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New York Times to Charge for Web Content

by Ben Atlas on 01.20.2010.10:07am · 0 comments

Great news, hopefully all medai sources follow this example. I have no doubt it will be more profitable than the print news ever was.The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site:

“The New York Times announced Wednesday that it intended to charge frequent readers for access to its Web site, a step being debated across the industry that nearly every major newspaper has so far feared to take.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.”

“Early 2001″, why not now?

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Sex, Lies, and Videotape in Boro Park

by Ben Atlas on 11.18.2009.8:58am · 0 comments

24-year-old Motty Borger jumped from the balcony of a hotel in Brooklyn the night after his wedding. The New York Post postmortem – Suicide groom twist reports that Motty Borger told his bride he was a victim of abuse . And now the subterranean blogosphere is eruption red-hot with the allegations that the epicenter of the abuse might be around the same tree from where the apple has fallen. “A videographer”, come again, WTF is a videographer? Oh I get it, it’s like you have all the bar mitzvah boys on tape. It’s very easy to check if there are videos of the boys (and girls) strapping more than a pair of tefillin. What would they think of next, perhaps a boy’s choir? If there are any grownups with the faint memories of their prepubescent voices, this would be a good time to sing.

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Revisiting Zizek, Sharansky and the Messianic Gene of Democracy

by Ben Atlas on 11.9.2009.5:05pm · 0 comments

Sir George Clausen, Study of a group of field workers, ca. 1901

On the subject of my post Psoy Korolenko – Ekh Lyuli Lyuli. OK, I am done speaking about Slavoj Zizek without actually reading his work. Today’s article in the NYT is a good start – 20 Years of Collapse. I find his views refreshing, nothing to disagree about. In fact the views of democracy, as a self-fulfilling utopia, ring true to me:

“Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”

It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated …

What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.”

A monumental shift occurred in America over the past decades. The appeal of the American model was not because you could become rich here, people instinctively understand that’s a lottery. The American appeal was because a mechanic in Detroit can live a comfortable life where his hard work is rewarded. This all changed. The rich got themselves the access to the global workforce and the middle class got pretty much demolished. There are structural changes in this country and not a single person knows how it will all play out.

At the same time America went to war(s) to impose its way of life on the savage world. The ideological underpinning and motivations came courtesy of Natan Sharansky and the Jewish neocons. It was the messianic vision – the flame of democracy engulfing the world (iz iskry vozgoritse plamya). The vision of the messianic peace and prosperity. But the realities of Iraq and Afghanistan put an end to the rhetoric and as always in history the messianic good intentions inevitably lead to bloodshed and massive death. Appropriately a post religious Russian Jew Natan Sharansky found new metaphors to articulate the central reckless messianic ethos of our Russian Jewish heritage. So we now have two pillars of the democratic utopia collapsing in front of our very eyes. America is no longer the model with its ruinous middle class and the repelled and defeated democratic jihad in the Middle East.

The so-called Chinese and Russian democracies are monarchical lordships, with no middle class to begin with. It took decades for America to destroy its middle class and Russia and China pretty mush had a clean slate. And this is the reason for the perceived and actual economic efficiencies in Russia and especially in China. No middle class to get in a way, just super rich apparatchiks and people who are accustomed to punishing work and orders. No such luck in America, weighted down by the obsolete middle class. The whiny and spoiled populace with unmet expectations. In this context Slavoj Zizek’s is honest and timely:

“How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism and disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for new Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search for justice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.”

P.S. Performance of US stock market recently decoupled from the economic reality. The rate of the dollar is more important for a global corporation than the unemployed one-third of the American workforce. As long as the global markets are intact to manufacture and sell, who cares about the American middle class.

Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts

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RSSCloud brought down to earth by wordpress.com

by Ben Atlas on 09.7.2009.8:03pm · 0 comments

Dave Winer invented RSS (Really Simple Syndication) ten years ago. You can’t really use the web and especially read blogs today without RSS. But there have been a structural flaw in the RSS specs. It was designed as a pull rather than a push service. When a post is published on a blog it sends a ping to let know different RSS client services to come and fetch the content, hence the delay. Recently there is up to 2-3 hours delay between a post being published and appearing in Feedburner for example (I actually don’t mind it gives me a little time to fix my typos and my terrible grammar). But real time syndication is very important to bloggers. RSS delay did damage to the time critical breaking news distributions and the real time conversation. This lead to all the chatter about Twitter being the new real time platform and the death of the RSS… Not so fast. Wordress.com just announced that it included RSSCloud format for all the blogs that they host. RSSCloud also created by Dave Winer is a push service that sends out post like emails to the special clients (there is currently only one client). More on Read Write Web.

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Free for All Permission Sharing

by Ben Atlas on 07.6.2009.8:25pm · 17 comments

I am jumping into the fray of the “free for all” debate. Seth Godin linked the most pertinent articles on Squidoo.

It seems that everyone takes the side and the virtual direction of his own shingle. Seth Godin in Malcolm is wrong speaks like a marketer, the internet allowed focused marketing (permission) campaigns and lubricated the display of a product, free samples and branding.

Fred Wilson speaks like a VC in Freemium and Freeconomics. As a banker Fred’s goal is to maximize the investment and while the cost of the delivery of the content is near zero, it would be most useful if the content itself is also zero. After all Google, Facebook and Twitter are not in the content creation business, they collate, sort, annotate and store what people give them for free. In Fred’s recent post about his vision for a newspaper he speaks more directly about the subject of the debate – Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media:

“If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I’d do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I’d do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.”

Notice that nowhere in the business plan is there even a concern about how the creators of the original content get paid. The idiots just post it on Flickr and YouTube so the “editors” can start curating… It’s all deposited for free and distributed almost for free so that the bankers can scale, kill the remaining competition and maximize the return on the investment in the aggregator. This is when the “freemium” thingy kicks in. After all competition is demolished, the writers will come and beg to be published for free. And the mighty curators will rescue the lowly content creators from the abyss of obscurity. The “editors” will set fees for the writers on par with the sneaker makers in Bangladesh to make sure the adverse conditions spur the creative juices. I mean who needs Christiane Amanpour when CNN does such a good job live narrating YouTube videos during the Iran revolution? That makeup the announcers use on air has to be the most expensive part of the report. Literally no skin in that game, somebody gets bloody and you just run it on CNN freely with the ads in-between.

There is a post by Mark Cuban – Free vs Freely Distributed. Amongst his numerous business achievements Mark is an investor in Television. So I wasn’t surprised when Mark essentially articulated a TV business model. The content is distributed for free but where and how the content is displayed and monetized is tightly controlled by the content creators. Again, this is your TV model, Mark Cuban writes:

“They should distribute their content for Free where they believe it maximizes return, but should do everything possible to keep it from being distributed Freely.”

And now the idea that has been circling in my head. Permission Marketing means that you need my permission to send me an email about a product. Why don’t you need my explicit permission to use my content? You can use my photos, my text, etc, but you have to ask and agree on the terms, even if it’s free.

Ban all “embeds” and “cut & pastes”. I mean it! Redefine the internet share culture. An example, suppose Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is using a Flickr photo to illustrate his post with a credit to the photographer, naturally. Next this photo will get indexed and tagged with Guy’s text. The photo will be archived in the Google image library with Guy’s URL and will bring traffic to his blog, but rarely anything back to the original photographer. This doesn’t seem right? If you let the bird out of the cage there has to be some compensation for the person who fed and raised that bird. I remember circa 1998? Jim Cramer couldn’t get over the fact that financial Reuters feeds that previously cost thousands of dollars on the Bloomberg Terminals suddenly became free on Yahoo! This is where the trouble started!

Solution as I said is straightforward – no republishing of content without the explicit permission from a creator. No “cut & paste” and no “embeds” (brief quotes to make a point are OK). If there is one thing we did learn from Twitter is that you don’t need to republish to share. Links are perfectly fine for sharing and links should be encouraged. But free “share alike” reposts (or the widespread outright content theft) without permission are at the root of this malice.

There is already a model in the newspaper industry, the traditional opinion syndication. You want to publish editorials by Charles Krauthammer, go to Washington Post and negotiated the weekly fee (I did just that when I run a news web site). The copyright law never caught up with the internet reality and the Creative Commons license is unresponsive to the changing reality. RSS culture created the impression that content is permanently detached from the source. The remedy is to to banish the “embed” mentality! The internet sharing culture must be tweaked and reconsidered to allow people to get paid for their creative efforts.

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Desk-bound Bloggers and the Iran Revolution

by Ben Atlas on 06.21.2009.6:27pm · 0 comments

There is interesting article in the Economist that gets it right (if you don’t count the lip service to the MSM). On the first night of the Iran revolution Twitter was superb and comprehensible, then it quickly disintegrated into unmanageable volume of repetitive low value messages. The old media had been reduced to the pathetic reporting about YouTube videos. And the clear winners are the blogs that can curate and filter the river of news. Economist – Twitter 1, CNN 0:

“Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.

Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English. The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.”