azeem azhar

MSM vs blogs (reduxdux)

Chris points me to a discussion on the strengths of  bloggers and MSM? Is Megan right about what blogs are good at and what they aren't? To summarise her arguments (I go into more detail below) bloggers make good opiners and good filters for the weird and idiosyncratic. Because they aren't paid they don't make good exhaustive researchers nor reliable ones nor will they cover boring stories about city council sewage conundrums.

At least three points of difference with this:

1. No doubt bloggers do opine at length. Nor that we find the weirdest shit, man. But we are starting to see economic models where bloggers perform the function of a journalist without the infrastructure of the firm. Exhibit A is Chris Allbriton's Back to Iraq--who was funded by contributions for his tour, unembedded of Iraq.

This is an anecdote not evidence, but during periods of disruption one often starts there. Can the B-to-I model be extended? Could we imagine a business matching qualified bloggers with interested parties who want a story to be investigated? Kind of  Rent-a-coder for journalism, the experiment has just started, according to Jeff Jarvis, at NewAssignment.

2. It's also important to recognise the implicit choices made by editors, who after all don't have unlimited resources. Each an every day an editor decides what is important and where to assign their resources. So Parliament (or the White House) gets a ton of reporters, and the local teachers strike gets none. What are the implications of this skew?  What about when the choices are not so stark? What about when the story is technically complex but important? Will it make the grade? MSM gives the veneer of comprehensiveness and objectivity which is starkly at odds with the daily resource allocation. No reporters in Lhasa, it's too dangerous (which means too expensive).

I started my career as a  tech journalist in the mid-90s when it was virtually impossible to get tech covered in the mainstream press, even though I worked with the three most forward thinking British institutions (The Guardian, The Economist and the BBC, although not as a journalist). So I'm very familiar with the harsh 'so-what' of the news editor or the disconnect between MSM commissioners and seismic shift across industries, politics and governance from the Internet.

Peer-to-peer mobile apps for Indian farmers

The Times has picked up on a project we launched through the innovation group at Reuters. Called Market Light it will provide farmers with price and weather information to help them get better prices for their primary products. The Indian agricultural market is beset with information problems throughout the supply chain which leads to poor prices for farmers, heavy intermediation and tremendous wastage (some 30 to 40% of vegetables rot, for examples) throughout the supply chain.

This is a fantastic opportunity to create a business addressing these information problems. Even with the increasing march of cellphones in India, particularly in the rural market, it's non-trivial to address the customer problems in this market, so kudos to Amit and his team for getting their teeth into it.

On user motivations

Nick Carr republishes a comment by Yochai Benkler on user motivations and commons-based peer production. Two key points for me (my emphasis)

The reason is that the power of the major sites comes from combining large-scale contributions from heterogeneous participants, with heterogeneous motivations. Pointing to the 80/20 rule on contributions misses the dynamic that comes from being part of a large community and a recognized leader or major contributors in it, for those at the top, and misses the  importance of framing this as a non-priced social process. Adding money alters the overall relationship. It makes some people "professionals," and renders other participants, "suckers."

...

There is an abiding skepticism, born of many years in the industrial age, about the sustainability and plausibility of nonmarket-based cooperation and productive collaboration. We have now, on the other hand, almost two decades of literature in experimental economics, game theory, anthropology, political science field studies, that shows that cooperation in fact does happen much more often than the standard economics textbooks predict, and that under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust.

Solving house buying angst

For the past nine months, we have been house hunting.

In the current market, it is a bore. Not enough housing stock being the biggest issues. But the biggest problem in my book is the asymmetry of information between buyer and seller. Fundamentally we are intermediated by the estate agent who holds his cards close to his chest. He is the one who understands the market and the motivations or buyers and sellers. Yet he is also the best source of information for buyers (or has been)--but he is commissioned by the seller to get the best prices. (Actually, the commission structure is rubbish too. A typical salesman will make less than £100 on every extra £10k he gets on a house, so his incentive is velocity.)

The Net isn't helping buyers or sellers as much as it could either.

Promising to be interesting

By I thought I ought to share my first YouTube video nonetheless.

It is one of a long running series, you'll be pleased to hear.

I am back

Just what the world needs. Another blog.

So I am back after an 18 month hiatus during which time a lot happened, most excitingly this chap, who is now being hilarious.

I started blogging in early 2000 using a tool called Pyra. We actually used Pyra as a project management tool for a few companies I was involved in. In took me a while to figure our what Pyra was about. Those blogs, I occasionally find them we used extensively as what came to be known as k-logs. So from the depths of the archives (with apologies that some links don't work as these were orignally hosted within a firewall) a blog on the UK incubator market from 2000. (Yes--there was such a think as the UK incubator market in 2000).

My on-again--off-again blogging continued here, reaching the dizzying heights of 2,000 visits a day in 2003. It featured war-porn (here, here and ultimately this), open-source outside of software (BBC Public License | other stuff) and some really worthy shit.

I hope to be more interesting this time round.