THE FON AFFAIR -- MONEY AND THE BLOGGERATI

Should leading bloggers be transparent about their association with commercial ventures they write about? The answer, of course, is a no brainer! Doc Searle's following piece is an important read! rmb Counterpoint r> David Weinberger's response to Rebecca Buckman's Wall Street Journal piece is so strong, and so well-written, that I didn't want to append a pointer to the piece below.

I saw the piece as a typical, predictable, stir-the-shit mainstream journal's dig against blogging. As David Isenberg puts it, "made up news". With an invitation to revisit protocols of disclosure. David goes deeper. And from a good position: he knows more, and is in a position to know more, than Rebecca Buckman, about his relationship with Fon.

His conclusion:

Yes, there are stories to be written about the "murkiness" and "nuance" of the relationships of bloggers to their readers and to companies who pay those bloggers. But, Rebecca could not have picked a worse example than the Fon advisory board: We all were transparent about our relationship and not only is there no current compensation package for the advisors, we still haven't even discussed it with Martin.

This might have been an interesting article. Instead, it imputes misconduct where there has been none and hypothesizes a trend using examples to the contrary.

Glenn Fleishman has more thoughts:

I totally believe in the love of something that brings good to society. However, love doesn't require nor raise $21 million from two VCs, Skype, and Google.

Read the whole things.

Why should interests conflict only around money? r> Blog Buzz on High-Tech Start-Ups Causes Some Static is a Wall Street Journal piece today by Rebecca Buckman. It begins,

When Spanish Internet start-up FON Technology SL tried to generate some buzz this past weekend about new funding it had snared from Google Inc. and eBay Inc.'s Skype Technologies, it pitched stories to traditional media outlets.

But the tiny company also got publicity from another source: influential commentators on the Internet who write blogs -- including some who may be compensated in the future for advising FON about its business.

Most of the nine members of FON's U.S. advisory board, including former newspaper journalist Dan Gillmor, technology author David Weinberger and Internet-law expert Wendy Seltzer, wrote about FON on their blogs late Sunday. That was right after FON founder Martin Varsavsky revealed on his own blog that the closely held company had raised $21.7 million in funding from Google, Skype and others, declaring it "a dream come true."

Later, she adds,

Some lawyers and academics with expertise in the Internet said the disclosures by the FON advisers were adequate and appropriate. But Bob Steele, an ethics specialist with the Poynter Institute, a journalism organization in St. Petersburg, Fla., says bloggers with financial ties to companies -- disclosed or not -- have "competing loyalties" that could taint their independence as writers. "It's still a problem," he says. While many bloggers don't consider themselves journalists, anyone putting information into the public domain about people or companies has certain ethical responsibilities, Mr. Steele says.

That can be a murky issue in today's clubby blogosphere, where many people including venture capitalists, lawyers and journalists write about Web issues and companies -- and often, each other -- with little editing. The rebound in Silicon Valley's economy, coupled with the popularity of cheap, easy-to-use blogging tools, means there are more aspiring commentators than ever opining about start-ups and tech trends on the Web. And increasingly, it is difficult to discern their allegiances.

In the article, "allegiances" and "interests" (of, say, the sort that become "conflicted") are mostly conceived in terms of corporate affiliation and financial payoff.

So, this paragraph:

David Isenberg, one FON advisory-board member with his own blog, says he expects to eventually receive some payment from FON, such as stock options or warrants. Though Mr. Isenberg didn't disclose that on his blog on Sunday -- his posting about FON was titled "Everybody have FON tonight!" -- he said he serves on the advisory board. "Usually, that means there's a business interest" in a company, he says. Mr. Isenberg also notes his blog post expressed some skepticism about whether FON's business was ready to be embraced by the general public.

Yet when I talked with David Weinberger and David Isenberg at Berkman on Tuesday, both told me their primary interest in Fon was not financial, but rather in getting Internet service to the less developed world. They also said this was the primary purpose of their advisory board involvement as well.

I don't know if they told that to Rebecca Buckman, but I think it's significant.

Peter Drucker used to talk about how most businesses aren't started, or even run, just for profit. Or just because some future CEO woke up one day and said "I have a deep urge to return value to some shareholders." Most companies are started for the purpose of pursuing a passion, and no small number are driven by a passion for doing good in the world.

Everybody I've spoken to about Fon, and founder Martin Varsavsky, who knows both first-hand, say he's building the company more for love than money.

Yet that's not where we look for interest conflicts. It's always around money.

A little more:

Mr. Varsavsky, FON's founder and chief executive, says none of the board members who publicized FON did so "because they're going to get paid. ... These are people who love what FON is about." He says the advisers weren't even sure FON would be a for-profit company when some signed up.

But University of Minnesota journalism professor Jane Kirtley says that "even if it's prospective money, it seems to me the prudent thing" for advisers would be to disclose that relationship on their blogs. Ms. Kirtley directs the Minneapolis school's Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law

Point taken.

Here's another: We're still learning here. Up until a couple years ago, some of my own disclosures were of the "I'm on the advisory board of _____" variety. Now I point to a bio page where all my advisory board memberships are listed, along with the fact that they involve equity. Now I'm wondering if even that is enough. In fact, I think it isn't.

Looking around, I think best model may be the Disclosures page of John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center. It's right below links to Berkman and his bio.

So I just changed my own Bio page to Bio & Disclosures. I already had an anchor I could point to at the disclosures section.

[Later...] Britt Blaser, who was witness to one end of the conversation between Rebecca Buckman and David Isenberg, blogs at length about the whole thing.

Jeff Jarvis blogs too. Glenn Fleishman. Daniel Berlinger. Nicholas Carr. Robert Scoble. Matthew Ingram. Paul Kedrosky. John Cook.

Intelligent design r> Val Landi:

Our new media world is a rip, mashup, blog, podcast, RSS delivery, small-is-the-new-big, world.

Media platforms use the Internet to build relationships with specific market segments and communities in a world dominated and driven by attention scarcity rather than distribution scarcity, which empowered the old top-down push world of the dying media conglomerates (the current Time-Warner/Carl Icahn/Bruce Wasserstein proxy battle is not a historical blip — as my grandfather used to say: if you find a turtle on a fencepost, it's not an accident).

Looks here r> Crabby Old Lady: Lo and behold, one cosmetic company has heard Crabby's lament and answered it as perfectly as if Crabby Old Lady had formulated the new cosmetics herself. Vital Radiance (from Revlon) does everything Crabby wanted and more.: Shopwork r> Talking identity shop at a Berkman meeting here at Harvard. Johannes Ernst has a list of attendees.

Additional notes (bound to be many) are accumulating over at IT Garage. It's easier and more appropriate (closer to my job) over there.

That's where we cribbed it r> Richard Edelman:

I was reading Shakespeare's Richard III last night and found this quote that implies that the Bard was onto the Cluetrain concept...

Viva la France Telecom! r> Norman Lewis, director of research at France Telecom, was transcribed, heroically by telephonydiscussion.com, after saying the following, and much more, at eTel:

I think that voice and innovation around voice has been very bloody awful. For the past 100-150 years I think telcos have throttled innovation around voice and voice has essentially been the same experience for the past 150 yearsŠand we have that possibility of taking that application [voice]Šand liberating it [voice] from that kind of stranglehold that I think telcos have had in the pastŠ and now we can begin to do things we have never done before. ŠIf you just look at the recent period with Ebay-Skype...voice is becoming something of an adjunct to other services and will open up new possibilities...I see this as a huge golden opportunity for immense innovation...What we [the telcos] are doing is re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. That is essentially what a lot of us are doing in our companies. The innovation landscape has changedŠ

We [France Telecom] are the leaders in providing voice over IP and both France and in the UK, this is Wanadoo in the UK. We are one of the biggest providers in the UK of voice over IP today. Us, not BT, Us. In France the same thing. We¹ve introduced some incredible pricing and packaging etcetera etcetera. Of course the real problem is you can get people to buy into the service but to get them to use it, is another question. And that is where this whole discussion comes a full circle. Because the way we are going to get people to use it, is by building compelling applications that embed voice, in other things that people are doing. And that is where I really want to talk about the futureŠby having this capability and more importantly understanding where we need to go in the future in terms of the sweet spot between providing that kind of infrastructure, providing that kind of capability with the ability to innovate that exists at the grass roots, that is where I think we need to come together and start working together and start building the next generation of applications that go far beyond the trivia that we see, ringtonesŠhow stupid are people, you get a whole song for 99 cents why would people pay three pounds fifty [6.23USD] for 30 seconds of a song?

What a nice break from the likes of Edward Whitacre and John Thorne.

One caveat, so far.

Bully telcos want rich Net student's lunch money r> Washington Post: Verizon Executive Calls for End to Google's 'Free Lunch'.

The comments by John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, came as lawmakers prepared to debate legislation that could let phone and cable companies charge Internet firms additional fees for using their high-speed lines.

"The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers," Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. "It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers."

My worry is that some lunchers — not just Google — will cave in.

Thanks to Thinking Machine for the pointer.

Mike Warot translates Thorne's statement to what it should have been.

Via Feedster on: solar energy

Sourced fromReblogged by dymaxion on February 10, 2006 02:10 AM | TrackBack