Talk About A Pirate Day

In honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day, I wanted to talk a little bit about intellectual property, copyright and a slightly different kind of piracy.

I'm still digesting The Pirates Dilemma and trying to figure out exactly what its implications are but with each passing day I'm becoming more and more convinced I'm working within a broken system, and my attempts to apply a new framework to the old system will ultimately be doomed to failure – at least as far as my career appears to be going at the moment. But's another kind of post.

Before I start to organize my thoughts on piracy, I want to be completely upfront and transparent: I am a pirate. I have pirated intellectual property in the past. Here is a list of offenses. Consider this the sheet they'll hang on me when I'm swinging by a rope on Ratcliffe Highway.

• When I was young, I pirated computer software, mostly because my friends and I couldn't afford to pay $50 for a new adventure game. So we'd all pool our money together to buy one copy and then share it amongst ourselves. More on this later, because it's an interesting concept of shared ownership that I think is being overlooked in the piracy/copyright debate.
  
• When I was a teenager, I owned several cassette tapes that were copies of albums I did not pay for. I can honestly say I eventually paid for many of those albums (and owned CDs of many, many more albums than I had pirated tapes for.)
  
• Here's the hardcore stuff. My sophomore year of college was the year that Napster hit the scenes. Before this, my friends and I would rip our CDs to MP3s and maybe pass them along to each other more out of convenience and curiosity. I was a complete nerd and hooked my stereo up to my computer so I could fully experience playing Quake with a subwoofer, so I could actually play MP3s through my computer speakers and not have it sound like a tinny mess, which most computer speakers still sounded like at the time. But Napster made finding music we didn't own incredibly easy. It also slowed our college's T1 connection to a crawl because of all the trafficking we did with it. I don't have many MP3s from those days anymore, mostly because the sound quality isn't that good compared with modern rips, but I've got a few still knocking around my cover song library.
  
  As much as I'd like to say Napster lead me to buy more music, it didn't, at least in the short term. Before Napster I would often purchase a CD for one or two tracks and never listen to the rest of the album, or listen to it a couple of times only. Typically – and this is important – this was because I was buying a CD for a song that received heavy airplay on the radio and I wanted to listen to it on my own, maybe in my car or in my room. For those familiar with the Long Tail model, this is the ultimate 'short head' model – not even listening to an entire CD, but only the hits on the radio. And I know there were lots of other people who did it too.
  
• After moving to the UK I discovered how easy BitTorrent is to use. I'd used BitTorrent before but purely for legal things. Since moving here, I started using it to grab Season 2 of Jericho because the show wasn't being aired here and while I was available to watch completely for free on CBS.com, I couldn't watch it because I was in the UK. Battlestar Galactica episodes? Ditto, I didn't care to wait a week, especially when an American audience could watch the whole thing online for free. And I admit I have also downloaded movies that aren't available here yet as well.

So I may have just painted a colossal target on my chest but I want to talk a little about how piracy has changed my buying habits – one of the key pieces of The Pirates Dilemma. I no longer buy short head CDs for one or two songs; if there's a hit I want badly enough, I can purchase it for less than a dollar from Amazon.com's DRM-free store. But this isn't a story about short heads, it's actually a story about long tails and legitimately purchasing more music. I don't listen to the radio anymore ever; all my music is discovered through my friends or other recommendations. I no longer buy CDs for one or two tracks, but for full albums by artists I like and have sampled online. I'd say that my music purchasing dropped off in the short term but now that I've started to tap into musicians I prefer and never would have heard on a top-40 terrestrial radio station, it's going back up again. And it's almost 100% digital. The only exception is when I buy a CD at a concert.

I'm not going to generalize everyone else's habits based on my own, but I certainly suspect my story is not unique. It is discoveries of this sort that will eventually reframe the business model as The Pirates Dilemma (and The Long Tail) suggests. Apart from the obvious applications of this principle to digitally distributed entertainment, I'm most interested in where it can go from here into other practices. Communications being a prime example.

There's a meme going around about brand hijacking on Twitter; I first became aware of it last week through this post, which cites an earlier incident this year where someone named Janet pretended to be an Exxon employee for three days. As a PR rep I can say with a high degree of certainty that this kind of hijacking would make even the most Internet-jaded old school communicator lose sleep at night: what if someone out there is pretending to be you online? Or worse, pretending to speak for your company and you couldn't control the message?

So much of how companies are trying to engage online depends on their reactions to these kinds of 'pirates.' People are talking about my brand online? Holy shit, are they staying on message? They aren't? Damn, I better get in there and either a) shut them down or b) make sure they've got the approved talking points!

Someone's hijacking my brand on Twitter? Holy shit, I'd better set up an official Twitter for my brand so everyone knows it's officially official!

Chris Lynn, the blogger who wrote the post above, made an excellent point about this in his post and specifically how to properly address it:

Back in the old 1.0 days of the Internet, you could be pretty much anyone–a 40 year old man pretending to be a 13 year old girl–and no one would know otherwise. In the Web 2.0 world, however, our identities are built on and confirmed by our relationships.

How many companies actually get this? And how many communicators get the why of all this? If we look 'under the hood' to we understand why we're being forced to change, that the rules no longer apply? To use a piratical reference – here there be monsters. The rules are being rewritten, and not by us.

But the rules are being bent and broken elsewhere. I realize this post is starting to get long and rambly and I doubt anyone's still reading, but to follow up on some points I made in a blog post on my company's corporate blog we're at a point where piracy is going to begin to force major changes in the way we think about and do business. It's not going to be as simple as just 'let's make some Twitter profiles and talk to people;' what's going to happen is that companies will be forced to reconsider how they do business from the ground up.

Collective ownerships much like my friends and I going in on expensive pieces of software won't just exist among consumers but among companies as well. Take the cooperative business model: what if this was applied to a games company? What if it was applied to a book publisher – not a giant short-head-based publishing house, nor tiny individuals putting out books for their 1000 Fans, but something in between, a publishing house owned as much by those with the presses as those writing and consuming the books.

Let your imagination run wild on the possibilities there. Cooperative banking? Cooperative real estate developments? Cooperate government taxation structures? It's all a long way away from kids pooling their money to buy King's Quest 5, but in the end it's not so different after all.

Let the revolution begin.

Link Roundup

I hate doing this, but I've got so many cool links stacking up that I am going to put them all into one post without much commentary. If it sounds interesting to you, check it out.

• Via Lifehacker, the 7 Habits of Highly Successful Freelancers. Work on your craft every day: I cannot stress this enough.
  
• Via Lifehacker, Keep Windows XP Running for the Long Haul. I appreciate simple tips like this to keep my machine in working order.
  
• At The Long Tail, Why I Gave Up On Second Life. SL was, until earlier this summer, the flavor de jour of social media and New Marketing. But perhaps the Emperor has no clothes? One of my favorite thinkers about the online space, Chris Anderson, weighs in.
  
• Via Lifehacker, Eight Foods You Should Eat Every Day. I'm trying to be more healthy - shouldn't you?
  
• Via BoingBoing, Is It Fucked Up? If So, What to Do. BB was posting a lot of flowcharts last week, this one was the funniest.
  
• On Simonsays (a blog run by a coworker at Edelman), Public Relations and Public Relationships. An excellent discussion of how PR should be engaging bloggers - in Simon's own words, "about how the PR industry is missing the point about the social web and going forward how PR can engage with the online environment properly."
  
• On Web Strategy by Jeremiah, the The 3 Spheres of Web Strategy and the Skills Required. Oddly enough, I seem to be inside that middle sweet spot. Perhaps that's more rare than I think it is.
  
• Via BoingBoing, Opus Being Censored. What is this, the Reagan 80s?
  
• On the Slog, a Greek restaurant recommendation I'll be trying the next time I'm in Greenlake. Always on the lookout for good Greek.
  

That's all folks. Until the next time my Starred Items pile up in my Google Reader.

The End of the Flat Blogosphere

Via The Stranger, a fairly high-concept story on the new liberal blog Open Left about "The End of the Flat Blogosphere." While it is very much a deconstruction of the liberal/progressive blogosphere, the lessons here apply to blogging in general - especially blogging as a form of social networking. Perhaps the best way to compare what the article says about blogging today is to see what it says about blogging in 2002:

Back in late 2002, there was a nearly universal, structural format for progressive blogging, that centered around the following five, ubiquitous characteristics:

1. Individual. A single writer produced virtually all of the front-page content. Group blogs were extremely rare.

2. Independent. Five years ago there were virtually no "official" blogs for electoral campaigns, party committees, politically focused news outlets, think tanks or advocacy organizations. Whatever blogs were around were independent of established media and political outlets.

3. Hobbies. Five years ago, political blogging as a profession simply did not exist. Advertising was non-existent on progressive, political blogs. Fundraisers for the proprietors of blogs were extraordinarily rare. No one blogged full-time and no one used blogging as a primary source of income. Blogging was a hobby that operated almost entirely outside the market economy.

4. Limited Communities. Comment sections were not moderated in any way, shape or form. Registration was never required to post a comment. Opportunities for reader generated content, such as diaries, were limited. Comment threads were sparse by today's standards.

5. Less varied and original content. Original reporting and research almost never took place. Multimedia options such as video were equally rare. Guest posts from prominent media and political figures were unheard of. There was comparatively little in the way of direct activism on behalf of candidates and causes. Overall, at the time, content in the political blogosphere could be accurately characterized as micro-punditry on current events that was driven almost entirely by reporting from established news sources.

To get the state of the blogosphere today, basically reverse those ideas. However, the writer acknowledges that the "long tail" of the blogosphere - about 95% of blogs - still follow the above rules, but the "short head" tends to do the opposite. The short head, in this instance, are giant blogs like Daily Kos that comprise a relatively small part of the 'sphere, but constitute a great majority of its traffic.

The term for large blogs like that in PR circles is "influencers," bloggers whose stories are constantly picked up on smaller blogs - the "head" influencing the "tail" if you will. I'm actually not entirely sold on the author's comparison to the long tail, because that's really more of an economic model of profits that doesn't always accurately describe what's occurring on smaller, more personal blogs, but it's a minor point. The insights about the changing nature of the blogosphere are certainly worth checking out.

If you're worried about the liberal bias, you can just substitute "conservative" for "liberal" and "Free Republic" for "Daily Kos" and the article reads exactly the same.

Option C: Give the Game Away, Get Money from Ads

Seth shot me this article yesterday from Wagner James Au at GigaOM regarding the financial success of Desktop Tower Defense. DTD was being passed around a few weeks ago, and while I tried it out and got fairly far, I didn't really even blog about it - even though it's one of the better Flash-based free games I've played.

The game itself is free, and very little was done in the way of promoting it - as the article explains. And yet, the creator is making four digits a month off the game alone. How? Click-throughs on advertising. The site got between 9 million and 20 million hits in April. There's been a lot of chatter lately about in-game advertising - when you play Crackdown, for example, there are billboards in the game advertising the latest Dodge cars (although you cannot actually drive and crash those cars in the game.) And of course the potential for in-game advertising to both set off the costs of development and make additional revenue.

But DTD took a different approach; the game is free and contained no ads, but the page on which it loaded offered a pretty standard Google ads module. It's certainly a different way to tap into the Long Tail than offering the game for a fee on Xbox Live or a similar service. I'm still unconvinced you could make a viable business model out of this - after all, there are sites that have been doing similar things for ages, like Yahoo games - but on a small scale like DTD, it's a great way for an indie developer to help finance his next project. As a Microstrategy, it's solid.

I'd love to see this experiment repeated, but possibly with more promotion efforts behind the game in the initial stages. It would be interesting to see if the results would be the same.

"Radical Transparency" and Me

I have to admit, last week's little kerfluffle over blogging and transparency made me think far more than I thought it might. And not think in a "well, that's interesting" kind of way - it really created the kind of existential crisis that I typically only face every couple of years. And rather than shy away from the abyss, I stood my ground, stared back, and I feel as though the flames of Internet discussion have tempered me a bit.

It wasn't the notion of Radical Transparency (discussed in the issue of Wired in question, and on Chris Anderson's blog here and here) that caused the crisis - but what resulted from it was that I had to redefine what transparency, radical or otherwise, means to me and my job.

Two things caused me to really start thinking. The first was a comment on Frank Shaw's blog, reproduced here unedited:

Dude, somebody needs to wipe that candy-ass :) off your lyin' face!

The sad part of this business is that PR guys like you have sold your soul to the man, and are too smart by half.

You lie for a living. In the old days, that meant you would burn in hell for eternity. Now it just means that you can take home a fat paycheck.

You look in the mirror & what do you see? That :). Yuck.

The second was something Seth said to me in an IM discussion. I didn't save the transcript, so it's not exact, but he said something to the effect of the perception of many people is that PR is an inhibitor to communication. Referring of course to the "spin factor" - call it lies if you wish - people associate with the term "PR."

Taken together, I sat and stewed on this one for a while. Not long ago, I sat in on a meeting with Edelman's Corporate PR team - the guys you call when something really bad is about to happen, like a product recall or something. I asked them point-blank if they would ever turn down a potential client who was obviously guilty of something pretty terrible (the answer, incidentally, was yes.) But before that, they told me that it's important to keep in mind that everyone deserves equal representation - everyone deserves to have their side of the story told.

The answer really didn't sit well with me. I mulled that over on the way home last week, after reading about the Wired kerfluffle for most of the day. My belief in the American system notwithstanding, aren't there some douchebags who are better off just ignoring? Perhaps it was the fact that, just a few days prior, I saw the slimy defense lawyer on Battlestar Galactica use that exact same phrase to explain why he would defend Dr. Baltar, who was responsible for assisting the Cylons in their destruction of the Twelve Colonies - and then later responsible for collaborating with them during the occupation of New Caprica (I'm a geek, deal with it.) But one of the awesome things about Galactica is that it shows us Baltar's side of the story. He was an unwitting accomplice before the attacks, because a Cylon was using his hubris to gain access to information. He kept his involvement a secret for fear that the survivors would simply shove him out the nearest airlock. On New Caprica, it is certainly possible that he was collaborating because he thought it was the way to save more lives - the Cylons had superior firepower and any attempt to fight them on a mass scale would have resulted in a lot of deaths - possibly the deaths of all on the planet. It's a utilitarian argument, but a plausible one.

But seriously, is that the best defense I have - that I'm like the guy defending Gaius Frackin' Baltar (I warned you I was a geek) because "everyone deserves a chance to tell their side of the story?" Well sure, on one hand, that is true. It's the foundation of the American justice system for fuck's sake. But on the other hand, people tend to form opinions that are very hard to change. When you read something that presents a point of view from only one angle, you're more likely to agree, especially if you don't have a previous opinion about the subject matter. And if you've already formed an opinion that's similar to that being expressed in the story (X is evil, or Y is good) then you're even more likely to agree. I simplify, of course, but it's basic human psychology.

But it's not the best defense I have. What Seth said stuck with me, and I thought about it more in the context of what I used to do at WizKids: I was the guy who was responsible for entering information into the HeroClix figure gallery. I was the guy who put out press releases (and wrote them.) My job was to let the community know what was coming in future HeroClix releases, because it got them excited. Did I have to break bad news? Sure. But I did it honestly, in a straightforward manner, and I'd like to think they appreciated me for that.

So the dissonance here comes from what I do and the perception of what I do: I don't inhibit information flow. If anything, I facilitate it. And I use that term in its true definition, not the "new business" definition - I'm not going to petition to change my job title to "Information Facilitator" anytime soon.

However.

As any HeroClix players reading this site can attest, we didn't simply dump every bit of information out into the community. We announced expansions at a certain time so it wouldn't deflect interest from current releases. We trickled information about set contents to keep people interested. We knew what people wanted to know most, and we knew we could drive traffic if we held back a couple of days on posting that information, so we would (Superman anyone?)

More importantly, there were things that were never discussed in public. We never released the HeroClix point formula, and to this day no one has accurately cracked it. This occurred for two reasons: if we released it, people could simply create their own dials (or try to "correct" our dials), and second, it was WizKids' intellectual property and probably worth quite a bit of money to the right people. Games are a competitive business. Nuff said.

Nor did we discuss other internal goings-on: meetings where we decided what conventions we would attend, how to reorganize things to meet our budgets, and which people in the company argued for various sides to those questions. Why? The public simply doesn't need to know that stuff. There is no benefit whatsoever to the public at large seeing that information.

On a more personal note: look around the blog you're reading. You can make some fairly accurate assumptions about me here based on information I have chosen to share. I like comic books, and specifically Groo. You can see things I've taken pictures of. You can see my friends and interests by reading who I link to. You can see what music I've listened to most recently on my laptop. You can tell when I'm playing my Xbox 360, and when - exactly - I've reached certain points in certain games. You can tell I have cats, I'm married, and get a vague idea of where I live.

However, you will never see other kinds of information here. You won't know before or while I'm taking a vacation - only after. I don't want you to know why my house is empty. You won't know my exact address. You'll never learn my phone number, because I value my privacy (just ask some of my former WizKids pals, who were woken one morning by a gamer calling their house to ask them rules questions for the MechWarrior game.) You won't know when my wife and I fight. You won't know if I'm looking for a new job, because people from my office read this blog (it's OK guys, I'm not going anywhere.)

Why? Because that information isn't relevant to the discussion occurring here. Sure, some of it shapes who I am - from my experiences in the long run to my current mood - and there are people who share all that information online. Bully for them. But for you, the reader, it's simply not relevant.

And that's basically where I arrived. Chris Anderson, as much as I agree with his Long Tail theory, needs to acknowledge that even "radical transparency" has its limits. There are nods to this in the print issue of Wired - he notes that Coca-Cola probably shouldn't publish its secret formula online - but there are simply things that are not relevant to a conversation. In other words, there can be - can be - such a thing as "too much information."

Not that Anderson's underlying idea about radical transparency is necessarily a bad one. There is something to be said for a CEO blogging about his doubts about business decisions - traditional thinking says it will spook the investors, lower public confidence, and damage morale. And those things may be true. But it also creates a rapport with the public in ways that no amount of traditional PR or advertising ever could, ever. But I'll bet that the same CEO does not blog about specific meetings, publish every memo or email he writes, or mentions when he waits a couple of extra seconds on the elevator to watch a shapely intern walk by. Because that information simply isn't relevant.

One response might be "well, selectively sharing information isn't really being transparent at all, is it?" And the simple answer is: I don't know. Transparency, radical or otherwise, isn't defined and it certainly isn't quantified. It's certainly not extreme, as many of the community members who commented on Frank Shaw's blog viewed it (and, I suspect, many in the community would view it - tell us everything, damn it!) And there is a lot of information out there now. The Internet is, basically, a neural network that represents the sum total of all human knowledge. If you want to find information, you can do it. MSNBC can run up to five scrolls of stock reports and news tickers at once. Football games are full of statistics, cameras and microphones on the field are now the norm. As Lewis Black said, "the only place left to go is to put a camera up the linebacker's ass to see what he had for dinner last night."

A cynic might say it's disingenuous to talk about transparency in the same space as talking about choosing which information to share and not to share. Is that any more disingenuous than selling an issue of Wired about being "transparent" by putting an extremely airbrushed model on the cover? Perhaps. Perhaps I'm simply rationalizing this in my head, and I'm wrong. But somehow I don't think so.

After all, ten years ago I could not have conceived of working a job where I wouldn't have gotten fired for posting what I just wrote - as many of my readers perhaps can imagine as well. And I sit here ten years later, encouraged to think about - and blog about - these kind of things by my supervisors.

Information facilitation. It's what we do.

Ain't That a Kick in the Head

I've blogged somewhat about transparency and other requirements of PR in new marketing, but today's bruhaha is more about the crossover between traditional PR and the blogosphere. The line between journalists and bloggers has always been a blurry one, especially when many journalists themselves have begun to blog. And I can say from working on the inside that when it's crunch time before a big outreach effort, it's doubly-important to make sure you've got things right.

Like say, for example, not sending a briefing bio to the journalist rather than the client. Oops.

All things considered, this is really just a minor screw-up. Someone at Waggener Edstrom sent Fred Vogelstein of Wired his own briefing bio. Other than a rare inside look at the machinations of corporate PR, there really wasn't much relevant information in there. Fred posted about it online, and posted the bio itself (PDF). Chris Anderson blogged about it at the Long Tail, and Wagged responded on their blog.

My first (and snarky) thought was "thank God it wasn't me/us!" But I have to wonder if this even would have been a story if it had happened before the blogosphere. Chris Anderson (full disclosure: I am a big fan of the Long Tail theory of online distribution, and I was involved in some outreach to him when I was on the Xbox corporate account) titled his post "Some choose radical transparency, some have it thrust upon them." As PR evolves and we try to find our footing with a top-tier blogosphere that consists largely of journalists like Anderson and Vogelstein who are actively (and rightly so) blurring the lines between traditional journalism and blogging, our internal machines will change as well. Does that mean us PR types are going to stop creating briefing documents? I seriously doubt it - as some of the comments on Anderson's post indicate, that's what our clients pay us to do.

But just as we can't expect to create a blog supposedly by 12-year-olds for a video game system, we also can't expect that kind of information to stay secret - and thus the need even for internal transparency. This would have happened eventually, whether it was a bio accidentally pasted into an email or some less-than-scrupulous person stealing the information and posting it online.

The interesting thing to watch here will be the blogosphere's response to this: will they act like journalists and see it for what it is? Just as PR is taking its steps out of childhood and into our awkward adolescent phase when engaging with bloggers, so too are bloggers looking across the dance floor at us. Both "sides" (and I use that term loosely) are gangly and not quite sure of themselves yet, but it'll be interesting to see whether we can manage to hold hands and dance for a song or two.