If you do follow online technology, you know that Twitter is the anywhere, anytime, instant publishing solution that lowers the threshold for publishing about yourself several orders of magnitude below blogging, such that there is nothing you can possibly be doing that is too mundane, private, or uninteresting that it isn’t worth posting on Twitter. Use of Twitter recently exploded in the geekosphere at the SXSW conference, leading to much pontificating on the existential meaning of Twitter, i.e. I Twitter, therefore I am.

I think Twitter is a well-executed application, which, like all technologies, is only good or bad in how it is used. What strikes me about Twitter is that it appears to be accentuating the natural exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies of avid blog writers and readers. While blog posts have traditionally been short, Twitter pushes this trend to the extreme, accentuating the attention deficit disorder that the web naturally fosters.

Let’s take Jason Calacanis as an example. He is a long time avid blogger, who often writes long, often insightful, sometime controversial, but always interesting posts. He claims that he’s now doing 90% of his blogging through Twitter, and that he’s thinking of trying a week of Twitter-only blogging. Let’s take a look at Jason’s Twitter feed:

@scoble has 1,498 Followers…. mmmm… wow?! 24 minutes ago from web
is there a twitter leaderboard showing who does the most twits and has most followers? wondering who is 500+, 1,000+, etc. 37 minutes ago from web
@scobleizer: taking orders… when’s the next LA conference!?! let’s have a blogger BBQ! about 1 hour ago from web in reply to Scobleizer
ask a ninja kills me! http://www.askaninja.com/no… about 1 hour ago from web
broke 500 followers today…. who are you people and why are you here?!?!? seriously, let me know via: d jasoncalacanis what you want 2 hear about 1 hour ago from web
Oh snap… Bbq getting installed… Burgers at calacanis compound y’all! about 2 hours ago from txt
I think tomorrow is workout then dimsum+nyt… Any suggestions for ds in LA? about 2 hours ago from txt
Coffee+nyt+wsj+twitter+foggy backyard=bliss. Life is soooooooooo good. about 2 hours ago from txt
Kobe 65 points… Season high. Wow… Like wow about 14 hours ago from txt
Lakers in overtime about 14 hours ago from txt
How many servers does twitter run on? about 16 hours ago from txt
At laker game, private box with project x team. about 17 hours ago from txt
Anyone know of phone that’s does flash/video/youtube? Blackberry doesn’t support right? about 23 hours ago from txt
@nick: you’re not a virgin any more?!?! Who knew! about 24 hours ago from txt in reply to nick
@kentnichols: I’m doing ninja HIIT training… Seven one minutes sprints at 8.5-10mph spread over 20 minutes. Details on calacanis.com later 10:08 AM March 16, 2007 from txt in reply to kentnichols
On treadmill listening to Cake. Lalalalaallalalallalalallalal 09:49 AM March 16, 2007 from txt
Want to get in studio guests soon.. Want the ninja, scoble and jimmy wales–on same show!! 09:40 PM March 15, 2007 from txt
@gaberivera: thx for feedback.. Had tellme founder on today… Video tomorrow, and had andrew lih of wikipedia book on as well. More good st … 09:39 PM March 15, 2007 from txt in reply to gaberivera
Askaninja kicked my ass at sxsw… Video at 11! It was hot… I’ve got the videooooooo 08:44 PM March 15, 2007 from txt

Jason is an interesting guy, so his Twitter feed is probably as interesting as Twitter feeds get. Of course, you have to find Jason Calacanis interesting to find the trivia of his life interesting.

The interesting question here is how would the value of Jason’s online publishing net out if he switched entirely to Twitter. Well, you certainly wouldn’t be getting any more long, interesting posts like these:

Is Squidoo becoming a massive, dirty SEO back alley?
Social Bookmarking 101: You gotta own your bury/sink. (or How Kevin Rose is painting himself into a corner).
Wikipedia’s Technological Obscurification: Three ways Wikipedia keeps 99% of the population from participating

It would also likely have been a lot harder for Jason to have singlehandedly started the phenomenon of fatblogging, which seems to have caught fire like Twitter. It would have been harder because it’s harder to inspire people with 140 characters.

I’m not suggesting that Twitter isn’t a fascinating form of publishing and communication, and that there isn’t much to learn from the phenomenon. There are elements of mobility and instantaneity that can’t be achieved through blogging software. The issue I’m raising here is what happens when people start Twittering instead of longer-form blogging — by long, I mean even a paragraph.

Of course, this is nothing new. People who write long-form journalism in print bemoan the short attention span for online content — Twitter is just the next step in the evolution towards the complete fragmentation and disintegration of attention.

So am I using Twitter yet? Well, I set up an account (yet one more domain land grab). But I still haven’t worked up a sufficient sense of self-importance and vanity to believe that what I’m going at any given moment is really all that important or interesting to anyone. But I’ll work on it.

Scott Karp blogs in the traditional sense at Publishing 2.0.

In an online world driven by search engines that create permanent — and easy to find — records of every inaccuracy, is this practice sufficient?

This week, Mike Arrington at TechCrunch wrote a post titled, “Federated Media Raising More Money, Looking To Sell,” which cited information from a proprietary research report and featured the following quote from Federated Media COO Jason Weisberger:

If Federated Media keeps performing the way we’ve predicted in 2007, it would be a really ripe time for a media player who understands this space to buy us now rather than having to buy us for a whole lot more later.

The post also included this statement: “The company is also considering a number of acquisitions, and raising a new round of financing of $3 – 8 million to pay for them.”

The post was featured on TechMeme and attracted a lot of attention, as many TechCrunch posts do. But then John Battelle, founder of Federated Media, posted the following on the FM blog:

A post on TechCrunch tonight picks up on some private research that discusses any number of details about FM and its purported plans. Despite the title of the post, FM is neither looking to sell, nor do we need financing. Sure, any startup has its price, but ours is dictated by a very important caveat – anyone who is looking to purchase FM must first look to our business model, and determine if it wants to take care of the most important asset we have – our relationship with our publishers. Just to be clear, here at FM we are not focused on selling our business, or even raising money (we don’t need any at the moment). What we are focused on is adding value to our publisher’s business. That’s it.

Mike Arrington added the following “update” to his original post:

Update: I spoke to John Battelle, who says that this interview was done under the impression that it would be used as background material only, and that they have no intention of selling the company in the near future. He also said that the company is not actively fundraising at this time.

This kind of update is generally accepted by the online community to be sufficient. But I wonder if it is. And I pose this question notwithstanding all of the posts, on a wide range of sites, where inaccuracies are not corrected at all.

If you Google “Federated Media sell,” here’s what you get:

If you follow the path to the TechCrunch post and don’t look below the fold (at least on my laptop screen), here’s what you see:

If you go back and read TechMeme for March 8, 2007, you’ll see the following:

My point here is that inaccuracies have a way of persisting on the web even when the standard “update” convention is employed. Of course, anyone putting in any reasonable effort to figure out whether Federated Media is indeed for sale will discover easily enough that the information, according to John Battelle, was inaccurate. But the web does a better job of highlighting the inaccuracy than the correction.

So should Arrington have done more? Should he have changed the title of the post? Should he have put the update on top? What if Federated Media IS for sale and Battelle just denied it after it went public? Of course, the original information was based on the statements of a company executive, so a statement from the company’s most senior executive should presumably be taken as more definitive. But what if Arrington felt that reporting Battelle’s denial was sufficient, and that it didn’t rise to the level of a larger correction?

Lot’s of sticky questions. And I don’t claim to have the answers. What I do know is that bloggers, as well as anyone who posts anything anywhere online, need to realize that they are acting as online publishers, whether they recognize it or not. And with any type of publishing comes responsibilities and liabilities that should not be taken lightly.

Newspapers – Free (or no business model) (pre 1704), Advertising (1704, The Boston News-Letter), Subscription (1893, Frank Munsey)
Radio – Free (or no business model), Advertising (1909, Charles Herrold)), Subscription (XM, Sirius)
Television – Free (or no business model), Advertising (1941), Subscription (Cable TV, HBO, DirecTV, Showtime)
Blogging – Free (or no business model), Advertising (Federated Media, Adsense), ……. ?It’s… inevitable.

Sahar’s historical analysis is certainly compelling. If other media ultimately adopted a paid content model, why not blogging? I agree that there is fairly strong case that some blogs may ultimately be able to adopt a paid model, but there is an equally strong case why most blogs will not.

The case for paid subscription blogs is the same as the case for any other paid content:

1) Must have
2) Not available elsewhere or better than what you can get for free
3) No ads (although not necessarily)

All you have to do is look at the top blogs to see examples of blogs that might be able to charge for their content, e.g., Engadget, Gizmodo, GigaOm, TechCrunch, Problogger, Seth Godin, TMZ, Ars Technica, PaidContent. (I am purposely not mentioning The Blog Herald to avoid a conflict of interest.)

What distinguishes these blogs is that they address either deep personal passions, e.g. Engadget, TMZ, or professional interests, e.g. TechCrunch, Ars Technica. What distinguishes Seth Godin’s blog is that he is a paid speaker and consultant, so paying to subscribe to his blog might be likely paying for a syndicated version of his consulting advice.

The issue of whether any paid content online is “better than what you can get for free” has been debated since the dawn of the Web. What arguably makes some of the top blogs better than other blogs is that, by dint of their success, they have become scoop magnets, e.g TechCrunch, Engadget. That doesn’t necessarily make their reporting or analysis better, but you can always get the information there first. Of course, if they were behind a pay wall, that advantage might disappear.

That’s why the Seth Godin consultant model might be more viable. Darren Rowse at Problogger, for example, offers advice to bloggers equivalent to what you might get from a paid consultant.

The argument against a paid content model for blogging begins of course with ideology — there are many blog purest who would refuse to call a paid blog a blog. Blogging, traditionally, has been about openness and inter-connectivity, which a paid subscriber wall certainly does not foster.

The more interesting argument I think begins with looking at the potential flaws in Sahar’s historical analysis. First, the Web has been around for more than a decade, with arguably an accelerated maturity timeline, and most content online is still free, paid for by advertising. Second, the long-term viability of paid radio is still untested. Lastly, and perhaps most important, the digital media revolution is poised to disrupt all existing paid media business models. Paid newspaper circulation, for example, is in free fall because the same news and information is available for free online.

Google is an important bellwether — if YouTube continues to pursue an advertising-based business model for online video, that will put pressure on paid video content business models.

That said, there was a study released a couple weeks ago that predicted that paid video would far outpace ad supported video:

Consumer spending on video downloads will rise to $4 billion a year in 2011 from the current $111 million spent annually, according to a study by Adams Media Research. Adams predicts that the growth will be fueled by increased broadband penetration and the introduction of devices such as Apple TV, which allows users to watch PC downloads on TV. The market researcher is already forecasting huge gains this year for video download sales. By the end of 2007, Adams Media is predicting sales totaling $472 million, then rising to $1.2 billion in 2008, $2 billion in 2009, $3.1 billion in 2010, then hit $4.1 billion in 2011. It also foresees advertiser spending on internet video streams to PCs and TVs approaching $1.7 billion by 2011.

The question of whether paid content is a viable business model for blogging is most likely intertwined with the future of paid content in a digital media world — and the question of business models is THE burning question for the future of media.

Scott Karp’s blog, Publishing 2.0, is free and open, with some advertising.

Now that every brand is jumping on the bandwagon to be a content creator to compete in the intensifying war over consumer attention, you have to wonder whether brands can really compete as content creators, lodged between traditional “professional” content creators and the newly empowered army of “users” generating content.

Here’s an example that crystallized this question (via Washington Post):

“Look, Roy, it’s a job. You know, the thing people do for money that they wouldn’t normally do otherwise. I know you need the dough.”

I looked at the envelope stuffed with cash and considered it. After a few seconds, I said, “Five-day minimum, plus expenses.”

If every man has his price, as this gumshoe admits, then his creator’s was the use of a Lexus and an undisclosed sum of money — more than a modest book advance but less than what he would get for an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” says Los Angeles writer Mark Haskell Smith. The serial novel he penned is a promotion for the Japanese luxury automaker, which, after some intense focus-grouping, decided that potboiler fiction would be a great advertising hook to reach a younger, hipper client base.

On the one hand, this content was created by a professional writer, so it’s not like a fake blog or other brand misadventures that pretend to be something they’re not. It just so happens that the crime story is about a missing Lexus.

Now, I suppose if you’re a die-hard Lexus fan, you might devote some time to reading a serial novel about your beloved car brand. But I have to wonder whether non-Lexus fans are going to allocate some of their precious media time to an ad masquerading as fiction — which is what this is.

I’ll concede that I can’t really fault Lexus and any other brands for taking the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach to competing for consumer attention. But you have to wonder whether consumers will opt for branded entertainment when there are so many other types of entertainment proliferating and competing for their attention.

Or maybe prospective Lexus owners will be more than happy to opt in to skimming through a bit of pulp fiction rather than being bombarded by a traditional ad. I suppose it’s all a matter of degrees.

Certainly, it’s a sobering reality for independent content creators, like bloggers, who not only have to compete with other independents and traditional media companies, but with brands as well.

And here’s another X factor — I tried searching for “Lexus” on YouTube and found this Gizmodo video of a Lexus that automatically parallel parks itself. It has 417,383 views. It’s also the #5 Google search result for Lexus.

You just can’t manufacture content-based advertising like this?

Or can you?

Scott Karp creates content at Publishing 2.0.

So I had to write this column today, and nothing really topical for the Blog Herald had me stirred — so what to do? Well, for one thing I can raise the core issue of blogging motivation, and ask the pointed question — what gets you worked up enough to blog about it? I can also posit for comments and reaction that the best blogging comes from the gut (although it’s also well informed by the brain).

Beyond that, I’m going to take the liberty of running through a number of brief items that got me worked up today, any one of which could have been a full blown blog post, but the point is to explore what the seed of a good post looks like. So here goes.


Steve Jobs And The Church Of DRM
If there was a TechMeme for Catholic theology, the view after a major papal pronouncement would probably look the same as TechMeme did after Steve Jobs came out against digital rights management (DRM). Kudos to Rex Hammock for recognizing the theological undertones to the whole DRM debate.

“Entering a conversation in order to influence it is almost always a corrupting influence on the conversation.”
Thus spoke David Weinberger, Cluetrain founding father, in an interview with Jeff Jarvis for Beet TV — is it possible that corporate communications and transparent conversations will never mix? Is everything emanating from a corporate entity destined to be “artificial” rather than “authentic”? You might call this the Weinberger Uncertainty Principle.

New Media Still Not Ready For Wall Street
News Corp’s quarterly earnings press release contained not a single mention of Fox Interactive Media or MySpace (hat tip to Staci Kramer at PaidContent, who also noticed this). If one of the new media leaders among traditional media companies can’t demonstrate the impact of new media on the bottom line, what does this portend for everyone else?

Barry Diller, honest media exec
From his Media Summit keynote:

Future of YouTube: I have no clue. They have a big audience…it is ridiculous

and

User-gen content: We come up with these terms which don’t mean anything. Almost everything we do has some form of user interactivity…user is part of the active process. We should not all be crazy over this

Why can’t more media executives cut through the crap like this?

First, Fix The Brand
From Jason Calacanis’ iMedia Brand Summit keynote:

The entire room laughed out loud when Calacanis asked if they knew whether or not their brand was loved while introducing the idea that — if a brand is interested in leveraging user-generated video — the answer had better be a firm yes. Cable companies, cell phone service providers and Calacanis’ former employer, AOL, would have a hard time driving good results, he said, with user-generated video, since at least some consumers would create brand-damaging content.

As Chevy Tahoe infamously learned when it put users in control of advertising, everything that’s wrong with your brand will immediately have an “authentic” consumer voice. Word of mouth has always worked best when you just make great products (see Apple). Giving “users” a platform to create marketing messages for your brand is a gimmick, not a marketing strategy.

Well, now, that feels better. When something gets you worked up, blogging can provide much needed relief. I find the best posts typically start with cage rattling and then take just enough time to step back and think things through, but without losing the momentum. (I will confess to having done more than a few posts where I blogged first and asked questions later, only to regret it in retrospect.)

Bottom line: blog your passion. And if nothing gets you worked up, you have to ask yourself — why am I standing on this soapbox?

Scott Karp gets all bent out of shape at Publishing 2.0.

Bloggers, almost by definition, create their own niche communities — they create content, readers comment, other bloggers link — it’s a deeply symbiotic relationship where participants get to know each other. There’s a direct connection between bloggers and their communities — so who better than the blogger to create marketing messages that are relevant and interesting for their communities?

This issue was crystallized for me reading Jeff Jarvis’ account of his run in with PayPerPost President Ted Murphy at the AlwaysOn conference. PayPerPost has taken A LOT of heat from all corners of the blogosphere for violating the principles of the traditional Chinese Wall. I’ve written that it comes down to the issue of deception — paid content that’s not dislosed as paid content is deceptive. PayPerPost brough this on themselves by not initially requiring bloggers to disclose that their posts were paid. But much of the outrage (mine included) seems to have overlooked the issue of whether bloggers creating marketing content that is relevant for their readers actually makes sense — ASSUMING, of course, proper disclosure and transparency. This jumped out at me from Jeff’s post:

He also said that he saw no difference in Amanda Congdon making commercials on her old or new vlog and a Pay Per Post person making a commercial on her blog. Fair point. But one of the panelists said that Rocketboom is clearly a show and a commercial makes sense in that context; the relationship is clearer.

But isn’t a blog clearly a publication, and therefore isn’t a clearly labled paid post equivalent to a host thanking a sponsor on a video/TV program or an advertorial in a magazine? Again, the issue of disclosure, crucial as it is, seems to be overshadowing the larger question, i.e IF you have proper disclosure, than that what are fair commercial practices for blogs?

Many bloggers, like David Weinberger, don’t believe in commercializing their blogs at all — and there are some other traditionalist bloggers (yes, it’s been around long enough to have an old school) who think that any ads on blogs are a sin. Certainly bloggers are not obligated to be commercial, but for those who want to make money from blogging, the standards are still very much a work in progress.

So just to play out this scenario — let’s say a blogger who writes about life and family, and has a number of readers outside of friends and family, occasionally writes a post through PayPerPost and properly uses the equivalent of “Special Advertising Section” to disclose that the post is paid. In the context of the entire blog, what’s wrong with that relative to how it has worked in other media?

I write this knowing that there has lately been a PayPerPost ad at the top of the Blog Herald — I can assure you that they didn’t paid me a cent to write this. Of course, the Blog Herald is paying me to write this, and PayPerPost is an advertiser, so did that influence my using PayPerPost as the example rather than one of the other services like ReviewMe? Oh, dear.

The truth is, standards in media have never been simple — blogs are just the latest medium to slog through the commercial mud.

Scott Karp runs ads on his blog Publishing 2.0, but does not get paid for individual posts (other than for the page views and ad clicks those posts generate — oh, whatever).

But, to get back to the question, is blogging really a suitable activity for a company boss? Seth Godin, author of business books such as “Small is the New Big”, and “All Marketers are Liars: the Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World”, is sceptical. Blogs work, he says, when they are based on the values of “candour, urgency, timeliness, pithiness and controversy (maybe utility if you want six)”. As he asks, “Does this sound like a CEO to you?”

Candour, in particular, will surely strike most bosses as a reckless risk in the liability-laden world of corporate America after Sarbanes-Oxley.

The notion of CEOs blogging grew out of the world of small business, in particular the online start-up, where having a blog is now as obligatory as having a an AJAX-laden homepage and a domain name that is either a misspelling or a made-up word. In the start-up context, a CEO blogging makes all the sense in the world, because the CEO and the other handful of team members ARE the company. The company hasn’t taken on a life of its own yet. There are shareholders, but most of them are the people blogging, so they are looking after their own interests. More importantly, there is no Sarbanes-Oxley threatening to send the CEO or other executives to jail if something they publish “spontaneously” to their blog runs afoul of SEC regulations.

To some degree, the difference in personality profile between an entrepreneurial CEO and a Fortune 500 CEO is the difference in the burdens they carry — and that makes all the difference in the world when it comes to blogging.

In his rant the other day about the slow evolution of PR, Stowe Boyd said:

The whole point is that the people formerly known at the audience — the edglings, as I call us — are participating in the blogosphere, and if individuals within companies want to, they can participate: as individuals. Companies don’t blog, or converse: people do.

People blog, that’s absolutely right, but a corporate blogger needs to balance being an “individual” with being a representative of the company. Even at the rank-in-file level, true, spontaneous, authentic (man, I’m starting to hate that word) blogging can be an impractical matter. Companies don’t tell their customer service reps, go ahead, say whatever you want, just make the customer happy. That might lead to a lot more happy customers, but it also might lead to untold process snafus, policy violations, even lawsuits in extreme cases.

It all comes back to control. Individuals can blog, because they are in control of their own identities (for better or worse). Small, private companies can blog, because there’s a fluidity and flexibility to how they operate — they don’t (necessarily) depend on tight controls. But big, public companies? They are all about control. “Internal controls,” Sarbanes-Oxley, audits, regulations. How do you blog “authentically” through so many layers of control?

The Economist cites a blog post from Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, to demonstrate that even CEO’s who are earnestly trying to blog “authentically” are still completely hamstrung:

Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems, is perhaps the most dedicated blogger boss. But even his online scribblings are sporadic, and he has a keen eye for legal risk, to judge from a post on January 22nd called “Sun/Intel Relationship”. It reads: “Yes, we are making an announcement with Intel this morning, and no, you’re not going to get the inside skinny here before we hold our press conference.” Thanks for the candour, Jonathan.

I’m not suggesting that big public companies can’t benefit from more transparency, better customer relationship management, and less corporate brand speak. I just don’t see the kind of raw communication that made the blogosphere what it is (for better and worse) translating directly to big corporate communications. Big companies can take inspiration from the best of blogging and try to evolve in that direction, but in a post-Enron, post-Worldcom world, I’m don’t want CEOs of companies I’m invested in embracing “fast and loose.”

Scott Karp blogs “authentically” at Publishing 2.0.

The inevitable result for media companies, who are having an increasingly tough time selling “bundles” of content, is to start paying their content creators based on how much traffic each discrete piece of content can draw. Steve Rubel highlighted ZDNet’s introduction of a pay-for-performance system:

ZDNet’s pay-for-performance blogging system raises some interesting questions. For example, will a blogger favor writing a sensational post that is likely to get more clicks over one that perhaps is less sexy and is based on, say, a press release? News value and clicks often go together, but as we’ve seen on collaborative sites like digg, sensationalist rumors sometimes are more popular.

Fundamentally, this is nothing new. “Yellow journalism” is a century old, and “sweeps week” for broadcast TV has been around for decades. As Dan Gillmor points out, supermarket tabloids have long played it close to the line on sensationalizing for dollars.

But never have the economic realities of content been so urgent and pervasive. As Nick Carr observed:

All businesses and all workers tailor what they do in response to economic incentives, and a shift in the way publishers and journalists make money means a shift in what gets written and what gets published.

So are we all, independent bloggers and mainstream media journalists alike, going to turn into pandering, lowest-common-denominator chasing, sensationalist traffic whores? Do we do whatever it takes, sell our souls, to get traffic?

Well, for one thing, if I wrote headlines like this all the time, people would soon get sick of it and stop reading what I write. Sensational content is manipulative, and people don’t like to be manipulated. Fool me once…etc. The occasional bit of trolling or sensationalism may be a useful short term tactic, but it’s not likely to be a sustainable publishing strategy — unless of course you are in the supermarket tabloid business.

That bit of prudence notwithstanding, it’s likely that pay-for-performance journalism will test the extremes before the pendulum starts to swing back. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Never have so many individual content creators had so much power, rather than being just cogs in a large editorial machine, but with that new power, it’s inevitable that they’re going to break stuff.

Still, I think the pendulum will inevitably swing back. Quality and standards are not a passing fad or a relic of old media economics. If you write good stuff, it’s not guaranteed to get traffic, but quality will increase your odds a lot more over the long term than pandering and sensationalism.

As institutional journalists are given an incentive to follow the siren song of traffic, independent bloggers might have an opportunity to distinguish themselves by holding the line on quality and standards. Which is not to say that news organization journalists will go tripping over that line en mass — it’s more about their facing the temptations that independent bloggers have long faced every time they write a post.

Being exposed to the raw economics of content is an equalizing force — everything that is published, whether by a small blog or a huge media company, is “naked in the marketplace,” as Nick put it.

Read me, click on me, link to me — PLEASE!!!!!!!

Scott Karp blogs and writes the occasional in-your-face headline at Publishing 2.0.

Jobs, in fact, couldn’t possibly be more out of touch with today’s Web 2.0 ethos, which is all about grand platforms, open systems, egalitarianism, and user-generated content. Like the iPod, the iPhone is a little fortress ruled over by King Steve. It’s as self-contained as a hammer. It’s a happening staged for an elite of one. The rest of us are free to gain admission by purchasing a ticket for $500, but we’re required to remain in our seats at all times while the show is in progress. User-generated content? Hah! You can’t even change the damn battery. In Jobs’s world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet.

Which is, of course, why the iPhone, like the iPod, is such an exquisite device.

Does Apple do product testing? Does Google do UI testing? Do these companies constantly improve their products based on user feedback? Of course they do. But the end result is the product of one or a hand full of minds with a vision of how things should work. I’m not talking about refusing to listen — I’m talking about at taking it all in and arriving at your own conclusion.

At the Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle asked Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist, why they don’t run text ads and make a boatload of money. Jim’s response:

No users have been requesting that we run text ads, so for us, that’s the end of the story. If users start calling out for text ads, we’ll listen.

But he could have easily phrased his answer: Because we DON’T WANT to put ads on the site. We’ll put up ads when we’re damn ready to, so stop asking.

There’s a lesson here for bloggers and writers. Think about all of the most successful bloggers — they don’t blog by consensus. They don’t try to please anybody — in fact, they routinely piss people off. They see the world, and they call it like they see it. They are sometimes wrong, and the best of them apologize or correct themselves when they are. But then they plow right ahead writing about how they see the world.

My most successful blog posts have been those that were born of pure conviction — for many of those posts, I look back and think, what an idiot, I was so totally wrong. But it didn’t matter. I called it as I saw it at the time — and I listened to the feedback I got, and often it changed my thinking. But I never wrote anything to please anybody.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the Apple iPhone, declaring it a stunning innovation. I had a moment of hesitation before I posted it — what if everyone else thinks it sucks? And sure enough, today the blogosphere is filled with discussion of everything wrong with the iPhone. But I posted it anyway. I don’t create any value for my readers by trying to hold a mirror up to everyone else’s opinion.

It’s possible this post may rub some people the wrong way. And I reserve the right to completely change my mind at some point in the future.

But this is what I really think, right now.

Scott Karp blogs his convictions at Publishing 2.0.

Is a blog really a blog if there are no reader comments?

Not a requirement, but comments enhance content dramatically
1223 – 40% of all votes

Comments are not a requirement for blogs
1009 – 33% of all votes

Without comments, it isn’t a blog
791 – 26% of all votes

Total Votes: 3023

The post itself received over 150 comments. I wasn’t going to wade into this perennial debate again until I came across this Joel Stein column from the L.A. Times, which is a tour de force rant against reader feedback:

Here’s what my Internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I don’t want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you. I have more than enough people to converse with. And I don’t listen to them either. That sound on the phone, Mom, is me typing.

Some newspapers even list the phone numbers of their reporters at the end of their articles. That’s a smart use of their employees’ time. Why not just save a step and have them set up a folding table at a senior citizen center with a sign asking for complaints?

Where does this end? Does Philip Roth have to put his e-mail at the end of his book? Does Tom Hanks have to hold up a sign with his e-mail at the end of his movie? Should your hotel housekeeper leave her e-mail on your sheets? Are you starting to see how creepy this is?

It goes on and on like that. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing, and I must say that it was quite refreshing. I say that being generally a strong proponent of comments — some of my best blogging experiences have been engaging in intense debates in comments. The other day I posted a rant against fake corporate conversations, and I invoked The Cluetrain Manifesto — and to my surprise, two of the four Cluetrain authors, David Weinberger and Rick Levine showed up in my comments with extremely thought responses. And they weren’t alone — the post elicited a range of thoughtful responses, which together were MUCH more interesting than the original post. I have often had the experience that the comments section of a post is for more valuable than the original post.

But what about the old one-way publishing format? Is it a relic of “old media” or does it still have a place? Seth Godin’s blog is the touchstone example of a successful blog without comments — as Seth explains:

I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters.

At the time, I took issue with Seth’s stance, but I do think that Joel Stein makes an interesting assertion:

Not everything should be interactive. A piece of work that stands on its own, without explanation or defense, takes on its own power.

I suppose it all depends on your objectives. When I blog, I’m typically throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. I often take provocative positions on purpose because I learn a lot from the disagreement in the comments — I have of course been accused of trolling, but attention for attention’s sake is never my objective. Blogging can be a great sounding board — “thinking out loud,” as John Battelle calls it. Most of what I blog is not a fully formed, finely crafted work of thought, but a raw piece of clay that I’ve taken a few whacks at. For me, blogging is a learning process, and comments are the key to that process.

But that’s by no means the only valid objective of publishing. Some people just want to publish their ideas to world, and that’s the end of it. It’s true that comments are a great responsibility. I always feel remiss when I don’t have time to respond to comments as thoroughly as I would like.

The other problem with comments is that they are an asynchronous conversation — anyone who uses IM knows this is not a very efficient way to carry on a conversation. Too often, commenters are just sounding off rather than talking to each other — or worse, just shouting at or past each other. But when it works, the debate can be extremely rich.

Now, you know what comes next. I have to ask what YOU think? Is there still value in one-way blogging and publishing? Any thoughts on how to make better use of comments?

Scott Karp blogs and responds to comments at Publishing 2.0.

User Generated Content: Since when did I become a heroin addict?

and

Treat me as a person, not some user, consumer, addict, shallow person defined by your brand or some other form of low life.

Worse than the negative word association is that the use of the term “user” in a media 2.0 context has completely obfuscated what is actually happening in media. Take this comment from Fred Wilson in his post on the end of page views:

Web pages themselves are changing, moving from pages controlled by publishers to pages controlled by users. I have no idea what percentage of total Internet pages viewed in the month of December are “controlled by users” (I’d love a number on that if anyone has it), but I am sure that percentage is increasing. I’d put some, but not all, social networking pages in this category. All blogs for sure. And the growing category of personalized start pages (Google, MyYahoo, Netvibes, etc) is a big part of this trend.

In most cases “users” in Media 2.0 are defined as the “people formerly known as the audience” or the “users” of Web 2.0 applications, including social networking sites like MySpace. The problem is that “users” are defined in opposition to “publishers” — as if people who create “blogs” are still in some lesser, “other” category, below and apart from traditional publishers like, uh, Yahoo.

Well, no. There is a revolution in media because people who create blogs and MySpace pages ARE publishers, and more importantly, they are now on equal footing with the “big,” “traditional” publishers. There has been a leveling of the playing field that renders largely meaningless the distinction between “users” and “publishers” — we’re all publishers now, and we’re all competing for the finite pie of attention. The problem is that the discourse on trends in online media still clings to the language of “us” and “them,” when it is all about the breakdown of that distinction.

Despite my objection to his use of “users,” Fred’s observation about trends in page views is an important one — smaller publishers, i.e. NOT USERS, do likely account for an increasing percentage of all page views. But I think it’s essential to recognize that the difference here is one of SCALE, not KIND. Traditional publishers who use cumbersome, out-dated multi-million dollar content management systems to publish on the web are also “users” of these over-priced systems, but they are publishers first.

It’s time we start adjusting our taxonomy to recognize that the tools do not define the activity or the output or the people doing it. There are large publishers and small publishers. There are people who publish for friends and family, and people who publish for professional colleagues, and people who publish for a (relatively) broad consumer audience. The revolution is that ANYONE can publish to the network and that anyone can leverage the power of the network.

That said, there is one respect in which some publishers are still “users” — when you publish to a platform like MySpace or YouTube, you cede control over the monetization of your publication. As I discussed in my last column, making money is certainly not the objective of everyone who publishes online. But regardless of financial motives, we are all seeking our share of attention — and anyone who publishes anything online is competing for their share.

So it’s time to throw off the mantle of “user” and be proud publishers — otherwise we’re going to get “used.”

Scott Karp is the publisher of the blog Publishing 2.0, which covers the convergence of media and technology.

Google’s approach was radical back then and, it seems, still now. Instead of monetizing Blogger sites by controlling the ad space themselves, Google put the monetization tools in the hands of the users, allowing them not only to share in but also optimize the monetization. Of course, Google had the advantage of tapping into its already wildly successful AdWords program, which funneled advertisers by the thousands into AdSense. The reason Google’s approach still seems radical today is that none of the other successful platforms has followed this lead — MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook all still control the ad space on the sites (with Google’s acquisition of YouTube, this may change, of course).

This difference has lead to much debate over the “exploitation” of user-generated content. In a recent post, Nick Carr argued:

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt pushed back:

What’s really going on is a recognition that not everything needs to be paid for in monetary terms (which isn’t a new concept). It’s not that the users are somehow being “exploited” by being tricked into giving up value in exchange for attention. They are making the choice and recognizing the benefit. The attention is a benefit to them. It is payment — not exploitation. This is the same mistake that others have made in claiming that Google is somehow exploiting sites by organizing and pointing people to those sites — while making money in the process. Once again, that’s a case where Google is providing some benefit (traffic, or if you must, attention) to those sites.

The missing element here is that, unlike most recipients of Google search traffic or bloggers running AdSense, most users of MySpace, for example, don’t have a means to convert the attention they receive into cash — and most probably aren’t interested in the relatively small amount of cash that their share of attention is worth. But — I think Mike is dead wrong when he argues that users are “making the choice and recognizing the benefit.” The vast majority of participants in the user-generated content economy are completely ignorant of their participation. Again, for most, that ignorance is bliss — Nick is right that “sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money.” But there is not yet a system in place to ensure that everyone who wants to participate in the cash economy around them is given that option and made clearly aware of it.

This issue has played out across the “social media” landscape, e.g. Revver (with its ad revenue sharing) vs. YouTube, Netscape (with its paid Navigators) vs. Digg. While I do believe there is an ethical right and wrong to this issue, that is tempered by Nick’s observation that the economic value of each individual contribution is “trivial.” Nonetheless, I think Mike put his finger on the key issue — CHOICE. I’d guess that many people using the YouTube platform aren’t aware that they can choose instead to use Revver and share in the ad revenue (although the management shakeup at Revver may be indirect evidence that there’s still not much money to be made yet). The majority of those people would likely stick with the social rewards of YouTube — or they are already “monetizing” their efforts by burnishing their reputations as video producers. But YouTube never explicitly says to its users, “Hey, thanks for all your contributions and your support of our ad revenue ambitions — if you want a piece of the action, unfortunately we’re not in the position to share at the moment. But we hope that you continue to enjoy the free service.” Again, this may change under Google ownership.

The reality is that the economics of a service like MySpace are not so different from the economics of free web mail — users get a free service, and owners of the service get to serve ads.

The key issue in my mind is how the explosion of user-generated content will affects over the long term how the finite pie of media attention is allocated. If media consumers start to spend more time with user-generated content (i.e. content that is produced “for free” by users of open platforms) than they do with “professional” content (i.e. content that is expensive to produce — think Hollywood), then this issue of allowing users to choose to share in the cash economy will come to a head because the cash value of each user contribution will increase over time.

User generators of the world, unite and takeover.

Scott Karp writes about the convergence of media and technology at Publishing 2.0.