Musings & Meanderings

After my post on Wednesday stating that I though CNet should apologize to Wired, several people asked me,

“Why do you care?”.

My initial response to this was simply, “Why don’t you?”, but, after some reflection, I decided that the question deserves a more detailed response. The following is hardly a complete response. The reasons for caring about attribution could easily lead to development of long tracts on morality, philosophy, social responsibility, and more, so here, first, are a few of my personal beliefs on why I care in general.

I care about the world I live in, and believe that every one of my actions combine with everyone else’s to make it either a better or worse place to live.

I know that it is possible to be successful in life and in business while behaving in a moral and ethical manner.

Speaking up for a popular cause is always easy, speaking up for what you believe in sometimes isn’t.

Personal popularity isn’t success, and it also isn’t a measure of trust or loyalty.

Being loyal to yourself and the things you believe in is worth it, even when it is difficult or costly.

Now as to why I care about attribution specifically:

Attribution is something that concerns anyone who has ever published, or thought to publish, anything. Ever more of us derive our livelihood from ‘right-brain’ activities. For reporters and journalists specifically, attribution or the lack thereof is an asset that translates into both reputation and earning power. Despite the major shifts taking place on the publishing landscape, in terms of copyright, ease and accessibility, etc., the basic societal structures of how we organize ourselves around ideas and information haven’t changed substantially.

The FBI spyware story belongs to all of us, and it’s a good thing that there are plenty of postings and conversations about it. It relates to many issues which we should understand better and be more aware of in general, including privacy, security, and law enforcement on the internet.

My post on Wednesday was a statement of my opinion on something I observed that bothered me. It is my way to act, whenever possible, when I see something that appears unjust. In most cases, that action involves private and personal communication. In others, where many lives are affected, there are organizations that I can add my support to, in the form of making a donation of time, influence, or money. (In this case, the actors were speaking in public.)

In the case of the Wired/CNet story, I subscribe to both of their feeds, and do not know either of the specific reporters personally. I initially emailed both of them. Declan McCullagh did not respond. Kevin Poulsen did. After a few more conversations about it, I decided to post my personal opinion here. Even though it wasn’t likely to change anything all those hours later, it is still a statement for the record.

If the CNet story lacked an appropriate attribution to Wired (as I believe), that could have, and still can, be changed at any time. This is a tremendous power to change that we have here. Like any power, it can be used well and it can also be abused.

We’ve seen, since the rise of powerful blogger journalists and the awkwardly growing area called citizen journalism, more than a few stories broken where ’scoops’ were publicly credited to individuals, adding to their reputation and clout. The majority of these individuals is deserving of their reputations, worked hard to build them, and did not do so primarily at the expense of others.

Plagiarism is anathema to any ethical publisher, of news or anything else. This is not, at heart, an issue of monetary value or rights, but rather an issue of ethical behavior and mutual respect, essential components to peaceful human co-existence. The growth of open platforms such as blogging, combined with the growing population online and the lightning speed of the medium, are enabling the dissemination of all published writing at unprecedented speed. Those of us who value the freedom of this medium, in my opinion, should also contribute whatever we can to education and to raising the standards of behavior whenever possible.

The basic definition of plagiarism, though, does not take into account the new concept of people chatting about, commenting on, and passing on ‘news’ in a published form. Telling your friends about something you heard/read isn’t a professional activity, and there is a lot of gray area here that would benefit from more discussion and consideration.

Most people publishing online include a copyright statement, and the most common (based on my own observations only) is one which states that all are free to re-publish, usually in original form, with attribution to the author. In the less formal publishing taking place in social mediums, it is becoming common practice to pass the word around without using or referencing the original form, but still thanking or giving a ‘hat tip’ to the writer’s source. Even non-professional publishers adhere to these basic behavioral codes of civility and respect.

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These are some of the reasons I care. What are some of yours?

Last night, Kevin Poulsen filed a story for Wired titled FBI’s Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made Bomb Threats, followed this morning by FBI’s Magic Lantern revealed.

Several hours after the first Wired story appeared, Declan McCullagh broke the same story on the CNet News Blog …without any mention of the earlier article in Wired.

This FBI spyware story, an important one to anyone concerned about privacy, has been on the tech news radar since since MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan first wrote about the rumored development of the Magic Lantern spyware in November of 2001, and has been followed by Wired since then.

Reporters and journalists work hard to break news, get the facts straight, and deliver them first.

So CNet’s blog posting needs, at the very least, an update acknowledging the original source of today’s story.

We need more, not less, ethical journalism on the internet. We enjoy unprecedented speed of communication here, as well as unprecedented freedom of speech. I believe that it is up to us who use and appreciate this medium to do everything we can to contribute to civil and ethical standards of behavior online in order to protect that freedom.

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A related post 2 days later.

It sounds less …crass, to talk about valuing your ‘brand’ and respecting your loyal readership, and displaying integrity via adhering to ethical principles, and practicing transparency… oh, and, replacing the for sale sign with ‘monetization opportunity’.

The blogosphere offers fascinating studies in shifting relationships between business and the consumer. No successful online community previously empowered the individual to this extent.

eBay, for example, enables individuals but deliberately ‘masses’ them. One could even say that, by insisting on remaining ‘just a venue’ and ignoring unethical and fraudulent behavior for too long it actively disabled individuals.

Previous communities which empower individuals are, for the most part, either protected cloisters, or ingrown special interest groups, or traditional grass roots movements.

Until blogging, individual empowerment has been extremely limited. Only those very few tech sophisticated enough to build and promote their own web presence successfully, or wealthy enough to pay for it, were previously empowered.

No one has come up with the next chapter yet, either. Currently popular ventures include Threadless (which is grassroots and promotes the current zeitgeist through aggregation of popular opinion on individual contributions), ASPs such as the fab 37signals suite, and enhancing the public space with privacy tools like Vox does. Although each of these examples is enabling in its way, all are private need centered.

Communality and the wisdom of crowds also has its place, and always will, but I doubt that anyone can subsume individual empowerment …put the genie back in the bottle, if you will.

The future of individual voices on the web is not traditional journalism, but it is the prominent bloggers who came from old media that, more than anyone, sit visibly in the awkward fast lane of this new form where consumers and business are converging.

They are in the fast lane because they have the training and skills to write prolifically and get read, which means that their traffic is substantial compared to most individuals on the web. As money tries to figure out how to buy all this traffic and attention, it is natural for the voices with the largest audiences to stand out.

They’re in the most awkward position, because part of their loyal readers’ trust is based on their perceived purity and impartiality. That this perception is faulty is totally irrelevant; the fact is that old media (who used to pay their bills) created it. Most people believe that great reporting and journalism and television are all free. They persist in this belief even as they pay their cable or satellite bill every month. The dollars traded for a newspaper go to the company that prints it, not to their favorite columnists, and so on. At least a bit of the antagonism directed at Rush Limbaugh is because he got rich doing his thing.

The numbers of professional bloggers who have struggled the most vocally with selling their reputation is already rapidly diminishing. They can’t go on about it forever, given that they still have to eat just like everyone else, and most have made their commercial beds. Their solutions range from private sponsors, ‘transparently’ disclosed on a page most don’t visit, to tasteful and limited traditional advertising. New and creative schemes for monetization, such as the Best Buy holiday shopping bloggers that Steve Rubel posted about last night, the Goodstorm’s MeCommerce and others posted about by Mathew Ingram, as well as recommendation engine and other aggregation concepts, are beginning to map the most accessible of these uncharted waters.

Selling your reputation, and therefore the trust your followers have put in you, is something that many would, on the theoretical surface, define as a betrayal of trust. That theoretical surface of popular belief, though, is melting like thin ice when recontextualized between real people. Joe the columnist isn’t getting a salary from the local News anymore is easily comprehended by the majority of people the first time advertising pops up on Joe’s blog. Ok, says the average person, but my thoughts and opinions aren’t in the same league as Joe’s either. Then comes the realization that simple popularity, basic social skills, a very little application, can result in a decent sized MySpace network that can be translated into a few bucks. The perception of immorality disappears.

Putting the selling of our time, knowledge, and reputation into a personal context, as blogging has led many people to do, leads us to an individualized and personalized perspective on business and economics that is practical, transactional, and realistic. It is a step towards slaying, or perhaps dismantling the bogeyman of evil capitalism that has been stoked in the public imagination for decades. All but the most fervently idealogical will concede that it is not money but people who are immoral when confronting the issues on a personal level.

May this emerging consciousness see sustained growth, enhancing individual comprehension of the transactional nature of human relationships and the utilitarian nature of money, and fostering a greater understanding of reputation and trust.

It’s worth what you pay for it, right? Yes and no. Conventional wisdom says yes, and there’s a wealth of idiom that has developed from this ‘wisdom’. Everyone has an opinion and will happily give you their ‘2 cents …for what it’s worth’. The ‘peanut gallery’ is, one gathers, packed with hecklers and malcontents who can’t even see what’s going on center stage, let alone in the back room.

There are various reasons for the common denigration of free advice. The most powerful is based on personal agendas. If you’ve ever hired lawyers, consultants, or other paid advisers, you’re probably well aware that the concept of getting what you pay for applies directly in this area, and perhaps you’ve also discovered that although the cheapest usually aren’t the best, sometimes the most expensive aren’t either.

Some conflict is likely to exist between any two people, but almost all of it is peripheral, and easy to identify and deal with. Serious conflict is usually very obvious and quite simple to identify swiftly and accurately.

More relevant to all of us, though, is our own lack of confidence in our observations and opinions outside of our own very specific area of expertise. The perverse thing about this is that a great deal of this lack of confidence stems less from our inability to observe and analyze than from our disinclination to really listen to the observations and analysis of others.

If you’re in any business where you’re dealing with people regularly then everyone you come in contact with can teach you something, even if they don’t realize it themselves. In other words, everyone around you is offering you good free advice all the time if you choose to hear it, if only through the way they respond to you, your presentation, your product.

What about the truly valuable advice? Who among us doesn’t recall a time when we were told something and ignored it, only to realize for ourselves (the hard way) that we should have paid attention? Why do we so often dismiss or turn down free advice or input?

I think it is, primarily, because we don’t understand how to contextualize it, and secondarily because we’re wary of trusting.

Let’s say that I’m a serial and successful restauranteur. Everyone’s been to restaurants, and few aren’t eager to throw a statement of personal preference my way. Much as I love my customers to be, I’m likely not going to let Tom pick his favorite music, or Dick his preferred crystal, or Harry the way he likes his bread presented.

But. I really do know my customers. I not only hear what they say, but also watch what they respond to enthusiastically and what they ignore.

But again. The reason I’m really successful is that I also know what they want that they don’t even know themselves. I know this by listening to what they say and don’t say as much as by watching them. My biggest successes, in a way, are built as much on free advice as they are on my own creativity and knowledge of the business side of things.

What if, however, I’m in a less customer interactive business? Now I’m only getting the very rare offer of direct input, and need to spend time using clumsy marketing tools to solicit input and observe behavior. I’ll probably hire lots of consultants.

The thing that the restauranteur example does, though, is make it easier to imagine how any businessperson can learn to contextualize and benefit from all input. Doing it in other businesses is far less common because we tend to only process input from our own pov and mindset. We have to develop and crystalize our own knowledge, ideas, and methods in order to accomplish anything. What we don’t have to do is close ourselves off from the wisdom of others, even when it comes from the ‘wrong’ perspective. Often a person giving you a piece of advice is seeing something that you aren’t. It may not be central to what you’re doing, but if you learn to look at what you’re doing from all sides, chances are you’ll do it a lot better.

Smart, successful business people who’ve decided they like you will commonly offer a single piece of advice. Most of us typically respond to this by dismissing it on the basis that they only have, say 20% or the picture of what we’re doing and therefore don’t fully ‘get’ it. This is often a mistake. If you’ve received that offer or single piece of advice from someone you’d consider a peer in at least some ways, stop and think about it. Even if it really isn’t on the nose or directly applicable, it can inform you in other ways. For example, even if it’s really out in left field then maybe you’ve painted a picture of left field unintentionally.

We pay big bucks to professionals to give us single purpose advice on narrow ranges of issues. The top pros make a point of trying to understand our big picture or at least pretend to. Not all expensive advice is bad, but not all is great either.

Free advice, on the other hand, is something we tend to value most when we’ve found it alone, by researching or reading or observing. In reality, the best free advice arrives through personal interaction, once we learn to hear what people say to us in the context of their knowledge and point of view. Doing so requires confidence in ourselves and a willingness to trust and share.

If you’re shy, or inexperienced at sharing and networking, then choose a community leader in your sphere who you like and admire and watch how they do it. You may not have the same temperament, nor become a community leader yourself, but you’re sure to see ways of communicating and connecting that you’d have never thought to try on your own.

There are times when free advice is the most valuable. One of the very things that makes us suspect it, the fact that it cost nothing to give, can also be what makes it a true gift.

From my oracle, OMO:

The 3 major tv networks have been conning program producers for decades (over 5 decades, in fact). Early on the networks convinced the producers that they should make series programs for the networks and accept a “license fee” for each show that was well below what it actually cost to make each show, i.e., a license fee of $100,000. for a show that actually cost $500,000. to produce.

The producers were told that “all they had to do” was remain on the air long enough to accumulate 100 episodes, and then they could put those 100 shows into “syndication” to the independent stations all around the country, and charge the indies exorbitant rates per show. In this way, they (the producers) would make back all the losses incurred when making the shows originally, plus huge profits.

They never mentioned that, of the hundreds of shows that were produced, only a handful ever reached the 100 episode level. Further, the losses involved were not only actual dollars spent in production budgets, but also the cost of money borrowed from banks to make programs at a loss for 5 years minimum. All the shows that lost money weekly, but never reached the “syndication” level, outnumbered the successful ones 20-1.

The networks, of course, paid their pittance of “license fees,” and then sold advertising in the millions of dollars per episode, per week. The producers never saw any of that money, they were busy waiting for the “pot-of-gold” at the end of the rainbow.

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Do we see any parallels to the production of web content?