Jarrett House North

Dan Gillmor: Newspapers: Open Your Archives. Right on. This is not only the right move from a business model perspective (more in a second) but from a Public Good perspective.

Why is it a good move from the business model perspective? Three things. First, keeping archives publicly accessible increases the newspaper’s share of voice in Google (as Doc Searls and I argued a long time ago). Second, it dramatically increases ad inventory. Third, it lowers the transaction costs for people interested in older information, increasing the likelihood that they’ll go in and find your content—and maybe click on an ad.

Paolo Valdemarin writes about the connection between folksonomy tagging and his proposed ENT extension to RSS 2.0. Go for it, Paolo—and yes, Steve, UserLand should support this extension in Radio and in Manila. I would like to have a structured way to tag posts that’s more flexible than the existing Manila category system.

Two articles on Metafilter, apparently unrelated: identical messages of support for Ashlee Simpson have appeared online in about fifteen message boards, all signed mandyc19, leading some to speculate that a viral marketing company is trying to start a “groundswell” of support for the once-lipsynching, now known to be just-bad singer—Ashleeturfing, if you will. And AOL has confirmed it will discontinue its AOL Newsgroup interface, ending eleven years of easy participation of AOL customers in Usenet (to the chagrin of many old-time Usenet users; see Eternal September). The connection: commercial actions that damage online community.

Communities anywhere are fragile things, born of the tension between their members’ self interest and their recognition that there is value in sharing a common place with other people. The catch is that communities have enormous value, both to their participants and to others outside them. It’s commonly recognized, even outside Cluetrain circles, that users talking to users about your products can have a far greater impact on purchase and use decisions and brand perception than your own marketing efforts.

This value is a double edged sword for both participants. For marketers, authentic user buzz and word of mouth can make or break your product—look at the buzz around the Tivo vs. the (negative) buzz around copy protected CDs for instance. For users, recognition of that value by marketers can lead to increased value for the community. Look, for instance, at the contributions to Usenet usability brought about by first DejaNews and then Google, or the benefit to the blog community from the New York Times’ RSS feeds.

The negative edge of the sword for users is the insidious part. Look at Usenet in 1993 for instance. AOL made an apparently calculated decision that there was value for their members in being able to participate in the Usenet community, which at that time was a vibrant functioning place with social norms and thousands of users. I got one of my better jobs, my gig at the Electronic Text Center at UVA, through a recommendation from a grad student I “met” in a UVA newsgroup.

After September 1993, a lot of that value was destroyed. First, the influx of new AOL users were unaware of the social protocols (read the FAQ; no flaming; every discussion in its proper place) that allowed Usenet to function, and they were coming faster than the existing Usenet users could educate them. Forums like comp.fonts, where once design professionals talked about the future of digital type, deciphered industry announcements, and critiqued type and print designs, turned into echo chambers for the endless “where can i find a free download of this adobe font kthxbye” messages that started to stream in.

And of course, once there was a large audience on Usenet, advertising was only a matter of time. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Canter and Siegel’s infamous green card spam, widely seen as the first commercial spam on the Internet, happened only seven months after AOL opened the floodgates.

Today the Usenet community is all but extinct. There’s still plenty of traffic, but a lot of it—as of August 2003, the last time Microsoft’s Netscan project rendered the treemap, is in porn and binaries, rather than discussions. Faced with the combination of declining value and increasing liabilities (such as the Harlan Ellison lawsuit over the availability of copyrighted works through Usenet), what else could AOL do but shut off the tap?

Or, to look at it another way, once you’ve removed the top of the mountain and stripped out everything of value, there’s no reason to stay there.

So what is the connection to Ashlee Simpson? Take the points in order:

1. Online user community resource (chat rooms and message boards)
2. Recognition of value and attempt to exploit (viral marketing)
3. Destruction of value (i.e. Simpson’s career)

This isn’t new; it’s been going on at least since 1999, when an Internet marketing firm started talking up a young Christina Aguilera’s debut single online (see the WSJ article). But it doesn’t seem to be getting any less clumsy.

What’s the lesson? Community can help a company’s bottom line, but it’s a living thing, not a resource to be exploited, and any attempt on the part of the company to interact with it has to be done honestly and with integrity. If there’s a good example for this, it might be Robert Scoble’s blogging on behalf of Microsoft. Scoble makes his biases clear, but he listens, and he participates in the blogging community according to its norms. Or look at He’s a participating member of the community. That makes all the difference.

(Disclaimer: I worked on online community at Microsoft in 2001, helping to shape the company’s strategy toward working with independent online communities, and in 2004, helping to launch the company’s blog portal. Therefore, there’s a pretty good chance I’m biased in favor of the Microsoft’s efforts.)

According to MSNBC, which has journalistic : apparently today, January 24, is “statistically” the most depressing day of the year. I love the “model” that Dr. Cliff Arnall (a “specialist in seasonal disorders” at the University of Cardiff, Wales) devised to calculate this phenomenon:

I decided to try this formula out, but I quickly ran into a few snags. Being a reasonably intelligent person, I’ve filled in the blanks using Google and a little induction.

So first I tried to substitute for W, or weather. But what is the correct unit? One could postulate that the intended value is temperature in Celsius, so that yields (today) about -5 C. Then take my debts and subtract my salary. Let’s say that I have about $10,000 in student loan debts, about $5,000 in car loans, and $300,000 in mortgage. Leaving out credit cards for a second, that’s $315,000 for big D. And of course right now little d is 0. So the second term is $315,000. So we add that to W… and get -5 C + $315,000, since you can’t add temperatures and dollars.

But hey, just for kicks: let’s postulate that one unit of Celsius is worth $24.84. Why? Because for every degree Fahrenheit ((°F – 32)*5/9 = C) you lower the temperature in your home, you save 2-3% of your total heating bill; so for each unit of Celsius, you should realize 5/9 * 2.5% = 1.38% of your total heating bill. And with oil prices the way they are, my total heating bill this year will be about $1800, so that’s $24.84 per degree Celsius. So on a day like today, with the temperature at -5 C, W is -$124.20, meaning that the first term is $314,875.80. Do these numbers make you wish for a recommended finance site yet? Don’t worry you are not alone. Let’s keep going.

(Of course, this calculation would be totally different if you lived in a part of the country that was fueled by gas, or had a bigger house, or if the price of oil should fall through the floor. But as long as we’re going along with this ridiculous steaming pile of horseshit hypothesis, we’ll continue pulling numbers out of our asses working with the conditions at hand.

So then. The next term in the equation is time since Christmas. Now, it’s been 30 days since St. Nick dropped off his presents. Except in the Ukrainian tradition it’s only been 13 days since Christmas was celebrated (on January 7). So assuming we’re not Ukrainian for a second, we substitute 30 for T, and get 9,446,274 dollar days for the product of the first two terms.

Now we get to Q, or time since failed quit attempt. This one, frankly, is a poser. I haven’t tried to quit anything recently and haven’t had any failures accordingly. But let’s say for the sake of argument that I pledged not to be a smartass yesterday, so my Q would be 1 day (since I’m failing to uphold that pledge in spades in this post). So multiplying that, we get 9,446,274 dollars days squared.

At this point, I should confess that I’m concerned about the units and where they’re all going to go.

The last two numbers are even worse. M is supposed to be low motivation levels and NA the need to take action. You know, I’m feeling pretty damned unmotivated right now, since neither of those numbers shows any signs of having the right dimensions to solve our quandry. Ideally, between the two terms in the denominator, you would see a combination of units like (dollars days squared divided by depression index), so that you would end up with depression index in the numerator when you worked everything through. Instead, you’ll end up with dollars days squared divided by motivation and need. Does that sound like depression to you?

Don’t forget that the formula predicts you’ll be substantially less depressed today if you’re Ukrainian. Or that your depression will increase, all other things being equal, until it reaches a maximum on December 24. Or January 6, if you’re … you get the drift.

The point? This weekend, there was a conference at the Berkman Center on Blogging, Journalism and Credibility. If you were to take this one piece of “journalism” from MSNBC, you’d find it fails every possible credibility test: the formula is impossible to interpret or verify, and there is no context (other than a few quotes from PR spokesmen and a random physician) in which to judge Arnall’s credibility. A link to a paper, a biography, or something would be helpful to allow people to judge the truth for themselves.

But I guess it was too much for them to Google him and find his instructor’s bio at Cardiff, which states that he is a “health psychologist specializing in confidence building and stress management.” Hmm. Yes, I feel more confident already.