Four short links: 1 October 2009

Objectivity Be Gone, Public Screens, Lobbying Patterns, DIY Africa

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. The End of Objectivity, Web2.0 Version -- Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society. (via Pia Waugh)
2. Screens in Context -- ideas for the video screens spring up in place of billboards. Whilst the advertising industry has one of the longest histories of trying to understand interaction, it’s a very different set of tools that digitalness brings; ones that designers at the coal face of web and mobile encounter every day. Everything can be considered in context, be timely, reactive, and data-driven. I’m going to try to outline some dimensions to think about, with some incredibly quick, simple, off the cuff dumb ideas [...] The technology to achieve some of these may be over and above what is possible now, but the biggest step - installing powered, networked computers in the real world - is already being taken by advertising media companies.
3. Interactive Network Map of Lobbying Patterns Around Key Senators in Health Care Reform -- fascinating visualization of political activity, via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. The Doers Club -- How DIY design gave a teenager from Malawi electricity, and can help transform Africa.

Four short links: 16 July 2009

Transparency Camp, Wasted Time, Advertising Hypocrisy, Maker Skills

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Transparency Camp West -- a few more slots left for Google-hosted Aug 8 and 9 Bar Camp on open government.
2. Meeting Ticker -- count the cost of a meeting in real time, just enter the number of people, the time it started, and the average salary. (via make on Twitter)
3. More Creative Shops Are Commercializing Their Own Product Lines -- Tellingly, ad companies don't run ads for their products. "[W]e haven't bought a single ad in support of any of our brands. Not one. Why would we? You can do so much if you know what you're doing with product placement, sponsorship, digital PR. It's that whole "I haven't got any money, so I'll have to think." It makes you much better at grinding out media without paying. (via someone on Twitter, apologies for forgetting whom)
4. 18 Essential Skills for a Maker -- 13. Strip, splice, and terminate wire- Trickier than it sounds. You should be able to splice wire using a crimp splice, a wire nut, and heat shrink + solder (note: electrical tape is NOT on that list). You should know how to use a wire stripper to strip stranded wire without cutting more than one or two strands. You should be able to attach a wire to your project in such a way that it will still be attached in two weeks, two months, or two years. (via Makezine)

Four short links: 27 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

The Economist in Chinese, online news, concurrency, and community. Have a great weekend!

1. Translating the Economist -- Andy Baio reports on a Chinese electronic community that, each week, splits up and translates The Economist articles into Chinese. The DIY ethos here, "we want this, it's not here yet, let's make it happen", is tremendous.
2. Business Models of News -- excellent insight into the travails of newspaper business. "In essence to secure the advertising for the print edition, they have in the past completely undermined the business they need to survive in the future. They have told every one of their advertisers that online adverts are not worth paying for." (via Julie Starr)
3. Embracing Concurrency -- Ignite UK North talk on parallel coding, at a high and clear level, by Michael Sparks of BBC R&D, who is also author of Kamaelia.
4. Things I've Learned From Hacker News -- Paul Graham on social and community lessons from running Hacker News. "Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa."

The Twitter Gold Mine & Beating Google to the Semantic Web

by Nick Bilton | comments: 47

There's always been jabs at Twitter for not having a viable business model and the chatter has increased in the current economic climate. In a recent interview Evan Williams, Twitter CEO, said "We had planned to focus on revenue in 2010 but that's no longer the case, so we changed the plan quite a bit... We've moved revenue higher on our list of priorities...".

I believe Twitter, potentially, has an incredible business model.

In The New York Times R&D Labs, where I work, we've been talking a lot about 'smart content', both in relation to advertising, search and news delivery. For the past 157 years (that's how old the newspaper is) we've essentially delivered 'dumb content' to people's doorsteps. You and I, irrespective of interests, location etc. have received the same newspaper on our doorsteps every morning. We're beginning to explore ways to make content smarter, to understand what you've read, which device you've read it on and your micro level interests—making the most important news find you, instead of you having to find it.

This also changes the advertising model where ads become even smarter. Sure, ads are at about a 1st grade reading level now; with adsense and cookies, the ad networks have half an idea of what I'm interested in, but they aren't exactly smart about it. Just because a friend sends me an email about a baseball game doesn't mean I want to see ESPN ads in my Gmail.

So what does this have to do with a Twitter business model? Twitter, potentially, has the ability to deliver unbelievably smart advertising; advertising that I actually want to see, and they have the ability to deliver search results far superior and more accurate to Google, putting Twitter in the running to beat Google in the latent quest to the semantic web. With some really intelligent data mining and cross pollination, they could give me ads that makes sense not for something I looked at 3 weeks ago, or a link my wife clicked on when she borrowed my laptop, but ads that are extremely relevant to 'what I'm doing right now'.

A quick perusal of my Tweets shows that I live in Brooklyn, NY, I work for The New York Times, teach at NYU/ITP, I travel somewhere once a month for work, I love gardening, cappuccinos, my Vespa , U.I./Design and hardware hacking, I'm a political news junkie, I read Gizmodo & NYTimes.com and I was looking for a new car for a while, but now have a MINI and I'm also friends with these people. That's a treasure trove of data about me, and it's semantic on a granular level about only my interests.

If I send a tweet saying "I'm looking for a new car does anyone have any recommendations", I would be more than happy to see 'smart' user generated advertising recommendations based on my past tweets, mine the data of other people living Brooklyn who have tweeted about their car and deliver a tweet/ad based on those result leaving spammers lost in the noise. I'd also expect when I send a tweet saying 'I got a new car and love it!' that those car ads stop appearing and something else, relevant to only me, takes its place.

And it doesn't have to be advertising delivered on their site alone. One of the great successes of Twitter has been their APIs and the wonderful applications and sites that users have built with them. Why not build out an advertising or search API that delivers the latest micro level tags or ad links of users interests? There's a plethora of opportunities with this data, and if it's done right it becomes enticing and engaging, not annoying, irrelevant and outdated.

Is SocialMedia Overstepping Facebook's Privacy Line?

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 6

SocialMedia is an advertising network which places ads within social applications such as those on Facebook and MySpace. SocialMedia claims to be more effective in this type of advertising, due to a patent-pending technology they've developed named FriendRank. SocialMedia CEO Seth Goldstein claims that SocialMedia ads can pay up to 2.5 times more than traditional ads within social networks and that early tests show people are 200 times more likely to respond to a "social ad". See CNET's coverage of SocialMedia's FriendRank launch for more detailed information.

This sounds very compelling, but immediately raises serious questions around privacy and whether a Facebook user knows that SocialMedia is using their profile information in this way. While technology certainly makes this possible, are user expectations being set correctly? Facebook's Beacon functionality faced an uproar at its launch earlier this year not for the technology it provided, but rather for upsetting expectations around privacy, information sharing, and ultimately ad targeting. So how is SocialMedia getting access to the type of information required to create such a compelling social advertising network?

Facebook provides a customizable public profile page for each user (mine is here) which by default makes your name, picture, and a few friends publicly available. SocialMedia could and most likely is using this public information, just like anyone else could too. Multiple sources including ValleyWag and others familiar with the ad platform say that SocialMedia doesn't stop there. Rather they're very quietly also accessing information from Facebook Platform applications directly. This was originally broken by The Social Times a few weeks ago:

So how does SocialMedia display these targeted ads outside of Facebook? Through a collection of data via applications in combination with images obtained via user public profiles and unique cookies they can piece together who you are and who some of your friends are. This is off of Facebook.

The question then is, are social applications properly disclosing the fact that they give your information to SocialMedia, and is that action covered by a clear privacy policy? This is not about the technology behind how SocialMedia might access this information, but rather making sure that the technological implementation matches user expecations. We can start by looking at the process of adding an application on Facebook which does not appear to use SocialMedia for advertising:

If you've ever installed a Facebook application, you're familiar with this screen, which prompts you to grant explicit permissions to each and every application you choose to install. It should be noted that Facebook Platform does not have any affordance for allowing an application to share your information data with a third party. Facebook's Developer Terms of Service explicitly prohibit such sharing, and the technological implementation of the Facebook Platform API make it extremely likely that sharing such data would sometimes involve sharing a developer's secret key with SocialMedia as well. All of this is explicitly and strictly prohibited by Facebook's Developer Terms of Service: (emphasis is mine for readability):

"Facebook Platform" means a set of APIs and services provided by Facebook that enable websites and applications (collectively, "Applications") to retrieve data relating to Facebook Users made available by Facebook and/or retrieve authorized data from other Applications. The term "Facebook Platform" includes any data, images, text, content, code, APIs, tools or other information or materials provided by Facebook through or in connection with such APIs and services (collectively, the "Facebook Properties").

...

5) You may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein.

The bottom line is that though this might seem like an obscure technical issue, sharing user activity and profile information with SocialMedia would be as objectionable as the worst behaviors ascribed to Facebook Beacon. With Beacon people were surprised that their actions from around the web were starting to be shared with their friends on Facebook. It wasn't that everyone objected to this happening, but rather that it was implemented as opt-out which led to information being shared in ways that normal people didn't expect. This in turn completely killed Beacon with participating brands such as Coke dropping support. A few weeks ago Facebook shut off access to Slide's Top Friends application for "allowing access to non-friends' personal information" as reported by Inside Facebook. The following week Facebook's responded with a blog post Building Trust and Protecting User Privacy which started by saying:

Privacy is at the core of Facebook.

Because we provide users with rich privacy controls and respect their choices, users feel safe using Facebook to share their information with their friends. By opening up Facebook through Platform, developers have the opportunity to innovate on top of this information. In exchange, developers commit to treating user information with the same respect that users expect of Facebook. Our Developer Terms of Service strictly limit use of user data and serves as guidelines to these expectations.

But I truly believe that Facebook does try to protect user privacy and by doing so creates an environment promoting the creation of rich profiles tied to real offline identities and sharing more content between friends. Facebook has shown a history of learning from these situations over time. If Facebook learned so much about the dangers of surprise with Beacon, shut off Top Friends for sharing profile information, and continues to block access to Google's Friend Connect for redistribution of profile information then why are they still permitting Platform applications to possibly share this data with SocialMedia? As technologists we must be extremely careful in making sure that our implementations match a normal person's expectations. If we forget to do this, we could collectively end up killing something that might someday become great.

I've tried contacting SocialMedia to ask about how their advertising network works, though unfortunately while I've received replies have not had my questions answered. As full disclosure, I work for Six Apart which launched an advertising network for bloggers earlier this year, and has a privacy policy here. I'll be at O'Reilly's Open Source conference in Portland at the end of the month.

Online Advertising Undervalued?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 8

On a publishing-related mailing list that he moderates, Peter Brantley highlighted a great interview on Silicon Alley Insider with David Moore, CEO of search ad firm 24/7 Real Media, recently bought by advertising giant WPP. Moore hammered home a point that hit me the first time I saw Imran Khan's spreadsheet showing the internet's share of global ad dollars vs. share of viewing time: there's a lot of upside still in online advertising. This is not breaking news, but well worth circulating more widely:

SAI: Assuming we're facing an ad slowdown, what's going to happen to online ad rates?

Moore: The fact of the matter is the Internet has been either dramatically underpriced or offline media is dramatically overpriced. Right now a reader of the Wall Street Journal might be worth a dollar, but for someone reading the online Journal you get a nickel. That's 20 to 1 offline versus online pricing. You need 20 online readers to replace one offline reader. So when you talk a bout pricing overall I think the web is dramatically underpriced already.

SAI: Haven't ad networks played a role in holding down online CPMs?

Moore: I dont think its the networks that are doing it. I haven't spoken to anybody who thinks media fragmentation is going to stop. I think we are dramatically underpriced compared to offline. The amount of money newpapers and magazines have been getting per thousand is outrageous. Newpapers and magazines are still getting roughly 30% of all advertising expenditures--yet if you look at their share of media usage, they've got between 7% and 9%. Thats why they're having so much trouble.

SAI: Google is adding video to search advertising. What happens to video ads in 2008?

Moore: It's still a small part of the overall online ad spend, but its the fastest growing part. Advertisers are starting to realize: "If I spend half million to produce a commercial why just put it on TV? If they see it online versus on TV--does it diminish?" No! Godaddy's strategy was to get a spot rejected from the Super Bowl and it got 14 million views online.