The Unsocial Web

By | November 22, 2011
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A piece by Donna Bogatin on why many more people read web sites liked digg.com rather than contribute to it has in itself spawned enough responses to become something of a summary of why the social web, citizen journalism, user-created content etc may not be quite the revolution it appears. Here’s how I see the responses:

  • I just want to watch. The more stuff is out there, ironically enough the less incentive there is to contribute. There’s probably a graph for this somewhere. People will contribute if they think their contribution is worth it. That means a) other people like it, b) it doesn’t take up too much time c) the stuff isn’t there already, or likely to be and d) that contributing to a site comes after browsing a site. (see Not On My Own Time, Thanks, below.) The logical conclusion of this is that while contributions may rise exponentially, gradually the number of contributors dwindles until a hardcore of contributors remains (see The Weirdo Factor below).
  • The Weirdo Factor. We newspaper journos have known this for a while. The kind of people who contribute, or contribute most, don’t represent a good cross section of ordinary readers/users. Readers’ letters are always great to receive, and they may contain useful and interesting stuff, but they tend to come from the same people, or group or kind of people. And that means an editor would be a fool to treat his mailbag as a cross section of his readership. Same is basically true of the Net.
  • Not On My Own Time, Thanks. Digesting Time isn’t the same as Creating Time. Most people probably browse sites like YouTube.com and Flickr.com at work. This means that the more content there is on these sites at work, a) the less productive workers will be, and b) the less likely they’ll actually upload their stuff — since that will probably have to be done at home, in a separate session. If you’ve already spent a couple of hours on YouTube.com at work, why would you spend more time on it at home?
  • People Don’t Like Hanging Out With Weirdoes Taking the above a step further, many users are going to be discouraged by the general tenor of discussions at places like Digg. Flaming and generally being rude may seem like a life to some people, but most people don’t like it very much, and are not going to expose themselves to ridicule by posting to such sites. (They are also not going to want to expose themself to being ignored: what happens if you Digg something and nobody comes?)
  • Freedloading off a freeloader Then there’s the reality that the social web is largely a Commenting Web, not a Creating Web. Not all of it, of course: Flickr.com is a very creative place. But photos are always of things, requiring only that someone have a camera and be there, and take a good picture. Writing is different. Writing is not just about commenting on what other people are writing. (Well, OK, this post is.) Writing is also about reporting  – about actually going out and finding information, digesting it, writing it up and then distributing it. Blogs, the foundation of Web 2.0, were built on the idea of commentary. But commentary always has to follow content, since without it there can be nothing to comment on. We shouldn’t confuse sites like Digg.com as content sites, since they simply aggregate links and comment. In the end, this freeloading element will have to be added to by something more substantial for it to grow. Netscape’s new site understands this, although I’m not convinced making a couple of calls to add to a wire story constitutes news gathering (but then again, a lot of journalists have done that for years, so who am I to quibble?)

The bottom line may be, just may be, that after huge bursts of participatory interest, that may even last a few years, the kinds of people who keep Slashdot going are going to be the people who keep Digg.com and every other user-driven, Web 2.0 site going. I’m not saying this is a bad thing — I love Slashdot, and there are some extraordinarily intelligent people on there (as well as some who could spend some time in the open air) — but it’s not a group that’s, er, broadly representative of the citizenry at large. They’re hugely dedicated, very focused, very knowledgeable about their sphere and have opinions coming out of their ears. A bit like folk who wrote letters to newspapers, come to think of it.

Write a Rant, Get Clicks

By | November 22, 2011
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I am not a fan of these In-Text ads, as you know. I think they’re intrusive, misleading and undermine the whole concept of linking, which is what has brought the Internet this far. One of my concerns is that since these ads rely on hooking up with particular words in the text, questions have to be raised about whether the provider of that text (I’m trying not to say “content” here) is skewing what they write to raise the number of words that ad sponsors have signed up for.

So I couldn’t help wondering whether it was the case here, on the blog of one Joel Comm, Internet marketing guru and expert on making the most out of, er, Internet advertising. The post is actually a (quite justifiable) rant against the smug robotics of your average cashier and attendant in stores who are programmed to ask “Are you finding everything okay?” whenever they see a customer who isn’t actually dead. But I couldn’t help wondering whether Joel’s rant had a secondary purpose when I noticed a lot of the words he was using — MP3 players, video games, dryers, stock — were contextual ad triggers for Kontera, his in-text ad provider of choice:

Kontera

Legitimate rant? Or clever revenue-raising ploy? You decide.

Getting a Lock on Your iPod

By | November 22, 2011
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A sign of the times: what are billed as the first mobile security locks for iPods. According to a press release (not yet available online):

Featuring a keyless, user-settable three-digit combination for added convenience and protection, the new Targus security locks are designed for use with iPods configured with a dock connector, including the 5G, nano, iPod Photo, 4G, iPod mini and 3G.

The Mobile Security Lock for iPod is “a compact case that houses the retractable cable and combination lock. Users simply loop the cable around the strap of a backpack, purse or briefcase, or other stationary object, insert the combination lock through the opening in the case, and then attach the lock to their iPod.” Cost: $40.

The Desktop Security Lock secures the iPod to any stationary object, while the Eyelet Security Lock for iPod (pictured above) “is designed for use with any notebook cable lock to secure the iPod and notebook together” by attaching to the iPod’s dock connector and then threading the cable from the notebook lock through the Eyelet Lock’s pass-through loop and then fastened to the notebook. Cost: $20.

Actually, I’m kinda surprised this kind of thing hasn’t emerged already. (Actually it has, but not the mobile element, I guess) I always feel horribly vulnerable walking around with my iPod, even though I’m actually still in the apartment. There seem to be plenty of thefts reported, hype aside: Dianne Wiest’s daughter pleaded guilty to lifting one in New York last month.

Watching the World Cup on a Widget

By | November 22, 2011
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Opera 9 is officially out today, so perhaps now is as good a time as any to offer some FIFA World Cup 2006 plugins:

For Firefox there’s

  • FootieFox, which has actually been around for a year or so. Nice and small, it displays any soccer scores (not just those of the World Cup) in your status bar, and even gives visual and acoustic notification when goals are scored. It also provides a customisable skin, according to your team of preference. Kick-off times in local time, world cup teams in local language:
    Footie1
  • Joga – a slightly fancier offering from Google and Nikefootball, Joga is community of soccer players dedicated to keep the game beautiful. It offers a sidebar that provides updated scores, as well as videos and “communities”:
    Joga1

Both expect you to know your country flags, which is probably no bad thing. (FootieFox’s comparison of the two extensions is here. Certainly FootieFox seems to be lighter and faster.

For Opera there are a couple of widgets:

  • Goal 06 which gives you a desktop window with access to all the usual information, plus photos etc. Seems a bit memory and CPU hungry. There’s a Mini version of this for your smart phone (just open your WAP browser and go to: http://mini.opera.com/goal/ and follow the instructions. The Goal 06 World Cup content is available in the site Bookmarked as “World Cup 06” in the Opera Mini home page.)
  • gCalendar World Cup edition which I must confess I didn’t really understand. Information with these widgets is minimal and barely intelligible. Grumble…

For Yahoo!, there’s a special Widget as well as some more basic (or out of date) ones. For Macs there’s a World Cup schedule widget which you can also get here. Microsoft has a Soccer Scoreboard, so long as you don’t mind validating your computer first.

For Google there’s a special news page module. There’s a collection of Klips if you’re into that. (Not quite as inspiring as I’d hoped; Klips, I thought, would be tailor made for the World Cup). For your Treo there’s the Football 2006 Manager, courtesy of Palm and TinyStocks (thanks, Mark), which is very cool but could be a lot cooler.

In fact, at the risk of sounding spoilt, none of these really jumped out at me. But if you’re working and can’t watch the games live, this might be a second best. Of course, there’s always the BBC website, which remains highly popular.

Guerrilla Marketing Via Lederhosen

By | November 22, 2011
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I’m getting a bit cheesed off with all the advertising/sponsorship shenanigans at the World Cup, and I’m not even there. The idea that you can only buy tickets using the sponsor’s credit card, that food like McDonalds and drink like Coke can somehow be an official partner of a sport, all seem to indicate a world gone mad, but all that is eclipsed by the fact that you can’t enter a stadium wearing a rival sponsor’s attire: Hundreds of — one report suggested more than 1,000 — Dutch fans had to watch the Ivory Coast game in their underwear after stewards ordered them to remove their orange lederhosen.

The story, as far as I can work out, goes like this. The idea is the brainchild of a Dutch brewery called  Grossbrauerei, which produce a beer called Bavaria. The brand marketing manager is one Peer Swinkels (“Bavaria is beer with guts, for men with guts”), who has launched several elaborate ploys to market the beer. One involves, er, sponsoring a motor racing event, along with a “Burning Rubber” Gala Night. (Event organiser: “We assure you that the name of this gala night is not a joke”). Another involved relaunching the career of Albert West, a slightly over the hill Dutch singer in towns with the word “West” in its name — Amsterdam West, Rotterdam West, Utrecht West, Leiden West, Hengelo West, etc: (“This sort of subtle humour is always combined with down-to-earth realism in the Bavaria-campaign. Albert liked the idea. He can laugh at himself. That is what makes Albert such a nice guy.”)

You had to be there, I guess.

Anyway, the lederhosen. This is an inspired idea and goes to the heart of some already controversial sponsorship over the most important item at the Cup: the beer.  The lederhosen, you see, sported the name of Dutch brewery Bavaria, which is not the official beer of the World Cup. (Anheuser Busch’s Budweiser is the official beer.) The lederhosen are orange, carry the regulation braces, as well as a tail. They come free with a 12–pack of Bavaria, and have become something of a cult item among Dutch fans, who wear orange from birth, although there are reports that they are just being handed out for free too:

Leeuwenhose

Briliiant. You get your product into the stadium and onto the world’s television without having to pay a dime. As a marketing ploy they are somewhat less subtle than the use of an aging Dutch rock star but they do deserve some credit: taking the mickey out of those German beerfests, selling a beer called Bavaria, right in the heart of Germany. And, to boot, embarrassing the U.S. beer partner Budweiser, who like other sponsors paid between $45 and $50 million for the privilege of having only their brand on display. In fact, Bavaria has already been making trouble: Heineken, the official sponsor of the Dutch national team, ordered fans to leave their lederhosen outside the ground at a friendly game against Cameroon. (A Dutch court has since ruled that fans should be allowed to wear the trousers, apparently, although this won’t wash in Germany.)

This explains why stewards are ordering fans to strip. FIFA spokesman Markus Siegler: “Of course, FIFA has no right to tell an individual fan what to wear at a match, but if thousands of people all turn up wearing the same thing to market a product and to be seen on TV screens then of course we would stop it.” The issue might be particularly sensitive because Anheuser Busch has its own problems, being forced by longstanding trademark issues to settle for merely Bud brand (not the full Budweiser brand, which is in dispute in Germany) in return for allowing local brewer Bitburger to sell its beer in unbranded cups outside the grounds.

Peer, of course, sounds suitably outraged but must be loving it. Officially, this kind of activity is appalling and the offline equivalent of subdomain spam, but so much more imaginative. At the same time it raises lots of interesting dinner party discussions about the rights of the individual against the rights of a sponsor (if I chose to wear those pants and wasn’t paid to do so, then does it constitute advertising, and should I not be allowed to wear what I choose so long as it does not appear to be a deliberate effort to advertise?); what constitutes a group, whether orange is an acceptable colour for a national soccer team, and whether people should even be allowed to wear lederhosen. T