In May, as part of the Carnival of Journalism, Ryan Sholin asked:

What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?

I have another take on that question, and it is one that more news organisations are being forced to ask. What can news organisations no longer afford to do? What is your news organisation doing that is either too costly or provides so little value to your readers/viewers/listeners that it’s no longer justifiable? Or put another way, if it’s not unique and it’s not really uniquely relevant to your audience, is there something else that you should be covering that is? What is the opportunity cost of covering that event that everyone and their dog, cat, sister, brother and third cousin covering? What are you foregoing to cover that event?

Why do I ask this question? I give you 15,000 reasons, which is the number of journalists covering the US political conventions. That is 3.75 journalists per delegate. It might be defensible if those 15,000 journalists was actually doing something unique in terms of coverage. But they aren’t. Furthermore, that is 15,000 journalists covering an event that the New York Times aptly described as “effectively a four-night miniseries before an audience of 20 million people or more”.

During a planning meeting, I was asked what kind of news we could expect. I responded: None. The entire goal of the conventions is not to make news, not to have surprises. They are carefully choreographed, scripted and stage-managed. Yes, the candidates will make an acceptance speech that is newsworthy, but the rest of the evenings are designed to net as much free air-time and coverage as possible to launch the candidates’ campaigns.

Political conventions are like class reunions for American press corps. I’ve covered two, and they are great fun and great theatre, but they aren’t great news events. Ted Koppel left the 1996 Republican Convention early, complaining that it was little more than a picture show. This year, he’s there as an analyst for BBC America. His assessment of the coverage is pretty damning:

Amy Gahran, writing for Poynter, called the numbers of journalists covering the convention an unconscionable waste of news resources in light of the current state of the news business. Mark Potts said:

At a time when news budgets are being slashed because of declining revenue, how can a news organization possibly justify sending a raft of people to the conventions? (I suspect the numbers for the Olympics are about the same-and just as ridiculous.) …

What stories are they going to get that the AP can’t supply? Hijinks of the local delegates? Inside info about what the candidates hope to do for the economy back home? Local color on Denver and St. Paul? It’s really hard to understand the need for this kind of bulk coverage.

And I couldn’t agree more with Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center who says that news organisations must focus on what is unique to their franchise. As I often say, the danger of Google News for news organisations isn’t that it steals your traffic but that it shows how little is unique in most coverage, how much re-packaged wire copy we re-produce. That’s the real danger, and it’s why the average news website visitor views about 2 pages per month. And Michele echoes my concerns about opportunity costs:

I also am frustrated when I thinking about all the stories that thousands of reporters might be covering closer to home as the conventions unfold. With the troubled economy, mortgage foreclosures, health care, the federal budget deficit and rising energy costs, I don’t think it’s possible for journalists to be developing enough stories about the impact of these issues on their communities and the people who live in them. Not to mention creating and linking to resources for people in trouble and holding officials accountable for their share of the problem (or explaining why they have no share).

At the end of the day, the Columbia Journalism Review lays out the naked truth, of the 15,000 journalists:

7,500 aren’t doing much at all. This isn’t surprising. Only a small number of reporters actually have a reason to be here. The rest are conventioneering—seeing old friends, eating Democratic-themed menu items (“Barack Obama’s Turkey Chili”) in pandering local restaurants, brandishing their press passes at all comers, looking for free things, and spending about 14 percent of their time trying to rustle up enough stories to justify their presence to their editors. These reporters are the ones mostly writing about themselves, or their friends, or their experiences exploring Denver with their friends (“I was enjoying some turkey chili with David Broder yesterday…”). At least they’re open about the fact that they’re enjoying themselves.

And I blame journalists as much as their editors. Yes, trips have always been used by editors to reward good journalists, but there are journalists who have come to treat the profession like their own personal travel bureau. They come up with the flimsiest pretence for extravagant travel that is of little journalistic value and of little benefit to their audience, who in the end are footing the bill.

No journalism organisation has ever had unlimited resources, and now, newspapers are fighting for their very existence. It is not a time for profligate spending, as if it ever were. If we are true to our word that journalism is essential to a healthy democracy, then we have to use our limited resources judiciously and for the benefit of our audience. If we provide them relevant information, then, hopefully, they will support our efforts. If we continue these wasteful ways, then our lofty arguments about our essential democratic role will be seen as disingenuous and self-serving.

Disclosure: Yes, I am taking a trip in October to cover the US Elections. But I am keeping a close eye on the bottom line. The quality of coverage is not directly proportional to the cost. I use digital technology to undercut the traditional cost basis of journalism. It’s what we all need to do. We must use disruptive digital technology to reduce the cost basis of what we do. It will give us more resources to do journalism and to innovate.

I have one prediction that I am reasonably confident in making. In 2012, there will not be 15,000 journalists. Not because news organisations finally come to their senses but because so many have ceased to exist.

On Wednesday, I spotted a post from Michael O’Connor Clarke about Jeff Gerstmann, a games reviewer and Editorial Director at CNET’s Gamespot, who appeared to have been fired for giving a bad review to Kane & Lynch. The game’s publishers, Eidos Interactive, had just bought hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising on the site and the rumour was that they used the weight of that contract to force CNET to fire Gerstmann. It seems the news was broken in this Penny Arcade strip.

Here’s Gerstmann’s review:

The implications of this rumour are clear: If CNET is bowing to pressure from advertisers to ensure that their own games are favourable reviewed, then CNET’s games coverage becomes not worth the electricity that lights its pixels. Indeed, the suspicion that CNET can be bought immediately devalues all its reviews, across all sectors. If the PR, advertising and editorial departments submit to bullying from one vendor, then there’s no reason why they aren’t doing the same for other vendors. This is potentially very damaging for CNET as it destroys readers’ confidence that what they are getting is honest, unbiased opinion.

As Kotaku says:

As our tipster points out, if the rumor is true, it could point to a distressing precedent at Gamespot and parent company CNet. “As writers of what is supposed to be objective content, this is our worst nightmare coming to life,” wrote the tipster.

Our efforts to confirm the story with Gamespot haven’t proved successful. Our current requests with PR, Gerstmann and other CNet contacts have either gone unanswered or yielded a “no comment.”

But rather than address the rumours head-on, CNET shilly-shallied about:

CNET allowed hours to pass by as people continued to spread word of the firings, creating incensed users everywhere. They issued no formal statement and made no attempt to defuse the situation. Eventually, they came out with what I refer to as a “non-denial denial,” in which they made no reference to the controversial situation, resorting to generalized statements about how CNET is a bastion of “unbiased reviews.”

And the first formal response on Gamespot is a masterpiece of not really saying anything:

Due to legal constraints and the company policy of GameSpot parent CNET Networks, details of Gerstmann’s departure cannot be disclosed publicly. However, contrary to widespread and unproven reports, his exit was not a result of pressure from an advertiser.

“Neither CNET Networks nor GameSpot has ever allowed its advertising business to affect its editorial content,” said Greg Brannan, CNET Networks Entertainment’s vice president of programming. “The accusations in the media that it has done so are unsubstantiated and untrue. Jeff’s departure stemmed from internal reasons unrelated to any buyer of advertising on GameSpot.”

“Though he will be missed by his colleagues, Jeff’s leaving does not affect GameSpot’s core mission of delivering the most timely news, video content, in-depth previews, and unbiased reviews in games journalism,” said Ryan MacDonald, executive producer of GameSpot Live. “GameSpot is an institution, and its code of ethics and duty to its users remains unchanged.”

Whilst neither CNET nor Gerstmann were willing to discuss exactly what happened, Gerstmann was keen to play down the implications of his firing by telling MTV’s Multiplayer blog that there’s no reason for gamers to doubt Gamespot’s reviews.

Despite that, public opinion in the gaming world swung against CNET, despite the hints that Gerstmann’s firing may be nothing to do with Kane & Lynch, and more to do disagreements with (new) senior manager Josh Larson. If I may quote liberally from Kotaku:

Speaking with a Gamespot employee yesterday who asked not to be named for this story, we’ve learned that, despite the neutral nature of the Gamespot news item on the matter, the editorial staff is said to be “devastated, gutted and demoralized” over the removal of former editorial director Jeff Gerstmann. While the termination of Gerstmann, a respected fixture at Gamespot, was pitched to his remaining colleagues by management as a “mutual decision”, it was anything but, we’re told.

The confusion over the reasons for Gerstmann’s termination, compounded with a lack of transparency from management has created a feeling of “irreconcilable despair” that may eventually lead to an exodus of Gamespot editorial staffers. “Our credibility,” said the source, “is in ruins.” Over the course of the previous days, a “large number of Gamespot editors” have expressed their intentions to leave. Tales of emotionally deflated peers, with no will to remain at the site, were numerous.

Unless cooler heads prevail or concerns are addressed, Gamespot could see “mass resignations”, our source revealed.

Rank and file employees of the Gamespot organization are unaware of the real reasons behind Gerstmann’s termination. Our source admitted that Eidos was less than pleased with the review scores for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, but the team has “dealt with plenty of unhappy publishers before.” Our contact stressed that “Money has never played a role in reviews before” and that “[Gamespot] has never altered a score.” No pressure from management or sales has been exercised to remove or alter content, the source reiterated.

However, the source did speculate that disagreements between Gertsmann and VP of games Josh Larson may have been the root cause of the former being terminated. Larson, successor to former editor in chief Greg Kasavin, was described as out of touch with the employees who report to him. The VP is the one allegedly responsible for telling Gamespot editorial staff that it was Gerstmann’s “tone” that was at the heart of his dismissal.

Then, on a Valleywag post disputing the theory that Gerstmann was fired for a bad review, someone who appears to be a Gamespot insider left a number of rather damning comments (again, summed up well by Kotaku):

No one wants to be named because no one wants to get fucking fired! This management team has shown what they’re willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was fucking locked out of his office and told to leave the building.

What you might not be aware of is that GS is well known for appealing mostly to hardcore gamers. The mucky-mucks have been doing a lot of “brand research” over the last year or so and indicating that they want to reach out to more casual gamers. Our last executive editor, Greg Kasavin, left to go to EA, and he was replaced by a suit, Josh Larson, who had no editorial experience and was only involved on the business side of things. Over the last year there has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process; we’ve started having to give our sales team heads-ups when a game is getting a low score, for instance, so that they can let the advertisers know that before a review goes up. Other publishers have started giving us notes involving when our reviews can go up; if a game’s getting a 9 or above, it can go up early; if not, it’ll have to wait until after the game is on the shelves.

I was in the meeting where Josh Larson was trying to explain this firing and the guy had absolutely no response to any of the criticisms we were sending his way. He kept dodging the question, saying that there were “multiple instances of tone” in the reviews that he hadn’t been happy about, but that wasn’t Jeff’s problem since we all vet every review. He also implied that “AAA” titles deserved more attention when they were being reviewed, which sounded to all of us that he was implying that they should get higher scores, especially since those titles are usually more highly advertised on our site.

Gamespot insiders were clearly unhappy with what has happened.

Eventually, Gamespot management did address the issue, although they maintain they are legally unable to discuss why Gerstmann was fired, the categorically deny that it was because of pressure from Eidos.

Q: Was Jeff fired?
A: Jeff was terminated on November 28, 2007, following an internal review process by the managerial team to which he reported.

Q: Why was Jeff fired?
A: Legally, the exact reasons behind his dismissal cannot be revealed. However, they stemmed from issues unrelated to any publisher or advertiser; his departure was due purely for internal reasons.

[...]

Q: Was Eidos Interactive upset by the game’s review?
A: It has been confirmed that Eidos representatives expressed their displeasure to their appropriate contacts at GameSpot, but not to editorial directly. It was not the first time a publisher has voiced disappointment with a game review, and it won’t be the last. However, it is strict GameSpot policy never to let any such feelings result in a review score to be altered or a video review to be pulled.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment cause Jeff to be terminated?
A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment cause the alteration of the review text?
A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment lead to the video review being pulled down?
A: Absolutely not.

[...]

Q: Why didn’t GameSpot write about Jeff’s departure sooner?
A: Due to HR procedures and legal considerations, unauthorized CNET Networks and GameSpot employees are forbidden from commenting on the employment status of current and former employees. This practice has been in effect for years, and the CNET public-relations department stuck to that in the days following Jeff’s termination. However, the company is now making an exception due to the widespread misinformation that has spread since Jeff’s departure.

[...]

Q: GameSpot’s credibility has been called into question as a result of this incident. What is being done to repair and rebuild it?
A: This article is one of the first steps toward restoring users’ faith in GameSpot, and an internal review of the incident and controversy is under way. However, at no point in its history has GameSpot ever deviated from its review guidelines, which are publicly listed on the site. Great pains are taken to keep sales and editorial separated to prevent any impression of impropriety.

For years, GameSpot has been known for maintaining the highest ethical standards and having the most reliable and informative game reviews, previews, and news on the Web. The colleagues and friends that Jeff leaves behind here at GameSpot intend to keep it that way.

The problem is, the damage has been done. Whatever the reason for Gerstmann’s dismissal, the appalling way that CNET handled the crisis means that a lot of people now believe that the Chinese wall that separates advertising and editorial has been permanently damaged. That in and of itself means that both Gamespot’s and CNET’s credibility has been severely dented and if there’s one thing that a publisher cannot afford to do, it’s to appear even for a moment to be in the pockets of its advertisers. Readers want impartiality, honesty, transparency, and if they sniff a rat they’ll leave in droves.

CNET should never have fired Gerstmann without thoroughly thinking through the implications of such a precipitate dismissal. Doing so without a strategy in place for addressing the inevitable rumour that would follow was stupid and short-sighted. In any company, that sort of “marching off the premises” style of dismissal is bound to cause a rumpus, especially when the person being fired, as Gerstmann appears to have been, is much loved by their colleagues and readers, and has been there for so long. It shouldn’t have taken a genius to realise that there’d be a pretty strong reaction against it, and that some sort of thought should be given to how to address the rumours early on.

Whether Gerstmann was fired because of Larson, or Eidos, or something else, is almost irrelevant now. The conclusions one can draw are that either CNET’s in bed with its advertisers, or it’s being managed incompetently by someone prone to throwing hissy fits and firing people on the spot. If one were being generous, one might just put this down to an HR/PR fuck-up, but there is a valuable lesson to be learnt by every publisher and every company with externally-facing bloggers: Look before you fire.

The news comes, via Thomas Vander Wal, that Yahoo! Photos is to close. I’m not a Yahoo! Photos user myself, but I think that this decision is wrong-headed and ill-conceived, in so many ways.

Thomas’ post is dated 7 July, and the email he had from Yahoo! Photos informs him that the service will close on 20 September 2007, at 9pm PDT. Assuming that Thomas didn’t miss an earlier email, that’s a little over two months’ notice - is that really enough time to notify all your users that you’re closing a service? Thomas says:

many of the people I know and run across that use Yahoo Photos rely on Yahoo Photos to always be there. They are often infrequent users. They like and love the service because it is relatively easy to use and “will always be there”. Many real people I know (you know the 95 percent of the people who do not live their life on the web) visit Yahoo Photos once or twice a year as it is where holiday, travel, or family reunion photos are stored. It would seem that this user base would need more than a year’s notice to get valuable notification that their digital heirlooms are going to be gone, toast, destroyed, etc. in a few short months.

I think it’s rather optimistic to think that everyone who’s going to be affected by this will find out in time to take action.

But let’s dig a little deeper, and go beyond the looming deadline to take a look at Yahoo! Photo’s help pages concerning the closure.

Yahoo! is giving people three “options if [they] want to keep [their] photos”. (I find the language here more than a little alarming as to me it implies that the default view is that people won’t want to keep their photos, and I’d bet money on that not being true.)

1. You can move your photos to Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish or Photobucket. You can only move your photos to one service, and once they’ve been moved, options 2 and 3 become unavailable to you.

2. You can download your photos, but you can only download them one at a time. There’s no bulk download, so if you have a lot of photos you’re in for a tedious ride. Again, Yahoo!’s underlying assumption seems to be that people aren’t interested in keeping all their photos: “for many of you it won’t take much time to download your favorites”, as if your favourites are the only photos that matter.

3. You can buy an archive CD, but only if you’re a New Yahoo! Photos user. Yahoo! have partnered with Englaze to offer a price of $6.95 for 700mb of photos. Why not use DVDs, I wonder? They’ll take a lot more data than a CD and surely the aim here is to help users, not screw them? Although old Yahoo! Photos users have to either download one by one, or move services, so maybe screwing users isn’t that big of a deal for them.

You can choose all three options, if you qualify for the CD of course, and if you have few enough photos that downloading them one by one doesn’t cause you to tear your hair out.

Digging deeper into Yahoo!’s help pages causes further concern. Maybe this is just me being a bit sensitive to language, but if I were a Yahoo! Photos user, I’d want to know exactly what this means:

How long do I have to make a decision about what to do with my photos?

You will have until September 20, 2007 at 9 p.m. PDT to make a decision about your photos.

Of course, we encourage you to decide sooner rather than later, to avoid the last-minute rush. All users who choose to move to another service will be added to the queue for that service. So the sooner you make the decision, the sooner you’ll be have access to your photos at their new home.

“Added to the queue”? How long is it going to take people to have their photos moved over? And what happens if you do get stuck in the “last-minute rush”? Oh, wait, we get that answer over on another help page:

Be patient…the move can take several days or even weeks depending upon how many other users are in front of you in the queue.

I’m getting the feeling that this is going to be a sub-par experience for anyone moving their photos.

But hey, it’s ok, because Yahoo! get to blame the other services for any delays:

How long will it take you to transfer my photos to another service?

The move itself should not take long at all, it depends more upon the number of users ahead of you in the queue to be moved.

After you’ve opted to move to another service, you’ll be added to a move queue managed by that service. The queue will be managed on a first come, first served basis. When they get to your Yahoo! Photos account, they will copy your original resolution photos into the account you identified on their service and send you an email when the move is complete.

Although if it all goes wrong - and goshdarn, data transfer never goes wrong, right? - Yahoo! will be there to sort it all out. Or not.

What can I do if I have issues with transferring my photos or my transfer fails?

Each of these services should be able to successfully transfer all your photos and will be responsible for all issues once that transfer occurs. So if you encounter issues with your new account you should contact them directly.

But if you’ve received emails that some of your photos failed to make the move or that the service was unable to move your photo collection, then it’s likely due to more complicated data issues with your account. Any failures that are specific to a user’s account will be reported to Yahoo!

In these cases, the best alternative may be to download your favorites or purchase an archive CD (for users of the New Yahoo! Photos only).

I am presuming the lock that Yahoo! will put on your account once transfer has been initiated will be lifted if transfer fails, because if not, how will users be able to download their “favourites” or buy an archive CD? Of course, I’ve presumed before and been wrong.

Finally, if you’ve been using any of your Yahoo! Photos in any other Yahoo! products, then you need to know that:

Yahoo! Photos features in these services will all be going away soon, which means your photos will no longer be accessible from these services. And your photos will definitely not be available from these other services (or anywhere else on the Web for that matter) after Yahoo! Photos closes and all remaining photos are deleted and no longer accessible.

Oh dear god. They’ve really buried the lead here. Let’s just read that again, with some emphasis added:

Yahoo! Photos features in these services will all be going away soon, which means your photos will no longer be accessible from these services. And your photos will definitely not be available from these other services (or anywhere else on the Web for that matter) after Yahoo! Photos closes and all remaining photos are deleted and no longer accessible.

This was my big unanswered question. What will happen to the photos that haven’t been transferred before 20 Sept 2007? Answer: They will be deleted. Yes, that’s right, you’ve got two months to get your stuff, and then it’s toast.

This is absolutely astonishing. User’s stuff should be sacred - giving people just over two months to find out that their photos are going to be deleted is absurd. As Thomas said, people put their trust in companies like Yahoo!, who’ve been around for years, to still be around for years to come and this is a massive betrayal of that trust.

If a service has to be closed - and I recognise that from time to time, that’s inevitable - then it has to be done in a thoughtful, careful way. A staged process would be the best way to deal with such an eventuality, where uploading is closed first, followed by a period during which people can download, transfer or archive their images before the site is ‘fossilised’. But there should be a lot more time in between the emails warning people and the cessation of uploading. Deleting people’s photos should be verboten. (And that’s not just about the importance of users’ data, but also about the wider issue of causing linkrot, which is something that responsible service providers try to avoid.)

Is there even a good reason for Yahoo! to be closing Yahoo! Photos? Yes, it’s true that they bought Flickr, but Thomas points out that these two services have different userbases:

Having similar service running allows for one to be innovative and test the waters, while keeping one a safe resource that is familiar to the many who want stability over fresh and innovative. Companies must understand these two groups of people exist and are not fully interchangeable (er, make that they are rarely interchangeable). Innovation takes experimentation and time. Once things are found to work within the groups accepting innovation the work becomes really tough with the integration and use testing with the people who are not change friendly (normally a much larger part of an organization’s base).

It would have seemed the smart move to be mindful that Flickr is the innovation platform and Photos is the stable use platform. The two groups of use are needed. Those in the perpetual beta and innovation platform are likely to jump to something new and different if the innovation gets stale. The stable platform users often are surprised and start looking to move when there is too much change.

I agree with Thomas that Yahoo! Photos and Flickr users are not interchangable - to treat the former group as expendable is pure foolishness. It’s not like there aren’t business models to experiment with for Yahoo! Photos, so is it really necessary to close it?

Whilst this closure is at first not going to affect Yahoo!’s international users, they should get out whilst the going’s good. I see no way that Yahoo! Photos won’t be closing their international sites, so I find it absurd that they are still allowing people to sign up and upload photos to the UK site. But then, I find the whole thing absurd.

I don’t really talk about marketing and PR much here, unless it has something to do with blogs or social media, but I’m going to make an exception for UK-based radio station Xfm. They are committing an act of such gross stupidity that I just can’t let it pass.

A little background: I have been a long-term fan of Xfm. Their playlist was probably the most closely aligned to my own tastes of any radio station I’ve every listened to, playing the best new indie, indie-pop, rock and indie-dance you could find, presented by the best DJs. For nearly ten years, they’ve ruled the radio roost, creating a real sense of belonging amongst those of us who listened and loved what we heard.

A couple of months ago, they shed some of their best daytime DJs in a move that I found mystifying and disappointing. Their playlist, too, has deteriorated over the last several months. Like a frog being slowly brought to the boil, I hadn’t really realised just how narrow their playlist had become until someone pointed it out to me. I’ve blogged about all this over on Chocolate and Vodka - if you want to get a feel for just how passionate I am about Xfm, just read the post.

But last week, I discovered that axing their best DJs was only their first move. Their coup de grâce is axing all DJs from 10am until 4pm each weekday, effective from Tuesday 29 May.

RadioNews.co.uk said:

Xfm listeners will be asked to compile their own playlists via SMS, phone and online and vote for the artists and songs they want to hear. The studio production team will then be on hand to send them straight to air.

Listeners will be able to build playlists and vote for their favourite songs, take part in discussions, and record messages for Xu which may well end up on air. All SMS’s will also be displayed instantly.

This is radio for the cable TV generation - in a VH1- or MTV-style move, the most popular songs of the day will be put on heavy rotation whilst the station rakes in the cash from all the SMS messages that they receive. I’m sure they’ll be putting together a nice premium rate phone line too, so that listeners can be fleeced whilst they leave messages that will never make it to air.

As the Guardian’s Organ Grinder says, Xfm are calling this “Radio to the power of U” - a hint that perhaps someone at GCap Media, Xfm’s owners, thinks that this is the radio equivalent of user generated content.

And MediaGuardian (subscription required), said:

A GCap spokeswoman said the changes were not a cost-cutting exercise, and said none of the presenters or production team would lose their jobs. The DJs affected will be moved to other slots, although the total number of hours they are on air will inevitably be reduced.

I am sure that GCap see this not as a cost-cutting exercise, but more as a revenue raising move - if you have six hours of air-time to fill with listener requests, that’s going to require a lot of texts and phone calls.

But surely, I hear you say (even if it is your evil alter-ego saying it), surely this is a good thing? UGC is the way forward! Giving listeners control is the logical thing to do in this age of consumer choice! Xfm’s Managing Director, Nick Davidson thinks so:

Xfm has always been an innovative radio station and we really felt that we were ready to push the boundaries again. We are all excited about handing over the airwaves of Xfm to our listeners – it’s a new era and we can’t wait to see what kind of playlists and discussions they come up with. Our listeners are used to being able to control what they watch or listen to as these days people are inundated with choice. Allowing them to shape their own content seems the next logical step.

Sounds nice, but it’s wrong, terribly wrong.

Think of the power law - the most popular minority gets all the love and kisses, the less popular long tail remains largely ignored. Perhaps the narrowing down of Xfm’s playlist was a preparatory move, getting us used to hearing the same songs over and over again, because that’s what’s going to happen when the Xfm make this move. The majority of people will vote for the minority of songs that they are familiar with. New songs, unfamiliar songs - the ones in the long tail of popularity - will have a very hard time breaking into the hallowed ground of the power curve’s spike, meaning they won’t make it onto the air.

Result: Xfm will become tedious and boring.

The loss of real human DJs - people who care, people who are passionate, funny, interesting, exciting, cute, intelligent, informed, connected - will diminish listeners’ feelings of loyalty to the station. People react most favourably to other people. We like it when a human answers the phone instead of a machine. We prefer to be treated as individuals, not en masse. We want to have conversations with people we like and care about, people that we feel some sort of fellowship with. We don’t connect with people who pop up with an intrusive message for their own little social circle, we simply aren’t wired to care all that much about strangers.

Result: Xfm’s existing listeners will disengage and stop caring about the station.

I’m not the only one to think this is a bit mad. Nik Goodman says:

This move is a negative, defensive step and my predication is that it won’t have any significant positive impact on the audience. If anything, the loyal Xfm fan who tuned in to hear a knowledgable DJ get excited by music, will re-tune to find a station that has one.

Sorry Xfm. Bad move.

And ex-Xfm DJ Iain Baker says:

Oh dear, what a foolish thing to do. And the idea that the listener will suddenly be able to access a huge range of music is just absurd. They’ll get access to the daytime playlist. The end result will be exactly the same songs you hear now, just in a different order.

*sighs*

I was listening to Xfm whilst I was in the bath this morning, it just made me very sad to think how far it’s fallen. It was such a big part of my life and i’ll always have an affection for it, but it really does feel as though they are trying to squeeze the life out of the station…..

It has been suggested (in these comments) that GCap are attempting to strengthen Xfm’s brand, but if that’s the case, then they’ve taken possibly the stupidest step they could have. Xfm already had a strong brand which sprang from hiring really good DJs and playing a varied and interesting selection of the best new and old indie music. If they wanted to strengthen their brand, there are plenty of things that they could do around real co-created content, around social networking, blogging, podcasts, wikis and the like that would take Xfm into truly interesting and innovative territory.

But in this post from On An Overgrown Path, the author implies that Xfm’s move is actually a ratings chaser, following the lead of Classic FM who pioneered the computerised playlist in the UK:

Classic FM’s use of the computerised playlist has been devastatingly successful in the ratings war. In the first three months of 2007 Classic FM reached an audience of 6.03m listeners, up from 5.71m the previous year, while during the same period BBC Radio 3’s audience dropped below the important 2.0 million threshold, declining from 2.1m to 1.9m.

If Xfm are after ratings, then pandering to the popular via listen-led playlisting might not be the stupid move it feels like to those of us who actually care about music. Sure, Xfm might alienate all its existing listeners, but maybe it’ll get new ones. Lots and lots of new ones, people brought up on an MTV diet who don’t want to be surprised or introduced to new music, but who just want to hear what’s familiar, over and over again. In that case, tedious and boring won’t be a problem. Nor will a lack of talented DJs.

The thought that that might be true makes me incredibly sad. One of the jewels in the UK radio crown turns out to be made of paste.

But all might not be lost. Way back when, after the original Xfm was taken over by the Capital Group, the station went through a major reformatting, becoming much more mainstream. Listeners revolted, and Xfm was forced to its senses. From the looks of the discussion on the Xfm listener forums, people aren’t happy with what’s going on now either:

Sounds rubbish to me. XFM daytime will become as soulless as an automated digital station or crappy local radio in the middle of the night.

One of the reasons for listening to radio is for company while you work / lounge around. Not anymore. Bad move.

I’m sure discussion there will hot up when the change comes into effect. Maybe then, when people realise what this new format means, we can organise another revolt.

Ok, I just looked up from desk and saw a segment on Sky News called Business Blog. What the hell is so bloggy about a business reporter sitting behind a desk on the telly? NOTHING! So stop calling it a blog.

Oh, but wait you say, Michael Wilson does have a blog on Typepad, buried somewhere in the sub-basement on the Sky News website right around the corner from janitor’s loo. Great! More news sushi! Just chop up what you would normally do and dump it on a blog.

What is interactive about this? Nothing. How is this engaging your audience? It’s not. Transparency? Nope. Easy for the gob on a stick (what some TV producers call the ‘talent’)? Possibly. Bottom line, what is compelling about this for the audience? Nothing. It will fail.

What I’m about to say may sound ridiculous coming from a ‘Blogs Editor’, but there is nothing magical about blog software - it’s just a really easy content-management system with comments. Just dumping content into a blog isn’t going to entice the masses to come round and participate. You actually have to engage with the audience, not just produce more flat boring content.

If you want to start a conversation with people, stop talking at them and start talking with them. Follow them sometimes, not the news agenda all the time. Link out. Link to blogs not just other news sites. Kick off a conversation. Don’t just ask: “What do you think?”

You can have the best technology and still fail because your content is stuck in the age of publishing, not the age of participation. And for chrissakes, stop calling everything a blog because you think a bit of branding is all it takes.

I’ve refrained from blogging about Six Apart lately, because I have nothing positive to say about them or their products right now, but I’m afraid I can’t let their latest marketing email pass without calling bullshit.

I have spent the best past of the last four or five months listening to various friends struggling on a daily basis to keep Movable Type up and running. In fact, if you’re a regular reader then you’ll have experienced for yourself some of the problems that Corante have had with MT: the slowness, the failed page loads, the inability to post comments and, at one point, Strange’s total absence. I know of at least four large commercial installations of MT that have struggled - and, at times, failed - because Movable Type simply did not scale. (Although the new Rebuild Queue has helped.) I have personal friends who have had significant problems with MT, even though their sites are relatively small. And I have consoled more than one developer as MT saps their will to live, with significant bugs in 6A’s code being found and, eventually, fixed.

(Note: I am not going to name names, other than Corante’s - you knew about that anyway. Businesses in particular seem to be very wary of admitting when they are having software problems, but I am talking about household names both in the UK and the US who are having problems, and not small ones.)

With all this in mind, I find it totally disingenuous of 6A when they write:

We talk a lot about helping bloggers succeed with Movable Type, and that requires us to also focus on an important rule: Failure Is Not An Option.

You see, one thing Movable Type users often have in common is that, whether they’re writing a personal parenting blog for friends and family, or they’re publishing their opinion on case law for a law blog, they just can’t accept downtime on their blog. Fortunately, Movable Type was designed from day one to be super-reliable, standing up to the heaviest traffic load, even if you get linked to be a huge website.

This is nothing more than marketing department spin. MT is not super-reliable. If it was, then I wouldn’t keep hearing of yet another blogger who has abandoned MT, or another company that’s fighting to keep its MT installation going.

Six Apart is talking about MT as if it’s only used by individual bloggers, and that the only problem is when you get linked to by a big site. But whilst there are plenty of individual bloggers who are having problems, there are also business who have paid good money to MT for a commercial licence and are now finding MT to be a liability. And it’s not necessarily a big link that’s causing the problem, but fundamental flaws in the way that MT deals with spam and comments, and other bugs in the code that frankly should have been picked up years ago.

The spam problem, as I understand it, is that MT doesn’t differentiate between a spam hit and a proper comment until it has hit the database. It does the same amount of work in both cases, and the only difference is where that comment eventually turns up: on your blog or in the junk folder. So if your blog is hammered by spammers, the database does the same amount of work as it would do if it were hammered by real commenters. Of course, a spambot can hit your database with more comments more quickly than a human being can, and that alone can bring a blog down.

I heard of one case where, every time a comment was made, it caused 250mb of data to be transferred between servers. Scale that up to 100s or 1000s of spam comments, and suddenly you have the kind of load that can melt a server.

So no. MT is not super-reliable, and it cannot stand up to the heaviest traffic loads.

Six Apart go on:

How does it work? Well, unlike most blogging tools, Movable Type supports two different ways of publishing your pages — it can look in your database and choose which posts to display each time someone visits your site, or it can just generate a regular HTML web page that gets displayed without having to touch your database. That’s what we’re talking about when we say Movable Type supports “static” or “dynamic” publishing — static publishing doesn’t talk to your database every time someone visits your blog, and it’s the default in Movable Type. We let you choose between both so you can set the right balance of performance and scalability. (Static publishing takes longer for you as an author, but less time for your readers — so if you’ve ever waiting for your site to “rebuild”, you can take some consolation in the fact that your readers will have less of a lag when they visit you.)

Aaah yes, the rebuild. They talk as if this is a good thing. The trouble with rebuild is it’s really not very efficient, and frequent comments cause superfluous tasks to be queued for the rebuild, so you end up wasting a lot of server capacity. God knows the number of times I’ve sat there, waiting for a blog to rebuild… and waiting, and waiting, and waiting.

If you have the very latest version of MT, you have Rebuild Queue, but if you don’t then it doesn’t matter whether your site is static or dynamic, the problem is total comment load, including both spam and valid comments.

Most other blogging tools don’t do rebuilds the way MT does, and I can’t think of another tool that I use that suffers as much from bugs and downtime as MT. Doing things differently doesn’t mean you’re doing them right and everyone else is doing them wrong.

Digg-proof

Now, if you have a huge farm of servers and lots of technical staff, you can make dynamic publishing work at very high traffic volumes, too. In fact, our LiveJournal team here at Six Apart invented a lot of the open source technology that makes that work — the people behind sites like Facebook and Digg and Wikipedia and our own Vox use it, too. But if you’re running on a regular web server at a standard hosting company, they’re going to get kind of annoyed if your blog is hitting the database thousands of times just because you wrote a popular post.

Most commercial installations don’t have big server farms, nor do they have lots of technical staff. Yet even if you do chuck a few extra blades and a couple of developers at the problem, it’s still difficult to make MT work in either mode, static or dynamic, if you’re being hammered by spammers. Again, writing popular posts isn’t the problem. Serving pages isn’t the problem. Comments are the problem.

Now, it’s very easy to blame the spammers, but the sad fact is that spammers aren’t going to go away, and tools have to be built to withstand their onslaughts. MT isn’t. It didn’t matter how many servers you threw at MT 3.2x, comment spam could still kill them.

Oh, and just to nitpick… all that lovely open source stuff from LiveJournal? Well, let’s remember that minor point of fact that 6A bought LJ for its open source goodies. No sneakily trying to claim credit for LJ, please.

You might’ve seen this effect already — ever check out a link that’s been promoted on a big site like Digg or Slashdot and been faced with a “database connection error” when you visit the blog that got Dugg? Well, Movable Type is designed to prevent you from ever having to face that problem.

I feel like a broken record. Spam, guys, spam. Not the Slashdot Effect. (For the record, I’ve noticed that the Slashdot Effect is nowhere near as strong as it used to be anyway.)

For more tips on how to make sure your blog is performing as reliably as possible, our community’s put together some resources:

* MT Wiki
* Performance tuning Movable Type
* Enabling FastCGI
* Movable Type System Architectures

MT was always a tool that you needed to have a reasonable amount of expertise to install. Then they made it a bit easier, so you didn’t need to have quite the developer chops that you used to. Now you need to be a developer again to make the damn thing work. Make up your minds, 6A. Either MT is a developer tool or a consumer tool - you can’t keep wavering between the two.

And of course, we haven’t yet achieved this goal of making blogs failure-proof. Some of the steps for making a Movable Type blog bulletproof are too obscure or confusing. So we want to collect your feedback on the questions and concerns you have about the reliability of your Movable Type site — if you’ve ever missed out on some page views or potential readers because your blog wasn’t reachable, let us know or briefly summarize your story on this Movable Type wiki page.

OK, so 6A haven’t achieved their goal of making blogs failure-proof, why spend five paragraphs claiming they had?

If they want to understand where the problems are, they should start offering some support instead of expecting the people they’ve let down put the time and effort into writing it all up for them on their wiki. I know of people who have paid good money for MT who have had to fight to get 6A’s attention for support - 6A have complained when people ‘don’t use the ticketing system’ when the ticketing system was in fact broken. Hell, I even know of companies that have had to fight to pay them for a licence to use their software as per their terms and conditions. What sort of way is that to run a business?

Give proper support to the people whose MT blogs are failing, and you’ll soon gather all the stories you need to figure out what’s screwed up with MT. Instead of asking us to put the effort in, why don’t you, for a change?

We’ll start blogging about the reliability stories we’ve heard, both where MT has held up under pressure as well as where MT didn’t do what you’d expect, and how to fix it. Until then, you can help by pointing us at examples of Blog Failure, whether it’s on Movable Type or not, and we can all work together to help solve the problem.

Frankly 6A’s marketing department should be given, at the very least, a strong talking to for this email and especially the first and last paragraphs. Why should we do your work? It’s not the consumer’s job to figure out what’s wrong with your software - that’s your job, and if you provided decent support you’d have most of the answers by now anyway.

MT 3.34, released on 17 Jan 2007, has helped a few of my friends and contacts, but they are still having to do significant work to get all the plug-ins installed and working efficiently. Spam is still a problem. FastCGI gives a perceived speed increase, but frankly is a bit like faking it.

And whilst Rebuild Queue helps, it comes too late for many individual users and large MT installations. In commercial settings, MT’s damaged reputation has rubbed off not just on other third-party blog-related tools, but also on those evangelists who championed blogs in the first place, obscuring blogs’ benefits with serious performance issues that blot everything else out. It also makes it much harder to sell other Web 2.0 applications because of the fear that they too won’t scale.

The truth is that 6A have dropped the ball. They abandoned MT and their users, and their lack of support and updates has caused significant problems for even those people who are paying to use the software. Instead of keeping on top of MT and ensuring that it can cope with a rapidly changing environment and increasingly sophisticated spammers, they’ve spent the last two years focused on Vox.

Personally, I find it hard to have faith in Six Apart’s commitment to developing, improving and supporting Movable Type, which is why I now advise clients to avoid it at all costs.

Technorati Tags: movable type, six apart

The day before yesterday, I blogged about Flickr forcing users to switch over to using a Yahoo! ID to access their Flickr account, and the patronising email I got about it. I was not a happy camper.

Now the furore has developed, and Flickr/Yahoo look even worse. Maybe it’s just bad timing, but it seems there are three main issues running concurrently here.

1. The forced switch to a Yahoo! ID.
2. Flickr forcing graceless limits to friends and tags.
3. Yahoo! using ‘all rights reserved’ and ‘non-commercial’ Creative Commons licensed photos on their Wii page, for commercial gain.

Oh dear. What a mess.

The forced switch to Yahoo!
Flickr announced in 2005 that they were going to be shifting to the Yahoo! log-in, and in a BBC article from September 05, they reassured people that all would really be ok with this move:

“We care deeply about our community, and their worries are ours,” [Caterina] Fake told the BBC News website.

“But I think the fears are unfounded. As always, the proof is in the pudding. We’re tending to our knitting, and making sure the Flickr experience is as good as it’s always been.”

But mistrust of Yahoo! goes back a long way, and disgruntled Flickr members started the Flick Off group to protest. There are now 1533 members, counting down to the day when Flickr IDs will be turned off and some of them will quit Flickr for good. The official Flickr forum thread is currently running at 1681 responses, and still going strong. The issues people are worried about include:

• Finding an available Yahoo! ID that doesn’t suck.
• Hating your existing Yahoo! ID; or losing the password and being unable to retrieve it.
• Hating the unpleasant and long-winded Yahoo! sign-up process, which includes questions some people find intrusive and objectionable. For an insight into this process, take a look at Chris Messina’s screenshots.
• Intermittency of Yahoo! sessions - people like being permanently logged into Flickr and don’t want to have to keep logging into Yahoo! (This is supposed to have been fixed now, but not everyone is happy with the cookie-based solution.)
• Concern that, in the UK at least, Yahoo! is wedded to British Telecom’s broadband service and that by tying Flickr to Yahoo! they are also tying Flickr to BT. This is not good - if you want to change ISP you loose your BT Internet email address, which would then invalidate your Yahoo! ID and cut you off from Flickr.
• Yahoo!’s habit of tracking usage using cookies and other methods.
• Fear that Yahoo! will terminate your account for reasons unclear or unreasonable, thus locking you out of Flickr.
• Fear that your Yahoo! account will expire without you realising it, thus locking you out of Flickr.
• The item in the official help page that says if you terminate your Yahoo! account, you will also terminate your Flickr account and delete all your photos (see below).
• A perception that Yahoo! marketing practises are unethical and exploitative.
• Fear that Yahoo! will screw with Flickr the same way they screwed with other sites they bought in the past.
• Technical issues with the Yahoo! sign-in screen, such as it timing out and not allowing browsers to save the password.
• Issues with different Terms of Service for Yahoo!
• Confusion for people with multiple accounts of either kind.
• A feeling that if one has signed up with and paid money to Flickr, one should not have to now sign up to Yahoo!
• Problems with people losing photos and contacts after merging their Flickr account with their Yahoo! account.
• Concern that people who have paid for Pro accounts, but who choose not to switch to Yahoo!, will lose their money.

I could go on - this list is just culled from the first two pages of the thread and, whilst it’s admirable to see some participation from Flickr staff, they don’t seem to be really appreciating the depth of feeling about this nor do they appear to be systematically answering questions. Are these concerns and fears legitimate? Some are minor niggles that aren’t all that big of a deal, some have already been addressed by the Flickr team, but some are deeply disturbing. For example, if you delete your Yahoo! ID, you will also be deleting your Flickr account, as the official help page says:

I’m going to delete my Yahoo! account. What happens to my Flickr photos?
If you sign in to Flickr with a Yahoo! ID and you then delete your Yahoo! account, you will not be able to sign in to your Flickr account. In the future, this will delete your Flickr account as well, including all of your photos, but currently your Flickr account must be deleted separately.

This seems like a really rather harsh policy. Are users really clear on this point?

Technorati Tags: media 2.0

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If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being told what to do. That’s why I’ve been a freelance for so long. I like making my own decisions and resent having them made for me, so it’s not surprising that I feel royally peeved with Yahoo and Flickr for sending me this email:

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

We’re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at: http://go.yahoo.com.

95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It’s easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don’t.

You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page:

http://flickr.com/account/associate/

Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.

Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here:

http://flickr.com/help/signin/

Thanks for your patience and understanding - and even bigger thanks for your continued support of Flickr: if you’re reading this, you’ve been around for a while and that means a lot to us!

Warmest regards,

- The Flickreenos

This email does not fill me with the warm fuzzy glow I usually associate with Flickr. Instead, my brain reinterprets if for me thus:

Hey! Unhip square kid with no friends!

You may not have noticed, but we’ve been making it increasingly difficult for you to sign in to Flickr using your original Flickr ID by burying the sign-in page deep in the bowels of our site, where we hoped you’d never find it. It seems, however, that you haven’t taken the hint, and are still using your old ID. For shame. From March 15th you’re not going to be able to use your old ID anymore, and we’re going to force you to either sign up to Yahoo or use your Yahoo ID instead. We don’t really care if this is an inconvenience for you - you’re just going to have to lump it.

We’re making this change now because it makes life much easier for us. We also want to introduce you to a plethora of Yahoo services that you’ve never shown the least bit of interest in, and probably neither want nor need. We’ve already introduced some new features to Flickr and we made them Yahoo-only, so that we can pretend that we’re doing you a favour by forcing you to use your Yahoo login. Just to prove it, here are two things that you can’t currently do. Fool.

Anyway, you’re so old-fashioned and behind the times that you’re one of only 5% of cretins who still use the old Flickr ID, so give it up already. You’re like one of those little grannies who refuse to move out of a hideous towerblock that’s scheduled for redevelopment by nice coffee shop owners, just because it’s ‘home’ or some such nonsense. This is progress, dammit.

OK, OK, we’ll give you a couple of months to come to terms with the fact that we own your ass. But after that, you will be assimilated, like it or not. Resistance is futile.

Of course, we do appreciate that you were one of the people who coughed up cold, hard cash for a proper Flickr account back when we really needed the money, but hell, Yahoo gave us big bucks a while back, so meh. Whatever.

Warmest fuzzy wuzzies. No really, we do care. Honest. No, don’t look at us like that. Look, we’re about to turn into squirrels even cuddlier and cuter than the Trotts. Just you wait and see… Look! Look!!

- The cutesy wutesy Flickreenosywosy

You know, I like Flickr. There are some astonishingly good people working there. There are also some astonishingly good people working at Yahoo, but yet I don’t like the Yahoo brand at all. It’s unpleasant. It says ‘ignorant false-hearted redneck who always hangs on other people’s coat-tails’ to me. They are a brand that started off ‘pretty cool’ in the mid-90s, sank to ‘horrible’ in 2001 and have now rebounded to ‘icky’ (in no small part to some absolutely awful TV adverts), with a hint of ‘cool’ because of the services they’ve bought. That’s a shame, because I think that the people I know who work for Yahoo and Flickr are some of the smartest cookies out there, and all lovely to boot.

But I feel like I’m being both patronised and bullied at the same time by this email. Not once do they apologise for any inconvenience they may cause me, not a single ’sorry’. Come on Flickr, you can do better than this. You are the Web 2.0 posterboys, your site is the one everyone talks about when they want a good example of community and social networking. Surely you are the people who understand that someone’s attachment to a site, even to a log-in, isn’t logical but emotional, and that you have to factor that in to how you deal with your community?

I didn’t join up to Yahoo Photos, I joined Flickr, and I rather resent the way I’m being told to move my log-in. You can be sure that I will be one of the bloodyminded few who will hold on to their Flickr log-in until the very last moment, just out of principle. Is there truly no behind-the-scenes solution to this? Would it not be better to use an OpenID solution, so that people have the option of using one log-in for whichever services they like? Or is this the beginning of a new mega-login trend? Are they going to start forcing people to use their Yahoo ID to log into Del.icio.us, or Upcoming? Oh god… you’re not trying to be Google are you?

Don’t let us down here Flickr. You created something wonderful, and now you have an opportunity to do something cool about your login problem, instead of just forcing users to dance to your tune.

Technorati Tags: media 2.0

As you might or might not know, I’ve got a relationship with Edelman, the PR company. I know Richard Edelman, I’ve spoken to their clients about blogging, had meetings with them, and spoken at two of their events. I have also worked closely with Jackie Cooper PR, their sister company, providing training and consultancy.

So I’m pretty embroiled with Edelman, and that makes me even more disappointed to be using the ‘Blog Fuckwittery’ category on this post, but it can’t be helped, I’m afraid.

If you’re into the whole PR thing, then you’ll likely have noticed recently that Edelman have got themselves into a bit of a pinch by helping create a fake blog for Wal-Mart. Called ‘Wal-Marting Across America‘, it purported to be a blog by a couple who decided to go on a cheap holiday in an RV (that’s camper van to us Brits), staying in Wal-Mart car parks overnight. What the blog failed to mention was that the project was a publicity stunt and that Wal-Mart were paying for their petrol, food, and the RV. This trick is known in the trade as ‘astroturfing’ (i.e. faking grassroots). Another way of describing it is ‘lying by omission’, and we all know lying is bad.

I’m not going to go into detail here about what was wrong with this specific project because lots of other people have done that, and I don’t much feel like parroting them. (For balance, I include the frankly lame responses from Richard and Steve.) But I do want to discuss a creeping disquiet I’ve felt lately that this serves only to reinforce.

Now, I like Richard Edelman - he seems to be a nice guy, quite savvy, and genuinely interested in the blogosphere, but the problem here is not just that Richard and his team were not transparent, it’s more fundamental than that. It’s that they are still thinking in old media terms: This was a typical ‘broadcast media’ stunt, an attempt to change the way people think about Wal-Mart by playing up the warm fuzzy angles and neglecting to mention that the whole thing was set up from the start. That is such an old-school way of thinking and it reveals just how much of the bloggers’ ethos has percolated through to the heart of what Edelman do, i.e. ‘not a lot’.

The other week, Kevin and I were invited by Richard and his team to attend a briefing that they, with Technorati, were giving their clients about the European blogosphere. Kevin was on the panel and I was asked by Richard just before the event if I could stand up and say something about the difference between US and UK top ten bloggers. I didn’t really blog it, bar a quick mention on Chocolate and Vodka, because I ended up feeling a little bit uncomfortable with some of the basic premises on show, such as ‘the A-list are important’.

There were a lot of other bloggers there, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it, because it was a little too much like they were there for show. For a long time I’ve felt that Richard is indulging in the zooification of bloggers - collecting and displaying them the way that rich people used to do with exotic animals. I worry that this makes him feel that he’s got a better understanding of the phenomenon than he actually has.

Surrounding myself with Chinese speakers does not instantaneously make me a fluent Chinese speaker. Yes, having access to Chinese speakers can help me learn Chinese better and faster, but only if I actually bother to speak Chinese to them. Surrounding yourself with bloggers is a pointless tactic if you don’t talk about blogs with them, if you don’t actually put some effort into learning what all this stuff means. You can’t pick it up by osmosis.

And this Wal-Mart debacle shows that Edelman still have a long way to go before they genuinely understand blogging. There are a lot of values and ethics they have yet to instil in all their staff at an instinctive level - Wal-Marting Across America should have been simply impossible to conceive, one of the ideas that they never had because it runs so counter to blogging culture. The fact that it wasn’t shows that too many people at Edelman think the old school way, about control and being on-message and spin. This is not the blogger way.

Kevin frequently talks about how he sees big media trying to adapt blogs to their business model instead of adapting their business to blogs, and Edelman are making exactly the same mistake - trying to use blogs for PR, instead of trying to adapt PR to blogs. Having a blog isn’t a magic bullet, it doesn’t fix anything. The magic comes from transparency, openness, honesty and engagement. As Kevin says, that’s the cluetrain, this is just clue-fucked.

Now, a few days after the furore, Richard has outlined the steps Edelman are taking to remedy the situation within Edelman. I have a few thoughts about his ideas, in order:

1. ‘Best practice’ is not something you get by put down rules into a document, or