Wassup Turps

So, speaking of blogging (which we were – don't deny it), there's been an interesting blogstorm this week over the new endorsement guidelines enacted by America's Federal Trade Commission. (KEEP READING! I promise this gets less boring.)

The FTC's new rules are all about people endorsing products – you know what I mean:

The FTC's new guidelines are much stricter on disclosure than ever before: if you say something nice about a product but you're being compensated in any way, it's now clear that you need to admit this compensation up front, or face FTC investigation. As far as this applies to celebrity testimonials and advertorials, nobody seems to be complaining; stricter guidelines for that sort for thing are probably overdue.

BUT. What's got the blogosphere in a twist are the new applications of these rules to bloggers. The new rules appear to demand that from now on, any bloggers who (e.g.) say something nice about a product or service – whether they say this on a blog post, or in a comment thread, or by tweet – must fully disclose if they (e.g.) received that product for free.

(Concise summary of the specific rules here.)

When I first read about this, I thought it seemed fairly reasonable, but the issue is turning out to be more complex. For one thing, apparently none of this applies to official news organisations or "real" journalists, despite the fact that they receive mountains of free swag all the time. Double standards? Angry bloggers are angry.

I don't know enough about the legalities to fully understand all of this. (And it's the FTC of the USA, not of the world, so does any of this – even theoretically – apply to us?) Either way, it's clearly not a simple issue. Is it unfair to expect bloggers to always disclose that they've received free stuff? Are the rules are too vague, or too impractical, to enforce? Should "official" journalists always be disclosing their free swag, too? Is there a meaningful line between professional and casual comment – one that the general public can be reasonably expected to distinguish?

Or are some angry bloggers just unethical tools, afraid to admit that they're being paid to shill because they're worth more if it's a secret?

Break!

In honour of the mid-semester break, here's some break history for you: the story of the world's most important 6 seconds of music.

If you're a music or history or music history geek, this is fascinating, I think. And after a while it also talks about the weirdness of copyright protection and intellectual property in the modern era, so it's even (vaguely) relevant to the course! Ha!

See you in a fortnight :)

Be nice, I know your name

As a bit of a follow-up to my last post about net anonymity . . .

"You can claim anonymity, but there is a range of things that a judge will use to determine whether you have used your anonymity responsibly" [my emphasis]

That's a provocative quote from this article about recent legal decisions unmasking people's internet anonymity, and the precedents being set. What's also interesting about the article, though, is its discussion of how and why this might not even matter.

See, the article argues that the rise of social networking (among other things) is undermining net anonymity on a basic, socio-cultural level. In the future, apparently, we'll almost always be authenticated & named on the net – just as usually we are on Facebook and in real life. Correspondingly, future internet forums & chats will be much nicer than they are now, because if we're identified then we're responsible for what we say – just as we are in real life. The article points out that, for example, nasty anonymous twitterers are never popular. Only the authentically real (or known fake) identities maintain an audience.

"It might be entertaining to post anonymously, but it's not very interesting to read . . . When people are going to be named, whether it's their real name or a persistent pseudonym, it takes them more of an effort to maintain the credibility of their name." [my emphasis]

Interesting, huh? Does it sound plausible to you?

More importantly – does using your real name make you a nicer person? And is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

Enjoy yr weekend, folks :)

Money Money Money Money Money

Crikey pointed out this interesting article by Lars Bastholm* about the money troubles possibly looming for the content industry – "content industry" being Bastholm's neat term for the mass of commercial media on the net (press websites, TV streaming, etc). Wait, money troubles? What?

Although the content industrialists have been hoping to support their online content via online advertising, Bastholm says this might not actually work. But if online ads aren't worth enough, where does money come from? There's two big ideas: micropayments, where people pay a miniscule amount of money every time they access content, or a subscription / licence fee model, where people a larger amount of money at regular intervals.

Bastholm's big argument is that "micropayments will never work", because Gen Y aren't willing to pay for anything. I think he's wrong, though. The whole point of micropayments is that the payments are tiny and invisible, and that's the key. There's a real psychological difference between spending $10 all at once and spending it in $0.0001 increments, the same as there's a difference between eating a whole cake at once versus eating it slice-by-slice. People don't like paying $150 for a dictionary, but paying a fraction of a cent for every definition you look up? Much easier to swallow.

If the prices are low enough and the mechanism makes it easy for you, people will pay rather than pirate. Even Gen Y kids will pay – isn't iTunes the proof? Most people are willing to spend (a little) money for legality and convenience. People bought a Nine Inch Nails album via iTunes, even though it was available free & legal via nin.com!

Anyhow – Bastholm wants to abandon paying for individual websites, and instead to implement a "content fee" similar to the television licences paid in Europe and elsewhere: one unavoidable payment to cover everything, like a tax. He admits that Americans, notoriously tax-phobic, are unlikely to accept a new fee to access what's now free. Yet he envisions every American paying an extra $20 a month or so, which is then distributed to the content producers via some kind of $$-per-popularity formula.

That might be a fair model, but wouldn't it be incredibly complicated? Not to mention, impossible to work across the net's (lack of) international borders? Or will the web of USA content just wall itself off from the rest of the world? (This might already be happening – I'm constantly pissed off that I can't watch television via Hulu, for example.)

I don't think a licence fee is practical. And mini-licence fees for each website (or network of sites) are already unpopular – people hate subscribing to websites! That might change if the big sites make it unavoidable... but I'm not convinced.

Micropayments are easier for websites to implement and easier for people to accept, I think. If the money has to come from somewhere, I'm definitely expecting micropayments.

Would you pay $20 a month for all your web content?

Would you rather pay a fraction of a cent per webpage view?

What's going to happen?

*LARS BASTHOLM: Lars the Red, Blood-Lord of the Ice Wastes of Fangthor, Chief Digital Creative Officer at Ogilvy North America.

Get Confident, Stupid

Mistakes? No mistakes here, honest. I'm using "Mistakes Being Marked" as a blog title because it's a convenient match to the name of the other place where I put things on the internet. Look, I ain't no mistake-obsessed pessimist, okay? If my confidence level were an advertisement for shirts in 1948, it'd be this:

Ready for a bright new day!

(Image from here.)

Actually, this might be relevant to the course: can anyone tell me how copyright and "fair use" work? By which I mean, if I grab an image from somewhere (as I've done above), and I simply acknowledge that the image's copyright is theirs and that I'm borrowing it from them, is this "acknowledgment" enough? I mean, should I be worrying about licensing and legal permissions et cetera, or do the finer legalities only apply if I'm making money? And should I be following the laws of Australia, or the laws of the nation where this blog's server is located (wherever that is), or what? Either way I'd guess I'm small enough to go unnoticed, and out of sight is out of jurisdiction, but... what if I'm not?

Any law graduates doing publishing & communications?