The Dreams of the Apatosaurs

Tom Hespos has just written an imediaconnection column on the difference between word-of-mouth marketing and "conversational" marketing (which is in my opinion just a recasting of Seth Godin's "permission marketing," but the zeitgeist is clear). His point is well-taken: "conversations" with your customers do not occur when you hire people who pretend to be fans of your crappy product or service and send them out on the streets.

Days like these, on the eve of a major site redesign initiative, I find myself thinking (more) about the relationship of good to great--and of suck to schweeet. Something's got to give, I keep thinking. It's not that you need to take it to the users--that's been done. And even the dinosaurs are aware in their dim little brains that the users are talking, and a fair number of them are even hearing those users--some are even listening, sort of, as the mire blurps and gurgles around them and a half-ton of proto-peat ferments in their bellies. Listening, dear reader, as you might have heard the sparrows arguing in the eaves this morning, as a distant commotion on the edges of slow, swampy dreams.

The problem is that it's time to wake up. Whyever should you listen to birds in the morning? Because they are a sign that you're still here and that the world has managed one more time to assemble itself around you out of chaos and old night. In short, they remind you of meaning, which is life. Does listening to customers create meaning? Well, if it doesn't create meaning for you, you need to be doing something else.

YouGoog (GooTube?)

So how about Google's purchase of YouTube? This may be the biggest search story of the year, even if Search Engine Watch's forum activity seemed fairly quiet on the subject two days after the announcement. Nonetheless, Google may have permanently changed the future of the Web. Why? They've acquired a major new platform for ad distribution, and if anyone can parse video content for ad serving (which is fiendishly difficult) Google can.

The Independent Online complains "Google doesn't give a fig for copyright." But any pretense of intelligent argument is destroyed when Mr. Warner goes on to call Google's business model "legally dubious," which is just stupid. Kind of breathtakingly stupid, actually. Showing ads next to search results and on web pages is "legally dubious"? Hmm. Maybe we better call up the Internet and complain. Now where's that number? S'pose I'll have to Google it.

Of course, we can contrast Warner with Angela Mills Wade, director of the European Publishers' Council, whose alarmism over the future of search engines is hilarious and sad. No, you cannot control content on the Internet or even in a library; it is also an unpleasant fact that the fuel that these "search engines" run on is actually made of...HUMAN BABIES. Or it's going to be, someday. Or something. Heard this at a publisher's trade group meeting...think it was the "Whyever Doesn't Anyone Read Books Anymore?" roundtable. You just can't predict what these search engines will do!

All jeering aside, the buy is a major development. But it makes perfect sense if you know what to look for. As always, Google doesn't really care about content. They care about "indexing the world's information." (All you Google-dancers: just read the mission statement. It's all you need to know. Really.)

You can't index video for a lot of complicated reasons. Machines can't "see" or understand it. You can tell the machine what it is, but this is both inefficient (a truly adequate description of a five-minute video might run five pages) and begging to be spammed or scammed (which is why user-generated descriptions of web pages--the meta and keyword tags--are no longer considered relevant for search engine rankings). It's not terribly accessible, either. So Google has been very slow to adopt video; in many ways, their ad policies actively discourage it. On the other hand, big traditional companies love online ad video for "branding," or getting people to feel good about a product rather than making them immediately buy the product. (In a lot of ways this is lazy, fat-cat, Cretaceous-era thinking--we need a change--but hey.) Such "rich interactive" ads are typically brokered and placed by "ad networks," which are no match for Google overall but at their best can beat it in very small, highly targeted niches. Unlike Yahoo!, which basically takes the same approach as Google, the ad networks are real competitors, relying on different markets, methodologies, and formats.

Now the Web's biggest and most effective advertising publisher has purchased the Web's biggest and most effective video distribution platform. The likely results?

1) Ad networks will be seriously damaged, if not destroyed, as a business proposition. Many of them were (and are!) thinly-disguised link farm and spam site schemes. The best of the best will survive, but will become much less profitable in all but a very few industries.
2) Google will dominate video search. If it is possible to index video content, Google is likely to be able to figure out how to do it, especially if they're only working with one major format. Furthermore, an index method for YouTube may be "good enough," just as VHS proved to be "good enough" for the VCR.
3) Traditional branding and advertising is likely to suffer some major changes. Such people as media planners, ad reps, account executives, and other brokers are likely to be much less important in a Google-fied world. If video is made more trackable, much of contemporary branding (which tends to be a lot of very expensive smoke and mirrors) is going to vanish.
4) Copyright protection efforts will now be outsourced to copyright holders, a neat trick indeed. Google has the engineering and other know-how to propose a general digital watermarking standard, something that YouTube would never, ever, ever be able to do no matter how many people watched that video of the old lady and the mastiff, and once Google enables the standard then it becomes difficult to argue that they are fostering piracy. Content producers would have an easy option to mark their content, which could then be auto-excluded by Googlebots. Those who chose not to adopt the standard would suffer YouTubing. (Even better, if you wanted your content spread quickly, you could just leave the watermark off. Easy!) Google would take nonwatermarked content down if asked, but that would legitimately take a while. Just as Google's search algorithm favors a certain site format (hint: it's NOT Flash), so their watermark would provide an effective copyright defense.
5) Google is going to make a lot more money. More money, in fact, than you can probably conceive.

Right now YouTube gets about 100,000,000 views a day, and there's a lot of room to serve ads alongside those views. Even so, if 1% of the ads convert at a dollar apiece, that's still only about thirty million a month, or about five years before the Tube makes back the $1.65 billion purchase price (which was paper, but I'm also ignoring the horrendous bandwidth bills, so we'll squint and call it even). But the buy makes a lot more sense if it's 1% of your net cap to corner a major segment of your market.

The Unspeakable Meets the Unreadable

Well, maybe "unreadable" is unfair--but I'm still carrying a lot of scars from my grad encounters with the French theoretique. And a lot of imbedded psychic shrapnel, as it were, from various Marxist improvised intellectual devices (IID's).

Anyhow--Michel Houellebecq has published a new book-length essay on H.P. Lovecraft, and it looks amazing. HPL as a New England Classicist equivalent of Jarry and Celine? I'm in. Check it out.

As a side note, Houellebecq's publisher McSweeney's (the press founded by Dave Eggers of Heartbreaking fame) continues to do God's work. Or the work of the Dark Gods. Or something. Go there and buy from them. They're aggressively supporting new, brilliant writing and also stretching the boundaries of culture. That includes 826 Valencia, a groundbreaking nonprofit that teaches low-income kids how to write and publish. Go on, go.

Sharing the Wealth of Networks

Yochai Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks is published in hardcover by Yale University Press and distributed online in various forums, including in a wikimedia workspace--and that workspace has been pornospammed. Whoops. (This link IS safe for work, but the links at the bottom of the page probably aren't.)

In Chapter Five--we read this for class last night--I was underwhelmed by Benkler's understanding of a "network"--his fear was that you could inhibit communication from A to C by buying up or controlling B. Um, that's a phone line. A network reroutes through D. Or through 7 or the King of Siam. This is hard to conceptualize--even if you happen to have a fishing net lying around and you're looking at it (perhaps you're in the pirate bar?), some of the implications aren't clear. So let's look at a couple. In fact, following Sterling's "Jets and Nets," let's look at one reason a network is a tempting target.

The porn spamming is related to head-phaking. Head-phaking is a (largely legitimate!) way to exploit Short Head namespace and branding work to send your obscure meme higher up the Long Tail. I'm going to call the spamming "coattailing"--it's more relevant to the Tail and it avoids that phlabby phreaking connotation. (They got us into this "it's all about the phones!" mess in the first place...let's put a little more 2006 into our understandings of communication modes.)

Basically, here we see the Net reward a superior conceptual model--again. Taking a page from viral behavior, the spammer associates himself with a more common, easily transmissible entity such as Benkler's work (which the professor is almost begging you to look at, online and via a number of speaking appearances). In short, the spammer hopes to co-infect, and the incredibly low cost of making the association means that even a few responses to his spam will end in profit for him.

The truly brilliant thing is that this model is a natural, if probably unintended, consequence of Benkler's ideas. If Benkler removes the spam, doesn't he impede the "free culture" he is so desperate to promote? Has anything of "value" been "stolen" from him? And let's consider the targeted host: an academic who, as so many do nowadays, has "intertwingled" the way he lives, or the way he represents the way he lives, and the ideas he propounds to support that life. Faithfulness to the first is a condition of the second. At the very least he'll probably think twice before he does anything. Meanwhile, every minute he delays the spammer makes money.

And regarding another class discussion we had last night: this is why the Net and blogs and all the rest of it are starting to boil down to economics.

Panza's Pants

We grapple in my Digital Economy class with notions of authority and copyright. In the October 9 issue of The New Yorker (no, the article's not online, and I'm not going to link to the main page because it changes every week), Milan Kundera asks "What Is a Novelist?" He answers this question in a few thousand graceful words. The question has been answered before and answered at length, and there's a sort of Great Answer beginning to take shape now, right at the end of a literary era, from the effects, so many chisel-strokes, of the essays and feuilletons and letters and annotated editions; but when you deal with a novelist from outside the Anglo-American tradition you often get a little fillip of insight--that the novel is actually a headstone for lyricism, for instance. If you're lucky you might get two:

Before Cervantes had completed the second volume of his novel, another writer, still unknown, preceded him by publishing, under a pseudonym, his own sequel to the adventures of Don Quixote. Cervantes reacted at the time the way a novelist would react today: with rage. He attacked the plagiarist violently and proclaimed "Don Quixote was born for me alone, and I for him. He knew about action, I about writing. He and I are simply one single entity."
Since Cervantes, this has been the primary, fundamental, mark of a novel: it is a unique, inimitable creation, inseparable from the imagination of a single author. Before he was written, no one could have imagined a Don Quixote; he was the unexpected itself, and, without the charm of the unexpected, no great novel character (and no great novel) would ever be conceivable again.
The birth of the art of the novel was linked to the consciousness of an author's rights and to their fierce defense. The novelist is the sole master of his work; he is his work. It was not always thus, and it will not always be thus. But when that day comes, the art of the novel, Cervantes's legacy, will cease to exist. (Kundera,45)

I find this fairly wonderful: it captures something of the Quixote (which Nabokov famously called "a cruel and crude old book"): its leathery temper and sudden tears, characteristics of de Saavedra himself, who, in the Preface to the second volume, manages to threaten his plagiarizers with a beautiful and extended paralipsis; paint an affecting if somewhat self-interested picture of An Old Veteran Now Robbed of His Last Crumbs (the Turks had shot off most of his hand at Lepanto); and flatter his wealthy patrons. With the same apoplectic brilliance that leads him to compare authorship to a dog inflated a posteriori, he goes on to incorporate the "unauthorized" material into his own book.

To identify a work so totally with its creator: the idea is attractive, and so is the line of argument, at least in the case of Cervantes and Kundera. (Less so in the case of unlettered trash, sop for kine, and hominid hootings : in theory, yes, I'm all for the unique rights of authors, but I wonder if perhaps we ought to look at what "unique" actually means.)

A Little Mouse and A Little Bird

Classes continue. In my Information Culture - Digital Economy class, a nominal focus of this blog, we're reading Lessig's book Free Culture (which you can buy here or, um, get here for free). What a terribly exciting document. Did you know that Big Media is inexorably buying up *every possible means* of cultural expression? And that pretty soon every type of culture will be copy-protected by those same big conglomerate corporations? (Full disclosure: I am currently entertaining a buyout offer from Bertelsmann A.G. I'll lay all the cards on the table: it's in the scores of dollars. I mean, you try to withstand these people, but it's a losing game, OK? At some point we all have to grow up and take the offer that's given to us. And maybe now they'll call off their Random House goons--that Cormac McCarthy scares me...and I don't know if it's him or Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie who keeps calling and not saying anything when I pick up, but I get the message, all right? I'm getting on board.)

In short, my friends, as 2003 dawns upon us it looks like we may be in for some grim times indeed.

Oh, wait! It's not 2003 at all, is it?!? Whew. Now we have the whole relevant-search thing and easy ways of posting stuff online, don't we? Go hack your iPod, kids.

Lessig's argument is, in essence, that copyright and intellectual property rights are currently being overextended to the detriment of cultural production as a whole. He advanced this argument in the Mickey Mouse case before the Supreme Court. He is broadly right, I think, in that there's something more than a little unsavory about tiny groups of greedheads convincing government to abandon its stated principles (everyone expected a conservative Court to throw out copyright extensions) and pass blatantly favorable special-interest laws. But at some level, I have to ask "So what?" So the Mouse gets protected for another twenty years--so what? Think up your own damn character, people. And stop buying the videos and toys and clothes and "theme park experiences" and other associated crap for your kids. (It has also come to my attention that there are actually adults who spend vacation money on Disney. [No, you don't get a link.] Quite simply, this is a totally indefensible act of cultural pollution--and is so ridiculous and sad that it makes my knees wobble in despair. Go here. Or here. And do adult stuff.)

Does lack of access to Mickey Mouse stifle cultural creativity? Not in any significant way, far's I can see. In fact, his success seems to have encouraged a great flowering of animated creativity--even now, the trope of a sly or funny animal being the star of a cartoon is so deeply ingrained that it seems it was always this way...but it didn't have to be, you know. And you can't trademark that sort of thing.

In fact, we might even want to increase copyright control. This might stem the tidal wave of crappy remakes and limp "remixes" that have essentially destroyed American pop. I'm not going to link to any examples of that either. But I'm calling you out, Rhianna. (God. Even her *name* is a remix, or re-Nicks.)

In short, Lessig's book already seems a little dated (and sometimes a lot dated): with the sort of vertiginous swoop that will happen more and more often in the next few decades, the world (which will become increasingly synonymous with the Internet) has moved on. Too easy to find stuff, too easy to post stuff, no real way to stomp out a million copyright infringements (::cough::), the increasing irrelevance of a lot of Big Media anyway. Mickey and friends are priced on scarcity--they're priced as if they're the only game in town, which made a lot more sense even a decade ago--and that's just not as valuable as it used to be. There are too many options, and most of them aren't options Lessig has heard of. In one particular howler, he bemoans the increasing scarcity of independent television producers--now the networks run most production companies. On the face of it, this looks terrible--all those presumably interesting and fresh perspectives throttled in the cradle like the little princes. On the other hand, this is the intellectual equivalent of worrying that American children aren't getting enough bacon in their diets. Feed them something else.

Which brings us to the real danger--which I will call "red-state syndrome" in the sort of offhanded slur that the Internet is great for. I think that Lessig's grim future of corporate-controlled content and restricted creativity may in fact come to pass, just in states that (coincidentally. Really) are red on the political map. In other words, just as people in the flyover states are the ones buying processed foods and bake mixes and stuff in cans--all the crap in the middle of the grocery store--they seem to be the ones scarfing up the processed Disney culture, the carefully-constructed pop sensations, and so forth. Of course the country's deliciously crispy crust is helping--pop is pop because it's popular--but there's a lot of additional options that the kid in Kansas just never sees. Until he flees the farm for a life of danger in the big city. But that's another problem.

In other news, a weekly response paper was returned with the comments "Entertaining--but not, perhaps, substantive." I reread the paper. This was in fact true. Sorry, Kathryn. In fact, that "perhaps" was a kindness I did not deserve. I'd meant to make a point about the articles on searching we'd read--that the mere juxtaposition of information often makes us see significance where there isn't any, necessarily, or not the significance we see, and that in turn has some real implications for modeling information gathering and search behavior. Instead I got carried off by my metaphor. Not that that ever happens to me. You can read the paper here. And, yes, there's a Solomonic connection to hoopoes.

It's Alive

A fair amount of buzz in the blogosphere today about yesterday's Yahoo! announcement that the portal's ad revenues were expected to drop because of a "slowing US economy." This is a charming idea, but the likely reason is that Yahoo!'s ad service sucks.

Search, I'm coming to realize, is a classic example of an affordance error. Humans seem predisposed at some level to make these. In essence, an affordance error has to do with misjudging the purpose of some device based on how it looks like it's supposed to work. The classic example is pushing a door when you're supposed to pull it. (Remember that Far Side cartoon--"The School for the Gifted, " I think? The Far Side Fat Kid is pushing with all his might at a door marked PULL. Sorry, Gary Larson.) But there's a pair of subtler, more insidious affordance errors. The first is assuming that something that looks simple actually is simple. The second type, potentially very dangerous, occurs when you assume that you can easily control and even predict the behavior of a simple (looking) device or situation. --Some examples? Water of unknown depth. Grenades. Search engines.

It's simple, right? You type in the word, you get a relevant site. (How quickly we've forgotten premillennial search experiences...but I digress.) How hard can that be? And wouldn't it be a good idea to start one of those yourself? Might be some money in it.

Well, the problem is that Google's simple interface hides an engine of fiendish power and complexity--in short, the Google engine is an artificial neural network that uses the sites it indexes to determine how to index and emphasize its own sites. Yahoo! is the equivalent of a really big phone directory. It's a good directory, but it doesn't learn, and it certainly doesn't learn faster the longer you run it. In fact, you could make a good argument that Google's engine is actually intelligent...probably not conscious, but a non-human intelligence nonetheless.

Of course, to anyone who's not reading about cognitive mapping and modeling, this is so much irrelevance. If you aren't a pilot and you compare a ramjet to a rotary airplane engine, you might well assume that the ramjet is inferior...it just looks too simple to work as well as the rotary. But that clean interface hides a product with a market advantage so superior that it's hard to describe, let alone explain. If you don't get this, you have no business starting a search engine company. If you do and you still start one, you're either stupid, deluded, or actively dishonest.

So this clarifies what's going on with Yahoo!. They're not stupid. They're hearing complaints from their customers and have been for a while. They know there's a problem. The answer must be that they just can't do anything about it. Even if they managed to build a neural net--and Google has done its best to hire everyone who knows anything about them--it would never catch up to a neural net that's been learning and studying for years now. So what is to be done?

1) Distract people with Panama. I wonder if this much-delayed product exists. Meanwhile, move quietly and calmly toward the lifeboats.
2) Go social. This plays to Yahoo! strengths--they've long been known as a pretty social-focused culture for a Net company, and they're trying to acquire social sites.
3) Admit you're beat when it comes to search. Which was probably a mistake--poor "message control"--but wasn't news to anyone geeking out on the topic.

The problem is that making the switch is going to take a long time and be expensive for Yahoo!. Even figuring out a new revenue model (and a culture to go with it) is going to take a long time and be expensive. Meanwhile, Google's revenue model is an extension of its neural net (see bottom of the first page in particular).

The result is clear. So's the bet.

Avast

Thirteen of us sat around the table interviewing a candidate for Webmaster this afternoon. --Except for our clothes and generally academic level of fitness (that is to say, not terribly high) we might have been galley pirates trying to fill out the boat. (Beards were, after all, well-represented.) Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, perhaps it was the letdown from yesterday's holiday that led me to think in these terms. (Perhaps it was a truly nasty story, "Under the Pitons," which I'd read on the train coming in. It's in Stone's Bear and His Daughter, which I bought remaindered seven years ago, which almost didn't make the move in July, and which is turning out to be very, very good indeed.)

Seth Godin wants to get rid of interviews. He may well have a point.

Time constraints and the number of participants kept us from going very deep--basically each interviewer got to ask a single question. This reminded me of a few things :

1) Social search is probably going to be terrible. Chris Sherman thinks so too. To sum up his post, when you get a bunch of people who aren't experts in the subject area, you're going to have a race to the bottom in terms of results.
2) It's long been known that groups tend to have a powerful urge to reach consensus. What's interesting though is that this result, familiar to anyone who's been on a committee, may actually be a "bad apples" phenomenon--the actions and words of certain individuals may have a disproportionate effect. I saw some of that today (and, um, I tried to be part of the solution). Marcus Buckingham would probably call these folks Harmonizers.

How do Harmonizers relate to the Long Tail? Do they build blockbusters by leveling taste? That might be too glib, I suspect. Discuss.