I want to get one more post in before putting RT on ice for the last couple of weeks of the summer. I’ve been debating what I should write about.

The obvious choice would be something about Wikipedia – maybe a look at the Battista Agnese entry and what it might tell us about the role of plagiarism in Wikipedia’s creation and success. How prevalent is plagiarism in Wikipedia? Is it a question we even care about? Is plagiarism itself some bourgeois pre-Internet taboo that we’re just as well to be rid of?

Good questions, but I’m going to have to leave them for others. If I ride the Wikipedia horse any longer, I’m going to have to take the old nag out back and shoot it.

Or I could do a follow up to my post yesterday about the system of patronage that has come to characterize the upper ranks of the blogosphere. I think there’s something to be said as well about the blogosphere’s cult of personality and whether it’s a strength or a weakness. T.S. Eliot famously wrote that “poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Is that true of all good writing? Is it true of journalism? It’s awfully hard to escape personality in the blogosphere.

But that’s pretty eggheaded stuff. I mean, “escape personality”? WTF?

I’ve also been meaning to write a post arguing that the dynamic that defines the way news stories are chosen at Digg is the same dynamic that defines video-game competition. The top Diggers frag the news with the same speed and dexterity that the top gamers frag baddies. It’s all about maximizing the killcount. Is it any coincidence that the demographics of the Digg audience match so closely the demographics of the first-person-shooter audience?

But I don’t have time for that one right now. Let it be noted, though: “fragging the news” is my idea. A search on the term in Google turns up nothing. That’s a rare pleasure. One of the tragic things about Google is that it reminds us daily how unoriginal we are.

No, I’m going to write about something important: My prediction that having a public service AdSense ad on your site will become the new mark of hipness. All cool sites are going to want to have those little text ads about hurricane relief or whatever. In case you don’t know, Google sticks public service ads in AdSense slots whenever the content gets a little too risque, a little too naughty, for its taste. A public service AdSense ad basically screams out: Read this page!

I realized this recently while reading Fake Steve’s blog, which in addition to being nut-bustingly funny offers the most insightful critique of modern technoculture mores I’ve come across. It makes ValleyWag look like, well, ValleyWag. (Memo to Real Steve: Please please please don’t take down Fake Steve. You can have the “pod” trademark. You can have the music monopoly. Hell, you can backdate all the options you want. Just let us have Fake Steve.)

Anyway, I’ve noticed that Fake Steve has had the “Gulf Hurricane Relief” ad at the top of his site for days on end now, probably as a result of his classic series on the infamous Yelp party (here, here, here, and here). The ad is just perfect – it is as great an example of advertising as content as I’ve ever seen. Fake Steve has, intentionally or not, singehandedly revealed the coolness inherent in the Google public service ad.

I want one of those ads on my site, too. But I’m not edgy enough. I get ads for freaking JotSpot and Blogger.

UPDATE: Needed to take a break from vacation to report that Fake Steve pumped up the size of the Google PSA on his home page today, signaling his slavish devotion to Rough Type. The bigger news, though, is that, thanks to reader Sid Steward, Rough Type now has its own customized PSA:

http://accesspdf.com/psa_widget.html

Top that, Fake Steve!

Sid says that you can easily stick this ad on your own site, giving you a faux gloss of edginess while also promoting Rough Type. A nifty two-fer. Make it viral.

UPDATE 2 (August 25): I regret to announce that Fake Steve has lost his edginess. The PSAs are gone, replaced this morning by Google ads for “Bible Ringtone,” Jesus Ringtone,” “Shepherds Care Publishing,” and “101 PowerPoint Sermons.” No joke.

Prelude

Once upon a time there was an island named Blogosphere, and at the very center of that island stood a great castle built of stone, and spreading out from that castle for miles in every direction was a vast settlement of peasants who lived in shacks fashioned of tin and cardboard and straw.

Part one:

On the nature of innocent fraud

I’ve been reading a short book – an essay, really – by John Kenneth Galbraith called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. It’s his last work, written while he was in his nineties, not long before he died. In it, he explains how we, as a society, have come to use the term “market economy” in place of the term “capitalism.” The new term is a kinder and gentler one, with its implication that economic power lies with consumers rather than with the owners of capital or with the managers who have taken over the work of the owners. It’s a fine example, says Galbraith, of innocent fraud.

An innocent fraud is a lie, but it’s a lie that’s more white than black. It’s a lie that makes most everyone happy. It suits the purposes of the powerful because it masks the full extent of their power, and it suits the purposes of the powerless because it masks the full extent of their powerlessness.

What we tell ourselves about the blogosphere – that it’s open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media – is an innocent fraud.

Part two:

The loneliness of the long-tail blogger

The thing about an innocent fraud, though, is that it’s not that hard to see through. Often, in fact, you have to make an effort not to see through it, and at some point, for some people, the effort no longer seems worth it. A few days back, the blogger Kent Newsome asked, “Who are the readers of our blogs?” His answer had a melancholy tone:

The number of bloggers competing for attention makes it seem like the blogosphere is a huge, chaotic place. But it only seems that way because we have all ended up in a small room at the end of the hall. When people refuse to converse with me or go out of their way to link around me, it hurts a little. Until I remember that while they aren’t listening to me, no one in the real world is listening to them either …

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy writing. But sometimes it feels vaguely depressing to write something, put it up and wait anxiously for someone to reply via comment or link.

A handful of people responded to Newsome’s post, among them the long-time blogger Seth Finkelstein. Finkelstein’s tone was much darker. You sensed not only the resignation but also the bitterness that is always left behind when a fraud is revealed:

To be more personal here, I wrote because:

1) I was suckered into the idea that blogs were a way to “route around” media power, and to be HEARD.

2) I had delusions of influence.

3) The random-payoff of attention makes it seem far more effective than it actually is.

4) It’s painful to admit that you’ve wasted so much time and effort and pretty much nobody is listening.

Blog evangelism is very cruel, as it preys on people’s frustrated hopes and dreams.

My blog is read by a few dozen fans … I’ve come close to shutting it down at times, and will finally reach the breaking-point eventually.

The powerful have a greater stake in the perpetuation of an innocent fraud than do the powerless. Long after the powerless have suspended their suspension of disbelief, the powerful will continue to hold tightly to the fraud, repeating it endlessly amongst themselves in an echo chamber that provides a false ring of truth.

Part three:

How to get a link from an A Lister

I met Seth Finkelstein recently. We had both been invited to participate in a day-long conference about “hyperlinking” at the Annenberg School in Philadelphia. The conference’s first panel was moderated by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University who also writes the popular blog Pressthink, which has the following tag line: “Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine.” During a brief Q&A session at the close of the panel, a woman in the audience expressed frustration about getting bloggers like Rosen to link to her site. She asked the professor if he had any suggestions. Rosen said that the best way to get a link from him is to write a post about one of his posts. He carefully monitors mentions of his work in other blogs, he said, and he frequently provides links back to them, at least when they have some substance.

Rosen’s answer could not possibly have been more honest. The best way, by far, to get a link from an A List blogger is to provide a link to the A List blogger. As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated – with the best of intentions, mind you – by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite. A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a lord, and the lord drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant’s little purse. The peasant is happy, and the lord’s hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.

“Ghost of Democracy” is a wonderful term. It perpetuates the innocent fraud even as it exposes it.

Epilogue

One day, a blog-peasant boy found buried in the dust beside his shack a sphere of flawless crystal. When he looked into the ball he was astounded to see a moving picture. It was an image of a fleet of merchant ships sailing into the harbor of the island of Blogosphere. The ships bore names that had long been hated throughout the island, names like Time-Warner and News Corp and Pearson and New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast and McGraw-Hill. The blog-peasants gathered along the shore, jeering at the ships and telling the invaders that they would soon be vanquished by the brave lords in the great castle. But when the captains of the merchant ships made their way to the gates of the castle, bearing crates of gold, they were not repelled by the lords with cannons but rather welcomed with fanfares. And all through the night the blog-peasants could hear the sounds of a great feast inside the castle walls.

When it comes to evaluating a tail, which matters more: its length or its shape? The answer, of course, is largely a matter of personal taste. But Douglas Galbi argues, compellingly, that we have been so focused on long tails and short tails that we have forgotten that tails of all lengths can come in an infinite variety of shapes. And those shapes – the slopes the tails form – are not fixed. They can change, and change dramatically, over time – even if (and this is important) the number of items in the tail remains the same. Here’s Galbi:

For a concrete example, consider the popularity of the ten-most-popular given names. The set of possible given names (given names on offer) is huge, and probably hasn’t changed much in the past two-hundred years. However, the popularity of the ten-most-popular given names for males in England has fallen from about 85% in 1800 to about 28% in 1994. If you want to understand changes in the popularity of the most popular items in a collection of symbols instantiated and used in a similar way, try to understand this change.

The shape of demand in a market, in other words, depends on many factors beyond just the number of items on offer, and it can vary independently of that number. Galbi believes “that size, which tail authorities have categorized as long or short, matters less than shape.” So could it be that, when it comes to the pattern of demand in a market, even a market or purely informational goods, the effect of the Internet may be considerably less important than we currently assume?

UPDATE: On a related note, Chris Edwards takes a close look at Jakob Nielsen’s drooping tail. Plotting a demand curve on a linear scale, it appears, may mask important variations in tail shape that become clear when the curve is plotted on a logarithmic scale. Edwards and Nielsen come to different conclusions about what one particular (and probably common) tail shape may mean.

UPDATE 2: Chief Long Tailer Chris Anderson has also been thinking about tail shape and in particular the differences between the classic long tail (powerlaw) and the drooping tail (lognormal). (Anderson has also posted a presentation on the subject that he gave at Google last weekend.) “The difference between those two curves,” he writes, “is the subject of a lot of research at the cutting edge of complexity theory, and the simple answer seems to be that it comes down to the nature of the network effects that create unequal (‘rich get richer’) distributions such as the powerlaw and lognormal in the first place.” Anderson’s focus on network effects as the ultimate determinant of demand patterns seems in line with Edwards’s focus on the nature and dynamics of linking in a market. Galbi’s view seems very different; he seems to be warning against trying to explain a market’s demand pattern solely in terms of network effects or any other universal “laws.” Markets are messier than that, is what (I think) he’s implying. My own sense – and I speak here as an ignorant bystander – is that the long tail and the drooping tail are overarching themes that provide a great deal of insight into the workings of markets in general but that don’t necessarily provide all that much help in understanding variations on those themes – and all real markets will, to one extent or another, be variations on the themes.

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington takes a whack at the world’s largest search engine. “Google smugness is at an all time high,” he writes. Google’s sin? It offers its employees “specially packaged, trans-fat-free” ice cream sandwiches, a practice that, according to Arrington, will “just make your shareholders think you are incredibly lame.” That’s so true. In fact, I’m shocked that Google hasn’t disclosed that it gives workers frozen delicacies in its SEC filings.

Arrington’s smugness charge comes just hours after he told Business Week’s Rob Hof, “I’m hoping everything crashes. Then I want to go buy all the big blogs.”

I remarked a couple of days ago on Dave Winer’s observation that the enormous popularity of Wikipedia may represent a new kind of centralization of information. An analysis of the recently disclosed AOL search data, by SEO Blackhat, adds a further gloss to this phenomenon. According to the analysis, the #1 ranked search result garners, on average, 42.1% of all clickthroughs. The clickthrough rate falls off precipitously from there, with the #2 result representing 11.9% percent of clickthroughs. If current trends continue, Wikipedia will likely come to occupy the top spot for a very wide range of topics – in fact, it already holds the top spot for many common terms.

Combine the growing dominance of web searches over the way people find information with the growing dominance of Wikipedia over search results, and you do seem to have the makings for an unprecedented dominance of a single information source. Could it be that, counter to our expectations, the natural dynamic of the web will lead to less diversity in information sources rather than more?

And could it be that Wikipedia will end up being Google’s most formidable competitor? After all, if Google simply points you to Wikipedia, why bother with the middleman?

UPDATE: Patrick Ross goes further down the long tail of topics and finds that Wikipedia’s dominance over Google results only gets stronger.

I came across this passage at the end of an article in USA Today:

[Google CEO Eric] Schmidt said he makes tons of searches daily on Google and uses it as a truth squad. He told of a politician who came to visit him who said there were more outhouses in the world than users of the TiVo digital video recorder. After the politician left, Schmidt looked it up. “We live in a world where people make all sorts of claims, and I always wonder if they’re true,” he said. Turned out the information was old — there are more TiVo users, he says. “Having the ability to search and get the answer is a nice way to live your life,” he says.

I was surprised. I would have thought there’d be a lot more outhouses in the world than TiVo users. So I thought I’d fact-check the fact-checking. But I’ve been unable to find outhouse statistics through Google searches. I did, though, come across a 2003 article that said that only 13% of Africans have sewage connections, which would indicate (I assume) quite a few outhouses. Can anybody out there confirm that Schmidt is right? And if you find good outhouse statistics through a Google search, let me know what keywords you used.

I’m just trying to separate the truth squad from the truthiness squad.

UPDATE: The consensus seems to be that Schmidt was referring to US outhouses, not worldwide outhouses, and he either misspoke or was misquoted. I feel relieved to have that cleared up. And remember: “Having the ability to search and get the answer is a nice way to live your life.” I know it’s all I ever wanted.

Ron Steen, “a really good guy” with “a dynamic personality” and “no drug or alcohol problems” (and a car that “is completely paid off”), is breaking new ground in the derivatives market by packaging himself as a financial instrument and selling himself at eBay. For $100,000, you get 2% of Ron’s total earnings throughout his lifetime. (He’ll use the money to pay for college.) Judging from his eBay writeup, Ron has a firm grasp of neither net present value nor the possibility of premature death, but he’s only a high school kid, and he clearly has gumption. His big mistake, though, is setting a fixed price rather than allowing an auction. If a liquid market for trading shares of an individual’s future earnings was established, that would be pretty interesting. I mean, if the young could cash in on their adult potential while they were still young, then maybe youth wouldn’t be wasted on them anymore. At the very least, they could dramatically improve the quality of their drug and alcohol problems.

UPDATE: Steen has been booted off eBay.