Net IDentity

Hopeful Holidays to You in a Not-So-Happy Economy

2008-12-24T11:43:00.000-08:00

I've been reflecting on our relatively somber holiday season, which reports the weakest holiday shopping I've ever seen growing up in Southern California. Currently a glass-half-full type, I think that this unfortunate economic time forces us to remember what's important: family and friends, love and support, hope and faith, peace and joy (all those good ole holiday buzzwords). So the economic weather is frightful, and maybe you lost your job, or feel hopeless about finding one. But keep that fire inside you burning, baby, because you've got people who love you, and apparently, the web is here to comfort you, too. (Just ignore the stock reports, if you're feeling particularly down.)

Oh the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we've no place to go
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Here's an article I read on Business Week: The Recession: My Facebook, My Therapy. There's so much I can say about it.

For now, here are the highlights of my immediate reactions:

1.) While stimulating the economy at my local Barnes and Noble the other day, I heard a woman in line saying, "It's a great thing to see a book store doing so well in this economy." The article mentions that we can't freeze the economy in its current state, so keeping your budget limitations in mind, do as I do, and help where you can - buy a few books, a meal at your local mom and pop restaurant, or something - anything! All but one of my books were guilt-free finds under $10.

2.) It's interesting to me that Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks are bringing so much warmth to the growing victims of unemployment. I have so much faith in the future of the web to harness genuine community and connectivity in a more personal way than I have criticized it for at times in the past. Perhaps we will one day paint the internet in a more human way with social networks, and it's just taking us some time. We have to get it right, to evolve the web in a direction that celebrates our humanity (the good, the bad, and the ugly) rather than away from it. Diverse as we all may be, the world is bound in the global economic crisis, and we inevitably share common ground in other areas too. Who would have thought that family could be forged on the World Wide Web, as people get together to stay strong (or at the very least to say, "I am not alone") during these tough times? Armed with this strength and support from strangers online, they can hopefully build up the resolve to reach out to family and friends in their everyday lives.

3.) The danger is when we use the internet purely to exacerbate, self-medicate or distract entirely from what we're living in the space of reality. The weather outside is frightful, but face it, embrace it, no matter how you hate coming out in the storm. Take that shovel out, and let's dig. And maybe we'll find that there is a place to go after all.

So don't get discouraged. Keep fighting. I have high hopes for the New Year. Let's pursue resolutions like never before, and hopefully watch the whole world change...

My Final Undergraduate Essay: Youth Media Consumption and International Awareness

2008-12-10T13:01:00.000-08:00

International Journalism

Youth Consumption of Journalism and International News

In May of 2006, National Geographic reported research findings that youth aged 18-24 are geographically illiterate. According to the survey, “Despite nearly constant news coverage since the war [in Iraq] began in 2003, 63 percent of [them] failed to correctly locate the country on a map of the Middle East. Seventy percent could not find Iran or Israel… Even for U.S. geography, the survey results are just as dismal. Half could not find New York State on a map of the United States”. Basic geography skills also suffer: “only two-thirds could indicate which way northwest is on a map”. National Geographic rightfully asks if we, the U.S. youth even care that we were in the bottom two during the 2002 geographical study that included youth from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, and Great Britain. Pressure is being put on educational institutions, the media, and the Millenial generation to realize that international “knowledge is essential for survival in our rapidly globalizing world” 1.

In an age of information overload and international news “under-load” the message appears to be lost on today’s American youth. Now, more than ever, American journalism must evaluate the nature of news media consumption for the sake of our futures, and make critical decisions about what is more important, news sales or global citizenship, and how we can maximize the technological evolution of journalism.

The talk of American journalism lately has been the state of the U.S. economy, but while the financial economy suffers, another economy, our information economy, suffers relatively quietly. The internet is a mess of information, and it is the messy room that youth live in, a cyber space that many older generations fail to understand. While many baby boomers still take the morning paper with their coffee, we are checking our e-mail, updating our Facebook or Myspace accounts, scoping our favorite blog, and viewing a You Tube video we found on a link somewhere. The Pew Research Center for People and the Press categorized news consumers into four categories: Integrators, Net-Newsers, Traditionalists, and the Disengaged. The largest group of news consumers is the traditionalist group, median age fifty-two, and a huge proponent of traditional television news channels and newspapers. Integrators, which comprise 23% of the surveyed population, are thought to be more engaged and sophisticated for their use of net and traditional sources (print, television, radio). A striking 44% of college grads say they get their news online daily, but the proportion of their peers getting no news has increased substantially over the past decade.

Net-Newsers (13%) is a likely category for these relatively affluent and educated young Americans; they are characterized by their appreciation for interactive web features, and new technologies. Of them, 30% prefer news clips on the net, compared to 18% who still watch traditional television broadcasts, and 26% read blogs regularly. The younger, more educated crowd often supports cable news, and ‘infotainment’ programs with large partisan divisions like The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with John Stewart. Many of them have smart phones, whose owners (37%) check news daily using web-access through their iPhones or Blackberries. The internet has served to provide ‘world-wide’ connectivity and a broader range of places to find news and related multimedia. Since we suffer from information overload, many newsfeed sites like Digg, offer a niche-ier news community that caters specifically to youth interests (technology, pop culture, entertainment, sports etc.). The World Wide Web, in effect, has bred an international phenomenon of self-interest: we pick and choose what sorts of news is important to us, at the expense of global awareness. It is no surprise, then, that youth, led by the limitless links on the internet, tend to “graze” online information, focus on what is interesting to them personally, and customize (or limit) their knowledge accordingly2.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (Journalism.Org) is also concerned with the “oversupply” problem afflicting American Journalism. The resulting tendency to create news niches with “news you can use” means that we ignore issues that were really important to the craft of journalism in previous generations: monitoring the government, for example, or keeping up with foreign affairs. The movement has become so much more about news the people want versus the broader scope of news that they need. This leads to more biases and stereotypes, “compassion fatigue”, and increasingly diluted hard news. And the internet is not necessarily to blame. The rise of credible bloggers, online think tanks, and citizen journalism shows promise for the future. The State of the News Media annual report (2007) asserts that “The key question is whether the investment community sees the news business as a declining industry or an emerging one in transition.” Are we going to continue in the direction of “franchising” and “branding” our news, or re-direct our focus on brain-food for our citizens? Put this way, news should not be seen primarily as an industry, but as a necessity that must transition upward.

We must make a return to global awareness. In a September 1996 New York Times article entitled “Foreign Coverage Less Prominent in News Magazines”, writer Robin Pogrebin discusses “the proliferation of domestic news” trend that we still see today. On the back end of this is the observation of editors of news magazines and foreign policy experts, who say “there is something deeper at work, that since Vietnam and even more so since the cold war, there has been a gradual but significant lessening of interest in matters overseas”. In 1995, Time devoted 14 percent of the magazine to international news, according to Hall's Magazine Editorial Reports, which analyzes the editorial content of most consumer magazines. Just a decade before, in 1985, Time had 24 percent. “But editors,” as reported by Pogrebin, “say they are simply responding to their readers, who care most about international news that directly affects them, a criterion that is increasingly difficult to meet”. Some journalists warned against the danger national self-interest posed to the integrity of journalism, saying that it could lead to an “unhealthy, ill-informed isolationism”. It appears that life-style and consumer interest stories will consume our status as a world power if we continue to let ourselves focus on ''low-cholesterol diets, science, the dinosaurs, life on Mars…''3.

The youth, and the future, are inheriting this ego-centric attitude toward the news. In December of 2003, the New York Times reported that the Dallas Morning News had hired a man with an advertising background to investigate “how to persuade more young readers, particularly those from their late teens to their mid-30's, to pick up a newspaper”. Several hundred young people in the Dallas area were asked to describe their dream newspaper: “a publication with big, bright photographs and snappy articles that focused heavily on subjects like entertainment, all wrapped in a package so thin that it could be scanned in the time it took to ride an elevator”4. While this sample of youth was taken from one small area of the nation, it serves to illuminate national trends: youth looking to news that satisfies their wants in a way that is fun and immediately gratifying. Now, imagine whether or not such a “dream” publication would venture to report global issues like HIV/AIDS, poverty, death tolls in Iraq…or anything else that shatters these dreams with an uglier reality.

Studies conducted by the Readership Institute at the Media Management Center (2003) suggest that young readers spend less time reading newspapers than their parents did at their age and certainly less time than their parents do now. The study shows that nearly 40 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 do not read a paper at all, compared to fewer than 30 percent of 45- to 64-year-olds. What is even more unsettling is that one of the institute leaders focused on the implications of these results for the newspapers, and not so much the impact this would have on society’s well-being. It is not the volume of news publications sold that we should dwell on, but the loss of valuable information on future generations. Let us hope that youth get informed soon, through print or other ways.

Perhaps we need another rescue plan (this is not in reference to the Wall Street bail-outs), one for a lesser known beneficiary – public television, radio and other independent media. In 2005, the Ford Foundation, recognizing the declining state of American Journalism, supported National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, Link TV (connecting the U.S. to the world), and the Sundance Documentary Fund (focused on human rights issues), among other organizations and efforts.

The primary goal was to bolster international affairs, and fair and accurate reporting5.

Other independent organizations are doing their best to mobilize international youth to get informed about the state of the world beyond their own borders and to keep up with news in general. Youthink.Worldbank.Org, a project spear-headed by the World Bank and aimed at cultivating cross-cultural dialogue and continued inquiry, is just one example. Our daily interactions with the internet and other technologies can make finding the truth seem like a daunting task. Due to the diversity of news sources and overwhelming media biases, we do not know which paper to read, which show to watch, which link to click. We are intimidated by a slew of information – piled high, burying the global issues that demand awareness. But in due time, I am confident that we will be able to better organize and tackle our increasingly diverse sources of news. I anticipate that one day we will learn to maximize social networks, online communities, and multimedia in the effort to become more educated, in solidarity with our international peers.

Journalism.Org’s Major Trends in 2007 section observes that “while journalists are becoming more serious about the Web, no clear models of how to do journalism online really exist yet”. I believe that the answer lies strongly with our youth, and the next generation of journalists, who are growing up on the web. In our hunger for cyber interaction, we need to revisit what forms of interaction are more worthwhile for our news diets. The Youth DNA study on one-hundred young people in ten different countries and how they approach the news (as reported by the World Association of News), offers suggestions: utilizing multiple sources, exercising more active journalistic practices, looking beyond self-interest, digging deeper, and discussing news with others.

1 Roach, John. Young Americans Geographically Illiterate, Survey Suggests. National Geographic News. 2 May, 2006.

2 Key News Audiences Now Blend Online and Traditional Sources. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. 17 August, 2008.

3 Pogrebin, Robin. Foreign Coverage Less Prominent in News Magazines. 23 September, 1996. New York Times.

4 Steinberg, Jacques. Technology and Media: To Grab Young Readers, Newspapers Print Free Jazzy Editions. 1 December 2003. New York Times.

5 Manly, Lorne, and Jensen, Elizabeth. Public TV and Radio to Receive Big Grants. 10 May 2005. New York Times.

Social Media Will Change Your Business

2008-09-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

Read it here.

BUSINESS WEEK:Technology February 20, 2008, 12:01AM EST

Social Media Will Change Your Business
Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later

by Stephen Baker and Heather Green

Editor's note: When we published "Blogs Will Change Your Business" in May, 2005, Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds. Truth is, we didn't see MySpace coming. Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation. Despite the onrush of technology, however, thousands of visitors are still downloading the original cover story.

So we decided to update it. Over the past month, we've been calling many of the original sources and asking the Blogspotting community to help revise the 2005 report. We've placed fixes and updates into more than 20 notes; to view them, click on the blue icons. If you see more details to fix, please leave comments. The role of blogs in business is clearly an ongoing story.

First, the headline. Blogs were the heart of the story in 2005. But they're just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter—they've all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. Social Media: It's clunkier language than blogs, but we're not putting it on the cover anyway. We're just fixing it.

Monday 9:30 a.m. It's time for a frank talk. And no, it can't wait. We know, we know: Most of you are sick to death of blogs. Don't even want to hear about these millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. And yes, there's plenty out there not to like. Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that's sick in our society today, and it's on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business—including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)

There's a little problem, though. Many of you don't visit blogs—or haven't since blogs became a sensation in last year's Presidential race. According to a Pew Research Center Survey, only 27% Some newer numbers: According to Forrester, 11.2% of online adults in the U.S. publish a blog at least once a month. Of the same group, 24.8% read a blog and 13.7% comment on a blog at least once a month. The numbers are higher for youths. Of online youths, 20.8% publish a blog, 36.6% read a blog, and 26.4% comment on a blog at least once a month. But I suspect the numbers are unreliable because many mainstream sites with millions of readers—celebrity site TMZ and gadget sites like Gizmodo—are actually blogs. But are all the readers aware of this? I doubt it. This is the blurring of the blog/mainstream divide, a theme we'll see again and again in these revisions. of Internet users in America now bother to read them. So we're going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story—call it Blogs 101 for businesses—in the style of a blog. We're even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story's online version to another Web page. This all may make for a strange experience, but it's the closest we can come to reaching out from the page, grabbing you by the collar, and shaking you into action.

First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, Yes, there were 9 million, but how many of them were active? Probably only a fraction. In early 2008, says Technorati Chairman David Sifry, the search company indexes 112 million blogs, with 120,000 new ones popping up each day. But only 11% of these blogs, he says, have posted within the past two months. That means the active universe is closer to 13 million blogs. Kevin Burton, CEO of FeedBlog, argues that the number should be lower, from 2 million to 4 million blogs. with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. "Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo," reads only one April Posting. Let's assume that 99.9% are equally off point. What we didn't see in early 2005 was the advent of the spam blog. These blogs, produced automatically, are designed to show up in search results and to attract Google advertisements known as Adsense. Sifry estimates that fully 99% of the blog posts reaching search engines are spam. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

Give the paranoids their due. The overwhelming majority of the information the world spews out every day is digital—photos from camera phones, PowerPoint presentations, government filings, billions and billions of e-mails, even digital phone messages. With a couple of clicks, every one of these items can be broadcast into the blogosphere by anyone with an Internet hookup—or even a cell phone. If it's scandalous, a poisonous e-mail from a CEO, for example, or torture pictures from a prison camp, others link to it in a flash. And here's the killer: Blog posts linger on the Web forever.

Yet not all the news is scary. Ideas circulate as fast as scandal. Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

More tomorrow.

Tuesday 6:35 a.m. How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. We attempted the chatty style of a blog. Not everyone appreciated it. Blogger Nick Carr cited this sentence and commented: "I'm so embarrassed." That said, the article might have left the impression that there's one style of writing for blogs. In fact, there are as many styles as there are bloggers. Everyone has the freedom to write however they want. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper.

The printing press set the model for mass media. A lucky handful owns the publishing machinery and controls the information. Whether at newspapers or global manufacturing giants, they decide what the masses will learn. This elite still holds sway at most companies. You know them. They generally park in sheltered spaces, have longer rides on elevators, and avoid the cafeteria. They keep the secrets safe and coif the company's message. Then they distribute it—usually on a need-to-know basis—to customers, employees, investors, and the press.

That's the world of mass media, and the blogs are turning it on its head. Set up a free account at Blogger or other blog services, and you see right away that the cost of publishing has fallen practically to zero. Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up.

Sure, most blogs are painfully primitive. That's not the point. They represent power. Look at it this way: In the age of mass media, publications like ours print the news. Sources try to get quoted, but the decision is ours. Ditto with letters to the editor. Now instead of just speaking through us, they can blog. And if they master the ins and outs of this new art—like how to get other bloggers to link to them—they reach a huge audience.

This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they're losing control of it.

Want to get it back? You never will, not entirely. But for a look at what you're facing, come along for a tour of the blogosphere.

Wednesday 7:38 a.m. Hmm. How to start this post? Idle talk about the weather, or maybe that red wine with dinner last night? No. Let's dive right in: One misstep Tim Bray, Sun's director of Web technologies, thinks we overstated the risks of company bloggers. He says that 4,000 bloggers at Sun, about 10% of the workforce, have had virtually no problems. And except for a few high-profile cases, like Mark Jen at Google, very few companies have had publicized problems with in-house bloggers. "I think there's a news story in the absence of carnage," he says. Jon Garfunkel responds on Blogspotting that a few punishments and firings could frighten in-house bloggers from "testing the limits"—and lead some of them to produce blog PR. and the blog world can have its way with you—even when the coolest, most tech-savvy companies are involved.

Google (GOOG) is regarded as a secretive company. So in January, when a young programmer named Mark Jen started blogging about his first days in the Googleplex, folks in the 'sphere instantly linked to him. Jen certainly wasn't dealing out inside dirt. But he griped that Google's health plan was less generous than his former employer's—Microsoft (MSFT)—and he argued, indignantly, that Google's free food was an enticement for employees to work past dinner.

Two weeks later, Google fired Jen. And that's when the 22-year-old became a big story. Google was blogbusted for overreacting and for sending an all-too-clear warning to the dozens of bloggers still at the company. A Google official says the company has lots of bloggers and just expects them to use common sense. For example, if it's something you wouldn't e-mail to a long list of strangers, don't blog it.

Jen clearly flunked that test. "As the media got hold of it, I was quickly educated," he says. He says he should have understood the company's goals and concerns better and been more sensitive to them. Still, his adventure turned him into an overnight celebrity. He was wooed by recruiters at Amazon.com (AMZN), Microsoft, and Yahoo! (YHOO) A month later, Jen landed a job at Plaxo, an Internet contact-management company. A key part of his job, says a company spokesperson, is to help coordinate Plaxo's blogging efforts—a pillar of Plaxo's promotional strategy. So what got him fired turned out to be his trump card. Plaxo, like many other companies, is now drawing up norms for blogging behavior, so that employees know what's in bounds, and what's not.

2:22 p.m. It sounds like the joke answer on a multiple-choice exam. Name a leading company in blog communications: General Motors?

That's right. For a company that's slipping in the auto biz, GM is showing a surprisingly nimble touch with blogs. GM uses them on occasion to steer past its own PR department and the mainstream press.

In January, Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz launched his own Bob Lutz blogs rarely these days on FastLane. He hands off much of the work to staffers, including PR. Many of the posts read like press releases. One recent post pointed readers to a speech that he said mentioned many of the points he had been too busy to blog! That said, FastLane still attracts lots of readers, and they leave comments. While the blog doesn't revolutionize GM's relations with customers, it provides a useful communications link. Perhaps equally important, it focuses some of the GM team on other blogs, where a lot of the car world is talking. FastLane Blog. Bloggers applauded, and car buffs flooded Lutz with suggestions and complaints. Lutz posted lots of barbs from outsiders and won points for balanced responses. Like his answer to criticisms of new Pontiacs: "Did you take a look at seat tailoring? Carpet fits?…hood gaps, hem flanges? We used to be bad at those, too."

But Lutz is only part of GM's blog strategy. In April the company yanked $10 million in advertising from the Los Angeles Times and demanded that the Times make retractions. Journalists asked GM for specific complaints, and the car company held off. It said it wanted to work quietly with the Times and not battle it out in the press.

How to get the word out through a back channel? GM directed journalists to a blog, AutomoBear.com, that detailed GM's beef. (It had to do with a comparison between two cars, which GM thought was unfair.) Both GM and Miro Pacic, the blogger at AutomoBear, say that GM provided Pacic with information but that no money passed hands.

Fair enough. But even if GM doesn't pay for positive coverage in blogs, just consider the possibilities in this new footloose media world. There's little to stop companies from quietly buying bloggers' support, or even starting unbranded blogs of their own to promote their products—or to tar the competition. This raises all kinds of questions about the ever-shrinking wall between advertising and editorial. We'll cover that later, when we get to the blogs' impact on our own business—the media.

Thursday 8:56 a.m. It's the latest wrinkle on Descartes. I blog therefore I… consult. An entire industry is rising up to guide companies into this frightening new realm. And the consultants establish their brands and reps with their blogs.

Perhaps the biggest is Steve Rubel. Sitting in his office at Edelman PR (he switched jobs in 2006) overlooking Times Square, Steve Rubel says that blogs have turned out to be less important for companies than he anticipated. "Outside of tech," he says, "big companies didn't jump in. They viewed the blog audience as niche. They weren't ready to be open, transparent, and loose." For advertising, he says companies are more drawn to social networks, where they have the potential to reach millions of customers. (We should stress that social networks, a megatrend in media, is not even mentioned in this 2005 story. The emergence of Facebook, MySpace, and others is one reason we should take "blogs" out of the headline.) In fact, it's worth mentioning that Rubel doesn't blog nearly as much as he used to. He regards blogs as just a piece of his communications arsenal. He uses it for longer pieces. For the short stuff, he sends out bursts of thought and links to what he's seeing and reading on Twitter, a microblogging technology. Thousands of people subscribe to his Twitters, which max out at 140 characters. On a Monday morning, he Twitters this message: "Sitting with Steve Baker of BW, wants to know why tweet?" Within 10 minutes, 20 responses flow in from all over the world. (Upshot: Baker now tweets at twitter.com/stevebaker.) A year ago, the exec at the PR firm CooperKatz & Co. started his blog, Micro Persuasion. He was already pushing such clients as WeatherBug and the Association of National Advertisers into the blog world. Then early one Sunday morning, as he recalls it, "my wife was sleeping, and I was sitting in the living room, laptop on my lap, and thinking if I am talking to clients and reading these blogs, I should jump in." When launching his site, he had the smarts to contact big shots such as Dan Gillmor, who was a leading blogger and tech reporter with the San Jose Mercury News. Gillmor linked to Rubel's site, and his traffic took off. It was great for his brand, and it also gave Rubel a blogger's education. "I became a living guinea pig for what I preach," he says.

Now Rubel is positioned as an all-knowing Thumper in a forest of clueless Bambis. The first job, he says, is to monitor the blogs to see what people are saying about your company. (An entire industry is growing to sell that service. Even IBM's (IBM) banging at the door.) Next step: Damage-control strategies. How to respond when blogs attack. He says companies have to learn to track what blogs are talking about, pinpoint influential bloggers, and figure out how to buttonhole them, privately and publicly.

He gives the example of Netflix (NFLX). When a fan blog called Hacking Netflix Hacking Netflix: The site continues to grow, and is now a major site for news from Netflix and Blockbuster. Both companies treat Mike Kaltschnee as a journalist. He puts subscription buttons on his site and gets a take of the revenue. He says the site does well, making money and attracting about 300,000 to 400,000 unique visitors per month. But he still hasn't quit his job as a software graphic programmer. asked the company for info and interviews last year, Netflix turned it down. How could they make time for all the bloggers? Predictably, the blogger, Mike Kaltschnee, aired the exchange, and Netflix faced a storm of public criticism. Now Netflix feeds info to Kaltschnee, and he passes along what he's hearing from the fans. Sounds like he's half journalist, half consultant—though he insists We should have used the word "says." "Insists" implies that he may not be telling the truth, which is not fair. Netflix doesn't pay him.

Friday 10:46 a.m. The question came up at a panel discussion last week: Any chance that a blog bubble could pop? The answer is really easy: no.

At least not an investment bubble. The potential bubbles are in Internet advertising and in Web 2.0 companies, including social networks. VC investment in Web 2.0 companies rose to $464 million in the first half of 2007, according to data released by Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young. Venture firms financed only $60 million in blog startups last year, according to industry tracker VentureOne. Chump change compared to the $19.9 billion that poured into dot-coms in 1999. The difference is that while dot-coms promised to make loads of money, blogs flex their power mostly by disrupting the status quo.

The bigger point, which is blindingly obvious when you think about it, is that the dot-com era was powered by companies—complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and—that's right—no bubble.

The role of the blog startups is to build tools for this grassroots uprising. Six Apart, In the last three years, Technorati has stumbled (below). PubSub, after failing to get venture funding, went belly-up. We also should have mentioned WordPress, a highly influential open-source blog platform. Neilsen BuzzMetrics is a power in blog analytics, as is Google. a four-year-old San Francisco company, leads in blog software. Technorati and PubSub Concepts are battling it out in blog search. The founders all insist that they plan to remain independent. But if recent history is any guide, most of them will wind up in the bellies of the blog-minded Internet giants—led by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The latest to disappear was Flickr. A photo-sharing service that spread madly across the blog world, 13-month-old Flickr was still running its software in its beta, or testing, phase when it was acquired by Yahoo in March for an undisclosed sum. Caterina Fake, Flickr's co-founder, wrote about the deal in her blog the day it happened: "Don't forget to breathe. It's not the end, it's the beginning."

Monday 10:23 a.m. If this were a true blog, that last post would have generated a mountain of comments over the weekend, most of them with the same question: If there's no clear business model, why are the Internet giants so bent on getting a foothold in blogs? Look at it from their point of view. A vibrant community that has doubled in size in the past eight months is teeming with potential customers and has a mother lode of data to mine. "Blogs are what's causing the Web to grow," says Jason Goldman. He's project manager at Google's Blogger, the world's biggest service to set people up as bloggers.

David Sifry Technorati is no longer the king of blog search, and Sifry was deposed as CEO in 2007. Google entered the industry in summer 2006. But more meaningful than its stand-alone blog search was its growing ability to incorporate blog posts with Web search. Google is helping to erase the distinction between blogs and the rest of the Web. In doing so, it extends its dominance. looks at it a bit differently. He's a serial entrepreneur and founder of Technorati, the blog search engine.

For Sifry, it's not the growth of the same Web, but an entirely new one. It's wrapped up far more in people's day-to-day lives. It's connected to time. The way he describes it, the Web we've come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don't change much. Try Googling Donald Trump, and you're more likely to find his Web page than a discussion of his appearance last night on The Apprentice.

Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private. Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other, comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global conversation.

Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth. Hunched over their laptops at one table sit six or seven experts in nanotechnology. Right across from them are teenage goths dressed in black and thoroughly pierced. Not too many links between those two tables. But the café goes on and on. Saudi women here, Labradoodle lovers there, a huge table of people fooling around with cell phones. Those are the mobile-photo crowd, busily sending camera-phone pictures up to their blogs.

The racket is deafening. But there's loads of valuable information floating around this cafe. Technorati, PubSub, and others provide the tools to listen. While the traditional Web catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds.

Why does this matter? Think of the implications for businesses of getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking. Already, studios are using blogs to see which movies are generating buzz. Advertisers are tracking responses to their campaigns. "I'm amazed people don't get it yet," says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice-president who heads up search. "Never in the history of market research has there been a tool like this."

Tuesday 9:12 p.m. Back to that coffeehouse. Sitting at one large table is a collection of some of the most gifted geeks you can imagine. These folks built the blogosphere. And they're using it to link with each other. They share ideas, test them, and get them up and running in a hurry. Many of them transform the network itself, making it more muscular—and disruptive.

The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working with software originally developed by Netscape, created an easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or even specific postings, into Web feeds. With this system, a user could subscribe to certain blogs, or to key words, and then have all the relevant items land at a single destination. These personalized Web pages bring together the music and video the user signs up for, in addition to news. They're called "aggregators." Aggregators turned out to be powerhouses in their own right, just not the ones we expected. Google Reader turned into a staple for many bloggers. But lots of other types of aggregation popped up, much of it associated with different types of social media. At Digg and YouTube and MySpace, for example, people pull apart bits and pieces of information and put them together in ways that suit themselves. In this sense, everyone can be an "aggregator," and growing numbers of us are. For now, only about 5% of Internet users have set them up. But that number's sure to rise as Yahoo and Microsoft plug them.

In time, aggregators could turn the Web on its head. Why? They discourage surfing as users increasingly just wait for interesting items to drop onto their page or e-mailbox. Internet advertising, which traditionally counts on page views and clicks, could be thrown for a loop. Already Yahoo is packaging ads on the feeds. Google is testing the waters.

But here's the really insidious part. If you set up your own aggregator page, such as my.yahoo.com, and subscribe to feeds, you soon discover that blog and mainstream postings mingle side by side. Feeds zip through the walls between blogs and the rest of the information world. Blog posts are becoming just part of the mix, swimming on the same page with the Associated Press, and yes, BusinessWeek.

Winer also ushered in a second tech breakthrough, podcasting. We missed the corporate mammoth that was just about to amble into podcasting: Apple. Podcasting pioneer Tony Kahn, producer of Morning Stories, says that podcasting grew from 2,000 to 5,000 downloads a week to 340,000 a week after Apple's iTunes incorporated podcasts in 2005. After that wave of podcasting euphoria, it's scaled back to a healthy 150,000 downloads a month. The downside? It doesn't make money. A back-and-forth between Winer and Adam Curry, a blogger and former MTV host, led last year to a system that easily distributes audio files. Looking for National Public Radio's On the Media or the latest ska compilations from a disk jockey in Trinidad? Sign up on a Web page, and the program gets automatically delivered to you—as an audio feed. Last summer, Curry created software called iPodder so these MP3s could hitch a ride on an iPod (AAPL). That was the birth of podcasting: radio programming whenever and wherever you want it. Since then, some 5,000 podcasting shows have sprouted up. They cover everything from yoga to the blues.

It's an overnight sensation. Before podcasting, only about 150 people a month bothered to download the audio files of Morning Stories, a show on Boston's public station WGBH. After the station switched to podcasting in October? Eighty thousand. Chalk it up to the bloggers. They pushed podcasting to their own circles, and it grew from there. Even with the power of Apple behind it, podcasting really hasn't lived up to its potential as widespread community-produced radio. It turned out to be too technical for many to use, and too hard for most people to find good content. Many of the most popular podcasts are produced by pros, like those at NPR. Still, the audience is nothing to sneeze at. Research company eMarketer reckons the market for podcasts in the U.S. was 18.5 million people in 2007, and will reach 28 million in 2008. Advertising revenue for podcasts totaled $165 million last year.

11:48 p.m. One more idea. Think of TiVo (TIVO), think of the iPod. When you're using one of them, do you consider the company that provides the programming? CBS, for example? Not much. You're putting together your own package. The pieces come from lots of companies and artists. Often you don't even know where.

Aggregators do the same job for the Net. So, just like the record companies, which have figured out how to market bits and pieces of their albums as standalone songs and ringtones, the rest of the media and entertainment world is going to have to think small. Content, whether it's news or a Hollywood movie, is going to travel in bite-size nuggets. The challenge, for bloggers and giants alike, is to brand those nuggets and devise ways to sell them or wrap them in advertising.

Wednesday 6:31 a.m. A prediction: Part of the prediction came true. Blogs have become a staple of mainstream media. BusinessWeek has 20 of them. Publications of all sizes mix blog posts with other news, both online and in print. We're getting bloggier. And more and more publications are subscribing to services that link to related content. These links steer readers away from the media sites, which would have seemed unthinkable until recently for mainstream publishers. Why do it now? Because if sites provide interesting links, the thinking goes, readers will return. One telling example: The New York Times runs Blogrunner.com, a site that aggregates everything from Times articles to blog posts. Still, big media is not dominating blogs or social media by any stretch. No one is. At the same time, certain blogs are turning into influential and lucrative media businesses. Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like—you guessed it—blogs. Clay Shirky, a Web expert at New York University, calls it "an absorption process where the thing doing the absorbing changes."

Take a look at blog advertising today, and it's hard to see a glittering future. Sure, enterprising bloggers make room on their pages for Google-generated ads, known as AdSense, and earn some pocket change. Some blog entrepreneurs, such as Nick Denton, publisher of New York's Gawker Media, sell ads for everything from Nike to Absolut Vodka (FO). Popular blogs can land sponsorship deals for as much as $25,000 per month, say consultants. O.K. money for an entrepreneur, but a rounding error in the ad industry.

Blog power simply doesn't translate yet into big bucks. For now, it's running mostly on people's passion to communicate—especially in developing markets. Consider Hossein Derakhshan. He's a 28-year-old Iranian blogger based in Toronto. He has thousands of readers, and politicians respond to his postings—even as the Iranian government frantically tries to shut down the servers hosting his blog. Yet Derakhshan can't yet cash on his fame. "Google doesn't have AdSense service in Persian Still no AdSense in Persian, though it's offered in some 20 other languages. yet," he says.

Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media's core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals—and their friends. That's every marketer's dream.

The big companies have what the bloggers lack. Scale, relations with advertisers, and large sales forces. Bloggers don't need a big sales force to sell blog advertising. They can farm out that work. Federated Media Publishing, an advertising network for social media, turned revenue of $22 million in 2007, according to its founder, John Battelle. Of that revenue, $14 million went to the bloggers and publishers. Of the 150 sites FM represents, some 15 of them are receiving $50,000 per month. But still, blogs represent far greater power in influence than money. TechCrunch, for example, while surely lucrative, is a major voice in Silicon Valley. They can use these forces to sell across all media, from general audience to bloggy niches. Already, Yahoo and Microsoft have been investing heavily to position themselves for niche advertising. And in February, the New York Times Co. (NYT) laid down $410 million for About Inc., a collection of 500 specialized Web sites that smell strongly of blogs. "What's to stop them from turning those 500 sites into 5,000?" About.com didn't even multiply by two, much less 10. A spokesperson says the company has grown to about 670 sites. says Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA Systems, an Internet advertising company.

Thursday 9 a.m. Hate to get wiggy here. But if the blogs eventually swallow up ad revenue, Blogs don't swallow most of the ad revenue. More of it disappears into search advertising and online classifieds, such as Craigslist and eBay. what's going to happen to us?

Yes, we, too, are under the gun. MSM, the bloggers call us. Mainstream media. And many of them delight in uncovering our errors, knocking us off that big pedestal we've occupied since the the first broadsheets started circulating.

We have to master the world of blogs, too. This isn't because they're taking away ad revenue, at least not yet, but because they represent millions of eyewitnesses armed with computers spread around the world. They are potential competitors—or editorial resources. Blogs are also a good tool to stretch a publication's content and expertise, to provide different angles on stories, and to venture into new forms of media. In a sense, blogs and related social media provide laboratories for experimentation, new products, and, above all, new relationships with readers and viewers.

Blog reporters showed their value following the Asian tsunami in December. Thousands of them posted pictures, video footage, and articles about the disaster long before the first accredited journalists showed up. MSNBC, which ran hours of tsunami footage on its Web site, has since opened an entire page devoted to citizens' journalism.

Dan Gillmor, who quit his San Jose newspaper job, is lining up investors for a new type of media company, Grassroots Media. Dan Gillmor's venture, Bayosphere, lasted only 11 months. Open-source journalism is still a work in progress. OhmyNews' revenue reached only $6 million in 2006, and its venture in Japan fell flat. He's interested in elements of an online journalism business in Korea, called OhmyNews. It mingles articles from 50 staff journalists with reports e-mailed and text-messaged in from thousands of citizen reporters. OhmyNews says it has been profitable for a year and a half and expects revenue this year of $10 million. "I keep hoping that all of the new conversational forms will augment the existing one," Gillmor says.

11:57 p.m. Thinking out of the box here for a minute. What would this article look like if it were a real blog, and not just this glossy simulacrum?

Think of the way we produce stories here. It's a closed process. We come up with an idea. We read, we discuss in-house, and then we interview all sorts of experts and take their pictures. We urge them not to spill the beans about what we're working on. It's a secret. Finally, we write. Then the story goes through lots and lots of editing. And when the proofreaders have had their last look, someone presses the button and we launch a finished product on the world.

If this were a real blog, we probably would have posted our story pitch on Day One, before we did any reporting. In the blog world, a host of experts (including many of the same ones we called for this story) would weigh in, telling us what's wrong, what we're overlooking. In many ways, it's a similar editorial process. But it takes place in the open. It's a discussion.

Why draw this comparison? In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here's betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Friday 11 a.m. So why not start here? We've done our research on blogs, made our dire pronouncements. Pretty soon, someone in production will press the button. But this story should go on, as a conversation. And it will, starting on Apr. 22. We're launching our own blog to cover the business drama ahead, as blogging spreads into companies and redefines media. The blog's name? Blogspotting.net. See you there.

Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York. Green is an associate editor for BusinessWeek .

"FACEBOOK NEVER FORGETS" - L.A. Times Opinion

2008-07-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

Facebook Never Forgets How all those scandalous photos lingering on the Internet may affect future elections
By Maureen O'Connor and Jacob Savage
July 14, 2008

Discuss Article Imagine if the current crop of public figures had grown up during the Facebook era. We might have photos of John McCain in Florida slurping body shots off his stripper girlfriend. Barack Obama rolling a joint on a beach in Hawaii. George W. Bush passed out at a Yale frat party, 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped to his hands. Hillary Rodham Clinton at a Wellesley peace rally, locking lips with her husband's future secretary of Labor, Robert Reich.

It's one thing to hear that your elected representative had a wild time in college. It's entirely different to have pictorial proof. Would you still vote for someone after viewing a photograph of him passed out in his own vomit?

This isn't just a thought experiment. The next generation of political leaders is coming of age right now -- and it's unlikely that any one of them will escape digital documentation of their college-era foibles.

Witness, for instance, the 2006 pictures sent to Wonkette.com of presidential nephew Pierce Bush, in which it's hard to tell what he's holding tighter: the sorority girls or his Bud Light. Or 18-year-old Antonio Villaraigosa Jr. -- son of the L.A. mayor -- bragging last summer on a Princeton Facebook discussion board about late-night boozing on a SoCal beach: "We had Bacardi, Bailey's Irish Cream and several Coronas. ... It was great until it got broken up by the po'..."

Our generation -- high schoolers, college students and recent graduates -- immortalizes the interesting and banal, the innocent and incriminating, all on the Internet. We update our Facebook status as often as we change our shoes, and upload party photos before the last reveler goes home. Nonparticipation is impossible: We file our job applications online and arrange first dates via e-mail. The upshot? America's standards for personal embarrassment, political scandal and appropriate disclosure are sure to change in the years to come.

The inbox at IvyGate, the Ivy League news-and-gossip blog we edit, fills daily with vicious gossip culled from forwarded e-mails, MySpace screen shots and candid pictures snapped by students' camera phones. Our tipsters are most often seeking an outlet for anger -- be it righteous or petty -- hoping to subject their targets to the one modern weapon mightier than the pen: a blog post gone viral.

Tipsters reveal their roommates' drug use, their sorority sisters' eating disorders, their classmates' laughable academic miscues. Our job is to decide which, if any, of these pieces of information is worth publishing. When the "mistake" was mutilating a squirrel and the "classmate" was running for student body president (as was the case last year at Princeton), that was clearly newsworthy.

For every tip we follow up, there are half a dozen we ignore. But we don't delete them, and neither do our peers. Should the subject ever become famous, you can bet there's incriminating evidence on a hard drive or server just waiting to explode into the blogosphere.

There are potentially hundreds of images (plenty of them unflattering) of every person between the ages of 18 and 30 floating around the Internet -- including your future congressman, city councilman or president.

If representative democracy is not to come to a standstill, we will get over it. Our generation -- Generation Facebook -- already understands this culture of scandal with far more nuance than our elders. We barely batted an eye over reports of Obama's admitted drug use or McCain's hasty and unsavory divorce.

And for all the cruelty involved in spreading online humiliation, we've seen it generate a fair amount of empathy as well. Last fall, Princeton's race for president of the undergraduate student government temporarily derailed when compromising images emerged of the front-runner, a spring-term junior. His white face completely covered in black paint, Josh Weinstein had been photographed grinning widely at a Halloween party his freshman year. He posted the pictures on his blog, though later removed them -- but someone had saved copies.

When IvyGate broke the story, our commenters expressed shock, outrage and schadenfreudic glee. But from the rabble of caps-locked condemnations rose a second and, ultimately, more powerful response: a desire to hear Weinstein's side. A few days later, hundreds of students stood hushed at a public forum where a tearful Weinstein traced the logic behind the costume and expressed regret for his misguided attempt at humor. He eventually won the endorsement of the Black Student Union and went on to beat his opponent in a landslide. The unsavory images were an issue, but they didn't overtake the election.

The Internet's anonymity, long memory and free-for-all gossip culture may yet prove a poisonous cocktail. But as our generation grows older and enters public life -- thankfully, we have some time -- we'll find ourselves in a political culture that increasingly views these "gotcha" moments in context and with an eye toward forgiveness. After all, the incriminating photo, the offensive blog post, that drunken 3 a.m. e-mail -- it could have been any of us.

Maureen O'Connor and Jacob Savage are editors at IvyGate.

Filipino Town-Hall Style Talk Show "SPEAK OUT" Discusses Internet Safety

2008-02-02T01:30:00.000-08:00

The Internet Party: What Happens When Google's Parents Leave Town for the Weekend?

2008-01-20T11:28:00.001-08:00

Point Smart, Click Safe!!!

2008-01-20T11:28:00.000-08:00

When I was about 11 or 12 years old, my friend told me that In-and-Out Burger had a secret menu, and that I could find it on the website. I typed in inandout.com and got a sexy menu instead. Can someone say animal style? To make matters worse, my mother walked in the room to find a flash XXX banner at the top of the screen. Watch your kids folks. Make sure they're not wandering off into less wholesome cyber territories.

pointsmartclicksafe.org

The Reality of Online Identity

2007-12-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

I would like to address the following question from my classmate, Weiquan's blog post: "How real then, is this online identity, although it means being able to be true to oneself, if online identities are as subjective as we made it out to be regarding the reality of the identity behind the screen and keyboard?"

In my recent explorations of net identity, I offer the conclusion that the reality of these identities is real in so far as they are our virtual realities (which are intrinsically subjective/mediated). What we need to come to grips with is that this is a reality that marks our modern day existence in a huge way. As critical as I myself am of the "reality" of our virtual reality and the constructed identities abound on the net, I am slowly realizing that virtual reality is something we have to embrace as a powerful force in our immediate reality.

In questions of reality, I now recall Plato's theory of the forms (the three forms of the couch). The virtual identities we create are like the painting of the couch, which is at a third remove from Plato's notion of a real, ideal couch. Virtual realities are our digital art form, to paint ourselves how we want to appear.

That power technologies have granted us is part of our reality. It's sort of like MTVs the Real World, where the producers and directors are able to cut and paste footage from film of so-called "real life" and reconstruct it to build an alternate television reality: one that's a little more exciting, a little more dramatic, or perhaps, in some scenarios, a little more censored.

But in the grander scheme of things, shows like the Real World are our modern day reality. Our increased taste for such shows during the late 20th and early 21st century was a precursor to our indulgence of blogging culture shortly after. Xanga, Friendster, and Myspace allowed us a space for our own confessionals. If I couldn't get chosen to be filmed spilling my guts on an MTV show, then this was good enough.

You see, our version of reality is undeniably seen through the artistic lenses of fast-paced, widely-used technology. The more we find out what's going on in the real world through mediums like Facebook, the more our reality resembles the third form of Plato's couch.

Or have we reached a new form? There's the ideal form of the couch, the physical couch, the painting of the couch, and now, the photo-shopped, online profile version of the couch?! Perhaps Plato did not foresee that there would one day be a fourth, digital form, at a further remove from his idea of reality.

And yet, this is what is so very real to us in our modern day existence. We cannot escape it. Try as I may, this blog post, like any blog posts I've ever done before,is an inextricable part of my reality, my real-life identity as well as my online identity; my real-life identity because I choose to engage with the virtual space through blogging my thoughts and sharing my identity(some people refuse to have online profiles or blogs of any sort), and my online identity because I convey messages about how I relate to the internet and net culture. And let it be known that the assertions I set forth here are very real to me. Subjective as my words are, I will maintain that the person typing on the other side of this computer screen is really me, Hana Visaya.

"James Kotecki: Video Blogger"

2007-12-05T01:27:00.000-08:00

Our class video conference with James Kotecki was the most memorable class period of the quarter. I often think about the rise of Youtube or video blogging celebrities such as Kotecki, and one of my favorite new artists, Marie Digby, who aired on Star 98.7 after she was discovered on Youtube. A lot of times, it seems that these video bloggers are simply doing what they love, reporting politics in a fun way, or making acoustic covers of popular music, not wanting or anticipating the fame that can literally happen overnight. Digby has a record deal now. Kotecki landed a job with Politico.com. And they are veritable cyber-celebrities, but where does something like Kotecki's current job begin exactly? I had the opportunity to ask him a bit about it. Here's a re-cap of my class notes, Kotecki's responses to my questions etc.:

Regarding how he got started, Kotecki says...

"I realized there was a low standard for what people can do to be popular [on spaces like Youtube]. I decided I would try an experiment to see how popular I could get by rehashing presidential candidates' news. I really just wanted to see how popular I could get."

"I started out making short videos in my dorm room."

Praises and critiques about life in the Youtube world....

(+) POSITIVES

"See, the thing about Youtube, is that it should be a conversation, a dialogue...and I think a lot of the time it achieves that two-way dialogue."

"It emphasizes participatory culture, and I get instant feedback, sometimes within three or four hours of a post. Sometimes there are video responses."

"Specifically thinking about the political debate concept, candidates operating on live feed need to be much more candid. It's like a town hall format, and I feel, a step in the right direction. It increases the legitimacy of the candidates' answers, and tests their ability to improvise and spin the answer in their own interest. It features dialogue which is possibly censored on mainstream news."

"Youtube and internet culture offers a level playing field helping to launch careers everywhere. It made me who I am today."

"It's simply a great space for fun, quirky videos."

(-) NEGATIVES

"I acknowledge that net culture can be vicious, vile, sexist, homophobic... but that's just the nature of the internet".

"Sometimes people say is that all it takes is quality [to become popularized on the internet], but that's not necessarily true. A lot of it is luck and timing."

When asked how he actively defines and redefines his internet identity as a professional political blogger....

"I do a lot of pattern studies, subscribe to a lot of political channels..."

"Sold out? NO! I bought in."

When asked about his job at Politico.com...

"I like the flexibility of sustaining my living this way. I never thought I would be doing this, that's for sure. "

"I'm more hardened to critiques now, and I'm comfortable with the attention." Kotecki remembers being recognized and praised on a subway in New York, but says, "I'm not that famous...not famous at all!"

"I love the performance aspect, skewing more towards entertainment rather than anything too serious...There's definitely no way to watch [Playbook TV] and get your fill of the day's news...it's a quick political fix...sometimes people tell me 'I get my news from you,' and my response to that is 'WHY?!!"

"I have three to four thousand subscribers who hopefully benefit from my web presence, and expand their political minds a little bit."

"I think I'd have more success as an attractive, young woman on Youtube."

Anxieties about his private life as a result of his internet persona?

"I think my subscribers like the fact that I'm a real person, so I kept my Facebook profile as real as it was before. "

"I have, however, experienced some reputation restriction. On Facebook, I've censored things that are damning, and I've deleted critical comments [from others] on Youtube."

Final thoughts about forging interesting online personas and developing them?

"(1) KEEP A NARROW FOCUS: something that you know about and are interested in
(2) HAVE A PLAN: for a script and editing, with time left to play around
(3) ENJOY!"

*** I can definitely enjoy Kotecki's net presence. He inspires a sense of opinionated edge with which to color the dry world of factual news. I think he represents a refreshing rawness of character, and frames valid, informed political opinion in such a way that is comedic and entertaining, but that also provokes the want and need for more information. His work is a sound opportunity for youth who, as a whole generation, are sweepingly apathetic about politics to take their typical hunger for immediate self-gratification somewhere else to eat for once. ***

Self-Censorship on the Net : Managing Your Net Rep for Potential Employers

2007-12-04T00:28:00.000-08:00

During the summer, I laughed at a friend of mine for Googling the guy she was starting to date at the time. A quick search, and she found out that his past self wasn't the well-dressed, party boy, and hip-hop dancer-DJ that he appeared and claimed to be in the present. In fact, he was someone that graced the academic scene at Northeastern University with his severely, stereotypically "nerdy" ways (something I found attractive, but she apparently did not). She found his old Friendster account, found him breaking any number of fashion rules, and then proceeded to retroactively judge him based on some internet findings. The poor guy...I defended him, and his right to be who he is today, and who he was yesterday, in peace. I had spoken with him extensively about international career goals and traveling, and found him to be a very impressive conversationalist. So what, I told my friend, if his past-life wardrobe and hair cuts were so horribly offensive? Does he not show evidence of a serious style make-over? So what, I demanded, if he was more so an Indian bhangra dance DJ than a top-forties-esque hip-hop one? He didn't lie about his rich schooling and business history. He did not really lie about being a DJ either, per se, although he skewed or rather hid the actuality of things to some degree. We censor ourselves all the time in day-to-day interactions with people. But I think where it seems to count more nowadays, we do not think to censor ourselves, and that place which to which I am referring is (surprise, surprise) the internet.

Google "Hana Visaya". Search "Hana Visaya" on Facebook or Myspace. You will not be able to help but judge me. I cannot stop you. Little did that unsuspecting guy know, the "truth" which concerned my friend was only a link, click, and a load away. And he was out of a date! Out of sheer curiosity, I even helped dish the DJ details when I stumbled upon a site featuring download-able sample clips of his old work. With distaste for his beats, my overly critical friend (who, by the way, works for Kiis FM, a popular hit radio station) was even more turned off, saying that he had been bragging about music that was clearly not worthy of boasting about.

So he's out of a date with my friend at least. Too bad, so sad. I like to think that somewhere out there, a girl is going to Google that man and be happy with the search results. But what if I'm not looking for a date? What if I'm looking for a job?

What I'm more worried about is the potential sabotage of our professional lives because of employer access to social networking sites. The following Youtube video, taken from a CBS news broadcast, talks about employers seeing past our interview face by looking at our internet face...

MYSPACE//FACEBOOK: EMPLOYERS ARE WATCHING

Tim DeMello, the employer being interviewed, estimates that 20% of employers are doing net scans of potential employees before their interviews. The notion of an internet "footprint" scares me a little. It made me think twice about anything I've ever had on any online profile, whether they were public, private, or even deleted. Somewhere out there in cyber space, I feel like they're haunting me, taunting me with the possibility that a potential boss will one day hack into those things, and not like what they see. This is largely unwarranted paranoia that I'm experiencing, I feel, but at the same time, the fear is valid. If one thing can tip an interviewer off in an instant (say, you're wearing a case full of perfume or cologne), one little blurb, one tagged photo...anything on Facebook can rub them the wrong way. DeMello's right in pointing out that some students really don't care that anything and everything about them is exposed by Facebook, and that they need to metaphorically "cover-up" with a more careful, professional online identity. It's just not enough to polish your resume anymore, it seems. The following video from the UK agrees, we need to manage our net reputations.

MANAGE YOUR NET REP

I think that the rhetorical set-up of this video is powerful because it cleverly juxtaposes the interview setting and the interview persona (buttoned up, polished, and eager to sell himself), with the all-too-common online persona who lets it all go ("Loosen Up My Buttons" by the Pussy Cat Dolls comes into mind). I think people forget that the internet is a public space.

The statistics in the video are striking. 59% of the one in five employers who admittedly scan online profiles say it influences their decision!!! I scoped the site advertised at the end: "viadeo.com/netrep". It's fascinating to me that a business opportunity exists solely to help others "clean up" their internet reputations. The website's purpose is backed by a series of studies conducted by the independent market research company, YouGov. If you get a chance, please read the full report featured on the site called "What does your Net Rep say about You? A study of how your internet reputation can influence your career prospects". It's really interesting and eye-opening: a reminder that we never know who is watching us online.

'The Facebook Effect', a Newsweek Cover Story (August 2007)

2007-12-03T08:08:00.000-08:00

In an article, "Facebook Grows Up", from the August 2007 Newsweek Magazine, Steven Levy analyzes the effect of social media, specifically Facebook, on digital society and the business world.

I remember the first big push for Facebook accounts when I was a freshman in the dorms here at UC Irvine. The site was just getting off the ground, and I was just getting acclimated into the blogging culture. My Xanga blog, as well as my Myspace account were as fresh as my crisp, new first set of extra-long twin sheets. When Facebook became popularized, I relished in the exclusive feeling I got from knowing it was strictly a college network. After its launch, Facebook morphed into a rocket soaring through the greater universe, taking with it high school teens and post-college career types, as well as its original university demographic. For many of its users, Facebook's role is a force that, like it or not, rules their lives as an undeniable addiction, or even a hyper-religious ritual.

Going along with the sacred quality I quickly afforded to Facebook, I was particularly upset when the site opened up to non-university students. Facebook was like Smeagol's "precious" in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and we were fighting for the privilege of calling it our own. I was admittedly a bit annoyed that high school seniors who had just received their college acceptance letters had jumped right on board. We, the "collegiate elite", weren't all that special anymore. We are all special now... Levy writes: "[Facebook's] people claim that more than half its 35 million active users are not college students, and that by the end of this year less than 30% of Facebook users will sport college IDs" (42). High school students are on Facebook now. Parents are on Facebook now. And it should come as no surprise that big businesses as well as budding business opportunities are all over Facebook now. The network is an ever-growing spider web in which to capture us: not just in the form of hundreds of snapshots or profile blurbs, but as food for the giant spider of advertising.

We make the advertiser's jobs easier for them, if you think about it. Not until a few months ago, and until I took this class have I really thought about what kind of people have access to my profile, and what they might be doing with it.

Facebook's current price tag is about seven or eight billion bucks, which rivals the value of MTV, according to some recent reports. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook at the age of nineteen, says, "Facebook is (1) not a social-networking site but a 'utility', a tool to facilitate the information flow between users and their compatriots, family members and professional connections; (2) not just for college students, and (3) a world-changing idea of unlimited potential" (42). It is interesting to consider his vision for the site, which most other people would readily call a social-networking site. What interests me is the notion of its unlimited potential.

One of my friends, Matt, and I had a conversation one night about Facebook's ultimate direction. Although I do not know his sources, he claims that one of Facebook's final goals is to let the internet technology auto-generate news stories of events. The idea of Facebook as a tool for building what Zuckerberg calls a "social graph" is right along these lines. Matt said that the mini-feed was only the beginning, that one day a short article could form from a cyber composite of the event invite, all related photos, notes and attendee comments/reviews. One day, my friend was so convinced, we would not have to remember what happened at that crazy concert or party on Friday night. Facebook would generate the memories for us. And furthermore, it would offer all possible angles and experiences from all those remotely involved.

Does anyone feel threatened by that possibility? I do.

Facebook is, perhaps, a self-imposed Big-Brother system that is cleverly disguised as fun. And pretty soon, it will claim all of us. Or at least that's what the main players in Facebook would like to happen. Those vampires...they got me!

"Karel Baloun, an engineer who worked at Facebook until last year, recalls vividly the baldly stated prediction of one of the company's cofounders: 'In five years...we'll have everybody on the planet on Facebook", Levy reports (42). (Side note: never mind those technologically deficient countries, shall we...but we'll get to the global technological divide at a later date.)

The site is catching like wild fire in Canada and in London, primarily, and is steadily gaining popularity among other places around the world (45). Is it not so far off to say that the developed nations of the world will have most of their population (young and professional alike) aboard the Facebook train in five years time? I'm still doubtful. Zuckerberg is soon to launch Facebook in other languages, but even still, I don't see my parents' generation signing up. My mom only occasionally enjoys utilizing her children's Facebook and Myspace profiles because they allow her to search for estranged friends and relatives' kids ("I want to see how they look like now," she says.)

David Rodnitzky, a marketing executive in San Francisco, criticizes some of the new applications on Facebook as not being the best way to interact in the 'grown-up' environment. Business colleagues, he said, shouldn't ask personal questions on the "My Questions" applications, or head-butt their bosses on "Super-Poke" (45). There's the personal issue of settling down and wanting more private, intimate lives in the family or business sphere; then again, other family people are eager to post photos of their newborns, or advertise their new position at the office. It goes both ways.

One thing is clear, however. Facebook has changed and is continually changing the way we live. An author named Robert Putnam states that "Facebook was originally a classic 'alloy', bonding the Internet and the real world", but that now "it feels less rooted in real life"(46). That gives me something else to think about when I sickeningly recall how many times I log in daily: how rooted in real life am I?

But that reminds me...I'll go log in...right NOW!

Rules for "Net IDentity"

2007-11-05T00:12:00.000-08:00

Blog posts must involve some aspect of net identity.

Blog posts must analyze and/or discuss some other writing and issues found therein: it could be a magazine article, another blog, a website blurb. In the true spirit of learning about rhetoric, I feel this is necessary. As long as the writings are relevant to the specific net identity featured in the post, I am entitled to include multiple works.

Strive for greater use of images, links, videos and other digital media. Try to think outside the box: link to online games etc.

Don’t be afraid of racy topics; as long as they are discussed in a professional, academic way, this will make the blog more intriguing to others. Be daring.

Try to read other people’s blogs about the related issues. Add a blog to the blog roll whenever possible.

Experiment with creating digital media whenever possible.

Always try to learn something new when posting blogs. And try to teach something as well. Make people, including yourself, more conscious of their own net identities and their own use of digital rhetoric. That should be the ultimate goal.

An Introduction to NetID

2007-10-21T23:44:00.000-07:00

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This

id [id] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

–noun Psychoanalysis.

the part of the psyche, residing in the unconscious, that is the source of instinctive impulses that seek satisfaction in accordance with the pleasure principle and are modified by the ego and the superego before they are given overt expression.

[Origin: 1920–25; <>id it, as a trans. of G Es, special use of es it, as a psychoanalytic term]

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This

ID [ahy-dee] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

1.	a means of identification, as a card or bracelet containing official or approved identification information.

–verb (used with object) ID'd or IDed or ID'ed, ID'ing or ID·ing.

2.	to identify.

3.	to issue an ID to: Go to the admissions office if you haven't been ID'd yet.

***

The internet has added another dynamic facet to our identities. We carry our driver's license and our school IDs on our person, but often times, we can proffer our Myspace or Facebook profiles to anyone who asks much faster than it would take to retrieve our wallets from our purses or pockets.

The concept of net identity is a complex and fascinating one. I think about it often enough: what net identity do I want to have? Who am in this vast cyber society? A blogging babe? The tell-all type, perhaps....

*I remember my early flirtations with the World Wide Web. We met over a free trial of America On-Line, and it was love at first click. Net and I hooked up (dial-up style…it was hot), and my life was never the same. Even if I tried, I don’t think I could ever escape his charms: Net is the ultimate lover, and I can’t think of anyone who would dare say no to him. The internet is undeniably irresistible, the epitome of attraction and distraction...*

...perhaps something else will suit me better.

Freud's notion of the "id" is very much like the portrayals of netID world wide. Dictionary.com offers the following definition for id: "the source of instinctive impulses that seek satisfaction in accordance with the pleasure principle." I find the internet to be a space where 'instinctive impulses' roam freely as bloggers everywhere shamelessly post about their lives in vivid detail; in some cases, with photos and Youtube videos to match. And it's so easy to get caught up, to get lost in the thrill of bearing it all in this profile or that one, under this screen name, or that other one you cleverly concocted once upon a time.

Keeping the definition of id in mind, now with special attention on the words "seek satisfaction", consider the natural human desire for attention, affection, and human connectivity. Being the innately social creatures that we are, it's no wonder we live in the age of social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. The experience of these sorts of online communities covers all those bases of satisfaction. The internet is HUMAN CONNECTIVITY to the extreme. A hip-hop group called The Foreign Exchange birthed their music online. Impressive as their underground sound is, it comes as a shock that the members “have never held a telephone conversation: never met face to face. That's right. Breaking the current barriers set up between music and geography, The Foreign Exchange conceptualized, conceived and completed [their album] Connected by means of instant messenger and the world wide web” [www.okayplayer.com]. AFFECTION comes in the form of comments or virtual gifts. (Why compliment them in person when you can comment with little hearts and kudos?! Or why go to the 99 cent store and buy a card, when you can comment and buy a little icon on Facebook for the person whose name flashes on your birthday reminders today? Instant thoughtfulness!)

I’ve read two articles recently on the issue of blog/profile culture, one of which was entitled “The Decline and Fall of the Private Self,” something I found in an issue of Psychology Today; I agreed completely with some assertions I was presented with therein, namely that we often divulge too much of ourselves in these online spaces, that we suffer from a sort of celebrity-syndrome. That is, online communities allow us to feel like we were all casted in the latest and greatest season of The Real World. And there we have the ATTENTION component: a way to paint a picture of ourselves in our own "real" way, by posting certain photos, and showcasing selective movies or quotes or whatever.

Online profiles allow us to say, ‘This is who I am, and this is what I like or don’t like’ in such a way that produces a feeling of importance, however big or small. Even if you make your profile a private profile, you’re still making a statement about yourself by doing so. You still have an audience, and you imply the following message: 'behold, unfortunate un-friended ones - to you, I will remain a mystery :P!'

Whether you like to admit it or not, some part of you enjoys the feeling of being the center of the cyber stage thanks to some web address(es). Others of you know very well that you love attention. When we pop up on the facebook mini-feed from time to time, there’s a part of us that is relishing in that 15 seconds of fame. I exist! I have new friends/ I know your friends! I posted something. I’m posting this. This is me…or at least some the netID version 4.0 of me, copyright Facebook 2007 me, updated 2 minutes ago me!

When we write for the public in a blog, like I am doing right now, our words are, in a way, a show. We take some degree of care with what we write and how we write it because we are consciously or subconsciously expecting a reaction (not necessarily a particular reaction, but a reaction nonetheless) whenever we publish something. Like when we tag people in a note, we’re saying, ‘Hey, look here!’ and sometimes we even have particular agendas, certain people we’ll want to elicit some sort of mental or emotional response from. On other occasions, we simply want to “let go” of something…to all of our Facebook or Myspace friends, all the hundreds of them out there floating around in this cyber www.onderland. And our netID-self hopes that they care.