MediaSavvy

The Web has become the universal library that a lot of futurists have dreamed of, but one that is completely different from what they foresaw:

• Information can be added to the library without anyone’s permission.
• Its indexing system is networked, not hierarchical.
• A lot of the information is wrong, unsourced, out of date, incomplete, or misleading presented.
• The fundamental unit of organization is the page, not the book.
• The information is largely untagged for keywords, topics covered, taxonomy, bibliogrphy, ownership, or creation date.

This goes against the grain and the conventional wisdom of information theorists, librarians, academics, policy-makers, academics, futurists, censors, law enforcement officers, intellectual propery owners, technologists, anal retentives and other stake holders and authorities. It’s…anarchy.
This takes some getting used to. Efforts to create a semantic Web, sell content, impose digital rights management, control linking, limit access, and standardize markup each may be marginalized by the populism of dirt-simple HTML, crawled by spiders, and created by amateurs for their own entertainment and that of their current and future friends: A billion users, all typing (and linking) as fast as they can think.
The universal library is here today and it can answer most real questions faster than the fastest proprietary database or reference librarian or science fiction computer.
A lot of official sources obsess about the (staggering) amount of misinformation on the Web. I knew the tide was turning when the other day a journalist friend told me something he’d heard and then said to me, “I’m not sure if that’s true, I should verify it on the Internet.”
What makes this mountain of dross so astonishingly valuable is the links, the information in the spaces between the information. We all benefit from this network of links. Every site that points to you, every site that points to a site that points to you, increases the value of your information to you and to the Net as a whole. Everyone wins.
Anything that diminishes the value of these links (subscription-based sites, deep-linking policies, moving free information to paid databases after a couple of weeks, or simply allowing links to die with your old content management system) diminishes the value of the Web beyond the simple loss of the information removed from circulation.

There’s a must-read conversation about media synergy between Anne Kreamer and Kurt Andersen at Fast Company. Andersen, who will always be known as the founding editor of Spy, is probably the most insightful observer of the media business. Some highlights:

AK: At a dinner with a few senior AOL Time Warner executives this past summer, just before Bob Pittman left, I asked good-naturedly, What was the mission of the company? The best answer was, “Well, we have to be more aggressive about our marketing and ad-sales packages.”
KA: What’s incredible to me is that most moguls still believe in size as the ultimate imperative. … When I had dinner with Rupert Murdoch at the TED conference earlier this year, I was flabbergasted when he sincerely fretted that News Corp. wasn’t big enough to compete effectively.

The conversation concludes with a comparison of media ecology to urban planning: a media culture should be like a vibrant downtown, with unique, unplanned, unstructured choices within easy walking distance. As much as I love Jane Jacobs, A Pattern Language, and The Geography of Nowhere, I never made this analogy, which is dead-on and extremely useful.

Fortune, unchastened in its shameless sucking up to CEO’s, is running a puff piece about Terry Semel at Yahoo. The story suggests that he’s really shaking things up by doing a deal with Overture and buying HotJobs.

By early this summer the partnership was responsible for an estimated 10% of Yahoo’s $226 million in second-quarter revenues–all with Yahoo’s barely lifting a finger or spending a dime.
So it’s no surprise why Yahoo did the deal: The listings are a rare bright spot in another year of advertising malaise. One question: Why didn’t Yahoo do this earlier?
The answer, says Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, has a lot to do with Yahoo’s vision of itself during the bubble. “In addition to doing a lot of great things, Yahoo had a sense of arrogance, of we-invented-this,” he says, fiddling with his silver-rimmed glasses. “If we are going to succeed, we have to have people with different attitudes.”

It’s not clear how the Overture deal is bolder than Yahoo’s original search deal with Altavista, or how buying HotJobs is different from buying Geocities or 411.
And in a more thoughtful article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the advertising market is dismissed by (also unchastened) Wall Street analysts hungry for breakthrough services. Supposedly, Yahoo’s stock is supposedly suffering as a result. But it has outperformed the S&P 500, AOL/TW, the AMEX Internet Index, and DoubleClick this year.
Both articles highlight Yahoo’s upcoming broadband ISP deal with SBC as an important test of Semel’s leadership and Yahoo’s viability. But SBC is the ISP in this relationship. Yahoo is providing some (generic) services — a Yahoo browser a 125 megabytes of e-mail storage — and its (unique) brand to the deal. At its heart this kind of licensing deal is the equivalent of looking for change in your sofa cushions.
Until Yahoo recognizes that

• “Yahoo” one of the most important brands on the Net.
• Paid consumer services and brand-licensing deals are only going to provide marginal revenue, and only if Yahoo maintains its brand.
• Its core businesses are its portal, advertising, and online services and they are badly in need of a makeover.
• Broadband is a distraction from its core business.

… the full, extraordinary value of the Yahoo brand will never be realized.

During the Internet bubble, I talked to a lot of silly companies who claimed a million or two users. I think PointCast reached around a million users before churn stalled their growth.
Interestingly, this is roughly the number of people who speak Esperanto.
Apparently, you can get a couple of million people to do just about anything, but that doesn’t make it a business.

Unless the news industry is willing to stand up for the first amendment rights of the porn business, we’re all going to suffer in the long run.
For nearly a decade the censors have used pornography and terrorism as an excuse to impose filtering on us all and to occupy the Internet’s choke-points. Even the sleaziest news corporations decry porn on the Net, rather than defend the first amendment rights of pornographers and their customers.
Declan MacCullagh’s outstanding Politech site is essential for anyone who cares about what our government is doing to the first amendment in the name of protecting us from ourselves. Declan recently posted a excellent roundup of civil liberties issues and an Internet, pornography, and law update.