falklueke.com

I was asked to contribute as a guest author to economist.com/debate on online privacy regulation, which I happily did. There are two kinds of learnings for me: the first is a matter of the subject, the second a matter of online debates.

Regarding the first issue, I have to admit that it seems I underestimated the mistrust in elected representatives compared to the mistrust in private companies, which are often not to be held accountable in any way as long as no privacy legislation gives you a right to hold them accountable. In Germany we mistrust the government a lot, but at least they are the elected untrustworthy. Since there is little reason to trust in binding corporate rules or other self-regulatory approaches for a whole and non-definable branch such as ‘all data processing and storing companies’ I don’t see the possibility of something like a third way besides privacy legislation and international cooperation on both the standards but in particular on the enforcement issue too.

The second issue is that I would really like to see the format of the Economist debate on German language newspaper or magazine websites as well. The only thing I am not that happy with yet is the voting system. The Economists question ‘agree with the motion’ is an invitation for campaigning (I’ve seen ‘click-no-campaigning’ on Twitter, and it was interesting to see that most of the written comments were mostly pro while the vote was very narrow in the end). The number of how many changed their minds on the issue during the debate is only visible as a mouseover – this could be enhanced, since convincing someone of a different opinion seems to be much more interesting than how many readers agree with the one or the other side of the fence in a non-representative way. Maybe there could be a change to the voting model that only on the first one or two days the voting is open and after that you are only allowed to change your opinion. This could help avoiding campaigning effects a little at least, I guess.

In case you wonder about one of the trending topics on Twitter right now: Blumenkübel means flower bucket.

This german meme was created based on an article by a regional newspaper of Münster (Westphalia), reporting in a dramatic story that a flower bucket on the street in front of an old people’s home was destroyed during the night.

Now this very sad story of the very sad people in Neuenkirchen has become part of the German twittersphere, including a tweet by second national tv program that there might be good arguments for sending a special report on the flower bucket issue tonight right after the evening news. Scientists tweeted, they’d like to conduct surveys on Blumenkübel case related issues, the official account of the very popular savings banks announced that their household insurance would cover destroyed flower buckets and the distance selling giant Otto gave recommendation, that you could buy new flower buckets online there.

During summer holidays, newspapers and tv stations often face serious problems finding important news to report. We call it “Saure Gurken-Zeit” (translates as “sour gherkins term”) or “Sommerloch” (summer hole, both translates best as silly season). There’s a german saying “and in china, a sack of rice fell”, meaning could(n’t) care less. Or, as the original posting on twitter reads: “In Neuenkirchen, a flower bucket fell.”

About one year ago I sat in my kitchen, sketching a platform for a convertible attention currency. I had just stopped working on the idea of a Berlin web magazine, because I found that the economic situation is lacking the infrastructure to run something like that in a way I’d like to use it myself. I didn’t want to have subscriptions, paywalls, I didn’t want to have to sell advertisements as content or any other things like that. Therefore I thought about enhancing the infrastructure a little.

The first thoughts were something like this: usually we are paying with our attention on the web. But attention doesn’t make you pay your rent, it doesn’t even make you pay your meals. Even in heavily link recommendation based online environments such as Twitter or Facebook, people are comfortable with getting something ‘for free’ and at the same time, to say they’d pay for some services if there was some kind of easy way to do so.

I worked as a journalist for years. My most difficult story ever had to be published on a blog and I didn’t make a single dime out of it, since the publishers I usually worked for had gotten ‘cold feet’. It was read by 30.000 unique visitors within one week in 2006, just by mouth-to-mouth hints. So there had to be a way to give all those who really do something for their users, their readers, their listeners an easy option to earn some money. And at the same time, to give a little kick to those who still don’t get the net.

To make this already too long story short: I thought of a platform where:
1. you as a user might register with your email address and either your credit card data or a bank account for direct debit (which is very popular, with consumer friendly laws for it in Germany).
2. you as a content producer might register to get your share of the cake.
3. you as a content producer might register to pitch for unclaimed money (explanation follows below).

For the user, the system would be very easy: you see something you like on the web. You decide: this is something I’d like to pay a decent amount for. Maybe 5 cents, maybe a Euro, maybe 10. To prevent fraud there should be no more than 20 Euros per item allowed. In fact this works just like bookmarking with an amount for you.
At the end of the month you receive an email including details on your proposed payments and the possibility to change amounts or to drop your spendings (maybe the blogger you chose turned out to be a millionaire and you might want to spend it in a different way).
So you decide how much you pay, who do you think should get that money and have provided a decent web address for the database.

For the content producer the system has to be much more complex: you are claiming that you own a content by a mechanism similar to the Technorati blog claim mechanism - you register, you get an instant personalized picture and install it at your server in the root directory you are responsible for. Then you click: claim. After that, all content below this directory will be counted as yours and any money which users want to give you will reach you (except someone else claims a subdirectory of it as an ‘owner’).

All money from the users is collected by a foundation. It only has one goal: to get rid of the money again, either by transferring it to the owners of the content which users wanted to pay for or by doing something different with it - a board of trusted people should decide on how to spend the money, maybe by granting fellowships for journalism, for arts or other ways of helping those who want to produce for the nets public. Only the foundations own expenses for administration should be covered by some of the unclaimed money.

Now Flattr is out there and Kachingle, too. I tried to get in touch with Peter Sunde earlier this year, he didn’t reply. Since I think there’s not space for another competitor and I really didn’t have time to get this run, I now decided to abandon it and just publish my thoughts. If you like it, tell others and get them towards the direction I thought it should be done.

Is the internet really a tool for promoting democracy in authoritarian states? Is it just a relay of the existing societies mechanisms? Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.org asked me whether I’d like to participate in an interview with Evgeny Morozov for his podcast series. Evgeny, a Belarus born researcher at Georgetown University and contributing editor at Foreign Policy gave us a lot of insights in his very interesting research. Thanks a lot for both, the interview and the opportunity to do it.

The interview is available as MP3 (62 MB) and OGG Vorbis (46 MB).

I don’t have to complain to Chris Anderson. I heard his book ‘free’ mostly on the subway. The audio book was free in it’s german double meaning of ‘umsonst’ (free of charge/without any effects) in any meaning. The time I spent was ‘too small to meter’, just to quote Andersons main thesis.

Some weeks ago there was a lively discussion on the reporting and / or journalism quality Twitter allows, influences or stands for. My position was: without referencing, twitter is nothing. Today, a plane went down at the Hudson River in NYC.

Within seconds it was reported by several Twitter users, for example @manolantern, by @trappedinabay, by @jdackerman and by @jkrums.

Janis Krums said to be on a ferry which was getting as close as possible to the watered plane and trying to rescue it’s passengers. He took a picture which will make it around the world during the next hours, sent it via TwitPic into the world. Even though TwitPics servers did not survive the massive amount of requests, the picture was republished by several others [I include it here, too, will change that to a reference link later on when TwitPic is back].

Some of the most interesting pictures I saw yet are to be found at the Flickr stream of user GregoryLam, who started taking pictures obviously within seconds after the plane watered (notice the wave trails behind the plane). They are also interesting to all kind of media, since they are published under a Creative Commons 2.0 BY license, which means: you just have to name the photographer and might use the pictures for whatever purpose you like to.

But what happened on Twitter after the crash? Loads of people reported that others reported that a plane fell into Hudson River. Most of them did not even reference sources or started chatting about it, so their content was mainly meaning- and worthless - twitter search was flooded with plane/hudson posts within 30 minutes, it was hard to find the original posting. There was no journalism on twitter, after the reporting had ended/was replaced by those who do traditional media.

CNN just called me!?!? How did they get my number

To me, this was the most interesting tweet of the day. Oh, and by the way, it’s good to have a good positioning system.

The New York Times sent a News Alert about an hour after the plane went down. It’s content: flight route, no. of passengers and cabin crew, expected reason for the watering. Twitter was not mentioned.

Over there at TechCrunch, people discuss whether Twitter is a news source. I think it’s easier than you might think it is.

1. Twitter is a close-to-real time reporting medium.
2. You usually do not follow the guy at the place where “it” happens.
3. You probably do follow a guy that follows a guy that follows a guy… at the place “it” happens.
4. The last guy in the chain will cover “it”. Others will read and spread the word.
5. When Twitterers are not referring to the original source, Twitter is not a news source. It’s just a news channel.
6. If you are interested in making Twitter a crowd source medium, refer to your sources by linking the exact status or at least the original users.

It won’t hurt. I’m sure.

For the young department of ZEIT online ZEIT Zuender, I took a look on which european nations are using which Social Networks (The text behind the link is German only, but I think you will understand it anyway). While researching, I stumbled across some sites new to me. The result might be read within minutes - but working on it was quite some work (especially, since you won’t believe that some nations seem not to use any social networks).

Not mentioned in the article, since not in the EU: Одноклассники (to be read: Odnoklassniki, in english “classmate”) from Russia, saying it would have 15 Mio registered users. Russian, too: В Контакте (”in contact”), the first Facebook clone looking even more like the original than 2006 started German StudiVZ.

Not available since a few days is Ekipa.hr (in english something like “Team”), which even though I don’t know croatian seemed to be quite interesting, regarding technical issues.

My virtual desk is aching and so do I. It turns out to be a little bit problematic that days are limited to 24 hours. I don’t feel that well, since I feel that some of the things I do are not of the quality I’d like to see them.

In fact, I’m working on 7 different projects at the same time right now, just one of them to be ending during the next week. I think that’s nothing you should try out yourself, it makes your head burst, sleep less than what’s acceptable.

On the other hand, a lot of what I’m doing right now makes me happy. Things are going in a good direction, some projects I had in mind for a while are most probably going to be realized. Need some vacation soon, anyway. Between articles, concepts, ideas and long lists of lovely stuff, my head gets heavier every day.

Something quite remarkable about the number of paper based magazines/newspapers which are printed on no demand:

But the problem isn’t with individual magazines but with the whole industry: As long as publishers consider it acceptable to destroy, unsold, twice as many copies as they ship to newsstands, the word “magazine” won’t deserve to appear in the same sentence as “green.” (Average newsstand sell-through is only about 34 percent.)

Jeff Bercovici at the Mixed Media Blog reports. Maybe that’s well known, but at least to me, that sounds very low. I don’t know the numbers for Germany, but I will try to find or research.

(via OTR)