My Brush with Chris Anderson

I had a fun accidental exchange with Wired Magazine editor and author of The Long Tail Chris Anderson last night.

This is how it happened:

I was watching a TED video that I decided to share over Facebook. In order to do that, I have to copy the link to the video page, sign into my Facebook account, go to my profile page, and share it through the standard link sharing functionality found there. Recently, I helped Shiv Singh and Jesse Pickard publish a deck about Facebook Connect, Facebook's newest API which will allow websites to enables websites and users to:

1. Sign into a website using their Facebook Account
   
2. Import their social graph to third party websites
   
3. Design functionality and personalization around the data contained within the social graph
   
4. Export their activity from these third party sites, back to Facebook through the newsfeed feature
   

It's the type of thing that would work beautifully with a website like TED, given TED's naturally viral nature. On a side note, I also wanted to suggest that they set up an affiliate partnership with Amazon so they could promote TED speaker's books through the website, and at the same time develop a small revenue stream to help TED grow. So, I went to go find the feedback spot, but to no avail. So I looked for someone in the NY office that could possibly make a difference: I found their editor Chris Anderson. I happen to be re-reading The Long Tail right now and it just made sense that the author of The Long Tail, and the curator of TED should be the same person. Apparently, it is only a coincidence. At the time I did not know that, so I went to go find Chris Anderson's email address, which was surprisingly easy to do. Here is the brief exchange:

Me:

Subject: Facebook Connect & TED

Message:

Hi,

I don't think I really need to say much more than the subject line of this email… it would be great. I constantly send videos I watch on TED to my friends through Facebook, and have converted quite a few to fervent followers. I wish I could broadcast to my community every video I favorite without having to manually post the link.

That, plus the benefit of SSID and the layering of my social graph onto my TED experience would give me a lot more to do on TED than simply watch videos.

On a separate note, I think you guys should also be offering TED speaker's books on the TED website. Through an Amazon affiliate program it could even be a revenue stream for TED as well as a great way to help support the speakers. My intuition tells me that the community wouldn't be offended. I recently bought a book, a piece of which should have been diverted to TED instead of Amazon!

Thanks for a great website

Daniel Stern

PS - Not that it necessarily means anything, but I work in User Experience at Razorfish and have a love for social media, and I would happy to help participate in TED in any way that would make sense for me on a volunteer basis. I am truly a fan.

PPS – Thanks for The Long Tail… it was a great read!

Chris:Wrong Chris ;-) It's my namesake that does TED.

Me:No way… That's remarkable. Funny how it automatically made sense that you could be the curator for TED (particularly ironic since the other Chris Anderson also got his start in the magazine world). Sorry for the inconvenience, but I appreciate you taking the time to let me know.

BTW: When is your next book coming out… I've been waiting ever since The Long Tail. Also, if you want to mention something to the other Chris Anderson about Facebook Connect and why it makes sense for TED, I think it would mean more coming from you.

Chris:July 6^th…

Me:Cool… looks interesting, I am looking forward to it. Funny how The Long Tail became a hit, no? Good luck on repeated success.

In the end I felt like more of a nuisance than anything else, but it was a mildly fun and interesting experience none the less. I thought it was really big of him to take the time to write me and let me know that I had the wrong guy, and really indicative of the culture that exists on the web, and in the social media space.

There is one additional coincidence though, that I find worth sharing. The other Chris Anderson, the one who curates TED, also happens to have gotten his start in the magazine business. He started a company called Future which was responsible for more than 130 magazines including PC Gamer, MacAddict, and Business 2.0.

Anyway, that was my last night.

Net Neutrality Hullabaloo

The Wall Street Journal wrote an article on Monday that alleged Google's dealings with ISP's over CDN's and "edge caching" to violate net neutrality principles. The Wall Street Journal seems to have gotten the issues dead wrong, however, causing quite an uproar in the community. The most informative components of this article reside in the 'comments' section.

Furthermore, The Wall Street Journal drew the ire of Professor Lessig, an internet scholar at Stanford University. You can read his blog responses here (1st one), and here (follow-up).

The article also elicited a response from Google itself, which clearly delineates its intentions and limitations with CDN's and edge caching strategies, and futher expounds on its commitment to net neutrality.

What are the lessons is all of this?

1. The Wall Street Journal does not have a thorough understanding of ISP's, internet infrastructure, bandwidth, or net neutrality.

2. Professor Lessig is more preoccupied with defending that his position hasnt shifted, rather than the meat and potatoes whats really important here.

3. Google is doing nothing wrong by trying to bring content faster through the use of CDN's and edge caching.

4. Net neutrality is a really big issue that not enough people understand because they dont know enough about network infrastructure and the business concerns of ISP's and content providers.

5. Obama and the FCC better get this right.

Facebook Connect from Razorfish

Portable Social Graphs - Imagining their Potential

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)

CyberLaw News - 12/5/08

Court Rejects Appeal Over Student-Teacher Drunk MySpace Pics - Ars Technica 12/5/08

CyberLaw News - 11/25/08

• Web Suicide Watchers Tough to Prosecute - CNET 11/24/08
• Making Facebook Safe Against Spam - Facebook blog 11/24/08
• RIAA v. Lessig, Zittrain, Barlow - AlwaysOn 11/25/08
• Judge Says BU Can't Turn Over Infringers' IPs in P2P Case - Ars Technica 11/26/08

Obama Online - The Whole Kit and Kaboodle

The Washington post got the scoop on the official numbers regarding president elect Barack Obama's online efforts. Members of Obamas online team, called the Triple O, sat down with The Washington Post and dished the details. So, the numbers are finally out and they are bound to permanently change the way political campaigning and fund raising are done:

• Timespan = 21 months
• 3 million individual online donors (many of whom contributed more than once).
  
• 6.5 million donations made online (6 million of which were $100 or less).
  
• $80 = the average online donation.
• > $500,000,000 = sum of online contributions. (Out of a total of >$640 mil.)

How effective was My.BarackObama.com? Check this out:

• 8,000 web based affinity groups.
• 50,000 local events
• 1.5 million web volunteers
• Unique visitors: 34,024,584
  

These numbers are astounding. It wasn't just the Obama website alone that made this happen. There was tremendous activity all across the social web that acted as an all star supporting cast. Here are some numbers on that:

• Twitter: 122,513 followers and 263 updates.
• Facebook: 3,181,790 supporters
• MySpace Friends: 1,013,121
• YouTube: 114,060,747 cumulative video viewership
• Technorati Results: 788,968
• Google Results for "Barack Obama": 45,700,000

You might be wondering what kind of investment it took to get those kinds of numbers. Well, here ya go:

• $7.97 mllion = amount spent on online advertising before november. (primarily search, ad networks, social networks, local tv sites, newspaper sites, and NBA.com.
• $3.5 million on Google search in OCTOBER ALONE.
• $467,000 went to Facebook in 2008 ($370,000 in September alone).
• Blue State Digital, the company that built the obama site, earned $2,123,402 throughout the course of the campaign.

Here are some fun stats derived from the numbers I just laid out there:

• Barack Obama's online ROI: 6250%
• If $3.5 million was spent on Google SEM in October alone, and most of Obama's campaign funds were raised before October, that means the ROI is considerably higher.
• Conversion Rate (Visitors divided by contributors) = 19%.
  

If you are itnerested for some more in depth knowledge regarding Obama's online efforts, check out these great resources for additional information:

• www.opensecrets.org
• www.techpresident.com
• www.personaldemocracy.com

This is the team that made that all possible, from left to right:

Nikki Sutton, Joe Rospars, Chris Hughes, Kate Albright-Hanna, Scott Goodstein and Sam Graham-Felsen

White Space & Wireless Internet

Currently, Motorola is aggressively developing products which function on a bandwidth known as white space. White space is an electromagnetic frequency, on which analog television is currently broadcast. However, television is moving entirely to digital in the near future, and as a consequence this bandwidth will be freed up. Because this signal / bandwidth is capable of carrying a tremendous amount of information, it has tremendous implications for who has access to broadband and from where.

One of the immediate beneficiaries will be rural America, for whom the cost of cable network development has not been justified, mostly on account of a diminutive population density. Now, these ruralites will be able to access broadband speeds wirelessly in their homes.

Another important group of beneficiaries will be mobile cell phone users. If you thought that the 3G network was fast, you ain't seen nothing yet. Mobile web browsing and data transfer will become lightning quick.

As a consequence, I think we will see a spike in internet usage across the board. One market to keep an eye on will be mobile advertisers and application developers, who will now be able to build out much more complex web dependent functionality that is exceedingly data intensive, and interesting, as a result.

For some more information, watch this video featuring Google's very own Larry Page, and an FCC representative.

CyberLaw News - 11/20/08

1. Arguments in Case Involving Net and Suicide - NYT, 11/20/08
   
2. eHarmony Agrees to Provide Same Sex Matches - NYT, 11/20/08
   
3. Samsung Is Hit With Patent Suits - NYT, 11/17/08
4. Law Professor Fires Back at Music Industry - NYT, 11/17/08
5. Online Age Verification for Children Brings Privacy Worries - NYT 11/15/08
6. Lawmaker Plans Bill on Web Neutrality - NYT 11/14/08
   

What's Ballmer Really Doing?

With all the coverage that the stalled Microhoo! is still getting, I cannot help but wonder if Ballmer is just playing games in an attempt to drive down Yahoo! share prices in order to fetch a better deal.

On Nov. 17th, the announcement came that Yahoo!'s CEO Jerry Yang would be stepping down, causing a strong uptick in Yahoo! share prices from $10.63 to $11.55 a share. The next day, stocks once again fell to $9.14, when Ballmer interjected with yet another affirmation of Microsoft's disinterest in a buyout.

Ted McConnell says Social Media is not Media

Ted McConnell, the GM for interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble, recently ruffled feathers in the social media world by stating that social media is not actually media.
McConnell spoke:

"I really don't want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook..."

"I have a reaction to Facebook as a consumer advocate and an advertiser: What in heaven's name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?"

"Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren't trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. ... We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it."

The statement cause such a dust storm, that it even made it to social media list serve at Razorfish. An interesting debate ensued, to which my first reaction was this:

" First, I think the central point of the article is advertising versus consumer rights (specifically privacy)… ie whether it is morally sound to monetize social media space.

The fact is, if people really took offense to the advertising that is occurring in the “space that they are breaking up with their girlfriend,” then they simply wouldn’t use the service. I believe this is one of the reasons for MySpaces slowed growth turned attrition rate, and for Facebook’s rise: FB has figured out a way to advertise with minimal invasion. Let the market decide whether or not they are willing to bear advertising in their social networks!

Furthermore, customers SHOULD accept advertising in their space. McConnel’s statement portrays a sense of entitlement that I don’t think is warranted. Why should people get to use Facebook for free? It took a lot of hard work to get Facebook to where it is, and it needs a revenue model to allow it to continue to exist.

Also, McConnell’s objection that Facebook is not media is a quirky statement. Sure people were just trying to have a conversation, but people are generally willing to pay (either a phone bill, or the price of seeing advertising) in order to have conversations through a service. The platform on which that service occurs is a media platform. Some of that media space is for socializing, and some of it is for advertising, and the two are mutually reciprocating. People accept there is a price to use a service to have a conversation. If McConnell has a problem with that, he probably shouldn’t buy adwords with google, since they show up in your gmail inbox.

The only other alternative is to start charging a service fee for Facebook… and I think we all know how that would end up. Which leads me to a comparison to the business model of the alleged ad supported Google phone. Apparently “56 percent of mobile users said they would view ads on their phones if they were given a 25 to 50 percent discount on their monthly bill.” You can read the original article here.

Conclusion: I am not sure why McConnell feels the need to stand up for Facebook users, since Facebook users seem pretty happy, and quite capable of standing up for themselves… perhaps he needs to be reminded of Beacon before he jumps in to save those who carrying on swimmingly."

Several other interesting comments were made that, when taken together, fully contextualize the issue. A colleague of mine wrote:

" When I read this article, I thought, wonder how much of McConnell’s thoughts come down to something as simple as a generation gap? Then earlier this evening, I Ws reading Emily Nussbaum’s excellent 2007 article “Say Everything” and it confirmed it for me. Compare McConnell against some relevant excerpts:

So it just seems a bit arrogant. ... We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it. – McConnell

Vs. Nussbaum:

“More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones.”

I think McConnell just doesn’t get it."