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October 18, 2005
The hunt for a silver bullet
The powers that be at Google must be wondering why they ever bought Pyra Labs, the people behind Blogger. The relentless expansionism of Google has made the company the number-one target for angry bloggers who want to know why their ego feed searches are full of splog entries.
Chris Pirillo came up with some suggestions to Google. Unfortunately, as with email spam, we are getting to the situation where the cure could be worse than the disease, and have little to no effect on splogs themselves (other than forcing them to alter strategies a little). People tend to forget that spammers present a moving target.
I can't help but see problems with most, if not all, of Pirillo's suggestions simply because spammers do adapt. I've paraphrased the suggestions for brevity:
1) Employ a blog spammer. Maybe Google already does. Oh, you mean knowingly employ a blog spammer. And if you do get one, how do you know you've got a good one? Or should that be bad one?
2) Probationary period: only allow people with a track record to create more blogs. Good plan, if it were not for the case that, apparently, the spammers have been using lots of accounts to create blogs, not a few accounts spawning lots of blogs.
3) Sponsor a blogger: you need a reference to create a blog. And if a new blog goes spammy, revoke both it and the referee account. This is something that will run and run, in court. As with Ebay, Blogger account hijacking will become the new sport for keen phishermen (and women). Why use up your real accounts when you can phish one out of Little Jimmy and his blog on Star Wars puppets?
4) Flag splogs from the toolbar. Apparently now done. But that does not deal with the problems caused by false flagging. Who is to stop sploggers from flagging. Don't forget, these guys are operating with a very large number of accounts.
5) Take every experience seriously. Can't argue with that one in principle but do we know that not taking it seriously is the problem? How long does it take to alter what is already a large code base? Google engineers might be sitting on their fat arses, maybe their engineering is undermined by crypto-blog spammers (see point 1), or maybe they're just a bit overwhelmed.
6) Track bad neighbourhoods (ie link farms) and penalise Blogspot sites that start linking to them. Interesting but we could start seeing a new trend in blogbowling as well as Googlebowling. Also, it already seems that sploggers are building rings around their bad neighbourhoods and, if this were to become policy, the sploggers would simply make sure there was an insulating layer between new Blogspot splogs and the link farms they are really trying to support. For a splogger there is little point in linking straight from a new Blogspot splog to a link farm anyway, as the new splog would have sod all in the way of PageRank.
7) Reward flaggers. Flagging is it's own reward and maybe should stay that way. How many T-shirts do sploggers need (see point 4)?
8) Audit randomly with a "how's it going" question once in a while. Actually, that's not a bad one. But sploggers tend to work by probabilities rather than saying: "Oh dang! They've changed the script, knocking out 10 per cent of my bots' attempts. Better hang up the old splogging boots." Nope, they just try and get more accounts, or write scripts to account for the change.
9) Get the AdWords team to help flag 'hot' keywords. And then do what exactly?
10) No more dashes in blog names, cos sploggers like dashes. Well, there are plenty more characters in the ASCII set I'm sure they'd like to try.
Posted by Chris at 10:33 PM | Comments (2)
The hyperlink is dead, long live the hyperlink
A spat between two blogging stalwarts Steve Gillmor and Doc Searls has seen the role of the venerable hyperlink come into question. Gillmor doesn't like links. He has declared links to be dead. Searls is sceptical of the Gillmor position and wants to know why Gillmor is so greedy as to deny him, or anybody else, the benefit of a link.
In reality, the argument is less about the hyperlink than it is about one search engine's mechanism for rating pages. A search engine that has given blogs the biggest single boost than any other factor. Google's PageRank system is built on the idea that people link to pages that are important to them. If important people link to pages, then those pages must be really important. Blogs benefit greatly from PageRank because they rely so much on intensive linking. But the recent rise of splogs that have linked to high-profile blogs means that links "have been devalued", in the words of Dave Winer.
Although splogs are becoming more troublesome, does that really mean the underpinning of the Web should be thrown away and replaced with something completely different?
As an alternative to linking, Gillmor is pumping up the use of RSS feeds:
"I am specifically and overtly not linking to drive people to RSS and its fundamental time efficiency."
Fundamental time efficiency? I can agree if you only want to keep up with a relatively fixed set of sites. But most people surf through pages following a trail of links through them. RSS is not great for where you are searching for things you do not normally keep track of. Links are, however, no matter how devalued they might be in the context of a proxy used by search engines for ranking purposes.
Gillmor says he wants people to cite rather than link directly. Fantastic. And how exactly do we use those citations if they do not link directly? We have to use the one alternative we currently have to hand: the search engine. The very engine that is the main target of sploggers right now. There is another problem. Citations are fine, just as long as the citation is unambiguous enough to allow a search engine or some other intermediary to come up with the appropriate...now, what's the word? Oh, link. That's it. Now, let me think, what was the last attempt to use search technology to build dynamic links to words and phrases that could be regarded as citations? Oh, smart tags. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the world decide they were evil after Google imposed AutoLinks on web pages courtesy of its toolbar? And Microsoft did not win many fans for its Smart Tags before then.
For a self-confessed old fart, I'm surprised Gillmor has forgotten that hyperlinks did not begin with the World Wide Web; that they have a wider reach and deeper history. Ted Nelson had the idea for hyperlinks way back in the mid-1960s, about the same time that people came up with many of the ideas that are still used today in computers: mice; superscalar architectures; memory caches; and a bunch of other things. I'm not sure that a little problem with one search engine should cause an eminently good idea to get dumped. The search engine has been hit with this kind of thing before, when link farms first appeared. What did they do? They stopped trying to treat all pages as equal. They used heuristics to try to identify and penalise spammy pages. The heuristics are getting more difficult and we will reach the point where search engines might have to use some serious AI to tell blog from splog. Even humans will have difficulty with the distinction.
I see nothing in Gillmor's citation approach that is fundamentally less susceptible to spamming than the good old link. In fact, by not relying on intermediaries to handle the connection, direct links between trusted sites are far more resistant to spam. Take away the links and the spammers will simply focus on the intermediaries that rise up to take their place. Of course, using intermediaries to link content from different sites would make it far easier for Gillmor to build his attention-based economy.
Posted by Chris at 10:10 PM
October 14, 2005
Do we need qualifications to read press releases now?
I received two emails from a media researcher at PRNewswire (PRN) today wanting some supplementary information about me as a journalist. Nothing unusual in that, except that the questions go a bit further than whether I'd like to get releases by mail, email or carrier pigeon. And, apparently it is all in the aim of achieving a "better targeting of press releases".
First up: the year I started in my current role. I don't know, will PRN only send me stuff if I have been in place for one, two, maybe three years? It might help if they indicated which role they were asking about: the two emails suggest that the entries are for different magazines. Even so, the relevance of this information to PRN I have yet to work out*. But the thirst for information at PRN did not stop there.
The next bit on the email form looked like this:
Education (the most recent)
The name of the Educational establishment:Subject studied:
Just the most recent education, you understand. No need for the full CV. Well, that's a relief. I thought for a minute I'd better just send my full CV off to PRN just so they can improve their targeting. Quite how telling them I (kind of) studied chemistry close to 20 years ago in London is going to help them work out which releases they are going to send me on electronics, I am a little unsure. Maybe I'll get taken off the electronics listings altogether and put onto feedstocks and drug design bulletins. I'd be intrigued to know which genius thought up this bunch of questions. I have asked PRN, but have had no reply as yet.
The questions didn't stop there, although they didn't go as far as inside leg measurement or sexual preference. PRN would also like to know which foreign languages I speak - which does make a bit more sense. And finally, my story-gathering preferences. Don't you worry your little heads over that PRN, just keep updating the RSS channels and I'll decide how I deal with the stuff that gets plonked in them.
* OK, I might have worked it out. It looks like PRN is putting together a journalist's profile database along the lines of MediaMap, but doing it in the most ham-fisted way possible.
Posted by Chris at 10:44 PM
October 13, 2005
No comment, no firing
In his musings, PR Stuart Bruce is surprised that PRs need to be told of the dangers of the "no comment" reply to hacks' questions.
Well, there's still plenty of it going on, although few restrict themselves to the simple "no comment". People have found slightly more imaginative ways to try to fend off the questions they'd rather not answer, even though they are not necessarily more effective. Or, there is always the run-and-hide option, which is often the most popular: "Company X did not respond to questions..." or "Company X was approached for comment but did not return calls at the time of going to press".
For reasons I can't fathom, Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion said he thought not returning calls was a better option than the "no comment" option:
I even learned long ago to let calls from certain reporters go to voicemail if necessary. This forces journalists to write such-and-such “didn't return calls” as opposed to “didn't comment.” (It's subtle, but it sounds better.)
It's subtle, alright. It makes you look panicky scared or just plain incompetent on top of the other claims you were otherwise going to "no commment".
I can understand that there are good reasons for reaching for the stock answer or just letting the phone ring on. As the PR hears the question, it may not be uppermost in their mind, but there will be a thought running around in there: "What's the safest thing I can say or do to avoid getting sacked?". In this context, saying the bare minimum is generally safer than volunteering information that is definitely going to lead to a P45 (or pink slip, depending on where you happen to be reading this).
You might not have made the situation any better but at least you cannot be blamed for making it worse. It has become so common to the conversation, we even seem to have degrees of it. I once had a PR argue the toss over whether she was refusing to comment, or just declining on the basis that declining sounded "less forceful". I guess refusing to comment to her meant slamming the phone down or something. And we only got to that point because she was previously trying out one of the less direct phrases that are now reaching epidemic point.
Sometimes, these newer phrases like "it was a business decision" seem to work out for the PR, as noted by Dan Janal in June on a story in which two restaurants used the same non-answer to try to avoid giving up any precious detail about closures and layoffs. Although the reporter did not look to test the response, it surely invites a comeback: "What were the non-business reasons you considered for closing your restaurant?"
It's a little like my least-favourite non-stick non-answer that is spreading like wildfire round the tech world: "We haven't made any announcement on that". This is one that seems to be used by people who have just come off a morning's worth of media training, because, in face-to-face situations they look kind of smug when they say it (in a "look at me ma, I remembered some of that training" kind of way). And people look genuinely surprised when you come back on it: "I'm aware that you haven't announced anything, that's why I'm asking the question. If you had, I wouldn't need to ask it. Now..."
Posted by Chris at 08:09 PM
October 12, 2005
Advertising? That's so Web 1.0
The issue of getting money for blogging is exercising quite a few minds at the moment, especially as some bloggers are already celebrating the imminent demise of traditional publishing: a business that depends on advertising for much of its revenue. And that is advertising that full-time bloggers would like. Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher declared IBM's policy of not booking ads on blogs contradicted a drive to increase the number of its employees who blog. If people do the same as IBM and decide not to advertise on blogs, who is going to pay for their upkeep? After all, you cannot have subscriptions as the cross-linking that has become integral to the growth of the blog collapses.
But are the bloggers themselves the cause of the advertising malaise? They decry traditional mechanisms of promotion, quoting chunks of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they go. Markets are conversations, they say. Blogs are conversations too, apparently. Therefore, the argument goes, blogs are the new marketing. They are Web 2.0 vehicles, not like the hated Web 1.0 DoubleClick-fed banner ads. So why are bloggers so insistent on getting olde worlde ads?
There is absolutely nothing conversational about advertising. It is purely a one-way means of communication. Punching a monkey does not count as conversation in my book. It certainly didn't feel good at the time (although I suspect many people would much prefer a version of that ad that involved pictures of its creators). You can see why the Cluetrain authors took issue with advertising: "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it". To be fair, one of the Cluetrain authors did recant:
[David] Weinberger candidly admits that he can't even remember all of it (honesty is a clueful trait), then adds: "One thing I knew was wrong when we posted it was the thesis 'forget about advertising'. Advertising is not dead. But the thing the internet adds is the ability to undo some of the damage being done to the lower levels of our brains by advertising. We can find out in an instant if the ads are untrue."
However, if you are an advertiser, then you are likely to take the message "we are immune to advertising" reasonably seriously. Advertisers tend to like being told that the audience for a particular medium is only too happy to be assaulted with brightly coloured, loud content. It was only after popup blockers came in that some of them decided that they had gone a bit too far with some campaigns. I'm not suggesting that bloggers dump the rest of Cluetrain and start lying to people with money but the undercurrent of "hey you, sucker. Your products suck, your marketing sucks, you suck. Can I have your money please?" that permeates much of the Long Tail stuff that abounds on blogs has a corrosive effect. People stop asking "where should I advertise" and start musing "why should I advertise if advertising is so broken?". This may not be a bad thing long term if the result is ultimately better. But that is not going to help bloggers in the short term.
In demanding 'support' for their chosen medium, bloggers run the risk of turning the whole enterprise into a vanity publishing model. Advertisers, like most people, concentrate on the benefit to them not on whether they should subsidise one medium over another. This is how it should be and is, presumably, clueful. Don't do things that don't work.
The apparent silver lining in all this is contextual advertising, which does work on blogs, but there is a problem even with this for the blogger. AdSense and the like are site-neutral. That's good up to a point for the living, breathing blogger. But AdSense advertisers don't care about the quality of the sites that sent them, only the conversions, which are the things they actually measure. If a bot-driven splog is sending as many convertible clicks as a 'quality' blog, the splog wins because it is way more profitable.
Then there is the other thing about contextual advertising: it only works for situations where the context is explicit. Only the consumer has a full appreciation of what their context is. They might be reading about blade servers, but Tiddles may be moaning about not having enough food. They might be as interested in fast delivery of Whiskas as a go-faster 64-bit blade, but they aren't going to type that into a search engine. Most advertising is only vaguely contextual. It uses repetition to remind you of a product's existence, to make sure it's the one you feel warm and cuddly about when you are standing in a supermarket and cannot work out whether to buy Brand X or just the nearest one to hand. Or maybe it just makes you wonder whether you should try Product Y out.
To deal with this problem, publishers and broadcasters provide extensive demographics of their own readers and viewers. "We know our readership will consider your product because they are ABC1s with an interest in fast cars" they explain to BMW. "50 per cent of our readers keep cats" they may tell Purina, using the results of the last reader survey.
What can bloggers do about this? If they want traditional advertising money, there is not a lot they can do without doing some pretty intrusive things that will make them look like big media publishers like the New York Times. But if they want the money, they need to come up with some answers that do not involve simply asking for the revenue that currently goes into what some claim is a discredited model. Social media may provide some of the additional context that advertisers crave but the important information belongs to the consumer not to the blogger. Perhaps there is no business model other than micropayments and subscriptions. Oh dear.
Posted by Chris at 09:57 PM | Comments (1)
October 11, 2005
The sound of silence
Whereas the Palm LifeDrive is burdened by its own complexity, the same cannot be said for the breathtakingly expensive E4c earphones made by Shure. But they really do work. Shure didn't bother with all that active noise cancelling malarky in making the E4c arguably one of the best earphones for wearing in an airplane: they just took the concept behind sound-isolating earplugs and added speakers.
Having a lot of experience with producing in-ear monitors for stage work helped a lot. Despite being severely wallet-lightening compared with most high-street earphones, they are still a lot cheaper than the pro versions and manage to avoid having to have a cast made of your lugholes. But they succeed in wiping out most of the noise from an aircraft cabin. If you can stretch to buying them, get some and you need not worry about the imminent introduction of cellphone services on commercial services, crying babies or engine noise. Just don't wear them on the street: they greatly increase the risk of getting run over.
Posted by Chris at 12:22 AM | Comments (1)
LifeDrive
I had a rush of blood to the head on a recent trip to Boston and picked up a Palm LifeDrive on the way out at the Duty Free store. This is one of those products that looks a lot better on paper than it really works in real life. In making their machines take up more PC-like functions, Palm seems to be giving their PDAs all of the PC's niggles as well.
Hardware-wise, I don't think there is all that much wrong with the LifeDrive but this beast is seriously in need of a software update. I've never seen a PDA crash so often. Even after installing the WiFi update, the network at MIT made the thing freak out so badly that it rebooted itself when it tried to log on. And it refused to do anything useful with the WiFi at the Cambridge Galleria, although the hotel network (at the Tria near Alewife) worked just fine. OmniWeb on the Powerbook gave a clue as to why the MIT network tripped it up - a strange security certificate - but that's no excuse for the PDA equivalent of a Blue Screen of Death. And that was not the only thing to make it crash.
Speed is an unexpected issue on the LifeDrive. Things that used to be near instant on a Tungsten now take several seconds as the device seems to fetch a lot of stuff from the built-in Microdrive. I can understand the reasons for the sluggishness, but Palm seems to have forgotten why people use PDAs rather than little handheld PCs for some things.
I didn't buy the machine for its MP3 capabilities as I used an iPod Shuffle on the trip: the Shuffle is so unobtrusive that it's one of those devices you can take anywhere. But, I had a load of stuff that I could download from the Powerbook and gave the LifeDrive a whirl. Like a number of other users, I found the music playback from the bundled MP3 player to be scratchy at best. The end of each track was accompanied by a burst of crackling that suggests the decoding software is not what it could be. And certainly no reason for Apple to be concerned about converged devices eating the company's lunch just yet.
I didn't expect Palm to have improved their Mac software and I wasn't disappointed. I guess the company knows Mac users are not going to be buying Windows CE machines but I don't reckon that is a good excuse for giving them host software that makes synchronisation take about an hour to sort out (and that is for someone who had to do it before for an old Tungsten).
In short, the PDA does all the things you'd want. Unfortunately, it does them fairly badly. Hopefully, this is down to poorly debugged software and a later update will fix the issues. However, given Palm's recent track record on software updates, I won't be holding my breath.
Posted by Chris at 12:00 AM
October 10, 2005
Secrets and rumours
Having gone over Jeff Jarvis's column in Media Guardian twice I'm still having trouble making sense of it. I think I've got to the bottom of it: his definition of the word secret is different to that of most other people. And it changes halfway through.
First, Jarvis tells us that the Internet is changing the nature of secrets. How so? Does the Internet apply some form of quantum nuttiness that makes secrets somehow not secrets anymore? I doubt that. I think he means that the ease of publishing on the Internet makes it easier to disclose things that in a paper-dominated world would remain secret or at least obscure. Apparently, "the web explodes our view of truth like a kernel of popcorn: it has given birth to a culture of transparency". I would question that. It has given birth to a culture of mass-publishing. Transparency? Yet to be demonstrated long-term. Job applicants are already finding that transparency is providing would-be employers with too much information.
However, it's the next sentence that had me scratching my head and wondering whether I had suffered a blow to the head that made my internal dictionary no longer match up with the rest of the world: the Internet "also allows citizens to say what they want without saying who they are - yes, to keep secrets". Erm...would that not make such things no longer secrets but...rumours? Keeping secrets involves not telling people things. Disclosing things anonymously does not maintain their secret status and also remains a long way from maintaining transparency.
He then starts writing about Judith Miller of the New York Times who was locked up for 85 days for trying to make it possible for someone to disclose something without saying who they are. For Jarvis, keeping the secret of the source's identity broke some unwritten rule of true journalism: "She did not immediately reveal the full story to her public - and shouldn't that be a reporter's gravest sin?" People are questioning why Miller did not go public with the source's name when the source apparently waived the privilege of anonymity a while ago. But Jarvis wants full disclosure immediately. If a journalist agrees to keep something "off the record" or "on background", that's a sin. He conveniently ignores the realpolitik of hackdom that means to get information sometimes you have to cut deals. "Off the record" is nothing more than a verbal agreement. It carries no legal weight, just an expression of some level of trust between two people. Lots of people tell hacks things off the record that are worthless as secrets or public information but, with some sources, you are going to agree and continue to agree to their anonymity because that gets you other stories that check out.
To look at Jarvis's statement on the beauty of anonymity on the Web, were the source to publish a one-time secret on as an unnamed citizen, I can only conclude that would be OK with him (and not a sin). To tell a journalist, any source would be at risk of full disclosure in Jarvis's perfect, transparent world because anything else would be a sin.
Jarvis writes that if a future Deep Throat wants to reveal a secret without fear of being caught, they can blog anonymously or just post it on a forum. In a practical sense, that is probably a safe bet given today's state of surveillance law and technology. I wouldn't bet on those loopholes being around in the future. And how much would such a Deep Throat have to post to prevent the information being seen as no more than the rantings of a wacko, a bunch of unreliable rumours? At some point, their identity becomes extremely difficult to hide because of the amount of evidence they need to provide to back up their position if they want to be taken seriously.
Posted by Chris at 11:16 PM
