I’ll be in Chicago (actually, Naperville) next week for a “news leadership summit” produced by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation and sponsored by the McCormick Foundation. The title of the event is: “Wires and Lights in a Box: Murrow’s Legacy and the Future of Electronic News.” This year is the 50th anniversary of Murrow’s famous “wires and lights in a box” speech, which explains the title of the summit.

Participants are a Who’s Who of broadcast news managers and leaders at both the network and local level. Edward R. Murrow is the patron saint of broadcast news and a powerful figure in broadcasting history, so you can usually expect good attendance when asked to meet in his name.

There’s a session on Murrow’s legacy, one on entertainment versus news, another on ideology/partisanship in the press versus an impartial press, and my panel, “What is the business model of the future?”

Here are the questions we’ll be exploring with my panel:

• What will financial success look like in the future? What is the business model of the future?
• How does the industry address the ethical and credibility concerns raised by the intersection of news content and advertising? Even Murrow had sponsors.
• Will news operations continue to put news and public service over profit? How do news operations serve the public’s right to know and still say in business? Can public service journalism survive?

We’re also going to break into small groups (what would a conference be without small groups?) with the goal, it appears, of coming up with journalistic principles and standards to preserve for the future.

In all, it’s a pretty heady event, and I’m honored to be a participant. This has been my life’s work, and I appreciate the chance to share my thoughts. Besides, I really like to hear myself talk.

I’m always a little nervous, though, when an institution that’s being disrupted gets together to talk about the future. Broadcasting isn’t casting broadly anymore (to borrow a cool phrase from Scott Collins of the LA Times), so there’s a niggling sense that we’re heading for mediasaurus land. It’s natural that we’d turn to each other to try and figure things out, but it might be better to talk with those who are actually doing the disrupting.

I like to use a whale oil industry metaphor. Let’s go back in history to the annual whale oil industry conference, with the industry in the midst of disruption from electricity. Rather than seeing that they’re in the home lighting business, the whale oilers can only see electrical power in ways that will help them either extend the whale oil business or do it more cost-effectively — for example, by creating an electrically-powered harpoon (it cuts the manpower costs significantly, you see). So rather than invest in electricity for home lighting, they press forward to protect the bottom line. Nice, huh?

I’ll blog as much as I can from Naperville, and if you’re going to be there, I look forward to saying hello.

I don’t write much about web growth anymore. I even gave up on web advertising growth stories a couple of years ago, because it seemed kind of foolish to keep saying the same thing. Anybody even remotely interested in the Web could tell that everything about it was moving northward (still is).

But the Borrell report below and a new study from market research firm IDC are too much to resist. According to the IDC report, overall Internet advertising revenue in the U.S. will double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012. That’s right: double! Borrell reveals that local online revenues are growing “at a phenomenal rate of 50 percent this year” and that double digit growth will continue for at least another 18 months. His prediction that 2008 will be a $13.1 billion year for local online spending is in line with the IDC numbers.

A little context is in order. Television advertising in the U.S. is a $70 billion industry. While there have been a lot of doomsday predictions about broadcast revenues, I think that number is going to be around for awhile. But at $51.1 billion in 2012, web advertising revenue will be pushing TV. IDG actually predicts that by 2012, internet advertising will displace TV and be second behind only direct marketing.

Think about that for a minute.

Meanwhile, the report offers promise for those who already live in the world of video (can you say TV?):

Video advertising will be the principal disruptor of Internet advertising over the next five years by attracting the most new marketing dollars. Its revenue will grow sevenfold from $0.5 billion in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 49.4%. This growth will take place because brand advertisers will shift significant amounts of money into these video commercials, primarily from broadcast television and to a lesser extent from cable television.

And these kinds of predictions are always based on current models. What happens if the Web finally figures out how to advertise for real? It is a very long time (in web years) between now and 2012.

The point is the Web is where it’s at, and the size of those numbers mean disruptions will continue to relentlessly pound the status quo, even if that status quo was only created yesterday. We’re in an incredible season of change, and nobody really knows how its all going to play out, if it ever really does.

But you already knew that, right?

Yesterday was the anniversary of the conquering of Mount Everest, and Google was Johnny-on-the-spot with one of its usual customized front door logos.

I’ve grown accustomed to these cute logo treatments and have written about them before. It’s one of the things that makes Google Google.

But in the nine years since they’ve been doing this, they’ve not once acknowledged Memorial Day (at least from what my research can tell). What’s that all about, huh? It’s so obvious that it has to be deliberate, and I would love to hear the rationale. Protest war by not honoring those who’ve died? Surely that can’t be it.

There’s a pretty large contingent of bloggers who take Google to task for this every year. Please add my voice to the group.

I moved awhile back, so my porch squirrels are history. But that doesn’t mean the little buggers aren’t still a part of my life. Here’s what happened this afternoon in my backyard. I apologize for the crappy camera work. I’m SUCH an amateur.

New research just out from Borrell Associates shows the continuing growth and dominance of local online spending by internet pureplay companies (like Google, Yahoo, etc.).

I’ve not seen the report yet, but here are a few lines from the press release:

The Pac-Man affect continues, with Internet pure-plays continuing to gobble share at the expense of print media, particularly Yellow Pages and newspaper publishers.

Meanwhile, the growth in local online advertising continues to outpace even the most optimistic expectations. We are projecting 50 percent growth this year — phenomenal, considering the sharp decline in retail sales. The recession appears to be an economic prod that is motivating the smaller local advertisers to abandon long-time spending patterns and seek out the most economical methods of reaching potential customers.

The pureplay companies are the real enemy of local media, because it’s all about ad dollars. Most companies don’t see this as priority number one, and I only hope they can get there before it’s too late.

MORE from the executive summary:

We expect local online advertising to reach $13.1 billion in 2008, up slightly from our initial forecast last December.

Part of the growth is being driven by traditional local media companies selling advertising on their own sites. Most of it, however, comes from pure-play companies delivering lowercost advertising that intercepts consumers not as they are reading news online, but as they are using the Web to research products and prices. The recession is an economic prod that is motivating advertisers to abandon their long-time spending patterns and seek out more economical methods of reaching potential customers.

Borrell predicts the growth will slow after another 18-month period of double digit upside. Indeed.

Here is the latest in my series of essays Local Media in a Postmodern World, and it’s a topic I’ve kind of “written around” over the years.

The Cost of Interaction is a simple concept with complex aspects pertaining to web design and content management, but for local media companies to be relevant downstream, we’re going to have to take a serious look at this.

Just as there are costs in doing business, there are costs in being a consumer. Over the years, we’ve witnessed businesses shifting some of their costs to their customers — think self-service gas, fast food, self check-out at the grocery store or telephone answering systems — but online is a different matter, for consumers have choices here than they don’t have in the “real” world. Therefore, pushing customers in this manner online is a dangerous proposition. A high cost of interaction means less value to users and fewer reasons to return. Conversely, the lower the cost of interaction, the easier and more usable the application, and that means a reason to come back.

I’m coming up for air from a few days of writer’s block, and I think it’s because there’s just so much to write about these days. The moment I start concentrating in one area, something even more compelling pops up. The bane of bloggers isn’t a lack of things to say; it’s having too much to say.

So I’m just going to go through some things quickly, beginning with the networks getting together to offer a video-on-demand service that encourages people to not use TiVo. The point? They want those same people to watch the ads! Call me a nut, but this is too little, too late.

The business of The New York Times offering an API for its content is intriguing and smart. I hope it sends a message to other companies, and while I fully endorse the concept, it’s still about keeping users inside the walls of The Times. We’ll see.

One of the brightest minds in media, Jack Myers, took a shot at media company ownership this week in his Media Business Report. I’ve been saying this kind of thing for a long time, but Myers is above my pay grade, so his commentary carries significant weight.

…most executives remain committed to outdated and dangerous mass-media-dependent economic models. Media companies today - even the largest digital media companies - are in danger of following the railroad industry model and becoming Industrial Age mass distribution vehicles rather than Relationship Age™ interactive brand and human connectors.

Nice, and absolutely spot-on.

The L.A. Times painted a chilling picture of the future of television in an article called Broadcast Networks Under Siege that examines the shocking ratings’ declines in May.

Broadcasting, simply put, isn’t casting broadly anymore. As the sweep suggests, the TV networks are losing not just their viewers but also their sense of specialness. They’re becoming just the lowest numbers on the multichannel dial, rather than the last outposts of mass culture. It’s true that this evolution has been happening for years, but this year a tipping point was reached, a Rubicon crossed. Broadcast exceptionalism — its supposed immunity from the market forces afflicting all other media — is finally dead.

Right, and the problem is that tipping point is, while acknowledged, problematic in terms of reacting, because we’re deep into a cycle of expense reduction. Broadcasting still makes a lot of money ($70 billion last year?), and more eyes are focused on salvaging that than actually responding to technology and changing consumer behavior. It’s a tough place to be.

Finally, there’s this gem from Robert Lichter in the American Journalism Review:

“I think there’s a feeling that journalists have overstepped their boundaries,” he says. “People don’t look on [journalists] the way journalists like to view themselves – as the public’s tribune, speaking truth to power, standing up for the little guy. They don’t look like the little guy anymore. They’re part of the celebrity culture.” Increasingly, he says, “people like the news but hate the news media.”

Go read the whole article by Paul Fahri. It’s filled with lots of good stuff that I’d love to comment about. However, I’ve got this writer’s block, see?

The Justice Department has announced a major settlement in its anti-trust case involving the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and the use of its Multiple Listing Services (MLS) by internet-based residential real estate brokers. In a nutshell, it means Realtors won’t have exclusive access to MLS listings; they will be shared with those who are competing with Realtors by offering much lower commissions.

A New York Times article on the matter notes that MLS listings are the “lifeblood” of the real estate industry:

The settlement “is a win for consumers, certainly, who will now have the benefit of unrestricted competition,” Deborah A. Garza, deputy assistant attorney general for antitrust, said in an interview. “There inevitably will be more efficiency and more competition in the market.”

…The National Association of Realtors, with more than 1.2 million members, said that the settlement was “a win-win” for both the real estate industry and consumers. It noted that the association admitted no wrongdoing and paid no fines or damages as part of the deal.

The NAR notes that consumers won’t notice much difference, but I disagree. This opens the door for a high level of innovation in a $93 billion industry, and it will certainly benefit home buyers and sellers. Realtors? Not so much.

In a Buzzmachine.com post on the settlement, Jeff Jarvis says, “Kiss your 6 percent commission goodbye, Ms. Agent!”

This new economy can now come to real estate sales as information becomes freer. Oh, it’s not fully freed yet. But I do believe that the combination of this settlement and what it does to empower discount players and the depressed real estate market will combine to finally shove dynamite up Realtors’ rears.

I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that this is further evidence of the cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism, one that threatens every modernist institution of the West.

Protected knowledge (or access) is what empowers such institutions, and as we’re already witnessing with media, when you remove the protection, the institution collapses. Craig Newmark did it to classifieds with Craigslist, so what’s next?

How about medicine and the law, to name a couple. Back in the early days of the Web, the American Medical Association formed a special lobbying group to make sure they maintained control of medical information (to protect the people), because those within the group with vision could see what would come down-the-pike. Will we have a “doc-in-a-box” someday? The insurance industry might be interested in that. How about a “lawyer-in-a-box” to represent your needs in court?

I know those ideas are way out there, but the horse of postmodernism — that participatory, interactive culture — has already left the barn, and its destination is unknown.

Most of the men my age recognize the item to the left. It’s a Vietnam-era service medal, to be worn only by those who served during that awful conflict. It’s hard for people like me to call it a war, because you get into wars to win, and we certainly weren’t there for that (can you say “Nuke Hanoi?”).

I have this little box full of memories from my time in the service (U.S. Coast Guard, 1965-1970), and the only time I ever get the urge to go through it is on Memorial Day. It wasn’t easy to serve your country back then, because the country, it seemed, didn’t want our service. By “the country,” I’m referring not to the government but to the people. Yes, the people.

If you’re a young person, you’ve heard the stories. Somehow, we were the bad guys, the symbol of the fear everybody felt. The draft was in full bloom, and again, we were drafted to serve in a war that wasn’t a war. Today, servicemen and women are looked upon with respect and admiration. They are recognized and even applauded in public places, but for us, removing the uniform was a necessary part of feeling like a human being on the streets of the U.S.A.

World War II and Korean War vets extended the hand of friendship and camaraderie, but publicly, we were scorned.

I think that one of the reasons young soldiers, sailors and Marines are so respected today is because of what we, their parents, went through back then. Service men and women who die in Iraq are heroes, but that honor was never extended to my friends and contemporaries who were butchered in Vietnam. We’re darned sure not going to let that happen again.

One of the most famous lines from General Patton is, “..no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” So today, as we remember (and I hope we remember) those who’ve died to preserve the freedoms that we enjoy in this country, let’s also give a few thoughts to what it means to be at war.

It would be nice to not have to have a Memorial Day some day.

A new web application called Flowww (warning slow loading) is out that’s generating discussion in the tech world, and I think it may have possibilities for media companies in the future. The developers are going to have to do a lot of work before it gets my full endorsement, but the nut of a really good idea is there.

Flowww takes the browser view of a page of content, turns it into a Flash image, and makes those images available in a simple click-and-flow experience. If you want more, clicking on a page image takes you directly to the page. Think of it as an RSS feed that looks at the actual pages of the feed instead of just a headline or headline and text. The beauty of it is that the ads come with the browser view, and that’s what intrigues me most. You have to use your imagination, but think of a page specifically designed to be distributed this way. Nice.

TechCrunch has an excellent write-up, and the comments are interesting, too. They’ve even created an example of what their site would like like presented this way.

I’ve been preaching unbundled media for a very long time, but the resistance has always been the loss of control over ad revenues. RSS advertising companies like Pheedo have helped with this some, but not enough to make it universally acceptable to distribute content in this manner. Flowww has the potential to change that.

As I said above, the developers have a lot of work to do before this can become viable, not the least of which is to fix the slow load time. Assuming they’re successful, this might be something to watch.

An excellent article by the BBC nails the problem many media companies are having trying to move the “frequency” needle in their efforts to build a sustainable mass for marketing.

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.

Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.

The information comes from usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who says most people are “hot potato” driven and just want to get a specific task completed. That’s not good news for sites who want people to explore and discover.

“The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment,” Dr Nielsen told BBC News.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them.

“Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so,” said Dr Nielsen.

“People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said.

Media companies would do well to pay attention here, for this is yet another indication that the portal website concept is sinking deeper into the tar pits.

I spend a great deal of time challenging my assumptions, as most of you know. It’s a part of the pomo in me, I guess, but I find the practice useful in times like these, especially in the world of media. And I do a lot of this at 30,000 feet. Perhaps it’s the view. Perhaps it’s the altitude. Perhaps it’s how insignificant I feel up there among the clouds, for insignificance is a fine form of humility that helps keep me balanced.

To be a television broadcaster, one requires a special license. Those suckers are scarce, so it stands to reason that everything about TV would be determined by those in TV. It is, after all, their little corner of the world.

To be a newspaper, one needs a printing press or a ton of cash. That makes newspapers scarce, so it also stands to reason that everything about the newspaper business would be determined by those in it. You wouldn’t go to Kroger to ask how to run a newspaper, right?

But that’s all different on the Web. The Web and all its intricate applications were created by the tech community. Every piece of software solves a problem that the nerds of the world have discovered, and since the only license you need to create things for the Web is one’s own creativity, the growth and development of the Web and its applications has been at light speed.

It’s into this world that traditional media companies have come to do business, but here’s the fundamental problem: we want everything done our way, and that’s not necessarily the way of the Web.

In the early days, the Web consisted of static sites built by static HTML pages. This was the era of the browser, when people “traveled” from point A to point B to “discover” the world that was out there. AOL made it easy by putting a form of “everything” inside its walled garden, but eventually, most people grew tired of the training wheels.

Search basically supplanted browsing, but traditional media companies never adapted. We stayed put, and so began a serious disconnect with reality. Since we liked static sites (they served our needs well, thank you very much), we saw no reason to move on, and when the Live Web came along with its unbundled content and interactive applications, we were trapped in the past. The extent to which this continues today is remarkable, especially since the Web has now moved past search and into the world of subscribe.

So here are a couple of fundamental mistakes that most media companies make in their assumptions:

One, we don’t actually “browse” websites, and we never have. The browser sits on your desktop and brings documents or portions of documents TO YOU. These documents may reside in code form on distant servers, but your browser doesn’t “go” anywhere; it brings everything to you.

This is such an important web fundamental to understand, because it will help you recognize what’s taking place in the unbundled world of the Live Web. Our browser can now bring a little from here and a little from there, all depending on what we want, and this understanding will be critical as the Web moves to its next iteration, the Semantic Web.

Two, the Web is no respecter of sites — all are just points in the maze. Just because you’re a big, bad media company doesn’t mean that you have any special place online. There’s nothing special about your URL that makes you different than any other URL, in the eyes of the Web.

The algorithms that Google uses to rank sites respect the amount of content that is “under” that URL, but they also deeply respect inbound links, because that is viewed as more important than just size. Yahoo may be an enormous “site,” residing on multiple servers, but its URL is just a URL, and the structure of the Web treats it no differently than any other. This is the central factor in Google’s use of the entire Web as its platform. More URLs are better than just one, so Google encourages the growth and development of sites, and monetizes them for builders and owners through its brilliant Adsense program.

The above is part of why I keep encouraging the NAB and other organizations to bring the tech community into its conferences about the future. We’re blinded by our online business models, but the nerds of the world — those people who actually built the Web — aren’t so encumbered, and it’s about time we started listening to them.

So YouTube has announced the hiring of a news manager and the launch of a citizen journalism channel. Don’t be fooled by the raw nature of this, folks, because you may be looking at not only future hires in your community but also future styles in presenting video news. This is an unorganized group with YouTube (Google) playing its typical support and distribution role in sidestepping traditional media companies to present a form of journalism that most professionals deem far beneath them.

The news manager is no novice when it comes to citizen journalism. Olivia Ma recently graduated from Harvard and was a regular contributor to Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media blog.

Gillmor, author of what is widely considered the original manifesto of the citizen journalism movement, We, the Media, told me via email this morning that the YouTube project is another worthwhile experiment, and “I’m looking forward to seeing how it works.”

“But as they monetize this,” he added, “I hope they’re going to find a way to reward the people who are doing the work. I’m not a fan of business models that say ‘You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.’ I also hope they’ll give people a way to post using Creative Commons licenses, which are all about sharing information, as opposed to the currently restrictive terms of service.”

I agree with Dan on the above, and his message is relevant for all media companies trying to “monetize” user-generated content.

But beyond that, this move by YouTube demands our attention for its assumption that anybody can “do news” and distribute their work for free. The pamphleteers of journalism’s past would’ve loved it.

(Originally posted in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

A Business Week article caught my attention, because it speaks so well to an ongoing issue that I encounter with media companies. The issue is whether it makes more sense to run digital operations from a centralized unit or to give freedom to individual properties to do their own thing.

Each has its merits, but I’ve always come down more on the side of local control. That’s because I think all of the flexibility for making money exists there and that nobody knows a market like the people who work therein.

The Business Week article looks at new strategic moves by Best Buy that the company believes will better equip it stores to handle the current economic uncertainty. At the crux of the decision is moving control of many things previously dictated by the corporate offices to the hands of the people running the stores. This has had a rather significant impact on business.

Lately, however, the employees at this store (Baytown, Tex) have noticed a different stripe of shopper: Eastern European workers from cargo ships or oil tankers, temporarily docked at Baytown’s busy port, are spending their precious shore hours scouring the store’s aisles. They take a 15-minute cab or shuttle ride to stock up on iPods and Apple laptops priced cheaper than back home. To speed their shopping, the Baytown Best Buy has moved the iPods from the back corner of the store to the front, paired them with overseas power converters, and simplified the signage. Since the changes were made over the holidays, cash register receipts for the boat workers have ballooned by 67%.

This moving around of stock would not have happened in a paradigm of top-down control. As a result, Best Buy’s “centricity” strategy is producing projections of healthy revenue growth at a time when the price of gas is soaring.

This is a fascinating look at a company that is trying to shift control over certain things to the local level, and it’s exactly what media companies need to be doing as well. Any corporate media strategy that forces, for example, a certain kind of niche vertical on all of its properties without regard for their local relevancy is sacrificing localized niche revenue opportunities in the name of uniformity. That kind of thinking may have worked at one time, but today, its value is certainly open to debate.

Let’s give control of how we make money online to the people in the best position to know where the money is and how to go about getting it.

Despite all the evidence that the Web is different, there are those who are still trying to turn it into a form of cable television. These folks are happy with what they’re doing, and there certainly are elements of the Web that can function this way. But if you’re going to try and make cable TV out of the Web, then you cannot count on the norms of the Web being relevant to your product.

An Online Media Daily article today is headlined with what appears to be an “Ah-ha” moment: Research Contradicts Myths About Online TV Shows. The research is from Futurescape, a London-based digital entertainment R&D firm, and it appears to disprove the “myths” that with viral marketing, engaging and well-produced content will distribute itself online.

“It’s what we we’ve dubbed the ‘viral fallacy,’” explained Futurescape Director Colin Donald. “Producers are adamant that launching a show requires a full-scale promotional campaign, possibly employing broadcast television.”

As a result, said Donald, “total budgets will rise to reflect promotional costs, unless the producer has been commissioned by a social network that can be the promotional vehicle.”

Mr. Donald also refutes the “myth” that it’s cheap to produce online television and provides production cost numbers to prove it.

Here’s my beef with all of this. Futurescape’s “findings” are not findings at all, for what do you expect when the producers of online TV only see the Web as a form of cable TV? The “myths” of viral marketing and cost that the company cites cannot be applied to traditional television online, and, to be frank, I’ve never heard anyone make these assertions anyway.

What I see here is the conflict between web video and television for the Web. They’re two different animals, and what I fear is that false arguments such as those posed by this “research” will spread to media companies trying to figure out what to do in the wake of declining ratings and ad money shifting online.

The processes that are a part of making traditional television aren’t disrupted by the Web, for the creation and distribution of programs for the mass media world are the same whether online or off. The “myths” to which Mr. Donald refers are all part of the personal media revolution, a phrase coined by J.D. Lasica in his book, Darknet, Hollywood’s War Against The Digital Generation, and these people have a big dog in that fight. Rather than dealing with it, however, Hollywood wants needs to keep things as they are. Hence, “revelations” like those painted in this “research” are self-serving and, therefore, useless. The disruption is much deeper than people shifting viewing habits from one place to the next.

Dear Les Moonves,

It was a very smart move for you to acquire CNET. I’ll save all the business analysis for others, because I’m not sure you really understand a certain intangible — namely that the talented group of observers and writers who make up your acquisition can really, really help you with your, um, other business.

The first thing you should do is invite Dan Farber (and if they’ll come, the rest of the Gillmor Gang) into your office and have a nice little sit down. I know you’re the guy who normally does all the talking, but this time, I’d suggest you might want to just listen. Bring your underlings along and tell them to listen, too.

Take a hard look at CNET-TV and invite the writers in to talk to them about communicating with an audience. Yeah, I know; tech isn’t Iraq (and so forth), but neither is a lot of the other crap that passes for news these days.

There’s a point to this whole strategy, Les, and it’s why I think you’d be wise to implement the “CBS listens to CNET” campaign: These folks grew a media business without being a part of the media business! That means they BEGAN outside your box, and while I’ll bet you want to suck them into it, you’d be smart not to. Why? Because they can teach you things that those inside the box don’t even see, and isn’t that exactly what traditional media companies need in this day and age.

Now go out and make it a great day.

Your pal,

Terry

The unveiling of Google’s new “Friend Connect” program this week is very big news that must not be overlooked by local media companies as we work to become more web-centric. Friend Connect is the latest from Google’s “Open Social” project, which is designed to allow users to aggregate and take with them various important aspects of social networking sites. The logic is simple (and typical Google): the walled-garden approach to the Web is archaic. What’s needed is portability.

So as MySpace and Facebook duke it out to see who can gather the most users, Google says “let’s make it possible for people to take social elements with them wherever they go (if they wish).” To Google, the Web is the platform. To Facebook, for example, Facebook is the platform. This, Google argues, is limiting, so the Open Social project is a natural extension of the Google model.

Open Social treats elements of social networking like widgets (Google’s term is “gadgets”) that can be moved anywhere. Software developers can use the “open” aspects of the project to create gadgets that can be used by anyone on any site anywhere. Friend Connect makes this possible, and local media sites need to jump in as soon as we can. Google is moving slowly with the project, they say, so they can study potential privacy ramifications, among other things.

Google provides the code, which can be embedded anywhere on your pages via iFrames (code that displays, essentially, a site within a site). When completed, users are able to interact with your content socially by inviting others within their established social networks into your site, ranking stories, sharing comments, and meeting new friends. Publishers who use Friend Connect don’t have access to the data involved, but that shouldn’t stop people from using it. In its introductory materials, Google concludes by saying “Everyone wins in a friend connected web:

• You, the site owner - Google Friend Connect gives you a snippet of code that, when put into your site, will equip the site with social features, including the ability to run third-party social applications. Moreover, it enables your visitors to log in with existing credentials, see who among their friends is already registered at that site. It also gives them one-click access to invite friends from their existing friends lists on other sites, such as Facebook or orkut.
• Your site’s visitors - Visitors no longer need to create a new account or develop yet another friends list just to use the social applications on your site. We create the infrastructure that allows one login to be used across multiple sites and the ability to reuse existing friend relationships that the visitor has already established elsewhere.
• OpenSocial developers - With Google Friend Connect, any website on the web can become an OpenSocial container. Their social applications can now run on social networking sites and anywhere else on the web that uses Google Friend Connect. By placing these applications on sites where users already visit, these application will be seen and used by more users more often.
• Social networks - With Google Friend Connect, social networks thrive as hubs of activity while giving their users more opportunities to bring their friend relationships to other websites while simultaneously bringing their friends and activities from outside the social network back in — with people having the ability to publish their activities across the web into the activity streams of their social networks.

However, not all observers are impressed. Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web thinks the Google initiative simply buries social connections in a “dark little box” and dismisses privacy concerns along the way.

Google could have worked with other large companies and with the creators of these standards (some are in the Data Portability Working Group that Google joined, for example) to tackle the hard questions around data exposure, integration and privacy. Instead they are pushing their Open Social standard around in an iframe. Easy is very good, but co-operation could have come up with something better than this.

Kirkpatrick and others are also noting that the service isn’t widely available yet and that Google is limiting access in order to let others help them build it.

Still, it’s hard to argue with the essence of what’s taking place here, and Google’s involvement will accelerate the work of others in developing social portability. MySpace (Data Availability) and Facebook (Connect) are both trying to accomplish similar goals, but both want to be THE platform leading the charge. Google (again) takes a bigger view and says the Web itself is the platform, describing Friend Connect as a form of “social plumbing” for the Web.

And the message to media companies is clear: we need to be in this space in ways beyond providing simple content widgets that can be swapped and shared. We need to be developing gadgets under the Open Social standards, so that we can participate even beyond just bringing “social” to our sites.

After all, “social” is still largely “local,” and that means opportunities beyond that which the big platforms currently provide.

Stay with me here.

Carl Icahn has done his hostile deed in an attempt to take over Yahoo at its annual meeting next month, offering up a slate of directors for shareholder consideration. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has the details, including the letter from Icahn to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock. Icahn personifies the word “colorful” in his thoughts about the “botched” Microsoft-Yahoo merger.

I am perplexed by the board’s actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management’s more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo’s closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet.

That last thought is significant, especially because Mark Cuban is one of the directors that Icahn wants on the Yahoo board. The always outspoken — and often controversial — Cuban is no friend of Google and is thinking out loud about how to beat them (with his Mahalo, Cuban has a considerable dog in the fight), prompting John Battelle to note that Cuban “is clearly drinking and blogging again.” That’s because Cuban’s Microhoo strategy is a doozie: “What would happen,” Cuban asks, “if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo went to the 5 top results for the top 25k searches and paid them to leave the Google Index?” He reasons that at $1,000 a site and 100,000 sites, “thats only $ 1 Billion Dollars.” (sic)

Battelle rolls his eyes and invites Cuban to try:

One big problem: No one would do it. Well, some would, but assuming that folks would be willing to be paid to screw over Google assumes folks 1. have no soul and/or 2. hate Google. I pray that for most folks, #1 is not true, and Google prays that for most folks, #2 is not true. So far, I think we’re both right.

But hey, Mark, you have the money! Why not find out?!

Carl Icahn is a smart and colorful fellow who’s making a hard run at this (and getting a ton of attention for it), but by putting Mark Cuban on his Yahoo wonder board at the precise moment Cuban is talking about paying people to leave Google’s index boggles the mind.

According to Parade Magazine (via David Weinberger), here are the top ten baby names for boys and girls this year.

As David points out in his piece, we rarely find common names like these anymore (He calls it the “long tail” of names, LOL). The preference seems to be to so badly misspell the name that the identity of the person becomes “unique,” to which I can only ask, “WTF?”

I noticed a couple of years ago that receptionists began asking me to spell my first name. This shocked me, until I realized that there are now dozens of ways to spell a simple name like mine. Why do parents do this? Don’t we realize that we’re creating a friggin’ monster here?

Oh, I forgot. Everybody’s “special” these days. My bad.

One of the great things about the Web is the immediate access to knowledge and information, something about which I’ve written here often. All of the institutions of colonial modernism are under attack, in part, because their place in the culture — their authority, if you will — is granted by access to protected knowledge. This culture clash is uncomfortable for those whose position is being picked apart, and so they’re fighting back with arguments that are often specious, at best.

One such argument has been thoroughly dissected here, that of terrified elitist Andrew Keen and his assertion that amateurs will surely destroy the world. This meme — this attack on everyday people with access to knowledge — has been picked up by others with something to lose in the culture clash and is now rather widespread among all elites.

And it’s absolutely wonderful to find the occasional person who kicks back against this crap, and I was introduced to a spectacular example today in the form of Mike Caulfield, his blog and an entry titled If a Columnist Calls a Tail a Leg…

In this outstanding piece of work, Caulfield elegantly deconstructs a Keenish form of argument by Monica Hesse in, of all places, The Washington Post. Her column is provocatively called “Truth: Can You Handle It?” She attacks what she pejoratively calls the “wiki-world” and uses what she feels is a false quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln to make her point.

Unfortunately for Ms. Hesse, HER Lincoln reference is the one that’s wrong (Oops!), and Caulfield’s legwork on the matter is worthy of any journalism award.

Go read the whole thing. You’ll thank me later on.