Dana Blankenhorn

Opportunity Lives Here

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 32 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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More than 15 years after the Web was spun it is still filled with opportunity.

What marks many of today's opportunities is that they're not about machine work. Machine work is the low-hanging fruit of the Web. Machine work has an immense profit margin, and incredibly low costs.

Google does machine work. Its success proved that, when machines face man online, machines are going to win. Yahoo was, originally, a directory, and invested heavily in sites like Geocities and Broadcast.com which required human work to fill them with stuff. Google, meanwhile, invested in machines, in software to parse the Web in various ways, and proved that's the way to the greatest profit.

This does not mean people have no place. It just means profit margins aren't quite as fat.

I have written many times here about the opportunities in my own field, journalism. Many of them still remain. The way to approach them, as always, is from the business side, defining an under-served market, place or lifestyle for which you have passion (and about which you have some knowledge), then organizing that market, and finally offering sellers the chance to meet buyers through entertaining editorial.

This is CNN's real problem. It has nothing to do with what the yahoos who argue about "journalism's failures" think. The channel never really defined its audience, its target market. Fox did. MSNBC (finally) did. So did dozens of other cable success stories. CNN never did -- they said they were a news station, and above all that. Bullshit. No one is above all that.

Let their failure be your guide in your journalism endeavors. And now with no further ado, some new niches for you to profitably explore:

A Solution to Your Imaging Problems

I caused big problems, for myself and my employer, back in April when I used an image, with credit, but without permission on one of my employer's blogs.

I have always been more interested in solving problems than causing them, however. Despite my poking at critics, I knew both I and Chris Buzelli are in the copyright business, and believed technology could create some common ground.

The good news, I've found, is that a Web permission engine exists. The folks at Picscout called to tell me they've been in this business for almost a year, and best of all they have a competitor, LicenseScout, which has been in the business a while longer. (Competition is always good. It helps a market grow.) LicenseScout sees its mission broadly -- including all kinds of content -- while PicScout is focused on images. 

The difference between PicScout and a regular photo agency is that everything's automated, and can be integrated with browsers and search engines. For image owners, it integrates with a service called PhotoShelter, aimed at increasing sales of images for re-use. (The picture above leads to this sales page.)

Amy Love, PicScout's  vice president of marketing since September, was kind enough to lead me through it.  The heart of the offer is ImageIRC, which indexes images through digital fingerprints, maintains a metadata registry on the images, and offers an API through which buyers and sellers can connect.

The result is a suite of software-driven services:

• ImageExchange, which identifies images with metadata and throws up pricing information, then handles transactions. (There are currently versions for Firefox and Explorer.)
• ImageTracker, which lets owners of images see who has accessed them, again by following the metadata, and
• ImageQualification, which helps site owners know the status of their images as soon as they are posted. 

What has me most excited is PicApp, a spin-off that not only allows access to license-free thumbnails, but includes meta data aimed at helping sites hosting the images get more traffic. They're pitching it as a free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service for sites and a tracking system for image owners. There's a plug-in for Wordpress and a Firefox plug-in.

Most of what I have described is a service for owners and users of stock photography, and in fact big rights owners like Corbis and Getty Images are already playing. But Amy said any artist can register to have their art catalogued, free, because once art goes online it becomes an image by default. Artists can either do this directly or through the agents they prefer to use.

There's money here for someone. Reuters signed up with PicApp last month and traffic has been growing smartly as word has gotten around that friction in this market can be reduced.

I like a happy ending, don't you?

What's Wrong with South Carolina?

The following is based on my 4 years covering southern politics for Voic.us and nearly 35 years living in the southern cities of Houston and Atlanta.

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We're rednecks, We're rednecks

We don't know our ass from a hole in the ground

We're rednecks, we're rednecks.

And we're keeping the niggers down.

-- Randy Newman

What's wrong with South Carolina is the same thing that's wrong with the rest of the South, but most especially Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, which with South Carolina make up the "Deep South."

The southern power structure is racist.

I don't mean here that southern politicians are racist, or southerners are, if by that you mean they believe blacks are inferior to them, or even different. The vast majority know better than that.

When I say they're racist, I mean they practice power as a zero-sum game based on skin color. Politics is defined by race. If you're serious about political power you can either play on the majority (white) side or confine yourself to the minority.

Minorities have power in the South where they have majorities, or near-majorities. Many southern cities like my own hometown of Atlanta are run by black folks, as are counties such as DeKalb or Clayton. There are black congress-critters like John Lewis and Jim Clyburn whose voting records are very similar to northern Democratic norms.

But whites and blacks can add. They know that where whites are the majority, whether statewide or locally, whites are going to get what they want. And vice versa. This is the reality, and it has defined southern politics since the Nixon era, when whites started moving toward the Republicans. Once a state figured out the game -- as Georgia did in 2002 -- there could be no going back.

Power means patronage. It means control over contracts. It has nothing to do with parties or ideologies. Cobb County Republicans don't act that much differently than DeKalb County Democrats -- they just talk differently about it.

Now that we have the lay of the land, let's talk about the specific case of South Carolina.

Journalists in FoxLand

If this century teaches any lesson above all others it is this.

It doesn't pay a decision maker to listen only to what you want to hear.

George W. Bush did. He destroyed himself by it. He refused to take delivery of news from Iraq, or New Orleans, or the housing market, that differed from his world view. He actually seemed to believe he could create his own reality.

We paid for it.

Reformers Only Morning Glories

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 21 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Money is the most enduring power in American politics.

Reform will come and reform will go, but the only secure way to power is by negotiating with the money power.

Each generational turn of the wheel in American history has been followed by just such a negotiation. Money lost the struggle only once, as Andrew Jackson closed the Bank of the United States. This was followed by economic collapse driven by the states' uncontrolled issuance of bonds. Money won't make that mistake again, especially since Europe is playing the 1837 Game right now.

Republicans put the money power in charge after the Civil War. The progressive era was a continued effort to negotiate with, and struggle against, the money power. The liberal era forced the money power to accept a new normal of regulation in exchange for profit. And the Nixon era overturned the compromise.

The best explanation for why money covets order can be found in the classic "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall." "Reformers are only morning glories," Plunkitt claims. Truer words do not exist. Issues drive reformers, and causes. These are problems of a moment. They may transform, but they do not transact. You can't have constant political revolution. Eventually you have to settle down and do business.

In the years around a genuine political crisis, and that's what we've been in since 2005, this can be hard to see, hard to fathom. There is great fervor on both sides. The question for money is always, who will set the rules.

Ich bin ein Blogger

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Recently one of the publishers I work for called with good news. I was being named a contributing editor. I was no longer "just" a blogger.

Well, thanks but no thanks.

I have been using blogging software since 2003, when the folks at Corante gave me a free store front. In late 2004 they introduced me to ZDNet, and I'm now doing pretty well, especially since their parent company (CNet) was bought by CBS Interactive.

But that's not the point.

The point is that journalism companies hire bloggers and later claim they are "promoting" them to journalists. They're not. It's not a promotion.

Defending an Atlantan

Having lived in Atlanta for nearly 30 years, I have been witness many times to the degrading attitude my original hometown of New York takes to this place.

Of course, it's the same attitude New York takes to every other place in America. It looks down at us. It assumes a right to define us, to buy and sell us, to treat us as its economic and cultural subjects.

New York does not know best. You have only to look at the fate of Turner Broadcasting in the hands of Time Warner to know that. CNN is crap. The company disinvested in The Cartoon Network, which had been successful, for short term gain. It's sad, and I know Ted Turner would agree.

Usually Atlanta falls meekly under the gaze of the Big Apple. At least white Atlanta does. Black Atlanta -- that's something else. You don't see black rap or R&B artists kowtowing to their New York counterparts. They have succeeded in bringing a little power down here, and that's actually good for everyone, white and black.

Something similar has finally happened in TV thanks to Tyler Perry. He came here less than 20 years ago from his birthplace of New Orleans, penniless. Now he's worth a great deal of money. He has built his own production studio on property formerly owned by Delta Airlines in southwest Atlanta.

Asynchronicity

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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A study from the Pew Internet Center says 88% of teens with mobile phones text, that one-third text more than 100 times per day, that it's now the most common way for them to communicate.

OMG, say parents. WTF? Kids are, like ROFLMAO.

What's going on is now a generation-long trend. Asynchronicity.

(The illustration here is from John Suler's very fine 2002 work, The Psychology of Cyberspace.)

Most electronic messaging is, by its nature, asynchronous. That is, the two parties don't need to be together in time or space for communication to happen. (When we're doing things at the same time, that's synchronous. Asynchronous is its opposite. Hence asynchronicity.)

As we become busier, by choice, by habit, or because we have to, the need for asynchronicity naturally grows, and the desire for better forms of asynchronicity grows as well.

As Suler's article notes, asynchronicity is just one aspect of how our lives change in a cyber world. Suler calls such things as disassociative anonymity, invisibility, and solipsistic interjection part of  The Online Disinhibition Effect. It's supposed to explain why we flame, participate in web mobs, and do other things we feel distant from but which have immense impacts on our targets.

All true, but it's asynchronicity which, to me, is the most important skill to master.

Guy Kewney was the best computer journalist ever

I lost a good friend last week, and computing lost a great man.

Guy Kewney died. He was 63. He had cancer. The announcement was delivered by his daughter Lucy on her dad's Facebook page. We learned of it when my wife went to the BBC Technology Web site yesterday.

Guy chronicled the PC revolution from its birth. He knew such entrepreneurs as Adam Osborne and Clive Sinclair personally, interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates when they were all in their salad days, and stayed at it through the age of the Internet.

What made Guy great wasn't his tech savvy. It was his attitude. He looked at everything from a user's perspective, and he was an avid user of everything that came his way. He never wrote down to his reader. His columns always read as though you were sitting right next to him, and he were trying to understand the new in context as you sat there and nodded.

It was Guy's status as the "customer's man" that made him truly great, and that kept British computer journalism relevant even as its American cousins -- so devoted to vendors and their strategies -- collapsed early in this century, their credibility shot.

Guy never lost his credibility.

The American Civility War

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 16 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most important issue before the American people right now isn't Afghanistan. It's not the deficit. It's not health care.

It's civility. (This is the logo of the Civility Center, a non-profit run by Dr. Jay Newman of Michigan.)

Political and technology trends have combined over the last 40 years to make us a very uncivil people. The Nixon Thesis' adoption of McCarthyism, of thinly disguised racism, and later of religious intolerance resulted in the Bush Excess, a time during which Republicans decided they could make up their own reality.

That Excess is still alive in the Tea Party, whose signs, abuse of public figures and threats of violence are all direct attacks on the American experiment. History will prove that their incivility makes them traitors. It will bury them as it did the hippies before them.

I first saw this trend, online, in 1988, when I entered some Usenet discussions concerning politics through the old GEnie service. The level of vitriol, of insult, and sheer incivility I experienced there stayed with me.

It's easy to insult someone online. It's easy to call them names when you don't know them, when they're not standing in front of you. It's easy to ignore any moves toward compromise, or apology. It's easy to dehumanize.

It is in dehumanizing others that we dehumanize ourselves. The Web makes it easy. Some artists, reading that sentence, are already, right now, getting ready to flame me again, because I made a mistake with a piece of art and they have no intention of accepting any apology, explanation, or suggestion aimed at prevention.

I can't do anything about that except pity them.