Category: Uncategorized

All the Web’s a Stage

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Timothy Lee has an excellent post at Freedom To Tinker. Here is some of it:

[T]alking about "free riding" as a problem the Wikipedia community needs to solve doesn't make any sense. The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia users "free ride," and far from being a drag on Wikipedia's growth, this large audience acts as a powerful motivator for continued contribution to the site. People like to contribute to an encyclopedia with a large readership; indeed, the enormous number of "free-riders"—a.k.a. users—is one of the most appealing things about being a Wikipedia editor.

This is more than a semantic point. Unfortunately, the "free riding" frame is one of the most common ways people discuss the economics of online content creation, and I think it has been an obstacle to clear thinking.

The idea of "free riding" is based on a couple of key 20th-century assumptions that just don't apply to the online world. The first assumption is that the production of content is a net cost that must either be borne by the producer or compensated by consumers. This is obviously true for some categories of content—no one has yet figured out how to peer-produce Hollywood-quality motion pictures, for example—but it's far from universal.
Moreover, the real world abounds in counterexamples. No one loses sleep over the fact that people "free ride" off of watching company softball games, community orchestras, or amateur poetry readings. To the contrary, it's understood that the vast majority of musicians, poets, and athletes find these activities intrinsically enjoyable, and they're grateful to have an audience "free ride" off of their effort.

The same principle applies to Wikipedia. Participating in Wikipedia is a net positive experience for both readers and editors. We don't need to "solve" the free rider problem because there are more than enough people out there for whom the act of contributing is its own reward.

You can see how we got into this problem. Britannica is an encyclopedia and it is an economic enterprise. Wikipedia ends in pedia so it must be an economic enterprise too. But it is not, and we should look elsewhere for our analogies. Once we stop thinking of Wikipedia in economic terms the supposed paradox disappears. Small wonder that, as Lee says, economists are the ones who have the hardest time understanding it.

Amateurs have performed on other world-stages before now. Sports provides prominent examples: rugby union,Wimbledon and the Olympics were all amateur-only for many years. What happened, of course, is that although these stages were not economic for their participants, the hosts ended up with a lot of money once the world of television and advertising intruded. And once the hosts got money the performers started acting like economic agents too and demanded their share. Giving an amateur performance on a non-profit stage is not a paradox, but giving an amateur performance on a profitable stage is being a sucker.

Wikipedia, for historical reasons, has so far kept advertising and profit out of the picture. But other "platforms of mass collaboration" have not – Amazon, YouTube, IMDB, Bebo have all shown that the owners of the stage can make a lot of money. And once they do, it's only so long before the actors start to demand a share, and the whole dynamic changes. 

The indiscriminate gushing over the age of mass collaboration has obscured these differences for now, but they won't for long. And then, I would guess, amateur production may go the way of the amateur olympics. But maybe not – let's hope that non-profit stages stay that way so that the economists' misunderstanding of Wikipedia can continue.

YouTube Becomes Big Business

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It's one of those hoary old sayings – it's been around for maybe two whole years now – that while the Geezer Generation of passive consumers watched network TV, the Net Generation of cool participators go on YouTube and do their creative teenage thing. But it's no longer either/or. A few recent milestones highlight how YouTube is changing.

First, Avril Lavigne pipped a homegrown video to be first to 100 million viewers and now "six of the 10 most-watched videos of all time are straight music videos."

Second, CBS has reached an agreement with Google to show full-length TV shows on YouTube.

Third, Tina Fey's Sarah Palin sketches for Saturday Night Live have been watched more times on the Internet than on TV. Says the Associated Press:

There were 10.2 million people watching the season-opening "Saturday Night Live" when Fey first appeared as Palin, with Amy Poehler portraying Hillary Clinton, according to Nielsen Media Research. These days, that's a good-sized audience for prime-time, let alone late-night, TV.
Another 1.2 million people captured the episode on their DVRs and watched within the week. Through the middle of last week, NBC estimated that it had streamed the skit online more than 13 million times. Those are just the numbers NBC can keep track of; the skit was undoubtedly captured and posted or e-mailed many more times.
NBC perfected "widget" technology only a few months ago, allowing video of its material to be captured across the Internet while retaining a tie to the network's Web site. It has aggressively marketed the Fey skits to political and comedy blogs…
…There's also the chance for even more revenue. Only in the past few weeks has NBC Universal perfected the technology to place a movie studio advertisement at the end of the clip it distributes online. Pre-clip advertising would add even more value.

It's not actually YouTube – as the article says, NBC now posts its own videos and removes them from the YouTube site when viewers post there – but these developments show that Internet viewing can be complementary to, not competitive with, mainstreamTV.  And "going viral" is no longer reserved for amateur guitar players. In fact, in an example of the centripetal web, the Internet now lets US Network productions go where they could not go before – you can now watch Fey/Palin in the UK on the Guardian and The BBC web sites. 

Whether TV networks will end up hosting their own material a la NBC, or whether there will be more CBS-style Google/network deals that see the networks outsourcing the hosting to YouTube in return for a slice of the advertising money, who knows? But the trend is clear; the confrontation between Internet and TV is coming to an end. The old enemies were perhaps never really at each others throats, and now they will cohabit happily. And while YouTube will continue to host amateur videos (why not?) it will make money from the music videos and the TV networks as it moves to higher-quality images and longer shows. Google's expanded YouTube advertising initiatives will help these deals along.

The Carr-Benkler wager is looking more and more like a win for Carr.

How Long Will This Post Survive?

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Will this post still be here on November 1, 2008? Definitely. I'm not going to remove it and I don't see anyone else doing so.

Will it be here on November 1, 3008? Surely not.

So how long will be here? My guess is about 10 years but I'd be interested in your guesses too. 

When it goes, how will it go? The most likely cause of deletion is that I stop blogging and Six Apart deletes my blog. Right now I pay them $5 per month for hosting this blog, and if I stop paying them they say "After cancellation, you will no longer have access to your website and all information contained
therein may be deleted by Six Apart. " I would guess that I'm unlikely to want to blog for more than a few years. I've been doing it for — pause for quick look up — nearly three years, and regular readers will know I have to pause for breath even now. I don't think this post exists anywhere else; a search for whimsley on the wayback machine shows nothing, so that would be it.

Do Six Apart actually go round deleting the blogs of people who stop subscribing? I don't know although actually I doubt it. At least one typepad blog, the wonderfully named "wit of the staircase" by a now-deceased author is still around. But if they do delete it, probably this post will vanish sometime between 2013 and 2020.

Another way it could go is if Six Apart fold. They are privately owned so their finances are not public, but from what I can tell it's a small operation and they have a history with blogging so I would guess they make enough to pay the rent and more.

But it's not just about this blog post of course. If you sign up with Blogger then it costs nothing, so they don't know when you've stopped posting. So even after you stop, and even after you die, your pages will presumably still be there so long as Google's servers are around.

So if this post survives the most likely issues with Six Apart, what will get rid of it? It's difficult to imagine it being here in 100 years but equally difficult to imagine what, short of global cataclysm, will get rid of it.

Any guesses? 

Election prediction (Not that one, the Canadian one)

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We won't know who the PM is until mid-day tomorrow. Will it be minority Tory or Liberal-led coalition? Talks continue through the day until … they fall apart. And it's back to the status quo. Oh, and the Greens take a single seat as May wins.
The nice thing about blog predictions is you can always edit your posts to fit reality.

Blogging for the Man

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I recently volunteered for extra work for no extra pay, so my day job now includes blogging. Not interesting to most people who read this, or indeed to anyone not intrigued by the mysteries of BlackBerry programming or data synchronization with the occasional smartphone-market comment thrown in. But it's here anyway.

And for more compulsive volunteering, you can watch my attempt to get people to vote for the admirable Cindy Jacobsen as our local candidate in the Canadian election here.

Letter to the Globe and Mail

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Dear Editor,

On today's front page we learn about the sad killing of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan, with a poignant photograph and personal stories. 

On page A13 a single small paragraph in the "In Brief" section tells us that NATO forces killed two Afghan civilians. There are no names, no pictures. Not even the age or gender of the victims.

Tom Slee