September 2nd, 2009

AT&T's "problem" customers get the blame

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 2:12 pm

Categories: Media Comment & Crimes

Tags: AT&T Corp., 3G, Cellular Phones, Wireless And Mobility, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Mitch Ratcliffe

Fortune Magazine swallows the AT&T pitch hook, line and sinker in a story titled “Bandwidth hogs — iPhones and other smartphones.” Writer Jon Fortt dishes up a steaming dish of bull shoveled straight out of AT&T PR:

Now the wireless providers hawking those Internet-enabled mobile devices are experiencing the digital equivalent of being proprietors of an all-you-can-eat buffet: It seems like the perfect business until the sumo wrestlers show up.

Well, forgive us, AT&T, for buying your dog food. And, yes, I do hold telecom carriers to the promises they make. I only seem to pick on AT&T because I am a customer who has covered the company through years of over-promising and frequent under-delivery. AT&T has been selling its 3G services for years and only now is claiming it can’t make an adequate profit (because, get set for the PR spin: AT&T is positioning to raise prices in this Fortune article).

Unfortunately, the reporter didn’t think to check into AT&T’s claims by, for example, comparing AT&T’s assertions that users are overtaxing its 3G network to the Federal Communications Commission’s definition of 3G networks, the spectrum for which the agency freed up to serve data-intensive applications for mobile handsets: “Key features of 3G systems are a high degree of commonality of design worldwide, compatibility of services, use of small pocket terminals with worldwide roaming capability, Internet and other multimedia applications, and a wide range of services and terminals.”

Specifically, the carriers asked for the bandwidth in exchange for: Fixed and variable rate bit traffic; Bandwidth on demand; Asymmetric data rates in the forward and reverse links; Multimedia mail store and forward; Broadband access up to 2 Megabits/second (my iPhone 3G typically delivers about 700 Kbps throughput, not 2 Mbps). Customers haven’t even got MMS on the iPhone, but AT&T is angling to justify higher prices well before it delivers improved network service.

AT&T’s CTO, John Donovan, is quoted saying “3G networks were not designed effectively for this kind of usage.” Not much of a CTO, if you ask me, unless CTO is an acronym for “Liar.” Mr. Donovan, please read the FCC’s definitions of 3G technology, review AT&T’s own promotional materials, and answer one question: Why does AT&T promise all these ‘3G’ features and services if its network cannot deliver them? If your network cannot provide 3G services, don’t charge as though they do. I get a bill for 3G services every month.

The next section of the article, which labels the top five percent of data plan users as “problems,” according to a remark attributed to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, sets the stage for price increases for 3G, because “4G systems won’t be available for years.” That AT&T would describe its most active users as “problems” is ludicrous, but the complete lack of any alternative perspective on the question in the article is outrageous.

The problem lies with AT&T, not its customers.

January 19th, 2009

Let’s talk about the economics of great journalism

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 3:54 pm

Categories: Business & Technology, Media Comment & Crimes

Tags: Journalism, Coverage, Reporter, News, ON24, Team Management, Benefits, Advertising & Promotion, Management, Human Resources

Responding to various recent postings about journalism, including Ethan Zuckerman, Seth Godin, Dan Gillmor, Amy Gahran and Lisa Williams. I think the economics of journalism and ethics are deeply related and we tend to talk about them separately, emphasizing the dying channels for distribution at the expense of understanding the net loss of reporting.

When I worked with the team that built the ON24 iFinancial Network, a personalized financial news network that delivered hundreds of long- and short-form investment news each day, we tried to grow on advertising. Even though we had several million viewers who spent an hour or more a day getting much deeper reports than other sources provided—complete coverage of conference calls, analyst reports, company statements and executive speeches—advertisers were slow to adopt the idea.

ON24’s news team operated on approximately $1.8 million a year at its peak, when it was producing 28 hours, and more, of programming a day, far below the cost at competitors like CNBC, which paid just one of their anchors almost as much as ON24’s news staff of 85 full-time employees. Such radical changes in the economics of news are always possible, especially now.

Media innovation cannot be dependent on advertisers, they will not take the risk. Innovation must find a foothold with people who demand that great news be available. The users of news have to support it to get it going. In the past, rich men made this investment and we got what they paid for. Are we going to pay for better news in the coming century? Are we going to pay for it now, when media is down and change can overwhelm the old controlled media that delivers more pabulum than hard news?

Having been in and around journalism, citizen journalism and publishing for a long time, let me suggest we stop talking about the ethics of providing complete and useful information to citizens of a democracy, which are barely changed by the requirements of social media and cloud computing technology, in isolation from the economics of journalism. If someone delivers great journalism on a regular basis, what does it cost to do it? What is it worth to you to get better news coverage of an important issue?

Let’s posit that if the journalism is “great” or even “good,” it will be ethical, and face the problem of paying for the change we want. Unethical reporting is not journalism.

Forget about advertising and the like as a means of support. What’s a solid source of useful reliable information worth to you? A dollar a month? Twenty Read the rest of this entry »

July 14th, 2008

Amanda Chapel, aka "Strumpette," needs some tough love

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 8:37 pm

Categories: Media Comment & Crimes

Tags: Hacker, Twitter, Amanda Chapel, Hacking, Security, Mitch Ratcliffe

I had a strange Twitter back-and-forth with “Amanda Chapel,” the pseudonymous authors of a PR blog called “Strumpette,” about the nature of the hacker ethic. I personally don’t think the hacker ethic is very effective as a counterpoint to the system of intellectual property it decries, because hackers seem intent on getting rich one way or the other. “Amanda” apparently agrees, because she/he/they wrote that it was “bankrupt.” Nevertheless, Amanda had to find a disagreement in order to continue her/his/their snarky schtick. I asked “Amanda” why she/he/they thought the hacker ethic, which is characterized by an often over-simplified Hayekian-libertarian approach to markets, exists outside the current economic and philosophical system and ended up being confronted with a number of epithets and was told “[Amanda doesn't] entertain opinions, period.”

You can watch the unwinding of the dialog here and here.

Amanda’s is small mind(s) in action (and yes, that is grammatically as close to correct as I can get without more gratuitous use of forward slashes). I try to understand where disagreements arise, because that’s how we can all improve our thinking. I tried with “Amanda” to point out that we don’t really disagree about the value of the hacker ethic. The phony distinctions between liberals and conservatives, for example, have prevented real engagement with precisely the same ideas stated in different terms for the past 28 years, when Ronald Reagan abandoned the traditional Republican commitment to liberal principles, at least in word, as the deeds of the Republican administrations have only magnified the power of government vis-a-vis the individual.

The thing is, I have often thought “Amanda” made some constructive interventions in the mindless chatter of Web 2.0 with her/his/their contrarian posting and tweets. It’s as though Godwin’s Law kicked in, in a different form, this time proving that as the length of time a person tweets increases the more likely they are to accuse someone of “blowing arrogant bullshit.” Call it Ratcliffe’s Corollary and think of me well when I am gone.

Our discussion of an unpublished academic article that Amanda said supported her/his/their position that the hacker ethic is a bankrupt extra-capitalist (specifically, she/he/the wrote “anti-property”) movement quickly devolved into Amanda resorting to name-calling. This is the kind of self-important amateurish blowhardism she/he/they generally decries, but it appears “Amanda” is merely playing at controversy Read the rest of this entry »

June 9th, 2008

Scribes, professionals and the decline of mass media

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 10:34 pm

Categories: Media Comment & Crimes

Tags: Journalist, Journalism, Stock, Media, Photograph, Image, Music, Investment, Document Management, Finance

Clay Shirky, in his Here Comes Everybody, devotes a chapter, “Everyone is a media outlet”, to a comparison of the decline of scribal production to the decline of “professional” journalism. He sets up this analogy on faulty legs that leave the argument that “what was once a chasm is now a mere slope [between "professional" journalism and committing acts of journalism or journalistic-like writing or photopublication]” completely unsupported.

The problem is that the scribe’s production of books, which was, for the most part, merely rote copying (with mistakes sometimes adding very interesting flavor to the resulting books), is not analogous to the acts of research and authorship that a journalist does. And I don’t mean a “professional” journalist, just the act of researching and writing a thorough report of an event or events.

Clay mixes in photojournalism and stock photography, two very different functions in the scheme of things, as one is concerned with immediacy and the other with illustration of events with handy and cheap symbolic images, to make his point that it is in organizing data that most value is created:

“Who is a professional photographer? Like ‘journalist,’ that category seems at first to be coherent and internally cohesive, but it turns out to be tied to scarcity as well….. Much of the price for professional stock photos came from the difficulty of finding the right photo rather than from the difference in quality between photos….”

Photojournalism was and still is expensive, because someone has to take the bet that they can be in the right place at the right time. As a result, one photo can be worth months’ or, even, a year’s pay, because it took a year to be in the right place. Likewise, the reason stock photos exist is that they have been composed in the past from false realities (models posed in “natural” settings) or captured during the long effort to make a valuable image, and were ready for the future need as a result. In both cases, production rather than distribution is the essential cost.

Widespread amateurization doesn’t make it cheaper to produce a staged photo, it simply increases the likelihood that you can find a “real” image of something at a lower cost than the composed image of the photojournalist or stock photographer.

Shirky also cites the music and film industry, which engages in “distributing music and moving images” that is being undermined because “laypeople can now move move music and video easily.” Without getting into the distinctions between artists who can produce themselves and those that need packaging by a marketer before their music doesn’t suck too much for human consumption, the real value in these industries is production, not just distribution. Try to make The Lord of the Rings trilogy on less than $500,000 and you will see what I mean. Production includes the financing of risk, too.

Additionally, Clay dwells on “professionalism” as the essence of journalism. I’d like to see his take on the evolution of journalism, which is characterized by amateur writers becoming paid writers as they try to fill their own or a friend’s press with content. Over the long run, most great journalists never had a journalism degree. Professionalism actually rose with the proliferation of media outlets as a way of credentialing people, mostly to the detriment of the dedication to reporting the perceived truth that drove the rise of mass journalism.

In many ways, Shirky treats anything flowing over a network as an undifferentiated mass of content on which his economic and social rules operate.

“The entire basis on which scribes earned their keep vanished not when reading and writing vanished but when reading and writing became ubiquitous,” Clay writes. Indeed, it is so, but that is also when those scribes began to write their own works, as he points out with regard the Abbot of Sponheim’s 1492 defense of the scribal life, which he chose to print and distribute through movable type. Rather than a chaos during that 100 to 150 year period when scribes and printing presses competed with one another, there was a long process of change that was largely comprehensible to everyone involved. For an excellent history of this period, see Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change.

What changed for the scribes was that the church would no longer pay for their work, because it no longer had a monopoly on readers, so they had to evolve different skills or, rather, focus on improving existing skills for the new channels of distribution. In other words, they had to become authors.

Scribes were copyists whose errors did introduce some of the most interesting elements of the books they reproduced (and, so, were failing as “copyists”). At best, they were masterful annotators and commentators on those works that passed beneath their quills, but not authors in the modern sense. Both authoring and annotation/commentary survived and thrived because of the enlarged markets for printed work. The scribes didn’t die off, they evolved into, among other things, academics, scientists and historians.

December 11th, 2005

This "exclusive" is PR

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 10:32 am

Categories: Media Comment & Crimes

Tags:

No matter how good Wikinews is, this "exclusive interview" with Jimmy Wales, the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation is the same kind of PR you get from the mainstream.

Jimbo says a lot of good things, but this is like having the Survivor rejectee on the CBS morning show the next day…. All cross-promotion-all-the-time is not what people need more of, but less.

Can we be honest in civic media and not make news out of promotions, please?

Technorati Tags: JimmyWales, journalism, wikinews

December 11th, 2005

Why conservative blogs are more effective

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 7:28 am

Categories: Business & Technology, Media Comment & Crimes, Social & Political

Tags:

Conservative Blogs are More Effective - New York Times:

But what really makes conservatives effective is their pre-existing media infrastructure, composed of local and national talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the Fox News Channel and sensationalist say-anything outlets like the Drudge Report - all of which are quick to pass on the latest tidbit from the blogosphere. "One blogger on the Republican side can have a real impact on a race because he can just plug right into the right-wing infrastructure that the Republicans have built," Stoller says.

But why? The infrastructure Matt Stoller talks about in the Times article makes conservative is what, but the why has to do with the differences in world view described by George Lakoff. Conservative minds seek a "stern father," according to Lakoff’s Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Liberals, by contrast, seek a "nurturing mother" arrangement of society. The former, seeking authority to back up their ideas, freely and efficiently repeat messages within the conservative blogosphere. I’ve seen this as I work on the Persuadio influence research I’ve been working on: Conservative messages are repeated more accurately, even in cases where they are modified or criticized by conservatives, because there is a distinct tendency to resort to authority on which to build an argument. Liberals mangle the messages they talk about, freely modifying, adding and subtracting to ideas as part of the dialogue they ("we," as a matter of disclosure: for the most part, I have a liberal world view) love to engage in.

Another way to put it is that liberals love an argument, because it lets them engage in finding a shared solution while conservatives love winning arguments. When I was a young activist, Read the rest of this entry »

December 9th, 2005

y.ah.oo buys del.icio.us!!

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 11:24 am

Categories: Business & Technology, Media Comment & Crimes

Tags:

del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!: Joshua Schachter reveals the news….

We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way - our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.

I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo!

Congrats to a worthy company and to the buyer, which will have some significant challenges in keeping the simple spirit of Del.icou.us alive as it is integrated into the big system that is Yahoo! Nevertheless, tying tagging to the Yahoo! world is a very valuable lever for extending Yahoo’s search functionality and the original content is it producing.

If when you read a Kevin Sites piece on Yahoo, for example, there is tagging built into the page, many more people will have straightforward tools for contributing to folksonomy. That tagging drives traffic, which drives revenue.

Makes a lot of sense.

Technorati Tags: community, del.icio.us, publishing, folksonomy, tagging, Yahoo

December 8th, 2005

What's the best style for rendering written articles for spoken word?

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 11:17 am

Categories: Business & Technology, Media Comment & Crimes

Tags:

Joi Ito’s Web: Podcast style issue: Thomas Crampton, writing at Joi’s blog, asks….

Been testing out how to most interestingly Podcast a written article.
Problem: How do you best express quotes in spoken form?

The translation of text to spoken word was a big problem at ON24, where we converted dozens of stories written by partners each day. The problem is in the variety of styles people use to express quotation and attribution in writing, so there is no standard way of doing it without rewriting "for air" to some extent. For example, you cannot break quotes comfortably when injecting "quote…unquote" in a sentence, because you end up with two or more renditions of the punctuation in a single sentence.

Saying "quote…unquote" or some variation works well in some circumstances, but it interrupts the listener’s flow of thought and, I think, is best used to highlight important points, but not all quotes. Varying the way you introduce a quote, using "[subject] said…." or "[subject] told me" makes it more comfortable to the ear, more like hearing a story told than hearing an article read.

The suggestion of putting the original up is certainly practical and convenient. It’s what I do with my podcast, but I always divert from my script as I speak so the text and the audio differ.

So, you have to mix up your suggestions and add a conversational-storytelling tone to the exposition of the text, as well.

Technorati Tags: journalism, podcasting

December 7th, 2005

Right tool, wrong fight

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 11:13 am

Categories: Business & Technology, Media Comment & Crimes, Social & Political

Tags:

Freedom of Anonymous Speech: Ross Mayfield writes of the Wikipedia debate….

Beyond this attempt to weaken anonymity on the Net, Wikipedia’s open nature is also under attack. Adam Curry edited podcasting history in his favor. Big deal. It’s a wiki, just edit it if you disagree and let the community’s practice work over time.

Consider regulating against graffiti. You have two options:

Guard every wall in town to prevent the infraction from occurring
Paint over infractions and enforce the law by chasing down perpetrators
The former is not just prohibitively expensive, it kills creativity and culture. The later is the status quo and generally works, especially where communities flourish.

So what would have Wikipedia do? Lock down contributions through a fact checking process with rigid policy? Or let people contribute, leverage revision history and let the group revert infractions.

Ross is wrong when he says "Big Deal. It’s a wiki…." The tools don’t add value, the user does. If the content of a wiki is essentially different because of the the tool used to create and edit it, I’ve yet to see it documented and that would be a good piece of research for someone to undertake.

As I see it, the content of a wiki is a direct reflection of the human behind the words, data, images or media. So, we do need to take seriously the quality and veracity of information wherever we find it—Wikipedia is no exception. Critical reading is an important skill to carry forward. When you are talking about creating a reference work like Wikipedia, it is important that the reader have the information to judge the "facts" they are presented with so that they can decide whether they will take it as correct or continue to do research.

If the purpose of Wikipedia is only to create a forum for changing entries, I suppose it would be sufficient to say "Big deal, I can change this entry." That, however, is not a viable reference system, it’s just more work for people who need access to information quickly and conveniently. If this is the purpose of Wikipedia—to provide a venue for anonymous debates about facts and interpretations of facts—then the company should stop licensing the content to other sites as a "reference" source.

If we are not thinking about that reader using the Wikipedia as a reference, who will suffer from misinformation they adopt as fact, then we are not understanding the social importance of capturing and organizing data.

We don’t buy an almanac to use it to begin research into [picking up my The New York Times 2005 Almanac and flipping randomly to page 512] the average inflation rate in Belarus between 1990 and 2001, I want to find that it is 318.1 percent. I can accept this "fact" based on my relationship with the source, which is the Times Co. and the World Bank, which is the source cited by the almanac. Those are sources I can rely on or, at least, cite when challenged by someone who insists that Belarussian economy experienced no inflation during those years.

The important thing is that when we are talking about sources of shared information, as compared to graffiti (a spurious comparison, as the accurate analogy is to an encyclopedia or almanac or dictionary), we can debate on the record. The reader has recourse Read the rest of this entry »

December 7th, 2005

Welcome to the bigger picture

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 7:08 am

Categories: Business & Technology, Media Comment & Crimes

Tags:

WSJ.com - Portals:

The difference between the old media elite and the new blogging elite is that the latter gets redefined much more frequently. All it takes is attracting links from other bloggers.

If you’re clever enough, you can make a career out of complaining about never being mentioned by the blog-aggregation sites. Get enough people to read you, and you’ll soon be on tech.memeorandum’s front page. That’s how software-mediated democracy works. It’s not always pretty, but is there any better system?

Lee Gomes’ column is a bit dismissive of the discussions going on through Memeorandum and blogniscient.com, but it also asks a question worth keeping at the forefront of the evolution of information politics: Is there a better system? I’ve suggested before that Memeorandum’s algorithm simply reinforces an existing elite because it samples a limited range of blogs to begin its display of discussion—that’s also the essence of human editing, a process built on the reality of limited attention—and true to Gomes’ statement, it landed my blog on the Memeorandum home page more than before.

That the elite is more porous than before, when newspaper companies defined who got column inches, is a Good Thing, for sure.

That the power to crawl gives organizations the power to define dialogue is Not So Good, because algorithms that assume the kind of neutrality that produces "objective truth" without acknowledging the selectivity of the resulting data leads to misinformed readers. Gomes is pointing out that a lot of irreducibly miniscule arguments become holy crusades, while the details of real import are neglected.

The point that Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum has an audience of 12,000 is important, but that readership is not the new elite. The blogs selected to be on the page are an elite, of a sort. However, while doing analysis of social influence, I’ve seen repeatedly that it is the "mainstream media" that start the talking in many cases—this one, for example, where a Wall Street Journal article gets discussion going—and without that part of the media (the "media" includes everyone publishing today, from mainstream to "elite blogs" and the rest of the blog/podcast/Web/print universe) the discussion wouldn’t be so robust.

So, the answer to Gomes’ question is that the system is much more complex than "blog-aggregation sites" and "software-mediated democracy," just as newspapers were not the sole foundation of 20th century, either.

Technorati Tags: blogging, influencenetworks, LongTail, publishing