluffton Today has tempered some of that initial boldness, that's as it should be. I'm not surprised that the staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. A web-to-print, highly-interactive, low barrier to entry, read-write, everyone-contributes newspaper is still a daily production headache. Articles, photos, headlines, and ads have to come together. Unedited, the site would have almost no value, although it can have unedited parts with high value.

"It isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. It's important to look at both sides..." I agree with that, Stick. My new adventure, NewAssignment.Net, is a hybrid site for that reason. (Pros and amateurs collaborate on reporting projects.) In January of 2005 I wrote Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over for the same reason.

Bluffton today was a first wave attempt at innovation. Today initiatives like that face some second wave facts. Bringing capacity online does not itself create activity, so if you're counting on user activity, you better come with more than nifty new capacity. Create more writers and suddenly you may need more editors. "The conversation feeds journalism, journalism feeds the conversation" is a powerful idea, but we are several steps away from knowing how it works to create a live, intelligent filter in the newsroom.

There's just a long way to go. But yeah, you were on the right track working for those guys. Deeply so.

2) How to Get More Respect
by NewYorkCountryLawyer
I am convinced that online media have made a huge contribution to getting out the truth when the corporate media are seeking to suppress the truth. While there are a growing number of people aware of this phenomenon, reports in the 'blogosphere' just do not get the same respect and currency received by reports in the 'major' or 'corporate' media. What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large?

Rosen:

Well, "suppressing" the truth is not how I see the failures of modern journalism, or of our current press. I think it's bigger than that.

Bob Woodward, who is in the news this week, is at the top of the reporting game, an industry unto himself. In two books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, he failed to tell the truth about the Bush White House because his methods were not up to the obstacle they met: an administration that had broken through all the reality checks normally placed on a president and his closest aides. One by one these measures came under abnormal stress. The policy-making process used by presidents got subverted. The normal channels for sounding out opinion were just disowned. The intelligence community came under extreme stress when asked to supply facts for a decision already made.

A Congress controlled by the same party was expected to go along, which meant accepting the president's definition of reality. Oversight got evacuated. The normal tensions with the press were driven deeper: keep them back, keep them out, tell them nothing, tear them down. If someone does break a story from inside you immediately punish and isolate anyone who spoke to the reporter. You make them disown their words. You make them repent.

This is the story Woodward missed because he got inside it, so to speak. Ron Suskind, one of the few in Washington who did not miss that story, called it "the retreat from empiricism." To me, it's the big narrative yet to come out about the Bush White House. Attack Without a Plan was too crazy to be credible to Woodward. So he wrote Plan of Attack instead. I haven't read his new book yet, just the reviews and excerpts. But from early accounts, State of Denial is his attempt to get back the ground he lost, despite having the best access.

Woodward didn't "suppress" the story. Rather, he couldn't imagine it. Those are the kinds of failures that interest me. Sometimes things are suppressed. Often, the truth eludes professional journalism because no one thought to look for it. I welcome your question, What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large? My first answer is: we have to look for it.

You know how, when you've really mastered something and there's a news account of it, the news story will invariable get several (basic) things wrong? Eliminate the several things and respect will rise. If you want to inform the world of something, grok it before you rock it is a good simple rule.

Correct ourselves early and often. Correct the reporting in the major media, early and often. Fact check your own ass first, then your neighbor's. We should major in transparency; the "major" media will take a minor in that. Diversity of outlook in the reporters ultimately improves the reporting. The blogosphere has advantages there, especially as it does more reporting.

I think we have to accept that Big Media, which isn't going anywhere, is society's default legitimacy-distribution machine. But that doesn't mean it works well. The machine itself can lose legitimacy without exactly falling apart. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you suck at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you're really good at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. Then when you assume the shape of a writes-itself story--first bloggers to go to the political conventions!--Big Media will over-cover you, spreading a small bit of understanding over lots and lots of stories. Six months later it's time to debunk the trend they missed, then over-hyped and finally misdescribed. It's not personal. It's protective. It's also cheaper than figuring out what's going on.

We can win a lot of points for Net journalism just by being the opposite of that.

3) What about mob-rule journalism?
by Chas

What sort of safeguards are in place to do fact-checking and prevent false/obviously slanted mob-rule style reports from being propagated as fact?

Rosen:

People hear phrases like "an experiment in open source reporting" and they see it immediately: What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked "citizen," the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?

To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won't have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can't tell you--yet--how we're going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we'll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people. To simply pass along unchecked reports received from strangers over the Net would be fantastically dumb. To discount the possibility of people trying to game the system would be dumb, too; the more successful the site is, the more probable the gaming is. Not to mention spam, duplication, all kinds of junk.

What sort of safeguards are in place? Here are my answers so far. You tell me what is missing or cracked in this foundation:

One: The editors are full time on it. Assignments flow through editors several times before they are published by NewAssignment.Net. That's the pro-am way. It's an editor's job not to be gamed, not to publish bum facts. Everything that goes out has the editor's name on it. It's not an answer to everything--this reliance on "good editors"--but it's a proven system, a simple one, and a start.

Two: Users Self-Police. I'm not sure "community" is the right word for the eventual users of New Assignment. People use that term too loosely, in my opinion. But if NewAssignment.Net develops a base of active, loyal and intelligent users, it's not unreasonable that they can help police the site, especially if they understand that verifiying information and preventing fraud are basic to everything we're trying to do. And so a second answer, after editors, is a culture among users: catch errors, catch mistakes, catch fraud and manipulation. A mob mentality has to be met by something stronger; if you attract the right kind of users, that can happen. It would be foolish to think it will just because you're counting on it.

Three: Given enough eyeballs, all facts can be checked. I think there is every chance of developing a special subgroup of users who are effective fact checkers of the larger base of contributors, including new and casual contributors. One thing we are definitely going to do is see whether retired journalists and ex-journalists will volunteer to work with other natural born sticklers and operate our fact-checking system, which not only has to work, but eventually be better than industry standard. I don't know yet what that system will look like, or how systematic it will be. One of my advisers is interested in this puzzle and working on some ideas, assisted by a professional fact checker who emailed me offering to help. That's how we are going to solve this. Social scientists call it "muddling through."

Four: The site itself has to make verification easy. I mean in the way it is built and meant to operate. For example, editors have to be able to sort the raw from the initially verified from the double checked. This is one of the challenges for the developers of the New Assignment site, which will be Chapter Three. It's a new partnership--here's an about page for them--formed by Zack Rosen, who is my nephew, one of the originators of Dean Space and the co-founder of CivicSpace on the Drupal platform; and Josh Koenig, a co-founder of DeanSpace who started Music for America, a non-profit. They are both Drupal developers, active in that community. The third partner is Matt Cheney, who is trained as a librarian and worked as a researcher at National Center for SuperComputing Applications.

They're going to build the site with open source tools. Josh Koenig has a post up about the New Assignment project. It promises an Open Practice model: "posting tutorials, video screen casts, interviews, and write ups as our own work progresses and as we research others." Verification and fact-checking have to become open practices themselves. The developers understand that.

Five: The one percent rule.. Experience suggests a small slice of users will do most of the volunteer work. According to the one percent rule in social media, which is more of a tendency than a law, "if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will 'interact' with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it." This bears on the verification puzzle because we're not talking about "checking" vast hordes of people. If regular contributors provide most of the contributions, their reputations for reliability can accumulate at the site. In a well-designed system that will happen.

Six: How have others solved the problem? You tell me: has creating a reliable system of volunteer contributors ever been faced before on the Web? Did it prove unsolvable? I would expect NewAssignment.Net to look at prior cases first and find the key lessons.

4) Money
by truthsearch

Do you believe that as money flows into civic journalism that it'll change the equation? Obviously there are some people who's primary goal is to become famous and/or make money through more open journalism. Will the large community of contributors flush out those with less altruistic intentions? I guess I'm really asking will civic journalism be self-correcting as it gets bigger? Or is there a way it may become just as corrupted as much of the current mainstream professional journalism?

Rosen:

I doubt there's any incorruptible system, just different kinds of pressures, with greater and lesser freedoms for the journalists involved. We can certainly hope for a self-correcting system, but it's not likely to happen on its own.

There's nothing wrong with seeking recognition for great work. People who want to be become famous or make a salary through the more open forms in Net journalism aren't the enemy. Not at all. But they are going to have to work with users under conditions that build trust and permit collaboration. It's hard for me to see how the bad actors will succeed at that, but I am not discounting it, either.

Here's a site called Sportingo. It says it's a "new type of sports media company," which is "focused on telling the story from the fans' perspective." Users can write articles, which will be "professionally edited." They can rate and comment on articles written by peers.

Sportingo will own all the content published on the site. There are no plans to pay contributors. The company is for-profit. Tal Rozow, the marketing manager, told me that that "Sportingo authors aiming for a professional writing career will be able to benefit from having by-lines appearing on our website." He said he's confident that a strong network of independent sports writers will emerge at the site, and maybe that will happen. But I'm not sure it's a system designed to build trust among all the players involved.

Everyone I have consulted about open source projects of any kind has stressed one thing over and over: the importance of understanding what would motivate people to contribute to the gift economy of the project. You have to get that right, they say. Ultimately I believe a non-profit foundation is a more secure one. If there are profits and they are extracted by the owners, not distributed to co-creators; that's a problem. If there are profits and they go into doing more and better journalism, that's different.

5) What's wrong with other extant examples?
by crush

I'm assuming that you evaluated and rejected some of the other high-profile citizen journalism outfits that predate the founding of your own project. Off my head I can think of:

* The Indymedia network is one of the longest standing examples of an attempt to have a large citizen journalist network.

* The Pacifica Network (especially the Democracy Now show)

* The New Standard

What was it that you found lacking in the above and why did you decide to start a new project instead of reforming and adapting one of the above? Do you think that your decision to accept corporate sponsorship (which is rejected by the Pacifica Network) will see your organization's focus inevitably drift toward the anodyne ineffectiveness of e.g. NPR?

(And of course, how could I forget WikiNews?)

Rosen:

There's nothing "wrong" with these prior examples. I admire them all. I was especially pleased to see that the New Standard met its do-or-die fundraising goal last week. That site is an experiment with reader-supported, totally independent, strenuously-factual reporting. High standards of verification are meant to prevail. I think the New Standard has a lot in common with professional journalism, except it rejects the political economy of commercial news media entirely. It's run as a collective among those who do the work. I am thrilled that it will remain around, because we need to try lots of solutions to how to fund serious reporting. Just as I'm thrilled that Independent Media Center and its collectives around the world keep humming. I agree with Chris Anderson that what blogging begat--citizen journalism--Indy Media begat, too.

I didn't "evaluate and reject" the New Standard, Indy Media, Pacifica and Wiki News. Nor is it my place to decide they need fixing. They don't. The people who founded those organizations deserve a lot of credit for creating something new and daring-- and genuinely alternative. They inspired me. So did lots of others. (New West, for example, or Witness.org.) NewAssignment.Net is really about a single proposition: that if journalists and networks of users can report stuff together that neither could easily do alone, the public sphere will benefit and the site will build trust. I think there's room for that.

My decision to accept $100,000 from Reuters means we'll have an editor who can test the possibilities in networked journalism, as Jeff Jarvis calls it. My job is to make sure that Reuters has no influence on that person. The company has said it will have no editorial control, and no claim on the content. I agree: it won't. I think we can persuade users that it works as advertised. But people are free to draw their own conclusions about what the gift means, and I'm sure they will.

6) Plagiarism and Ethics?
by goombah99

Lately there's been a few incidents of Plagiarism in the news, not to mention some wholesale ethical breaches of faked stories (e.g. Blair at the NY times and "a million Little pieces"). But the thing is, the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do. Indeed, breaking this taboo is probably even more of a sin to the the fellow journalists than to the general public because of this entrenched ethic.

Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomenon, plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.

It seems to me this is a serious issue for any new journalism form with a low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author. How does this ethos get enforced in such a realm?

A related question is the ethical division of commentary and news. We know that's become a problem in the media for some outlets where management has a thumb on the content. But the traditional news organs, especially newspapers, still refrain for the most part. Indeed, the NY times just went so far as to remove the typeset justification from any article that contained any sort of analysis or opinion, reserving the justified typesetting for only traditional factual journalism stories so the difference is apparent to the reader from the start. How do we reinforce that ethos in the untrained journalist?

Rosen:

When people plagiarize they do it for a particular self-interested reason: to meet a deadline, get an unwanted task out of the way, get their full time salary with limited work. These motivations will probably be rarer in the New Assignment model. Why volunteer for a project only to cheat at it?

"The common man cannot restrain himself." Sorry, I don't trust that kind of language. Beyond that making stuff up is not a way to develop a base of users on the Web; people aren't that dumb! You speak of a "low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author." But for most users the higher the anonymity factor for the author, the higher the barrier of trust.

What some people can't seem to get over is that other people can say any damn thing they want on the Internet! How can you trust any of it? is their natural reaction to all open systems. Closed systems--and professional journalism is one--develop trust in one way. Open systems have to do it a much different way. Expecting one to look like the other is unreasonable.

We aren't going to learn much about this puzzle by asking how the "common man" can be trained to imitate his betters in the news media. I refer you to sociologist Raymond Williams, who once said, "There are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses." It is these ways of seeing that are retrograde. But they show up in the most surprising places.

7) Scale
by FuturePastNow

First, I'll admit that I haven't read much about citizen journalism other than Jeff Jarvis' [buzzmachine.com], but as a non-blogger thinking of getting in to it, I was wondering:

Much of the discussion seems to be about getting out from under the control of "gatekeepers" like publishers and media owners. Yet, while the internet is less concerned with money, it has its own form of currency: popularity, in the form of the link.

Doesn't this just turn the highest-traffic sites into new gatekeepers? Especially as the number of blogs increases, the gap between "rich" and "poor" expands?

I suppose what I'm really asking is, it's hard enough to get noticed today- how will someone just starting out get noticed ten years from now?

Rosen:

Ten years from now? Jeez, I have no idea what the world of media access will be like then. But anyone who is just starting out in self-publishing should consult Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, so as not to become prematurely disillusioned by discovering its truths later on.

Certainly there are new gatekeepers. (Slashdot itself is one. But does it work the same way the old system did?) Traffic-wise, there's still rich and poor. (But is this list as static as that one?) Hierarchies have not gone away. (And who said they would?) Inequality has not disappeared. (But did you really think it could?)

You still have to fight to be noticed, good work can still go unnoticed. Life online is not entirely fair, or completely different. There's a new attention economy to replace the old. The sooner we reconcile ourselves to these common sense conclusions, the easier it will be to see what is actually different today.

Here are some things that stand out for me: Amateurs have joined professionals and they own a part of "the press." An audience that was once connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other is now connected both ways. The cost for like-minded people to locate each other and collaborate has fallen dramatically. The tools of media production have been widely distributed, and broad distribution of content is no longer impossible for small, upstart producers. For professionals, they're not required to affiliate with Big Media in order to operate as a journalist, though most will. They can be stand alones and independents. The people formerly known as the audience (as I call them) are now a productive force to be reckoned with, and Big Media has just started that reckoning. The Net has new ways of distributing attention, which have taken their place alongside the old.

Still, there's a long way to go before we can say that our media system has been made more democratic, responsive and responsible.

8) What impact would this have on national elections?
by StressGuy

The Electoral process seems to be more of a "marketing contest" and marketing takes bags and bags of money. There's commercial time, signs, billboards, radio, etc. Let's face it, a commercial is, at most 90 seconds to tell me why I should vote for you - hardly enough time. So, all we see are glittering generalities or, all to often, "don't vote for the other guy" spots.

If "Citizen Journalism" takes off, do you see this as a way that candidates without the massive financial resources normally required to sustain a traditional campaign could actually compete? Could this make the "third party candidates" a credible threat? Could this actually serve to "level the playing field"?

Rosen:

We should be cautious here. I think the most we can say is that a system that was almost entirely closed and self-sustaining--in which a handful of people raised the money, took the polls, handled the candidates, made the ads, narrated the campaign and talked about the candidates on TV--has been disrupted. The people who ran it are not as confident as they once were in their ability to manage things and get the outcomes they want. Their party has been crashed, but it's not "over." Nor is it "ours."
It's possible that insurgent candidacies--not backed by current players in the system--will have an easier time of it in the years ahead, just as insurgent news providers have more of an opening now. That's as far as I would go on the leveled field.

9) Dilution of Protection
by ObsessiveMathsFreak

How long before corporations and wealthy individuals start employing goons, lawyers and wiretaps, a la HP, to threaten and intimidate citizen journalists with no real legal recourse? If faced with this, should a citizen journalist just back off and let the guilty win? How can the protections now enjoyed by the fourth estate be extended to citizen journalism without diluting them?

Rosen:

As a matter of law and public policy, I think "fourth estate" protections should focus on significant acts of journalism, not people in pre-fab categories or the kind of organization that surrounds the giver of news. All those who are engaged in the act of informing a broader public of what's going on deserve to be under the First Amendment umbrella that protects the press. The press itself is composed of amateur and professional wings.

But that's no answer to goons with lawyers who threaten to sue. Citizen journalists are definitely vulnerable there, which makes you realize why we have big media organizations in the first place. We have to be more creative. Robert Cox, head of the Media Bloggers Association (I am a founding member of the group) has shown that "an orchestrated campaign by bloggers to defend a fellow blogger in what appears to be a frivolous lawsuit" can work. That's encouraging but not a complete answer, either. Legal intimidation will happen, and I'm sure there will be times when the bad guys will win.

10) Blogging
by From A Far Away Land

When asking a primary source for information, I find that telling them I'm doing so to create a report on my blog tends to make them clam up, or continue to be unwilling to provide information that ought to be publicly available. What technique or phrases should I use to convince the interviewee that I both have a legitimate use for their information, and the right to obtain it?

Rosen:

Sometimes you have a right to obtain information from a primary source. Sometimes it's not a matter of your rights but their decision to recognize you and cooperate. If search costs are high for making an informed decision about whether to trust a blogger who shows up with questions, sources will seek to reduce costs by using reputation and even stereotype (bloggers: ugh) as proxies.

I don't think there's a proper technique or a magic phrase that will solve this problem. There's only one solution I can see. Send the guy the URL for the "about" section of your site. That page ought to persuade potential sources that legitimate use will be made of their information. It should tell them what you are up to, and why. The site itself, the reporting and commentary there, is the best reason any source has to cooperate. Ah, but how do you convince them to take the time and look?

There's at least one way. Break a story so that the source's world is talking about it and next time around the source will speak to you-- and go to your About page. I asked Dean Wright of Reuters what the biggest obstacle for NewAssignment.Net will be when it launches. "The same one that the more minor players in the mainstream media have: getting your calls returned," he said. "Then when you complete a project and publish, you may find that other media outlets are reluctant to pick up your stories." The only answer to that is "do some compelling projects that cannot be ignored."

NewAssignment.Net will try to take that advice. It will do stories developed by users into assignments that are given to journalists. It could also do stories developed by journalists and divided into parts for users to assign themselves. (Mechanical Turk meets the Center for Public Integrity.) I hope it will do stories where teams of users and journalists figure out the division of labor together.

Sometimes the network will be the knowledge producer, the journalist the enabler. Other times the journalist will be the producer, and the network the enabler. Pro-am journalism is not inherently better than am-pro. Amateur users could in some cases do it all themselves, with editors watching and giving the green light in stages. Different combinations beg to be tried. It's unwise to say in advance that we know how it will work, or that it can't.

cshirky writes "Boston.com is reporting that 'AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.' The telcos basic fear, of course, is that the end to end design of the net (PDF version) will erode the telcos ability to use service charges to generate revenue for delivering video and voice; the proposed solution is to break end-to-end in order to protect pricing leverage over the users." We reported on this at the beginning of the month, when it was just speculation. Not any more.

scubacuda writes "When engineering assumptions change, shouldn't the laws that govern technology reflect those changing assumptions? Perhaps Clay Shirky puts it best: 'Things like shoes, cars, and houses are all property. Property is excludable -- it is easy to prevent others from using it -- and rival -- meaning that one person's use of it will interfere with another person's use of it. Spectrum has neither characteristic. Spectrum is purely descriptive -- a frequency is just a particular number of waves a second -- so no one can own a particular frequency of spectrum in the same way no one can own a particular color of light. Instead, when an organization 'owns' spectrum, what they really have is a contract guaranteeing Federal prosecution if someone else broadcasts on their frequency in their area. The regulatory costs of forcing spectrum to emulate property are enormous, but worthwhile so long as it leads to better use of spectrum than other methods can. That used to be true. No longer.'"

janbjurstrom writes "Clay Shirky has published a thought-provoking (and long) essay discussing the concept of 'situated software', musing on changes in software development, from general systems catering to thousands towards applications 'form-fitted' to small, specific groups and particular social contexts. A lot of interesting observations about the differences." Shirky argues: "Most software built for large numbers of users or designed to last indefinitely fails at both goals anyway. Situated software is a way of saying 'Most software gets only a few users for a short period; why not take advantage of designing with that in mind?'"

janbjurstrom writes "Clay Shirky has published a thought-provoking (and long) essay discussing the concept of 'situated software', musing on changes in software development, from general systems catering to thousands towards applications 'form-fitted' to small, specific groups and particular social contexts. A lot of interesting observations about the differences." Shirky argues: "Most software built for large numbers of users or designed to last indefinitely fails at both goals anyway. Situated software is a way of saying 'Most software gets only a few users for a short period; why not take advantage of designing with that in mind?'"

scubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has an interesting take on encryption: 'The RIAA is succeeding where the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users to trade a broad but penetrable privacy for unbreakable anonymity under their personal control. In contrast to the Cypherpunks "eat your peas" approach, touting encryption as a first-order service users should work to embrace, encryption is now becoming a background feature of collaborative workspaces. Because encryption is becoming something that must run in the background, there is now an incentive to make its adoption as easy and transparent to the user as possible. It's too early to say how widely casual encryption use will spread, but it isn't too early to see that the shift is both profound and irreversible.'"

scubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has an interesting take on encryption: 'The RIAA is succeeding where the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users to trade a broad but penetrable privacy for unbreakable anonymity under their personal control. In contrast to the Cypherpunks "eat your peas" approach, touting encryption as a first-order service users should work to embrace, encryption is now becoming a background feature of collaborative workspaces. Because encryption is becoming something that must run in the background, there is now an incentive to make its adoption as easy and transparent to the user as possible. It's too early to say how widely casual encryption use will spread, but it isn't too early to see that the shift is both profound and irreversible.'"

PetiePooo writes "From an article at PCWorld: The Multistate Tax Commission is fighting a bill which makes the moratorium on internet taxes permanent. Their complaint is that it could be interpreted to include VoIP telephony such as Packet8 and Vonage, and they would lose that lucrative tax base as people switch from incumbent providers. The House has already approved the bill. When will the politicians figure out that VoIP is a going to end up as a product, not a service? Voice will be just another form of data. Here's another related article."

FrnkMit writes "Others besides Slashdotters have responded to Clay Shirky's latest article on Micropayments, including long-time micropayment booster Scott McCloud and the MIT Technology Review."

adharma writes "Clay Shirky is at it again. Addressed previously, his new article discussess the failures of Micropayments and the joys of free content."

adharma writes "Clay Shirky is at it again. Addressed previously, his new article discussess the failures of Micropayments and the joys of free content."

PetiePooo writes "Those of us in the telecom industry have been watching it wither and die in the past few years. Here's why. The Register has an article about the future of mobile communications using VoIP on WiFi. From the article: "... voice over IP would gradually come to be a prime driver of mobile Internet." VoIP has been considered by many for a while now to be the future of traditional telephony. Combining VoIP and WiFi makes a compelling argument for the convergence of voice and data services over a single platform. Here's a previous slashdot discussion on industry's efforts to make this happen."

Clay Shirky has a good essay on wireless networking, contrasting two approaches to building out a network, roughly akin to the cathedral and bazaar methods of building software.

scubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has written an excellent article entitled "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." Simply put, diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality: "A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on." A must read for anyone interested in the statistics, fairness, and power relations of blogging."

scubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has written an excellent article entitled "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." Simply put, diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality: "A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on." A must read for anyone interested in the statistics, fairness, and power relations of blogging."

Christopher Rath asks: "Earlier this month, a reference to Clay Shirky's piece on ZapMail was posted as a Slashdot article. An obvious (to me) next step, which was hinted at in a couple of the postings which followed, was for the Internet community---you and me---to put up a VoIP directory server. I want to use an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA), like the Cisco ATA or The Kompany's new tkcPhone, to talk to other guys who have ATAs too; I have very little interest in making a local call using the ATA (for that I've still got my Bell land-line). Surely someone has already started such a project, if not, why not?"

"To make investing in an ATA worthwhile, I need an easy method of establishing a connection. In the current broadband environment, where most of us don't have static IP addresses, this means that we need our ATA to register itself with some VoIP directory server that can be used to assist with "dialing the number": as a user I want to remember my friend's ATA number, and then the directory server maps this to the ATA's current address. Once my ATA has the other ATA's address, the call should be ATA-to-ATA without any burden on the directory server."

sasha writes "Here's a good article that describes how we, the consumers, can play the role of competitors to the vendors of products and services we buy. The author draws a parallel between FedEx's ZapMail failure and current situation with VoIP and WiFi in regard to the phone companies."

cshirky writes "A persistent criticism of open source is that it is more about copying features than creating new ones. While this criticism is overblown, the literature of open source is richer on the subject of debugging than design. I've written an article about Ben Hammersley's LazyWeb.org, wondering whether open source methods plus RSS distribution can do for feature requests what open source already does for bug fixes, namely parallelize the problem in ways not available to closed source development methods."

Slashback tonight with another round of updates and errata regarding recent Slashdot stories. Read on for more on domain slamming, the process behind fixing and revealing the recent OpenSSH vulnerability, early photography, and a special note for residents of Maricopa County, Arizona.

Quick work by smart people. ciaweb writes "The OpenSSH group has revised its security advisory about the recent OpenSSH vulnerabilities. In it, they describe their decision-making process for releasing the bug information. It is interesting to contrast their procedure, which appears designed to maximize user protection, against Microsoft's, which appears to maximize Microsoft's protection."

Pardon me, sir, would you mind if I SLAMMED THIS HAMMER ON YOUR FINGERS?! D0wnsp0ut writes "I thumbed through my mail today and found what appeared to be a renewal notice for my domain. This one came from "Domain Registry of America." Verisign attempted something similar back in March and Bulkregister.com fought back and won an injunction, against the mailings. So watch out if your domain is getting close to expiring. I talked to my registrar (Register.com) and they're aware of it.
I'll scan the letter but have no place to post the pictures. Can anyone lend some bandwidth?"

Half the world has never eaten a Krispy Kreme donut, either. cshirky writes "I've just written an essay on the phrase ' Half the world has never made a phone call'. It's more 'voice telephony-y' than the usual telecom stories here, but after seeing the interest in media and the market that surfaced during my /. interview, I thought it might be of some interest."

Please stop sending my money to Redmond, OK? TrumpetPower! writes "All that brouhaha over Maricopa County's policy prohibiting companies or persons convicted of antitrust violations has had an effect. I just received the following note announcing a public forum scheduled for this coming Monday.

You recently inquired about the County's use of Microsoft products and the manner in which we license their software. We appreciate your interest in the County's technology plans. To provide a forum in which to discuss our technology direction and address any questions you may have, we will have Information Technology staff members available to meet with citizens at 8:30 am on Monday July 8th. The meeting location will be the County Administration Building at 301 W. Jefferson in Suite 420. Please RSVP your attendance so we can ensure that adequate facilities are available for the meeting.

Thank you for your inquiry,
Paul Allsing
Deputy CIO
Maricopa County
301 W Jefferson, Suite 420
Phoenix, AZ 85003"

Ah, but what about the first annoying family photographer? 7h3_B055 writes: "Contrary to this article on Slashdot claiming the first photograph was created in 1826, much evidence is pointing to the fact that the Shroud of Turin may have been an earlier example (substantially earlier) of photography using ingredients as basic as egg-white for treating cloth (the photopaper) and urine for developing it. The camera itself could have been a simple box with a hole in it and the exposure time would have been lengthy."

Of course, there are a lot of theories about the Shroud of Turin, and a google search is likely to intrigue you for days.

There's a great Dan Gillmor article, from his blog ^[?] regarding the challenge issued by Tim O'Reilly and Clay Shirky to the computer OEMs, asking them to include the latest Java JRE. As Microsoft has said they won't be including Java in WinXP, but are cool with "letting" OEMs put in other programs, let's see the manufacturers strike a blow for competition, and compatibility, and including a non-"extended and embraced" JRE.

Really. He does. Quite eloquently. Clay Shirky's answers to our questions could easily be turned into an all-day seminar on where the Internet is today as a communications medium, where it might be 10 years from now, and how it is going to get from here to there. This is information you need if your career or business is affected by the Internet in any way. Lots of good debunking, too, of everything from WAP to the myth of increased media homogenization, all put forth with enough humor to keep even Clay's most depressing thoughts from bringing (too many) tears to your eyes.

1) DCMA Encryption and Mass File Sharing
by chancycat

Can you make a prediction?

I'm interested in your prediction for how the next two years will pan out with regard to all the litigation around mass file sharing (see: Napster) and its relationships to DCMA and possible future twists with parties circumventing "protection means" like encryption.

Recent developments have been interesting to follow, but I'm wondering if the furure is going to be getting scarier and more worrisome, or level out and more reasonable... and your contribution to this queston is most welcome.

Clay:

The next two years are, as usual, harder to predict than the next ten. so I'll start with the easy, long-term prediction and back into the two year outlook.

The Analog Millennium Copyright Act is an attempt to graft analog economics onto digital data by decree. This will fail.

The economics of selling information in an analog world have always relied on a piece of indirection: you pay for the object -- the magazine, book, tape, whatever -- in order to get the information stored in the object. In the digital world, information and storage are decoupled. You can get to information without using objects as intermediaries.

We have seen several industries come under this kind of pressure, where the switch from analog to digital distribution blows up the old business models, and the general trend seems to be a parallel transition from selling products to selling services.

The obvious comparison is with the software industry, which used to rely on selling physical objects -- CDs -- in just the way the recording industry does today. As the internet made redistribution of software easier, the software makers worked themselves up into a froth, launching the usual legal and technological attempts to prevent any change to the object-based sales model -- dongles, UCITA, even ad campaigns asking people to report one another or their employees.

As those rear-guard actions are happening, though, the industry as a whole is moving to a software-as-service model. Even Microsoft, who has arguably benefited more than any other software company from per-unit sales, is talking up its ASP strategy.

You can see this attempt to make digital music behave like objects in digital rights management schemes like SDMI. The recording industry is desperate to bring all the inconvenience of the physical world into cyberspace, and then ask music lovers to pay the same for music on- and offline, because it's costing them so much to make things so inconvenient.

Ten years from now, this nonsense will have failed. Embracing digital data for what it does well will so expand the size of the market, by lowering expensive physical barriers, that the music industry will be making *more* money than it does today.

Two years from now is a different, and muddier, story. The interesting fight today is between the music industry and the recording industry.

The music industry is that part of the business concerned with music, everyone from the artists themselves to the A&R department to ASCAP. The recording industry, on the other hand, is concerned with recording technology and its economic effects, principally per-unit pricing. The avatar of the recording industry is the RIAA; if the RIAA represented the music industry, they'd call it the MIAA.

Like all bureaucratic entities, whatever the RIAA is concerned with on paper, it is mainly concerned with its own survival. Even if new technology allows for an expansion of the music industry, if it does so at the expense of people paying per unit for music, the RIAA will be against it. Anything that looks like a subscription scheme undermines the RIAA's reason for existing, namely representing the people who collect all that revenue derived from linking music (the information) to objects (the physical CD). If that link disappears, the RIAA disappears, and groups like ASCAP and BMI, or some altogether new entity, will step in to take the RIAA's place.

This will not happen in the next two years, however, so what we will have in 2003 will look a lot like the software industry did in 1997, where dongles existed side by side with early experiments in software-as-service, and Egghead's closing of its brick and mortar stores was still in the future.

As we know from both democracy and free markets, systems that channel selfish behavior work better than systems that try to deflect it. I put Napster third on a list of uprisings of massive, uncoordinated civil disobedience in the last 100 years, after the 55 mph speed limit and Prohibition. The most important thing for users to do, as we weather the transformation of one industry after another in the next decade, is to consistently and loudly insist that the economic efficiencies offered by digital data and networks never be sacrificed to preserve outmoded industry practices.

2) Does New Media need journalism training?
by georgeha

Does the New Media need journalism training?

In the bad old days, journalists almost always got some training before they were unleashed on the public. Boring things like finding out a complete story, verifying rumors before publishing, disclosing conflicts of interest, journalist integrity, and a whole host of other things (including spelling and grammar).

Due to the rise of New Media, anyone with a web page can be a journalist, regardless of their qualifications. The Drudge Report is the canonical example. Matt Drudge can post any rumor he hears, without having to verify it.

Now, I'm not sure I want to go back to the old way of journalism, but should New Media editors at least try to follow some basic journalist ethics and principles?

If they should, how should they try to implement them?

Clay:

I have two answers as to whether we need better journalistic standards on the net: "No", and "Yes".

The "No" answer looks like this: the democratization of opinion on the net is easily the most important thing to happen to journalism since TV, and the most positive thing to happen to journalism since radio. If I could wave a magic wand and get all of that plus higher standards, I might do it.

However, magic wands are scarce in my corner of the internet, and the only non-magic ways I can think of to effect such a thing would require the creation of a journalistic standards body, equipped with the ability to make value judgments and the right to determine who is in and out of the club of acceptable standards. To be effective, this would have to be coupled with some sort of punishment for those who break these new rules, even if only by withholding the "Online Journalistic Seal of Approval".

The damage this would do to the present flowering of online journalism and opinion would be incalculable. It is precisely the fact that no third party -- no printer, no post office, not even the FCC -- needs to be involved in a public conversation between reader and writer that makes the internet's effect on media so important.

This huge expansion of the reach of the individual has the side effect (how could it be any other way?) of extending *both* tails of the bell curve -- in addition to the obvious increase in the bulge of mediocre writing, we get more dreck. As a consolation prize, though, we get the kind of thing you could not get in any other medium -- blogger, mcsweeneys.net, oldmanmurray.com, Slashdot itself.

These things are not unconnected. Slashdot and the Drudge Report are twin sons of different mothers. Taco and Drudge showed up at about the same time, and there is no objective standard by which one of them should have the "right" to run a web site but not the other.

And this brings me to the "Yes" answer. Yes, we need higher standards, but if we are to get there without coercion and official designations (read: governmental regulation), it has to come through pressure exerted by the audience themselves.

Your complaint about Drudge rings a bit hollow to me. Drudge is surely still peddling whatever he gets, but he is no longer in the public eye. His moment of fame came when the information he had was both accurate and of vital interest. Now, though, he has been largely sidelined, because his political views are more important to him than his journalistic probity -- the interesting stories he has are not true, and the true stories he has are not interesting.

Furthermore, if he ever *does* get another interesting story, we'll tune right back in. The public is better at sorting the good from the bad than you think.

That Drudge *wasn't* able to parlay l'affaire Lewinsky into a permanent place on the national stage seems to me to be an argument for continuing to let the users sort things out for themselves, rather than assuming they are too stupid and jumping into the drivers seat on their behalf. (But see question 4 for an argument about ways of organizing user input to maximize its force.)

3) Computers and humans.
by influensa

The way that people interact and exchange information over the internet has been one of your favourite topics.

What do you think the "information age" is doing to humans regarding their ability to socialize and interact. With the advent of television in the 1950's, there was criticism that television eroded communities by keeping people in their homes. Right now, the so called "MTV Generation" allegedly has the attention span of a 30 second soundbyte.

Many phenomena have been cited as a result of this. Some believe that because so much time is spent in front of televisions, alone, the population is segregated and isolated, unable to work as a community. Others would argue that television technology has merely expanded the community to a national or international level. Still others would refute that this monoculture is dangerous and allows our cultural identity to stagnate.

In the late 90's and now in the early parts of the "new millenium" we've seen an increasing amount of information being transacted over the internet. Does the web as we know it enhance our ability to communicate, or does it further isolate us?

Does a more distributed, decentralized peer2peer model of information exchange promise a type of interaction more natural to humans, or should we be for strategies to prevent further information glut and saturation?

Clay:

Oh my. Big questions.

Computer-mediated communication is a vast area of inquiry, and not one I cover closely, so rather than trying to talk about the field from a professional point of view I'm going to answer this one based on personal experience. Take it with a grain of salt.

In 1993, during what I can now thankfully call the nadir of my personal and professional life, I discovered the internet, and essentially disappeared into it. For someone who had spent a lot of time thinking about language and community, the net was like a gift, having something this interesting to think about. At a time when I was living an otherwise flattened existence, the daily challenge of trying to understand the net gave me something to live for.

None of my friends at the time was online, so I made a second set of friends, mainly on panix, ECHO, and alt.folklore.urban. During those years, I essentially lived in two worlds, with the networked world seeming realer to me than the real world. I often had a daydream in which the hum of the internet just grazed the top of my skull; it felt as if by standing on tip-toe I should be able to press my brain directly into the network. Going 24 hours without jacking in made me physically ill.

Therefore, when I face questions like "Does the web as we know it enhance our ability to communicate, or does it further isolate us?", I have to ask, why pick? It seems to do both, or at least it did for me.

I have no trouble saying the internet saved my life, but I also have no trouble saying that I was for a time addicted to it. (The addiction passed like a fever. I awoke one morning a few years ago, and *didn't need to check my email*, a craving whose absence rattled me a bit, as getting online with the first crack of consciousness had for years been a more reliable feature of my mornings than either eating or getting dressed.)

I was addicted to communication, to a very peculiar kind of social congress that put a huge premium on verbal acuity while conveying none of the emotional cues you pick up from other people when you are in the same physical space with them. Anyone who has ever gotten to know someone in email and later met them in the real world understands this difference instinctively: you read someone's email differently after you've spent some time with them offline as well.

So the web can paradoxically enhance our ability to communicate *and* further isolate us. The real danger, it seems to me, is in believing that it can only do one or the other.

As for decentralization, David Stutz says that peer-to-peer is succeeding because it maps better to the way people actually live their lives than client-server does. I do think that p2p strategies will open up new kinds of communications that don't readily map to the network we have today, especially as it concerns group (as opposed to global) publishing.

Again, though, peer-to-peer won't save us from needing strategies for dealing with info-saturation; if anything, the ability to commit more of our thoughts to the web will *raise* the pressure to find novel ways of filtering the important from the trivial and the interesting from the dull.

4) Do we hold successful New Media outlets to higher standards?
by typical geek

Do we hold New Media outlets that have made it (millions of page views per month) to higher ethical standards than someone running a homepage on an ISP dial up account?

There seems to be an attitude at some New Media outlets of Hey, it's my site and I'm doing what I want with it!

Now, I can understand this attitude if it's a part time site, with maybe 20 page view of day. But when you grow into a leading New Media outlet with 30 million page views a month, shouldn't this attitude change?

William Randolph Hearst was accused of starting the Spanish American war to increase circulation for his newspaper. This was rightly decried, you can safely stand on a street corner and advocate war, but when you have a bully pulpit of millions of readers, you should be expected to have more accountability and responsibility. Sadly, I'm not always seeing this on New Media outlets.

Should New Media outlets be more aware of journalistic integrity. Now, at Slashdot Rob Malda almost always let's us know about his VA LInux holding when he writes about VA Linux. He also posts stories about VA Linux's financial problems, to his credit. Should it be a policy that any New Media editor mention all conflicts of interest? Do they realize that with the ease of transferring cash, and the ease of faek indentities, New Media editors need to be cleaner than Caeser's wife.

Clay:

Right now, journalistic standards are enforced by cumulative effect individual users choices of which sites to frequent and which to avoid (vis the case of Slashdot and the Drudge report I referred to in the second question.)

It seems to me that in the case of the VA stock, we are not only holding Slashdot to higher standards because it's popular; Slashdot became popular in part because Rob, Jeff, and Co are forthcoming about their points of view. Slashdot's popularity may be both cause and effect of the editors' ethical standards, in other words, because reputation is the best way to keep readers. (Thanks to Lucas Gonze for pointing out the relationship between reputation management and publishing.)

When you ask "should it be a policy that...", though, I assume that this approach strikes you as unsatisfactory. My question about such a policy is this: created by whom? Policed by whom? Can you think of any group you'd trust with the power to make determinations concerning who is and is not cleaner than Caesar's wife? Can you even think of any group you'd trust with the responsibility of defining which sites were "news outlets" and which were merely "journals of opinion"?

The only group that I would trust to police Slashdot is the Slashdot users themselves. At the risk of being labeled a fanboy, I'd like to point to the History section of the moderator guidelines, which walks through the "Who will guard the guardians?" problem of moderation, going from no moderation, through hand-picked few, through "400 Lucky Winners" (which for me conjures up a curious mix of Lady Astor and the Charge of the Light Brigade) through to the present system.

When you create a small group whose role is to be representative of the whole, the smaller group often starts acting on its own behalf rather than for the public good. This is a well understood political problem, and representative democracy plus checks and balances has been the usual solution, because direct involvement of all the affected individuals has been too hard to arrange.

On the net, however, you can actually have a small group represent the larger whole, without making the members of the small group into a special interest, by rotating the membership of the smaller group in and out of the larger pool.

This is how juries work, this is how Slashdot works, this is even how collaborative filtering works, and it is a solution that is generally available on the internet, because the death of distance means we can create ad hoc groups to monitor behavior with little regard to geography.

Any discussion of addressing ethical lapses in the media will turn on specifics, of course -- there are different ethical issues for entertainmentweekly.com and schwab.com -- but in general, the most net-like solution for raising ethical standards is going to be to bypass the notion of third parties and instead to find ways of putting the users' hands directly on the dial.

5) Micropayments
by Ergo2000

In your article "The Case Against Micropayments" you state the case against micropayments. Has anything in the intervening time changed your mind (i.e. the collapse of content), or do you believe that the fundamentals of micropayments are impossible to achieve? Does your problem with micropayments stem primarily with pay-per-view, or rather the concept of mandatorily user supported sites (i.e. extrapolating micropayments to include subscriptions or content packs)?

Clay:

The "collapse of content" hasn't changed my mind, because my critique of micropayments has nothing to do with technological barriers and everything to do with human barriers.

In a competitive market, things rarely happen because they are good for producers but not consumers, and this is something micropayment proponents have rarely understood. Many of the arguments in favor of micropayments argue that they will succeed because they will be good for information providers, even though it is the consumers who have all the money. This "Good for the producers" argument is especially hard to support in an environment where the competition is one click away.

So yes, I believe that the fundamentals of micropayments, namely being embraced by users, are impossible to achieve. Do this thought experiment: Assume there are two comparable sources of financial news, one that charges a penny a page, and one that charges a subscription. Other things being equal, which system would _you_ use?

Micropayments could only work in a system where the producers have monopoly control. In a competitive environment, user preference for predictable pricing and a desire to be spared the anxiety of the meter ticking will always make micropayments vulnerable to competition by alternate pricing schemes.

As for pay-per-view vs mandatory, one of the problems with wading into the micropayment tar pit is that there is no one definition of micropayments that covers all uses of that word. My working definition is two-fold:

A micropayment is any system that

a) assumes that some alternative to the present financial infrastructure is required, and

b) assumes that people will be content to participate in systems that generate automatic or all but automatic charges.

I specifically *don't* think QPass and Paypal are micropayments, because they

a) use existing credit card infrastructure rather than creating alternative currency or transactions and

b) they interrupt the flow of the transaction in order to get your explicit approval.

I can use QPass to buy an article on the NY Times for $2.50, but I can also buy a used copy of "Hop On Pop" on Amazon for $2.00, and the Amazon interface is *less* intrusive than Qpass. Therefore, if Qpass is a micropayment system then so is one-click ordering, at which point I have no idea what a micropayment really is.

I think the real death of "micropayments" will be the increased flexibility of traditional financial institutions. The W3C "embedded micropayment" effort is completely stalled, QPass has lowered the price threshold for making purchase decisions into the single dollar range, and yet again (as with debit cards vs digicash "smart" cards in the mid-90s) the existing financial infrastructure will prove adequately flexible to handle charges for any size users are interested in transacting in.

Since it is the users' unwillingness to transact in penny and sub-penny amounts, this means that, also like smart cards, there won't be any real-world cases to drive micropayment adoption by consumers.

6) Internet Civilization
by Alien54

I think that it is well agreed that the Internet is changing civilization. The slightly tongue in cheek, but serious question is "Changing it into what?"

The spectrum of possible futures ranges from Utopian to paranoia making 1984 look like a children's tea party. And Idealism aside, there is a large class of people who like being sheeple, having all the tough decisions made for them.

So that is the question - what is the Internet changing civilization into?

Clay:

With the usual hand-waving about how a question this large invites over-broad speculation etc etc, I think the internet is driving the increasing importance of "immaterial culture" that will mostly operate alongside but in some cases displace the material culture we are used to.

Material culture is the present tense version of physical anthropology, where the question "How do we live?" is answered by examining the material facts of our lives: our clothes, food, houses, dwellings, decorations, and so on.

As the internet permeates society, examination of material culture is increasingly inadequate to answer those questions.

By way of example, I am writing this on my wife's computer. The material facts of using this computer -- desk, chair, keyboard, monitor -- are therefore the same for both of us.

The immaterial facts of our use of this computer could not be more different, however. It's safe to say that other than Yahoo, there is no site we both visit. She never opens telnet, I never open WordPerfect. Our experiences on this machine diverge in a way that examination of the physical set up would never reveal.

With the internet, a computer is a door rather than a box, and the worlds it is a door into -- Barney fan sites, auctions of excess steel, political dissidence, chemistry homework -- have to do with the will and interests of the individuals using it, not with the material aspects of the object itself. We are increasingly less bounded by the choices the material culture is offering us, and increasingly expressing our humanity through immaterial choices instead.

I first became aware of the way the human condition could attach itself to non-existant objects when a friend of mine on panix talked the sysadmins into changing her user id in /etc/passwd so she could have a lower number, because uid had become a status symbol, and the lower the number the more pioneering a panixian you were. (Compare karma whoring.)

This change in the direction of immaterial culture is going to catch a lot of people by surprise. I once did an interview with Bazaar about the internet's effect on fashion (an absurd occurrence, given my relaxed sartorial sensibilities), and I began talking about how the public faces we were fashioning for ourselves were increasingly created online. The editor had little use for this line of thought, since, for her readers, fashion == clothes.

But increasingly, fashion != clothes. In the blogger community, people put the effort into designing an interface that fits their public persona that an earlier generation might have put into picking a wardrobe for the same reason. When looking for work, you will probably spend much more time polishing your personal web site than dressing for the interview. When corresponding with someone you're trying to impress, editing and re-editing email takes the place of changing outfits three times.

So culture is increasingly vested in the immaterial choices we make about our lives -- when everyone has access to the network, what you *do* with that access becomes a more powerful act of self-definition than the choices you make about your material culture and your immediate surroundings.

7) Hi, I'm one of those Seattle protesters.
by perdida

After reading your piece on the WTO, I have a question for you.

What do you think of the Indymedia phenomenon?

Or, more broadly, do you feel that the increasing accessibility of digital cameras and other tools, which lower the cost of putting a strong Web-based newsroom together, might challenge the increasingly corporate system of mainstream news?

Interestingly, you don't mention Indymedia in that article, but we're a collective of people who gets equipment out to intereted people, to cover the protests on the inside.

They have connected live, streaming news about protests all over the world, including the recent UN climate talks, the WTO, the World Economic Forum, and the march of the Zapatistas to Mexico City.

Although Indymedia started in Seattle, there are IMC bureaus all over the world now.

I think they've done two important things- popularized the "movement against corporate globalization," and created a forum for debate.

The debate you talk about- between the protesters who want to fix institutions like the WTO and the ones who want to abolish them- is taking place in the discussion rooms of Indymedia. Check it out!

Clay:

I didn't know about Indymedia when I wrote that article, though since then I've spent some time talking with Craig Hymson about it.

Indymedia is a cool thing, and I am obviously in favor of anything that further decreases barriers to disseminating news and opinion.

That having been said, I disagree with the idea that there is an increasing corporatization of news. I refuse to be seduced by this comfortingly alarmist view, because I am old enough to know better.

In 1970, there were three sources of televised news in the US.

Three.

No points for guessing what language they broadcast in.

In the US today, there are 7 broadcast networks, someplace between half a dozen and several dozen cable news networks depending on how you define news (MTV covers presidential elections; religious channels discuss politics), not to mention Spanish cable channels, Arabic cable channels, Japanese cable channels, Korean cable channels.

All this without even mentioning the Web. Do you have any idea how many news outlets there are on the Web? If you want to see evidence that news is not in fact becoming increasingly corporate, take a look around the site you're asking this on. As they used to say on the Palmolive commercials, you're soaking in it.

That part of the left given to conspiracy theories has been banging on for 30 years about the contraction in the media space while out here in the real world, technology has been tearing the roof off the sucker since the launch of CNN. I lived through the 70s, and no matter how earnestly The Nation approaches the task of drawing all those little charts of media ownership, nothing can make me pretend that things are worse now than they were then.

To take but one example, 30 years ago there was no Spanish language news broadcast in New York City. None. I don't know how old you are, but if you are under 30 I doubt you can even imagine such a thing.

That's what it used to be like. The 70s were the absolute worst period of corporatization of news -- the old "news as a public trust" idea had died, but the lowering of barriers that would democratize media beyond all recognition had not yet begun.

There are certainly lots of corporate media outlets, and there is lots of cross-media ownership and more on the way, but the democratization of media outlets and media access is outstripping the corporate growth by leaps and bounds. Anyone fretting about a contracting media universe while Starbucks is getting ready to put 802.11b networks in its stores just looks like they have no grasp of history. The media landscape we have now is so unbelievably much less corporate than it used to be that it defies description.

8) Long-term solution to content reward needed
by Tony Shepps

I agree with you that micropayments are not coming any time soon. But I worry that the net is not accurately communicating its need for quality content -- and its willingness to pay for same.

Amongst any group of users, my bet is that you'll find several who would pay for improvements in the quality and nature of the information they receive. Obviously there is great value in correct and timely information. In some cases, it is nothing short of a life or death matter. In most cases it simply keeps us a little better informed.

I don't understand, therefore, why none of your proposed solutions (aggregation, subscription, subsidy) have evolved yet. Every site that I've seen try subscription has given up (except one: the WSJ). And everyone agrees that subsidy in the form of advertising is not going to fly.

Many high-quality sites that deserve to survive are having a tough time of it, and it's not for lack of readership. The Onion hasn't created any multi-millionaires; it should have. Salon has had layoffs. The Straight Dope should make more money on its website than on its books. User Friendly should not have to resort to dead tree publishing or syndication.

In short, while Fucked Company celebrates the death of the crappy sites and stupid business plans, the quality sites are in danger of dying as well. What's gone wrong? Why haven't any models come about that support what people really want?

Clay:

As a matter of discipline, I try not to use the word "should" in my writing, as it entices me to think like a cop or a priest instead of an analyst, so I can't really either agree or disagree with you about whether the Onion "should" have created any multi-millionaires, or which sites "deserve" to survive.

From my point of view, there are lots of sites using both aggregation and subsidy. UGO and Andover, to name but two, aggregate sites, sites that themselves often aggregate content from different sources, and then subsidize those sites with advertising. The one method of the three that is not in wide use is subscription, for all the economic difficulties presented by digital data I mentioned in the first question.

But by far the biggest single effect of the net on content is *user* subsidy, which is to say amateur subsidy. People who run web logs, people who run mailing lists, even people who submit stories or posts to slashdot or plastic, are creating subsidized content by participating for the love of the thing (the literal sense of amateur) rather than for money.

We have just lived through a period in which, by lowering the barriers to creating a media outlet, it was assumed that we were witnessing the mass professionalization of media.

But mass professionalization is an oxymoron. The mistake I think we've made is to assume that we need to find ways of increasing revenues so we can all go pro. What we are witnessing is the mass amateurization of media, because the net has revolutionized media in the other direction, reducing the cost of being a media outlet to the point where many *many* more people can participate, and with peer-to-peer models offloading even more of the costs to the edges of the network (viz Napster), the lowering of the barriers still has a ways to go.

The unfortunate fact of this lowering of barriers is that an increase in amateur participation puts further pressure on online media outlets hoping to go pro. The collapse of the content sites is just beginning, and there is no short-term fix for that. Advertising revenue will eventually be able to support good sites, but it will take quite some time before both the models and the demand are in place.

You ask "Why haven't any models come about that support what people really want?" My answer is that what people really want is high quality content for free, and for a half-dozen years, the net has been incredibly good at delivering on that desire. Now that the "stock price as business model" plan has failed, most of the sites built in that era will disappear.

In the next 6 months or so, the only professional sites that will be able to survive will either find some sort of patronage (including NPR/PBS-style subsidy from users, as Evan did when he needed servers for blogger) or get bought by a company that is willing to run a media outlet as a loss leader.

Some of the ones that can't stay professional will go back to being labors of love, as just happened to Old Man Murray.

The rest -- most -- will die.

I wish I believed there was some magic bullet. I don't. As John Maynard Keynes said, "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

9) Evolution and Good Usability
by KjetilK

In your open letter to Jakob Nielsen you say that evolution must decide what's good design. I agree that you can't force people into good design, but is the evolution doing us any good so far?

For example, I can read web pages on a normal mobile phone. I like that, it's my own little hack, it's far from good, but it can do the job. Now, if usable web sites had been designed, we would all be able to read web on our mobile phones. Another example: Speech browsers. I'd like a box to plug into my hifi, and I want to relax in my best chair talking to my browser, having it read pages for me, playing music, etc. Both these things have been possible for years, but they require good, usable pages.

It seems to me that the evolution isn't the fastest method of getting good design, mainly because people don't know what they never see, people like to have web on their phones, but they don't know that all that is needed is for web designers to do their job properly, and so there is no evolutionary pressure for designers to do their job properly.

OK, so to the question, how do you want to create this pressure?

Clay:

You are absolutely right, evolution isn't the fastest method of getting good design. I am uninterested in good design, however. I really only care about great design, and about the environment of experimentation that that requires.

The question I have for you is "Is good design good enough?" Because if it's great design you're after, evolution is the way to get there. I don't mean this as a rhetorical question, either. For many people, Nielsen among them, raising the minimum quality of design is the essential task, even if it means curtailing the freedom that makes for the most interesting experiments. So the question you have to ask yourself is: Would I accept higher average quality even if it meant less experimentation?

For me, the answer is No. Freedom is freedom, and the only way to prevent people from making bad stuff is to come up with some a priori definition of "good", and then enforce that. Not only do I not trust myself to be smart enough to know in advance what "good" looks like, I don't trust *anyone* to be that smart. Instead, I trust myself to know what's right for me: the sites I like go in the bookmark list, and the ones I don't, don't. I feel no need to punish people who do work I don't like in any way other than not looking at their work.

The wireless example you bring up is a perfect illustration. By and large, people *don't* like to have the Web on their phones. "Fewer than one in 50 UK adults are using mobile phones to access internet services despite millions of pounds spent on advertising and subsidising handsets, according to new research." http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=001109003316

Web sites are written for a user experience quite different from that offered by wireless devices, and some work has to go into modifying or converting content to make it make sense on the phone. To make this work worthwhile, you need both users and site owners to be motivated.

The only place anything like a wireless Web is taking off is in Japan, where DoCoMo quite sensibly made it possible to write for the phone interface in a sub-set of HTML, rather than in WML. There, there is an absolute explosion of third-party content, because designers are motivated to get onto the devices. Where people are using their phones for the Web, and where designers have low barriers to entry to to access to those people, evolution is working -- there is competition and rising quality. Where people are not using their phones, and where designers can't easily create or offer new services, there is no competition and no change in quality. There is also no way to force designers to design for a format they have no interest in.

And this, I think, is the core of my argument. The explosion of the Web was created by the adoption of HTML by amateurs -- anyone can write a web page (and frequently does). You cannot simultaneously have mass adoption and rigor, as evidenced by the failure of all attempts to make "a programming language so simple anyone can do it", or the collapse of the "HTML should be a purely semantic language" argument in 1995.

In large, unmanaged systems, only efforts that achieve partial results when partially implemented can survive, which mitigates against top-down approaches, so when you say "...there is no evolutionary pressure for designers to do their job properly", I have to ask: Who gets to say what is proper? You? Jakob Nielsen? Some newly minted Pope of Proper Design?

You are right that people don't know what they never see, but this is not their problem -- all web designers were first web users. Why should designers design for wireless if no one is offering them a good wireless experience as users?

If you want to know why designers aren't spending the cycles to convert or redesign for wireless, go ask Nokia and Sprint why they adopted WAP. As DoCoMo has shown us, when you make a good experience for the user, the designers follow.

10) An open garden?
by XNormal

The big players in the interactive television game are all building their own walled gardens. What kind of effort would it take for interactive television to evolve into a more web-like open garden model? Which new media players could fight the traditional broadcasters for a place on the screen in the living room?

Clay:

I once saw the tail end of this fairly terrible WWII movie in which a demolition expert promises to blow up a dam using a tiny amount of explosive, and when the explosion goes off and the dam doesn't fall, his colleagues look at him, crestfallen, and he says "Give it time. It'll blow." There's a cutaway shot to water trickling through the crack caused by the little explosion, which slowly turns into a gush, then a flood, and then the dam suddenly collapses.

Email is that tiny bit of explosive.

I have seen many (*many*) companies have the intuition that the internet is a great thing with only two teensy-weensy problems: they don't own it, and it's too easy for their competitors to use it. They then all have the same brainstorm: "Hey, I know! Lets build something that's just like the internet, except we'll control the whole thing! Then we'll be rich!"

The first time I saw anybody try this was Prodigy in the early 90s, when they were trying to force their users to stop emailing one another and get back to shopping. The most recent attempt was WAP, with stops along the way for AOL, Compuserve, eWorld, MSN, et al, and the thing they have always run aground on was email. People, alas for one-way media outlets, like to communicate with one another. A lot.

Once email arrives, people have very little patience for walled gardens, and less for mapping arbitrary technological distinctions onto live human relationships. "What do you mean I can't send a message to my mother because she has a Sony Interactive TV and I have a Panasonic?!"

Email is the gateway drug of the internet, because once email is in place, people begin to expect full interoperability. In the Olden Tymes (pre-IMG tag, roughly) AOL, Compuserve, and their cousins spent a lot of time patiently explaining to their paying customers why they couldn't use ftp servers or post to usenet, even as 19 years olds procrastinating on their CS homework were freaking everybody out by writing emailftp and emailnntp gateways in their spare time.

If this is the sort of fight you like to tune into, I can recommend no business battle more entertaining than the ongoing marginalization of WAP. The brokenness of the WAP protocol came about because the telcos were damned if they were going to allow anything like interoperability or freedom to weaken their hammerlock on paying customers, so they deluded themselves into believing that what users were crying out for was expensive new ways to get headline news.

In fact, in a news flash that seems to have caught the entire telecommunications industry by surprise, people who buy mobile phones often like to communicate with one another. Had this not been such an absolutely unpredictable occurrence, maybe somebody at the WAP consortium could have predicted that when you add text to the phone, users might like to communicate with one another via text.

Access to email is the #1 feature customers want in a wireless text device (duh), and all those wireless auctions where the telcos spent 22 gajillion Zlotys to own the customer now look like a giant shell game, because the users don't want to get headline news. They want to talk to one another, and they will switch carriers until they are allowed to. Email is the thin end of the interoperability wedge, and this will be true of interactive TV as well.

The biggest risk to this rosy scenario is government tolerance of monopolies. Conventional wisdom in the 70s was that cable access was only going to be possible if the cable companies were given local monopolies, since that yucky old competition would keep people from investing in infrastructure. The normal split between carrier and content owner was thus eroded in this situation, and we have the legacy of that decision to this day.

In countries where there are only one or two providers of interactive television, therefore, there might not be enough competition to force owners of interactive TV services to offer full, interoperable email. This is analagous to the situation in countries where the national monopoly telcos kept per-minute pricing or per-byte charges for internet access, because in a monopoly, the overwhelming customer preference for flat-rate pricing has no way to make itself known. In those places (keep an eye especially on the UK), email might not be enough to force interoperability on interactive TV, at least in the short term.

11) Worthwhile to scratch and start over?
by rho

I read your "DNS System is Coming Apart At the Seams" article with pointed interest. It is a topic I frequently harp on in private conversations -- the lack of a human-focused network and network protocols.

I've puzzled over the implications myself, but I'd be interested to hear your opinion -- Is it worthwhile to simply scratch what we have and begin anew, basing the new decisions made on more current assumptions?

For example, hardware is cheap and reliable (as compared to 20 years ago), bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper. Should the networking protocols reflect this new reality?

Clay:

(I "author modded" this one up. [g /]

From my point of view, we've *already* scratched what we had and started anew, and that happened when ICQ launched.

ICQ was the first group that I know of to figure out that if DNS wasn't allowing for unpredictable connectivity and unstable IP addresses, then the solution was *not* to wait for fiber-to-the-curb and IPv6, the solution was to bypass DNS, so they simply provided alternate namespaces built on top of IPv4.

whois is a decade and a half old and shows ~25M addresses. Napster is going on two and has twice that. ICQ and other IM services are 4 years old and have something like *6* times that many addresses. Non-DNS addresses are growing far faster than DNS addresses, in part because DNS was never modified to take into account the new reality of PC connectivity and impermanent IP addresses, and partly because setting up a domain name is a huge huge hassle compared to getting a fixed, human readable name with Napster.

So DNS is no longer the only game in town, and never will be again.

If by network protocols you mean redoing IP, however, it'll never happen. For reasons I listed above, I have no professional opinion about whether such a thing "should" happen, but I know it never will happen. It'll be enough to get IPv6 rolled out over the next five years.

-------

Clay Shirky is a Professor of New Media at Hunter College in NYC, currently on leave while he works with the acceleratorgroup. And writes. Prolifically. About almost everything to do with the Internet, with sidelong glances at Open Source and Linux, which (yes) he uses as his everyday operating system. What should you ask Clay? Take a look at his personal site, read some of what he's written, and go from there. (He's so wide-ranging that he's hard to pin down!) We'll forward 10 of the highest-moderated questions to him Thursday afternoon (US EST), and will post his answers early next week.

Clay Shirky is a Professor of New Media at Hunter College in NYC, currently on leave while he works with the acceleratorgroup. And writes. Prolifically. About almost everything to do with the Internet, with sidelong glances at Open Source and Linux, which (yes) he uses as his everyday operating system. What should you ask Clay? Take a look at his personal site, read some of what he's written, and go from there. (He's so wide-ranging that he's hard to pin down!) We'll forward 10 of the highest-moderated questions to him Thursday afternoon (US EST), and will post his answers early next week.

roblimo pointed out this article in Business 2.0 by one Clay Shirky, a professor of New Media at Hunter College. Shirky goes into the idea of "adaptive radiation," and makes some pointed observations about its effect on software, Linux specifically. An excerpt: "This will keep Linux out of the best of breed competition because it is never perfectly tailored to any particular environment, but it also means that Linux avoids the best of breed trap. For any given purpose, best of breed products are either ideal or useless." Shirky is an insightful commentator as well; he also set up a "Web Pay Phone" outside his office at Hunter a few years back. Now go mutate!

Well, hat's off to S. Blood for pointing us over to Clay Shirky's e-petition. This site has numerous petitions but I think the one that deserves the Slashdot effect is one calling on the government to Evaluate Open Source Software.