Sips from the Firehose
A blog that seeks to filter the internet into a refreshing, easily-gulped beverage
Nov 30
Posted: under Current Affairs, Politix.
It's like operant conditioning. If you don't give the monkey the shock, it won't stop pushing the lever that used to deliver it hits of cocaine. Well, the government has been working overtime to try to stave off that shock. Which is all well & good - nobody likes getting high-voltage shocks - but my concern is that if we don't in some way start changing our mindless consumerist behavior, the eventual shock is going to be much, much worse than what we've got coming in the next year or so, if we just stand & take our medicine.
[...more]
I saw this comment over at a political blog today:
We are likely to see a weak GOP and a democratic party beset by infighting. Get ready for a decade of political chaos on top of economic chaos. There is no way to take even an educated guess of what will arise from the ashes.
Which, actually, might be the best thing for this country.
Seriously.
The news this weekend about frenzied shoppers KILLING A MAN in their lust to … what? … save $1.50 on a Wiimote?
We have learned nothing from The Crash yet. Which means that we aren’t yet going to change our behavior. 
It’s like operant conditioning. If you don’t give the monkey the shock, it won’t stop pushing the lever that used to deliver it hits of cocaine. Well, the government has been working overtime to try to stave off that shock. Which is all well & good – nobody likes getting high-voltage shocks – but my concern is that if we don’t in some way start changing our mindless consumerist behavior, the eventual shock is going to be much, much worse than what we’ve got coming in the next year or so, if we just stand & take our medicine.
I”m looking at the long-term effects of jamming this much cash into our economy – at last count, we’re getting up near $10 TRILLION in so-called “bailout” cash. Yeah, for the next year or so, we’re going to cushion the comedown from the last 8 (or 28, really) years of borrowing & spending like drunken sailors while not really producing anything.
The problem is that long-term, the effect of waving a magic wand to create that much cash is going to be … well, you’re familiar with supply & demand, right? When supply exceeds demand, value goes down.
So when an extra 10 trillion of the commodity known as “dollars” gets jammed into the system … what does that mean for the value of the dollar?
Buy gold, folks. Gold, silver, or arable land. I’d like to think that there’s some greater plan for doing these crazy macroeconomic borrowing policies in the short term & fixing them in the mid-term, but I just don’t see it happening yet.
Nov 21
Posted: under Community, Digital Migration, journalism, new media, Politics & New Media.
I have hopes (perhaps naive & unwarranted) that there will be a disaggregated Newsroom of the Future, where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience all work together to separate truth from spin. The Look&Feel of this Newsroom of the Future is being chiseled out of the raw WebChaos on sites like TPM, Firedoglake, ProPublica, Publish2, RedState, and even on Michelle Malkin (hey - she called the "B on the face" girl out as a fraud). [...more]
LA Times - No Shit, Sherlock?
This came in through the comment threads, and is thoughtful enough that it merits more attention:
It sounds like both media channels worked as I would expect them too. The mainstream media sticks with the low risk stories that are easy to substantiate and defend while New Media takes risks on radical story ideas, digest the story in the public forum, shares the discoveries with its readers and lets the readers decide when it is time to move on to other issues.
Very true, and a very good observation. However – my worry is that as the mainstream media increasingly dissolves, their filters grow ever weaker. Evidence of this can be seen in the big bounce in the amount of glaring errors in print editions – this last week, I noted big, bad spelling errors on the front page of the LA Times. The jump pages aren’t where they’re supposed to be. The same paragraph gets printed twice.
Apparently, the editorial guidlines have changed at the LA Times... or, to put it more colloquially, "the shit has loosened up."
Basically, the cuts in editorial positions have left the papers so stressed that they are vulnerable to the kinds of errors that would previously have been unthinkable. And if papers can screw up on something so simple as whether or not the word “Shit” should be put in a headline for a book review (as it was today), then a complex story that demands that reporters and editors pay close attention and follow a thread to its logical conclusion – well, that capability may not longer be in the traditional newsroom.
I have hopes (perhaps naive & unwarranted) that there will be a disaggregated Newsroom of the Future, where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience all work together to separate truth from spin. The Look&Feel of this Newsroom of the Future is being chiseled out of the raw WebChaos on sites like TPM, Firedoglake, ProPublica, Publish2, RedState, and even on Michelle Malkin (hey – she called the “B on the face” girl out as a fraud).
It looks kinda like the same model that’s been in existence for hundreds (maybe even thousands) of years:
- The reporter/blogger/town crier/social media collective identifies a trend or event as significant, and communicates that to the people in their circle of influence (make up a term – audience, listeners, readers, lurkers, etc.)
- Those people take in that message and react. In the traditional media models, a positive reaction would be to buy more papers, tell their friends to tune in to the next newscast, and discuss it around the watercooler.
- Positive feedback means the originator keeps doing more – that is, follow-up stories, sidebars, looking for more stories like that.
- In the online world, positive feedback can mean that the audience self-deputizes and starts haring off on their own, trying to add their efforts to expand the narrative.
- Negative feedback – the audience not caring about or responding to the story – means that the reporter/blogger/town crier moves on to the next story
The only change is that the web makes all this happen much faster, and allows the audience to get much more involved than was possible before.
And yeah, I know, this kind of thinking is hardly original. But we’re seeing the dissolution of the traditional media happen much quicker than we had anticipated. And yeah, I’m aware that history is replete with examples of traditional media being used to perpetrate Big Lies & Big Mistakes – from the Spanish-American War of 1898, waged because newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst wanted a cause to boost circulation (where we get the famous quote “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”) to the yellowcake uranium and 18 words in the State of the Union address.
The point is, that as it is now easier for smaller & less powerful groups to take on the mantle of the MSM, it is also increasingly possible for smaller & less powerful groups to drill into the national narrative for their own purposes…
I’ll leave you with this, from the Hearst link above:
Hearst upped his circulation by producing a new kind of paper, one with mass- market appeal. His papers used lots of pictures and illustrations, large headlines, and the like. Reducing the cost of a paper to as little as a single cent a copy, Hearst made his newspapers accessible to nearly everyone. Because he controlled so much of the market for newspapers, a market that was rapidly growing because of his newspapers, Hearst could practically dictate what the country would think the next day.
The whole point of yellow journalism was to produce exciting, sensational stories, even if the truth had to be stretched or a story had to be made up. These stories would boost sales, something very important in this period, when newspapers and magazines were battling for circulation numbers. In regard to the situation in Cuba in the mid-1890s, yellow journalism sought to exploit the atrocities in Cuba to sell more magazines and newspapers.
The papers depicted Spanish behavior as exaggeratedly bad, and political cartoons depicted “Spain” as a nearly subhuman and brutal monster, while “Cuba” was usually depicted as a pretty white girl being pushed around by the Spanish monster. Once US opinions were inflamed over Cuba, Hearst in particular tried to do everything he could to whip the public into such a frenzy that a war would start. Once the country was at war, Hearst had little doubt his papers would have no end of interesting and sensational articles to publish.
Nov 19
Posted: under Uncategorized.
[UPDATE: Thanks to Soren & Xeni for the link-lovin'. I'm in the process of moving my blog from Typepad to WordPress, so's I can take more control of the look&feel of my writings, and I'm dual-posting here and at the new joint Sips from the Firehose. I published a follow-up on this scam - check [...] [...more]
[UPDATE: Thanks to Soren & Xeni for the link-lovin'. I'm in the process of moving my blog from Typepad to WordPress, so's I can take more control of the look&feel of my writings, and I'm dual-posting here and at the new joint Sips from the Firehose.
I published a follow-up on this scam - check it out & please join the discussion. Thanks - dlf]
Nobody directly involved will admit it, but this is looking more and more like one of the more nasty, yet brilliant, scams of the last couple years. It may have been pulled off by the legendary Nigerian internet scammers, but it’s beginning to look like it may have been the work of a vast leftwing conspiracy with a twisted sense of humor.
It gets complicated, as these things often do, but the core appears to be:
1. A WordPress website claiming to be the creation of the African Press International, and NGO somehow associated with the Rainbow Foundation – OK, already I know this is a lot to process – claimed that they had a tape of Michelle Obama admitting that Barack Obama was not an U.S. citizen, and thus not eligible to be president.
2. Nobody seemed to notice that the API’s headquarters are in Norway.
3. In the weeks leading up to the election, as John McCain’s campaign was trailing smoke and in a steep vertical dive (to use an Air Force-appropriate metaphor), a ragtag bunch of deranged Obama-haters his desperate supporters seized on this story as a last-minute chance to save the U.S. from an Obama presidency, which they had come to believe would be some horrible combination of Stalinist Russia, the Taliban and a San Francisco gay bathhouse, circa 1978.
4. The overheated right-wing blog echo chamber started to scream and yell about the tapes, hoping to spark an uproar.
5. The API started getting erratic in its pronouncements about the tapes, on the one hand demanding money, on the other alleging mysterious dark conspiracies that were preventing the release of the tapes, conspiracies involving shadowy pro-Obama forces.
5. Still believing that these tapes existed, the right-wing blogs started collecting money from their readers to buy the tapes.
From the Ace of Spades website:
$20,000 $25,000 Reward for Obama/Ayers/Dohrn/Khalidi Tape
Dirty Harry suggests a benefactor can offer $100,000.
Well, I don’t know if one will step forward. I can guarantee, though,
that if the goods are delivered the blogosphere can contribute $20,000.
In a matter of hours.
Maybe more. More would depend on the tape.
This offer includes
is particularly directed towards Los Angeles Times employees. Maybe
ones that just got fired. Or will get fired in the next couple of weeks.
Guaranteed.
Anonymous.
That’s how we roll.
Pretty pathetic that we have to try to bribe “newsmen” to release newsworthy tapes.
If your conscience is troubled, They should have released it anyway.
6. The scam mutated into an allegation that the LA Times had some kind of tape that would once and for all, destroy the Obama campaign, but that it was withholding the tape because of the aforementioned vast left-wing conspiracy to hand the country over to Obama.
7. The bidding for the tape reached $150,000. In a move sure to be familiar to anyone who has studied the history of “The Spanish Prisoner,” the price for releasing the tape suddenly escalated to $2 million.
8. At this point, you’d think that the people who initially believed in the existence of this tape would start smelling a rat. You’d be wrong. A blogger named “Mountain Sage” started cataloging all the inconsistencies of this story, and if you’re really interested in all the ins & outs of this, please go there.
9. I’ll save you a whole bunch of mental consternation & possible suicidal impulses stemming from despair over the human condition, and cut to what I hope is the end of this story: the WordPress blog has been taken down, and the right-wing blogosphere has moved on (mostly) to its next alleged revelations of Obama conspiracies that will exterminate all mankind.
If your head is still spinning a little bit from all this, take a minute and look at some LOLcats or something.
Now then. How is all this relevant to the usual subject around here – New Media, newspapers, journalism? Well, as we debate migrating from the traditional media to a future where all our information comes at us over the Great Big Internet Pipe, I think it’s instructive to recognize that offloading some of the news-gathering & editing duties to the audience (i.e. crowdsourcing, Citizen Journalism, etc.), is not a process entirely free of risk.
Stories like this one were once confined to the utter fringes of our national conversation. Back when I first started working for newspapers, I learned that at least once a week, we’d get a long, somewhat smelly, letter from the local lunatic, ranting & raving about Zionist Occupation Government (“ZOG”) reading his mind with CIA laser beams. The single-spaced typewritten screeds were usually augmented by scrawling in red pen around the margins, in big circles. I’ve since learned that writing in big spirals is one of the warning signs of paranoid-schizophrenia, and in this case, of a person who has stopped taking their meds and is hearing the voices & acting on their instructions.
Unfortunately, as we open up the doors of the media to a more collaborative conversation between reader & journalist, fanatical factions are more easily able to hijack the national discourse, and divert us over into areas that are meaningless, pointless and an utter waste of time. Some would say that that has always been the case – that even in the traditional media’s heyday, we had stupid stories that for one reason or another, rose to the level where we were talking about them because everyone else was talking about them.
And yeah, I know that one of the benefits of the web is that the audience no longer just sits and passively accepts that the information being fed to them is true. That the Citizen Journalists are willing & able to step in to do research to expose fraudsters. That has certainly been the case here.
But this scam was, well, childish
and poorly organized. A guy in Norway claiming to run an African news agency making wild claims? Already the red flags were waving.
However, if a much more well-funded and intelligent organization were to set out to concoct a Big Lie, and to use the low barriers to entry that the web offers to storylines, memes, etc., to deceive the public … how would we know? And if this organization were smart enough, and good enough at using SEO and other tools to bury and discredit its critics and their objections, what then?
Nov 19
Posted: under Blogging, Community, Digital Migration, new media, Politics & New Media, Viral Fame.
Nobody directly involved will admit it, but this is looking more and more like one of the more nasty, yet brilliant, scams of the last couple years. It may have been pulled off by the legendary Nigerian internet scammers, but it’s beginning to look like it may have been the work of a vast leftwing [...] [...more]
Nobody directly involved will admit it, but this is looking more and more like one of the more nasty, yet brilliant, scams of the last couple years. It may have been pulled off by the legendary Nigerian internet scammers, but it’s beginning to look like it may have been the work of a vast leftwing conspiracy with a twisted sense of humor.
It gets complicated, as these things often do, but the core appears to be:
1. A WordPress website claiming to be the creation of the African Press International, and NGO somehow associated with the Rainbow Foundation – OK, already I know this is a lot to process – claimed that they had a tape of Michelle Obama admitting that Barack Obama was not an U.S. citizen, and thus not eligible to be president.
2. Nobody seemed to notice that the API’s headquarters are in Norway.
3. In the weeks leading up to the election, as John McCain’s campaign was trailing smoke and in a steep vertical dive (to use an Air Force-appropriate metaphor), a ragtag bunch of deranged Obama-haters his desperate supporters seized on this story as a last-minute chance to save the U.S. from an Obama presidency, which they had come to believe would be some horrible combination of Stalinist Russia, the Taliban and a San Francisco gay bathhouse, circa 1978.
4. The overheated right-wing blog echo chamber started to scream and yell about the tapes, hoping to spark an uproar.
5. The API started getting erratic in its pronouncements about the tapes, on the one hand demanding money, on the other alleging mysterious dark conspiracies that were preventing the release of the tapes, conspiracies involving shadowy pro-Obama forces.
5. Still believing that these tapes existed, the right-wing blogs started collecting money from their readers to buy the tapes.
From the Ace of Spades website:
$20,000 $25,000 Reward for Obama/Ayers/Dohrn/Khalidi Tape
Dirty Harry suggests a benefactor can offer $100,000.
Well, I don’t know if one will step forward. I can guarantee, though,
that if the goods are delivered the blogosphere can contribute $20,000.
In a matter of hours.
Maybe more. More would depend on the tape.
This offer includes
is particularly directed towards Los Angeles Times employees. Maybe
ones that just got fired. Or will get fired in the next couple of weeks.
Guaranteed.
Anonymous.
That’s how we roll.
Pretty pathetic that we have to try to bribe “newsmen” to release newsworthy tapes.
If your conscience is troubled, They should have released it anyway.
6. The scam mutated into an allegation that the LA Times had some kind of tape that would once and for all, destroy the Obama campaign, but that it was withholding the tape because of the aforementioned vast left-wing conspiracy to hand the country over to Obama.
7. The bidding for the tape reached $150,000. In a move sure to be familiar to anyone who has studied the history of “The Spanish Prisoner,” the price for releasing the tape suddenly escalated to $2 million.
8. At this point, you’d think that the people who initially believed in the existence of this tape would start smelling a rat. You’d be wrong. A blogger named “Mountain Sage” started cataloging all the inconsistencies of this story, and if you’re really interested in all the ins & outs of this, please go there.
9. I’ll save you a whole bunch of mental consternation & possible suicidal impulses stemming from despair over the human condition, and cut to what I hope is the end of this story: the WordPress blog has been taken down, and the right-wing blogosphere has moved on (mostly) to its next alleged revelations of Obama conspiracies that will exterminate all mankind.
If your head is still spinning a little bit from all this, take a minute and look at some LOLcats or something.
Now then. How is all this relevant to the usual subject around here – New Media, newspapers, journalism? Well, as we debate migrating from the traditional media to a future where all our information comes at us over the Great Big Internet Pipe, I think it’s instructive to recognize that offloading some of the news-gathering & editing duties to the audience (i.e. crowdsourcing, Citizen Journalism, etc.), is not a process entirely free of risk.
Stories like this one were once confined to the utter fringes of our national conversation. Back when I first started working for newspapers, I learned that at least once a week, we’d get a long, somewhat smelly, letter from the local lunatic, ranting & raving about Zionist Occupation Government (“ZOG”) reading his mind with CIA laser beams. The single-spaced typewritten screeds were usually augmented by scrawling in red pen around the margins, in big circles. I’ve since learned that writing in big spirals is one of the warning signs of paranoid-schizophrenia, and in this case, of a person who has stopped taking their meds and is hearing the voices & acting on their instructions.
Unfortunately, as we open up the doors of the media to a more collaborative conversation between reader & journalist, fanatical factions are more easily able to hijack the national discourse, and divert us over into areas that are meaningless, pointless and an utter waste of time. Some would say that that has always been the case – that even in the traditional media’s heyday, we had stupid stories that for one reason or another, rose to the level where we were talking about them because everyone else was talking about them.
And yeah, I know that one of the benefits of the web is that the audience no longer just sits and passively accepts that the information being fed to them is true. That the Citizen Journalists are willing & able to step in to do research to expose fraudsters. That has certainly been the case here.
But this scam was, well, childish and poorly organized. A guy in Norway claiming to run an African news agency making wild claims? Already the red flags were waving.
However, if a much more well-funded and intelligent organization were to set out to concoct a Big Lie, and to use the low barriers to entry that the web offers to storylines, memes, etc., to deceive the public … how would we know? And if this organization were smart enough, and good enough at using SEO and other tools to bury and discredit its critics and their objections, what then?
Nov 18
Posted: under Amusing Nonsense, Dead Cat Bounce, Multimedia, Tail Wags Dog.
I received the tweet earlier today, and it rocked my world like a bombshell. It was from Scott Beale, owner/operator/provocateur of the Laughing Squid collective of digital mischiefmakers. It read “what could you possibility be doing right now that is better than watching a cat ride a Roomba http://ping.fm/DRqoO” Here is the video embedded here, [...] [...more]
I received the tweet earlier today, and it rocked my world like a bombshell. It was from Scott Beale, owner/operator/provocateur of the Laughing Squid collective of digital mischiefmakers.
It read “what could you possibility be doing right now that is better than watching a cat ride a Roomba http://ping.fm/DRqoO”
Here is the video embedded here, but I encourage you all to click over to Laughing Squid, just so’s he can get some page traffic. Genius such as this must not go unrewarded.
I was forced to click over. What right-thinking person would not?
The conclusion is obvious. There is not one single thing that would be more important to do right now than to watch a cat riding a Roomba.
It makes me want to install wall-to-wall carpet in my house, just so I can justify getting a Roomba to see if my cats will do this. I love the rather scholarly air the cat seems to have, as though he were pondering one of the great questions of life, the universe & everything. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is, indeed a Zen Master Cat, and that he accepts the abrupt changes in speed, direction and scenery as all part of the temptations of Maya, the World of Illusion, and that the only appropriate response to such temptations is to adopt a calm, contemplative approach to the vagaries of the paths we travel as we journey through Life’s Rich Pageant. His purr is the equivalent of an “Ommmm” mantra.
Or maybe it’s just that the Roomba gets warm as it operates, and the kitty just wants to toast his butt a little.
Technorati Tags: cat, roomba, zen calm, unified field theorem, genius
Nov 18
Posted: under Uncategorized.
I received the tweet earlier today, and it rocked my world like a bombshell. It was from Scott Beale, owner/operator/provocateur of the Laughing Squid collective of digital mischiefmakers. It read “what could you possibility be doing right now that is better than watching a cat ride a Roomba http://ping.fm/DRqoO” Here is the video embedded here, [...] [...more]
I received the tweet earlier today, and it rocked my world like a bombshell. It was from Scott Beale, owner/operator/provocateur of the Laughing Squid collective of digital mischiefmakers.
It read “what could you possibility be doing right now that is better than watching a cat ride a Roomba http://ping.fm/DRqoO”
Here is the video embedded here, but I encourage you all to click over to Laughing Squid, just so’s he can get some page traffic. Genius such as this must not go unrewarded.
I was forced to click over. What right-thinking person would not?
The conclusion is obvious. There is not one single thing that would be more important to do right now than to watch a cat riding a Roomba.
It makes me want to install wall-to-wall carpet in my house, just so I can justify getting a Roomba to see if my cats will do this. I love the rather scholarly air the cat seems to have, as though he were pondering one of the great questions of life, the universe & everything. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is, indeed a Zen Master Cat, and that he accepts the abrupt changes in speed, direction and scenery as all part of the temptations of Maya, the World of Illusion, and that the only appropriate response to such temptations is to adopt a calm, contemplative approach to the vagaries of the paths we travel as we journey through Life’s Rich Pageant. His purr is the equivalent of an “Ommmm” mantra.
Or maybe it’s just that the Roomba gets warm as it operates, and the kitty just wants to toast his butt a little.
Nov 16
Posted: under Uncategorized.
This is just too funny to keep to myself – back in the halcyon days of comedy, before broad ethnic stereotypes became Verboten, and even the Muppets’ Swedish Chef became “edgy” … people used to post things like this in public places: ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers!Das computermachine ist nicht fuer [...] [...more]
This is just too funny to keep to myself – back in the halcyon days of comedy, before broad ethnic stereotypes became Verboten, and even the Muppets’ Swedish Chef became “edgy” … people used to post things like this in public places:
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.
Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken
mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das
pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
I kinda miss all the little pretty lights dancing around on my tech gear.
…and, of course, the little machine that goes “Ping~!”
The kinda cool notation here was that all this started back in WWII, when we were all encouraged to hate The Hun –
“We are informed that cod-German parodies of this kind were very common in Allied machine shops during and following WWII. Germans, then as now, had a reputation for being both good with precision machinery and prone to officious notices.”
You still run across stuff like this in upstate Wisconsin, in old bars full of grizzled coots smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes.
Danny Kaye made a career out of doing faux-German incomprehensible sputtering like this.
Nov 16
Posted: under Amusing Nonsense, Digital Migration.
Tags: Amusing Nonsense
This is just too funny to keep to myself – back in the halcyon days of comedy, before broad ethnic stereotypes became Verboten, and even the Muppets’ Swedish Chef became “edgy” … people used to post things like this in public places: ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers!Das computermachine ist nicht fuer [...] [...more]
This is just too funny to keep to myself – back in the halcyon days of comedy, before broad ethnic stereotypes became Verboten, and even the Muppets’ Swedish Chef became “edgy” … people used to post things like this in public places:
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.
Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken
mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das
pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
I kinda miss all the little pretty lights dancing around on my tech gear.
…and, of course, the little machine that goes “Ping~!”
The kinda cool notation here was that all this started back in WWII, when we were all encouraged to hate The Hun –
“We are informed that cod-German parodies of this kind were very common in Allied machine shops during and following WWII. Germans, then as now, had a reputation for being both good with precision machinery and prone to officious notices.”
You still run across stuff like this in upstate Wisconsin, in old bars full of grizzled coots smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes.
Danny Kaye made a career out of doing faux-German incomprehensible sputtering like this.
Nov 13
Posted: under Digital Migration, monetizing mobile content, Multimedia, new media, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers, Platform obsession, Webconomics, Wrongheaded solutions.
Tags: buzzmachine, new vs. old flamewar, newspaper death spiral
I've fallen prey to the digital triumphalism. I'll admit it. It's really easy to hang on the rim and hoot, when you're on the outside looking in. This provokes a reaction much like the one we're seeing here.
The digital enthusiasts feel like the crews on lifeboats, trying to pick up survivors after the Titanic has gone down, only the survivors are shooting at them with pistols, yelling "You smug bastards in the lifeboats! You don't know what it's like here in the freezing water! Sure, it's easy to be warm & dry when you're in a lifeboat! Bang!"
Meanwhile, to the guys in the water, what they see is the lifeboat crew saying "Sure, we'll give you a hand up. But first you have to sing a tune apologizing for how stupid you were while we pee all over your head. And maybe we'll smack you around with the boathook. But you have it coming."
And what both sides are missing is that while the lifeboat is a good stop-gap solution, the oars seem to be missing, and the crew in the lifeboat is arguing amongst themselves as to which direction they would row in, should the oars ever be found, while others say that rowing is so old-school, and that what we should concentrate on is inventing a nuclear reactor that would provide endless propulsive energy, while still others think that the whole lifeboat thing is wrong, and we should jump back in the water in the hopes of evolving gills. [...more]
Let’s set the stage.
First, Ron Rosenbaum unloads on Jeff Jarvis for being “increasingly heartless” about newsroom cutbacks, layoffs & the general death spiral.
A sampling:
Not all reporters had the prescience to become new-media consultants. A lot of good, dedicated people who have done actual writing and reporting, as opposed to writing about writing and reporting, have been caught up in this great upheaval, and many of them may have been too deeply involved in, you know, content—”subjects,” writing about real peoples’ lives—to figure out that reporting just isn’t where it’s at, that the smart thing to do is get a consulting gig.
But Jarvis believes the failure of the old-media business models is the result of having too many of those pesky reporters. In his report on his recent new-media summit at CUNY, he noted with approval one workshop’s conclusion that you’d need only 35 reporters to cover the entire city of Philadelphia. Less is more. Meta triumphs over matter.
It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting.
Oh, that’s nasty. Shorter Rosenbaum: “Jarvis is an substanceless, fluffy airhead, taking advantage of gullible publishers, peddling his New Media snakeoil & banking fat stacks while real reporters who actually work for a living are being thrown to the wolves.” Read More
Nov 10
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Another quick hit here: Just saw this story about how the spammer economy actually works. Apparently, researchers at UCSD hijacked a hijacker’s network – the “Storm” zombienet that uses Trojans in unprotected home computers to send out the “V1@gr@” and “h00d1@” spam messages. Their paper on “spamalytics” is here. The number that jumps out right [...] [...more]
Another quick hit here: Just saw this story about how the spammer economy actually works. Apparently, researchers at UCSD hijacked a hijacker’s network – the “Storm” zombienet that uses Trojans in unprotected home computers to send out the “V1@gr@” and “h00d1@” spam messages. Their paper on “spamalytics” is here.
The number that jumps out right away: while running their own spam network, the researchers found that they only made one sale of cut-rate pharmaceuticals for every 12.5 million messages they sent out. That’s a response rate of .00001%.
This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.
- It shows that successful business can operate and earn a profit on the web, even if their response rate is vanishingly small.
This is interesting, in light of the continued problems of big business to understand the concept of niches, rather than tossing out bland lowest-common-denominator pablum.
- The amount of money being made by the spammers is far, far lower than popular culture would have it.
Hey, these were the guys running the dreaded “Storm” bot-net. In popular imagination, they were an army of greasy-haired Eastern European thugs; dressing in trench coats and trailing a platoon of vicious former Spetsnaz killer commandos.
In reality, the amount of money they’re making relative to the amount of work they’re having to put in, is actually rather pathetic. They are having to demonstrate Mad Spamming Skills just to scrape off a tiny, tiny sliver of revenue. Those kinds of skills, put in to a more legitimate arena, would earn them far more money.
It’s like seeing someone with the skills of Shaq grifting tourists down at the basketball courts in Venice for pocket change, rather than making $121 million in the NBA. Not sure what’s at work with these guys…
And finally, and possibly most importantly:
The research shows that even a small perturbation in the spamcosystem can have a massive effect on their revenues and business models.
This could mean the end of spam as we know it.
Look, these clowns are hanging on by their fingernails. Even a small, incremental improvement in internet security – cutting down on the numbers of infected zombie ‘bots, f’rinstance. Or better router & packet sniffing, to bounce back spam messages.
If they have to send out 500-some-million messages to get back enough responses to survive on – well, if you make sure that they don’t even get those responses back … the spammers will be put out of business very, very quickly. Or as the BBC put it:
Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) per year.
While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past.
They suggest that the tight costs might also open up new avenues of attack on spammers.
The researchers concluded: “The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses.”
And BTW – may I just say to the guys at UCSD: kudos. Really. Someone there thought creatively. The way the guys who wrote “Freakonomics” did – they went behind the scenes and did the pick’n'shovel work to figure out how something really worked, and they came up with data that contradicted the conventional wisdom.
From one renegade researcher & unconventional thinker to another: well done, sirs. Technorati Tags: Spam, UCSD, botnets, Storm, hijacking
