Specifically, Tom objected to my suggestion, drawing from Matt’s argument, that the activities of soc-net users were already being viewed explicitly in terms of their monetary value, and that it was only a matter of time before the users themselves start asserting some kind of claim. His tweets, collated:

How on earth do you ‘earn’ money by talking to friends or sharing photos. You don’t.
A company that creates a space or an environment or takes on risk does, and it gives you stuff in return.

So the people using these services get nothing out of them? They need to socialize for a cash share of a company?

Do we expect a proportion of our TV company’s revenue? Are we ‘workers’ when we watch TV?

Now, I’m not a subscriber to the labour theory of value, but I do believe in what you might call the ‘value theory of value’. There’s clearly a billion dollars of value somewhere in Instagram: specifically, a billion dollars of value to Mark Zuckerberg, which admittedly exists on a scale all of its own. From there, the obvious follow-up is ‘what does Mark Zuckerberg value?’, and we can make a pretty decent guess based on how Facebook operates. When your business model is based upon swaddling and commodifying the sharing of personal information and social interaction, I don’t think it’s too outrageous to suggest that the participants may start to wonder what they’re worth.

But I’ll turn to Tom’s questions in reverse order. Stripped down to the basics (that’s to say, free-to-air networks as opposed to subscription services) the transactional model of commercial television works something like this: a television network pays for programming with the intention of generating a particular audience, the promise of which it uses in turn to sell advertisers the right to interrupt; the audience, in turn, accepts this right to be interrupted as the cost of watching, or pays for services and technology that reduce or remove those interruptions, or treats them as a cue to put the kettle on.

I don’t think that model applies to social networks at all. Television audiences are mostly non-participatory, unless you extend the definition to include ‘viewing time’, which seems so broad as to be meaningless.

However, within that wider framework, there are specific programming models that seem more relevant. Take, for instance, the You’ve Been Framed / AFV format: global in reach, hugely successful, a big broad family-friendly slapstick-loving demographic for advertisers, and most importantly, really bloody cheap to make. Got a video of a bridesmaid falling face-first into a cake, or a cat singing along to opera? Send it our way, and if we show it you get paid. If it’s especially funny, we invite you to come and watch, churn up additional time making fun out of you, and you might get even more money in return. Don’t think too hard about how your half-minute clip or two-minute audience segment costs us what we’d pay for half a second of CSI: My Arse.

These programmes wouldn’t exist without enthusiastic participation from their audience, but they thrive on the asymmetry of corporate and personal finance: paying ten grand to the best video of the week is cheap for the producers, but it’s a lot of money to the parents of little Jimmy who got filmed making a funny face.

It’s this disparity, assisted by cheap video technology that further lowers the barriers to participation, that underpins the rise of reality television over the past couple of decades. It even extends beyond the standard network broadcast model: a more distasteful example would be the Girls Gone Wild series, as documented by Ariel Levy for Slate, which offers t-shirts, baseball caps and large quantities of alcohol in exchange for filmed nudity and a scrawled signature on a release form, all presumably at a cost much lower than that demanded by industry professionals. This, of course, is much easier to dismiss as ugly exploitation, given the question of informed consent when hammered on margaritas.[1]

In short, television and video already compensates audiences when they become contributors, thanks to the comparative bargain that producers get from converting them into the source of programme content. Social platforms, for the most part, strike an even better deal, thanks to the transactional relationship established in the terms of service that you skipped over when you signed up.

Which leads us to objection two: aren’t users of a service compensated by what they get out of it, making it a fair deal? Again, up to a point, but the perception of fairness is shaped by preconceptions and expectations about the ongoing relationship between a service and its users, all the more so when the users are actively providing shared content.

Consider CDDB. It’s something I’ve cited more than once, because I think it sets an interesting precedent. Although created in the early days of the web, it acquired new value with the emergence of the MP3 format in the mid-90s, because it offered an elegant tool for digitising one’s music collection built upon collaborative effort. Although CDs contained no metadata on the disks themselves, CDDB used the track information to generate a (nearly) unique signature that could then be submitted to an online database; if the signature already existed, the database would confirm the title and artist, then fetch the appropriate track data; if a match couldn’t be found, you’d be invited to fill out that data yourself and submit it to the database for others to benefit.

This was the era of Slashdot and Winamp and fly-by-night FTP ratio sites, when a large section of web users blended their growing interest in open source development with an awareness that higher bandwidth and efficient file compression made storing and sharing music libraries as feasible as downloading the latest Linux kernel. CDDB’s server software was GPL-licenced; its signature-generating code was freeware; its database could be freely mirrored (and for a while, was declared to be under the GPL as well); and the developers of players, rippers and encoders rapidly incorporated its features into their software, automating the process of querying the database and simplifying the submission of new entries.

In 1998, the maintainers of the original codebase and master database incorporated the service, then sold it for an undisclosed sum to a relatively obscure consumer electronics company called Escient. The immediate reaction was mixed: goodwill for the project’s founders, some concern for its long-term fate under new ownership, a certain amount of disquiet that the freely-provided content accumulated over five years obviously counted as much in the acquisition as the backend that made those contributions possible.[2]

Within a year, the licence for accessing CDDB was drastically revised in ways regarded as an attempt to monopolise the market; by 2000, the service, spun off and renamed Gracenote, shifted to a new, proprietary format and began demanding licencing fees from developers, sending patent violation warnings and filing lawsuits. The heavy-handedness of this approach (for instance, demanding the display of the CDDB logo during lookups, which was unfeasible for console-based players) spurred on the creation of alternatives that would avoid the same fate. Gracenote is now owned by Sony, and provides (under licence) the track-identification capabilities of iTunes and other major music players; FreeDB maintains the old, GPL-licenced format; another alternative evolved into MusicBrainz, which uses a different approach to identify tracks, and operates through a non-profit entity committed to free, unrestricted access.

For the most part, the people who primed CDDB’s database and adopted its open-sourced features were comfortable with the project’s founders benefitting financially, given that they were the ones who’d sustained the core service as it scaled dramatically. They certainly didn’t think of themselves as ‘workers’ entitled to a share of the spoils, but neither was it recreational: they were volunteers, small-scale collaborators in a mutually-beneficial project. What chafed in the aftermath was the sense that the founders’ reward was being clawed back through rent-seeking and increasingly restrictive conditions on developers, which by extension affected users — in essence, biting the hand that fattened you for market. Volunteered effort approaches the condition of work when it becomes a means by which others profit from it, but what truly changes the characterisation of those contributions in retrospect, whether it’s from typing up your music collection in the small hours or baring your breasts at a party during spring break, is being made to feel like a sucker.

The comparison to Instagram isn’t straightforward, for reasons that Phil outlines in his post, but there are ties that bind. The decade-long evolution of social networking has embellished the dynamics of contribution, so that value adheres not just in the accumulation of content, but in the direct mapping of content to users, and the presence of user content as a catalyst of user presence. That’s a high-falutin’ way of saying that social networks aim to create non-replicable spaces: you go to CDDB because that’s where the track listings are, but you go to Facebook or Instagram because that’s where you’ve put yourself.

In that context, to objection three: that companies who invest financially in the creation and maintenance of collaborative online spaces, on account of taking on risk, earn the rights to the financial spoils, while users engaging in social activity in those spaces earn… the right to toast those companies’ success and keep using them. Now, I count many smart, bloody hard-working people in the social startup world as my friends, Tom included; the more richly rewarded they are, the better for everyone. Give them your money. All that said, I’m uncomfortable with that kind of forthrightness, and with attempts like that of Derek Powazek to cast it as a distinction between ‘work’ and ‘play’. To call user activity ‘work’ may be a stretch; to call it ‘play’ feels like a dodge, even if it’s not meant that way.[3] It’s a troubling polarisation, with the potential to lock down the conversation about the tangible and intangible value of social networks. Call it participation, call it contribution: what makes these kinds of user activity tricky is that they’re neither work nor play, and admitting that in no way delegitimises the talent and gumption of the startups that facilitate them.

And so, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to South Park and Environs.[4] Simply by virtue of its acquisition, Instagram has become a commoditised space, cumulatively worth 0.01 Facebooks on the ‘what Mark Zuckerberg values’ scale. What distinguishes Instagram from Hipstamatic and Camera+ on that scale (discussed by Gruber over the past fortnight) is its concentration of presence in a networked space that is explicitly public by default, a de facto broadcast platform, although one obfuscated by the lack of an official web interface. Flickr offers an archive of photographs; Instagram serves as a repository of presence.[5]

We understand the transactional model of paid or premium services; we’re still coming to terms with the transactional model of ‘free’, particularly in social networking; we know that our contributions bring value to those services even as we draw value from them, but have no way to quantify whether we’re being (or about to be) suckered; all we know for sure is the amount paid to acquire the collective rights.

When we contribute to social networks, we do so under terms that are both like and unlike those of employment: under those terms, it’s ultimately not the pay (or lack thereof) that matters: it’s the conditions.

[1] Then again, Boobstagram.
[2] Amazon acquired IMDB around the same time; from memory, it didn’t generate as much fuss, because the maintainers had spent a decade keeping it going, but perhaps it should have. (Update 22/04: Lee Maguire suggests, via email, that the muted reaction extended primarily from IMDB’s non-commercial licencing and open interfaces to the database, which makes sense to me.)
[3] A trickiness that Derek knows well, given the initial reaction to Pixish.
[4] Thus.
[5] Although thinking about it, I’m reminded of the very earliest Flash-based incarnation of Flickr, which suggests an interesting reversal from the web of 2004-5.

“Tag Suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested.

“If for any reason someone doesn’t want their name to be suggested, they can disable the feature in their privacy settings.”

Me, last year:

Perhaps it’s time to accept a new set of base assumptions about online privacy: that coders set the rules, whether they know it or not; that most users accept the defaults, whether they ought to or not; that transgressions become norms, whether checked or not; and that those who research and advocate and educate will continue to fight the last battle, while those with the power to implement their advice most directly will ignore it until shamed into acting.

And as I said in reply to danah boyd six years ago: tagging carries a power dynamic.

In the wake of the Apple location-data retention furore, and the staged concern of the subsequent Senate hearing, I wondered whether we might actually see a more concerted resistance to the weaselry that is ‘well, you can just disable it.’ (On more cynical days, I wonder whether Facebook and its non-privacy policy is actually a front for a grand scheme to conquer the web through ‘how do I turn off…?’ content farming.) But that’s not likely to happen, and so the countdown begins for another flackish faux-apology when the tagging defaults receive another little tweak.

We were talking about the distinction between what you might call ‘commodity data’ — downloaded media, shared documents, applications, core OS files — and personal data, and how that distinction is meditated through different licensing models, but also by a different sense of personal attachment, even if, at heart, data is data, and your most treasured photos can, for all their uniqueness, be diffed against somebody else’s.

Break down the contents of most hard drives, and you’ll find that it’s commodity data, for the most part, that has grown to fill the space now available, a new version of the push-pull that once existed between OS and hardware. A thousand hours of decently-compressed music fills around 100GB; the same in HD video takes you up to a terabyte.

Dropbox attempts to deal with the profusion of commodity data — whether obtained through purchase or P2P — through its segmented binary diffs, and it’s this model that makes most sense for generic cloud storage, even if it raises potential questions of legality and security.

Apple has decided to do things a little differently. What makes iTunes Match clever isn’t simply that it finally has the corporate clout to deliver an authorised version of Michael Robertson’s My.MP3.com ; it’s that while charging a tacit $25 amnesty fee (call it ‘iLaunder’), Apple can surreptitiously sidestep the question of how to deal with fifteen years of MP3 hoarding. While upload-based music storage services presumably have to deal with a multitude of digital versions in different bitrates, laden with the quirks of optical drives and encoding software, Apple offers a trade-in for a canonical, cloud-based version deliverable to all authorised devices.

However much Apple paid out to the record labels, it’s a model that’s intended to save them a huge amount in storage and bandwidth costs, and it sets a new precedent in how to approach commodity data online.

Still, I’m not getting rid of my FLAC archives.

This is not investment advice regarding the exchange rate trend for the next year, but it’s not divorced from the topic either.

* who you should read.

It’s not simply that iOS (or Android) devices run on pretty fast hardware; it’s that the immediacy of the UI demands immediacy in return. The computer is now judged against the feedback loop of the telephone.

Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the Company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition.

As a like-for-like comparison, the first sentence — the one highlighted by most reporting — clouds more than it clarifies. A bit of basic algebra (100p = 115k, where 3k = h) fills in the blank, giving a paperback-to-hardback ratio of 60:23, but the phrasing makes me wonder whether Amazon is trying to be coy about which market the Kindle is aimed at, and which market it’s eating into the most.

Unlike much of the anglosphere, the North American market remains tied to the higher margins and royalties of first-release hardback editions, even though many of the works that appear in that format are semi-disposable, and would likely be bought as eagerly in paperback with less weight and less pomp. Instead, the reader has generally been posed with a choice of paying the hardback premium and enjoying the collective experience of a new work, in cinematic fashion, or waiting for a library edition or paperback, by which time the social moment may have passed — or, in the case of nonfiction, the content may already be dated. [1]

Heavy discounting from chain bookshops and online retailers has blurred the pricing gap between the formats: since the list price is best regarded as a convenient fiction, sucker’s premium or anchor round the neck of the independent bookshop, you can readily buy new hardbacks for the cost of a standard trade paperback. What hasn’t blurred is the physical gap: while booksellers might like to perpetuate the idea that buyers are getting hardback quality for bargain prices, I suspect the more likely perception these days is one of ‘paperbacks with excess baggage’, with American readers increasingly feeling like Allen Lane at Exeter station.

Enter the Kindle. Or, more precisely, enter the e-reader at a tempting price, with a compelling bookishness, and a publishing format that disrupts the conventions of the American market with subtle devastation.

Take, for instance, the latest Stieg Larsson: with no US paperback currently available other than the large print edition, the choices on offer from Amazon are:

• the ‘deckle-edge’ hardback at $14.26 (around half the $27.95 list price); [2]
• import paperbacks from third-party sellers at around $18; [3]
• the Kindle edition at $9.95

(Barnes & Noble doesn’t delve into the grey market, but it matches Amazon for the hardback, and offers a Nook version for $9.99.)

If the consistency of your shelving depends upon Hornets’ Nest lining up pleasantly with the preceding volumes, deckle-edge and all, then the hardback is the obvious purchase. But for regular readers of semi-disposable books, the electronic edition delivers paperback pricing on a hardback release cycle without the hardback’s bulk — enough that the device conceivably pays for itself in short order. [4]

Which brings me back to that press release. Given that most new hardbacks sold in the US market are little more than steroidal paperbacks, comparing the sales of Kindle editions to the overall figures for paperbacks or hardbacks is statistical chaff. There’s one ratio that really matters: the number of $10 Kindle editions sold for every new hardback that’s listed around $30 and sold at around $15.

So, why that phrasing, emphasising the Kindle as an alternative to paperbacks? Is Amazon deliberately burying the lede to remain in the good graces of the publishers on whom it depends to supply timely electronic editions, even as e-readers seem poised to decimate the market for new bestselling hardbacks?

I honestly don’t know, but it comes across as the most delicate of dances.

1. In further emulation of the cinematic model, publishers now load up paperback nonfiction with revisions and extras in the hope of generating a second sale.

2. ‘…for books with deckle-edged pages will doubtless continue to be produced as long as the book-buying public lacks knowledge and taste and as long as there are publishers who are willing to take advantage of that lack by supplying a demand which most — not all — of them know is misguided and reckless.’ (New York Times, March 23rd 1903)

3. Like the Harry Potter series, Larsson’s books have been shipped in from the UK; unlike the later volumes of the Harry Potter series, the aim is to get ahead of the American release schedule. Amazon ‘respects’ the publishing fiefdoms of the English-speaking world (and 17 USC 601) by not selling import copies itself before US release dates, but doesn’t impede private purchases: another delicate dance that electronic editions will complicate further.

4. Yes, I know, you can’t pass e-books on once you’ve read them without breaking the DRM, but are hardbacks really loaned or given away as often as paperbacks to begin with? You might sell them for a fraction of the cover price, or donate them and take a writeoff, but the formality of the form conveys an implicit rights management — another reason, I suspect, why American publishers cling desperately to hardbacks.

Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don’t perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

As a sometime connoisseur of camp, the fact that the Glee treatment clearly does not work for The Rocky Horror Show — at least, in the songs released in advance — is especially intriguing. Some hypotheses:

–The generational effect. The stage version of RHS is as old as me. It evokes the early days of rock’n'roll and B-movies in the context of glam: and yet it seems barely plausible that only 15 years separates Buddy Holly from Marc Bolan, or Del Shannon from David Bowie. But perhaps that kind of distance is perfect for camp. (While Mad Men currently serves as the nostalgic anchor for 1960 and thereabouts, the standard retrofilter for a long time was that of Grease and Happy Days: one is camp, the other not so much.)

–You can’t square camp. Or, perhaps, ‘you can’t supersaturate camp.’ It’s clearly possible to give a Glee refinishing to songs that have always had a heavy varnish of camp, and the inherent stone-facedness of the power ballad makes especially potent source material. But RHS is part glam, part deviant doo-wop: there’s little in the way of high seriousness to play off, and the only route for a cover that’s not a bare homage is to strip down those layers, not add additional ones.

–Camp and kink. Regardless of amended lyrics or casting, the overtly kink-driven camp of RHS sits uneasily with Glee; perhaps ironically, I think that’s because Glee portrays camp as normalised, to the point of its being incidental.

I can easily imagine crossover fanfic in which the cast take on RHS roles, but I doubt the producers contemplated an ‘Atomic Shakespeare’-style re-enactment, and with good reason. Still, it raises the question of why they went anywhere near RHS at all.

I’m going to take very slight issue with the analysis: while I think the spare, link-based weblog set up a contrast to the long-form personal narrative that had previously held a certain amount of sway, my own recollection is close to Rosenberg’s: the distinction between the two forms was never as contentious or as zero-sum as the exchanges at SXSW 2000 made it out to be. That’s perhaps because of underlying personal relationships and a sense of common cause that transcended formal boundaries — what Heather* and Derek or Lance and Leslie were doing didn’t feel that dissimilar from Peter or Judith were doing around the same time. You could play around with the weblog format and maintain a zine/narrative site, perhaps in a subdirectory, perhaps a separate domain, and not feel like a traitor to the cause — or you could mix it up, because that’s what Justin Hall did, and everybody knew Justin’s site.

By 2000, there was, perhaps, a certain wistful regret that the hand-coded custom layouts and experimental design of {fray} and Colors and AfterDinner and 0sil8 were giving way to lower-maintenance templated sites, reflecting an era of browser messiness and dot-com craziness and increased demands on site creators’ time. (I’ll use this post to deliver my annual nudge at Kottke’s expense.) What appears in retrospect as conflict can also be read, perhaps more accurately, as a desire to give a proper send-off to the surfeit of effort in a craft superseded by production, even if subsequent production demands a new kind of craftsmanship.

Terms like ‘spirit’ don’t really suit analytical frameworks, but that’s where you find the continuity of the weblog era, in a group of people who have been engaged at the leading edge of the web for as long as I can remember, adapting to (and adapting) the forms that emerge.

*Heather’s non-bloggy jezebel.com is no longer in archive.org, perhaps on account of its current owners. This makes me sad.