Generally, spinach is a great food choice. So far I think 2 have died and about 140 become sick from the e-coli bagged spinach. Based on news coverage you’d think it had killed 2000 people. Assuming that the exaggeration of the spinach risk leads to less consumption and a health *cost* associate with that, I bet the spinach scare will kill more people than tainted spinach when you factor in the (very slight) increase in illness associated with eating less vegetables.
What’s for dinner?
I think it’ll take a few years for regular folks to figure out ways to measure the value of their content and for many to even understand the value of what they give away to many sites for free.
User content contributions to Facebook, travel sites, myspace, Google, Yahoo, and many many more make up what I think is an increasing share of the total value of all web info. When people understand this it may – it certainly should – change the internet landscape and hopefully shift more control from big companies to regular users. It also may increasingly commercialize the landscape, which is probably not a good thing though the world has never seen a very democratic and global commercialized landscape controlled by any old mom or pop who sticks up a site. It’ll be interesting to say the least.
To one extent this has already begun with Google adsense allowing publishers to share in revenues, but note that Google itself is built on the backbone of billions of web pages they didn’t have to create.
Most of their money comes from people using Google to search *other peoples stuff*. When will Yahoo or Microsoft wake up to the fact that people will abandon Google search quickly for a variety of reasons including inferior quality, change in habit, inconvenience (Vista Search!?), or payment to use alternatives (cha-ching!). Seems to me that Ask is doing a better job of changing habits than Yahoo or MSN though I haven’t checked the market share numbers to see if ASK’s massive ad campaign is working.
The current thinking by most Web 2.0 sites is that if you create a high traffic community site you’ve got it made, and that has certainly been true with Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, and many more. However users may soon start to realize that the content is more valuable than the consolidation of that content.
You might suggest that Adsense recognizes this since it a pays publishers about 70% of the ad click revenue from their sites. However this does not factor in that the collective site content around the world, indexed by Google et al, is the big money ticket. Google shares none of the revenue they get when somebody clicks on ads presented after a search at Google even though they’d have nothing to show if, say, the collective internet world did what the news agencies are starting to do – challenge Google’s right to present their content.
John Battelle’s Federated Media understands this and is providing mechanisms to better monetize high value content.
However it’s the low brow stuff that brings the big money and I wonder how long before banners above sites will read “Webbers of the World Unite!”
The FDA warns that there is a potential for e-coli tainted spinach in many states, and everybody should be tossing the salad spinach before they toss their salad thanks to e-coli poisoning.
What always strikes me about the drama of these warnings is that today in the USA about 100 people will die from Car accidents, and another 50+ from fatal gunshots, and hundreds more from preventable heart disease, smoking, etc, etc. Shouldn’t we have warnings about these far greater dangers to our health?
People often say about, for example, malaria deaths globally or traffic deaths in USA “that’s not news”, but I’ve met no people who can cite the statistics for preventable death in the USA, let alone the world. Doesn’t that make it news to them? Also, the huge numbers of deaths from what many call “not newsworthy” causes dwarf those of the “newsworthy” causes.
I call that fact alone ….. newsworthy.
New York Times notes that only ONE of the Fortune 500 CEOs is a blogger. That would be Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, who’s also a very cool guy for supporting MashupCamps in Silicon Valley and sporting very long hair.
Should the other 499 CEOs be blogging? Even if we leave aside the challenges they’d face from SEC and shareholder scrutiny of every post, leaving them and the company open to liabilities, I’m not at all convinced that blogging is suitable to old style business models.
However, it’s VERY suitable to new style business models and I think the early Corporate CEO adopters like Parsons at GoDaddy and blog Maverick Mark Cuban are going to see a lot of long term value from the practice, especially if they are ever challenged by the very forces that keep other company leaders from blogging. If, for example, ICANN or the SEC challenged Bob Parsons or Mark Cuban on some aspect of their business I’d be a lot more sympathetic to their side of things because I’ve read these guys and know they are straight shooters who often wear their business decisions on their sleeve. Without blogs they’d just be big shadowy Corporate insiders, with them comes a sort of friendly transparency that Robert Scoble and Shel Israel note in their excellent book about this topic, Naked Conversations.
Today’s TV News:
JonBenet story
JonBenet story
Middle East, Iraq, War story
JonBenet story
JonBenet story
(few/no stories about African War torn countries or third world disease killing another 10,000+ today)
Curiousity is a very significant and important aspect of being a higher mammal, and I’m wondering how much it affects our prioritization of other aspects of our lives. The JonBenet story involved an interesting and provocative and disturbing mystery elements, so is that why it so captivates the collective interest? What are the factors that affect our focus/attention on one thing rather than another?
Time has a nice summary of the latest rules on prohibited items.
Also see TSA’s Website for the latest guidelines.
Steven Berlin Johnson, the clever fellow who suggested that TV and video games often make kids smarter and we should stop fretting so much over screen time, is now defending the indefensible – mainstream journalism.
Here Steven suggests that all sane people would agree that Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should. [emphasis added ].
Well, it should NOT play that role because mainstream journalism’s commercial focus, though natural, is NOT healthy. In fact it’s tragic because the interpretations are so misguided and narrow. Blogs can help fix this, and they will.
I replied:
I think, therefore I’m insane?
Your first point – that professional journalism “should” play something like the powerful role it currently plays is as misguided as a Fox News analysis and simply absurd. Mainstream journalism stinks, and is getting worse. Blogs will help fix this deficiency, and hopefully will replace mainstream superficiality with in depth, smart coverage of complex events.
Although blogs are only beginning to challenge the absurd commercial sensibilities of mainstream journalism I have much higher hopes than you that blogger journalists will prevail over mainstream celebrity journalism which reaches new lows every year. (cf many great mainstream journalists who are impressive but stifled by forced brevity).
Mainstream journalism has fallen very far from reasoned analysis of current events. It no longer pays more than superficial attention to critical news events (e.g. “Oral rehydration therapy saves millions”, “Congo War”, “Global Child Welfare”, etc, etc.
Myspace and other social networking sites won’t be accessible from schools or libraries as a result of congressional legislation passed a few days ago. The Myspace ban was a fairly predictable type of response from congress, reflecting increasing concerns by adults who basically had no idea what their children were doing online.
The Myspace ban is very unlikely to have much of an effect on anything since kids, and the predators the bill is supposed to help thwart – probably were not using these access venues very much. Hopefully the news about this will get some parents to pay closer attention to their children’s online activities, which in general should be supervised far more than they are by all but a few parents.
As a parent I’m more supportive of restrictions and content filtering than most other internet folks, but I think the entire debate is missing a key point regarding a dramatic change in social norms.
I’d suggest that changes in social norms are something like those that happened in the USA in the 1960’s in both scope and substance, but that these changes in morality, personal identity, and social responsibility are “going global” thanks to online activities, online communities, and the explosive cross-cultural connectivity facilitated by 24/7 broadband access and online awareness.
Silly laws like this will hardly put the online Pandoras back in their boxes. However it will also be funny to hear free speech zealots whining about government intervention which will never have a chance of making truly significant changes.
The ships of sweeping social change sailed long ago and they are powered by exploding global online communities. Our best course is to look forward to the uncharted waters.
The wooden nickels are getting counted and the top number will determine the winner of the 5000 top prize here at Mashup Camp. I voted for WeatherBonk this time which is a very good mashup of NOAA, traffic, and many other feeds over Google maps. David Schorr had a good stack of nickels last time I passed that table. But I have a hunch Frucall may win – it’s a very usable and clever mashup as well.
The format here is such that the “simple to grasp” mashups may have an advantage over the more complex ones. PodBop, the last winner, carried this simplicity advantage.
David Berlind is keeping us in suspense … thanking the great sponsors of this event.
….now final ungiven nickels are getting distributed to the mashup people …
Here are some counts:
LoveCrunch 7+2?
Frucall 8
Jeff’s picture captcha 24 – this could be the winner?
Yobie Goodstorm
Bart with TrainCheck 8+1?
David WeatherBonk 21+1
Jeff with Elephant Drive 20
Cameron Jones, Public Radio Travel Planner – 2
Kurt? music/pix mash…. 2
Foto Tiger 5
Mark with SecretPrices – 13+1
Kung Gao, Frappr – 2
Chad MileGuru – 13
Tom TIKI mash 3?
Mindjet 3
411Synch 2 (surprising – this was GREAT!)
Dave StrikeIron – was not soliciting nickels -1
PubWalk -13
Eric Small Town Guides – ?
RealestateFu – Greg from FrozenBear.com 0 (!) This was a superb mash…what’s going on?
Wait – we may have a TIE! ?? Redistribution is happening….
It’s a tie between WeatherBonk and Mecommerce…(who also had the picture captcha )
The tie has been broken by voting by people moving across the room and it’s David Schorr’s WeatherBonk.
Here are a bunch of news reports about the camp. In fact one of the mashups here is from a Google engineer and will allow lists like this, created by Google, to be placed inside other applications. Good Google, good.
Joe Duck 