Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

12.07.07
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CNET, Gamespot and Jeff Gerstmann: Controversy or conspiracy theory?

On Wednesday, I spotted a post from Michael O’Connor Clarke about Jeff Gerstmann, a games reviewer and Editorial Director at CNET‘s Gamespot, who appeared to have been fired for giving a bad review to Kane & Lynch. The game’s publishers, Eidos Interactive, had just bought hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising on the site and the rumour was that they used the weight of that contract to force CNET to fire Gerstmann. It seems the news was broken in this Penny Arcade strip.

Here’s Gerstmann’s review:

The implications of this rumour are clear: If CNET is bowing to pressure from advertisers to ensure that their own games are favourable reviewed, then CNET’s games coverage becomes not worth the electricity that lights its pixels. Indeed, the suspicion that CNET can be bought immediately devalues all its reviews, across all sectors. If the PR, advertising and editorial departments submit to bullying from one vendor, then there’s no reason why they aren’t doing the same for other vendors. This is potentially very damaging for CNET as it destroys readers’ confidence that what they are getting is honest, unbiased opinion.

As Kotaku says:

As our tipster points out, if the rumor is true, it could point to a distressing precedent at Gamespot and parent company CNet. “As writers of what is supposed to be objective content, this is our worst nightmare coming to life,” wrote the tipster.

Our efforts to confirm the story with Gamespot haven’t proved successful. Our current requests with PR, Gerstmann and other CNet contacts have either gone unanswered or yielded a “no comment.”

But rather than address the rumours head-on, CNET shilly-shallied about:

CNET allowed hours to pass by as people continued to spread word of the firings, creating incensed users everywhere. They issued no formal statement and made no attempt to defuse the situation. Eventually, they came out with what I refer to as a “non-denial denial,” in which they made no reference to the controversial situation, resorting to generalized statements about how CNET is a bastion of “unbiased reviews.”

And the first formal response on Gamespot is a masterpiece of not really saying anything:

Due to legal constraints and the company policy of GameSpot parent CNET Networks, details of Gerstmann’s departure cannot be disclosed publicly. However, contrary to widespread and unproven reports, his exit was not a result of pressure from an advertiser.

“Neither CNET Networks nor GameSpot has ever allowed its advertising business to affect its editorial content,” said Greg Brannan, CNET Networks Entertainment’s vice president of programming. “The accusations in the media that it has done so are unsubstantiated and untrue. Jeff’s departure stemmed from internal reasons unrelated to any buyer of advertising on GameSpot.”

“Though he will be missed by his colleagues, Jeff’s leaving does not affect GameSpot’s core mission of delivering the most timely news, video content, in-depth previews, and unbiased reviews in games journalism,” said Ryan MacDonald, executive producer of GameSpot Live. “GameSpot is an institution, and its code of ethics and duty to its users remains unchanged.”

Whilst neither CNET nor Gerstmann were willing to discuss exactly what happened, Gerstmann was keen to play down the implications of his firing by telling MTV’s Multiplayer blog that there’s no reason for gamers to doubt Gamespot’s reviews.

Despite that, public opinion in the gaming world swung against CNET, despite the hints that Gerstmann’s firing may be nothing to do with Kane & Lynch, and more to do disagreements with (new) senior manager Josh Larson. If I may quote liberally from Kotaku:

Speaking with a Gamespot employee yesterday who asked not to be named for this story, we’ve learned that, despite the neutral nature of the Gamespot news item on the matter, the editorial staff is said to be “devastated, gutted and demoralized” over the removal of former editorial director Jeff Gerstmann. While the termination of Gerstmann, a respected fixture at Gamespot, was pitched to his remaining colleagues by management as a “mutual decision”, it was anything but, we’re told.

The confusion over the reasons for Gerstmann’s termination, compounded with a lack of transparency from management has created a feeling of “irreconcilable despair” that may eventually lead to an exodus of Gamespot editorial staffers. “Our credibility,” said the source, “is in ruins.” Over the course of the previous days, a “large number of Gamespot editors” have expressed their intentions to leave. Tales of emotionally deflated peers, with no will to remain at the site, were numerous.

Unless cooler heads prevail or concerns are addressed, Gamespot could see “mass resignations”, our source revealed.

Rank and file employees of the Gamespot organization are unaware of the real reasons behind Gerstmann’s termination. Our source admitted that Eidos was less than pleased with the review scores for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, but the team has “dealt with plenty of unhappy publishers before.” Our contact stressed that “Money has never played a role in reviews before” and that “[Gamespot] has never altered a score.” No pressure from management or sales has been exercised to remove or alter content, the source reiterated.

However, the source did speculate that disagreements between Gertsmann and VP of games Josh Larson may have been the root cause of the former being terminated. Larson, successor to former editor in chief Greg Kasavin, was described as out of touch with the employees who report to him. The VP is the one allegedly responsible for telling Gamespot editorial staff that it was Gerstmann’s “tone” that was at the heart of his dismissal.

Then, on a Valleywag post disputing the theory that Gerstmann was fired for a bad review, someone who appears to be a Gamespot insider left a number of rather damning comments (again, summed up well by Kotaku):

No one wants to be named because no one wants to get fucking fired! This management team has shown what they’re willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was fucking locked out of his office and told to leave the building.

What you might not be aware of is that GS is well known for appealing mostly to hardcore gamers. The mucky-mucks have been doing a lot of “brand research” over the last year or so and indicating that they want to reach out to more casual gamers. Our last executive editor, Greg Kasavin, left to go to EA, and he was replaced by a suit, Josh Larson, who had no editorial experience and was only involved on the business side of things. Over the last year there has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process; we’ve started having to give our sales team heads-ups when a game is getting a low score, for instance, so that they can let the advertisers know that before a review goes up. Other publishers have started giving us notes involving when our reviews can go up; if a game’s getting a 9 or above, it can go up early; if not, it’ll have to wait until after the game is on the shelves.

I was in the meeting where Josh Larson was trying to explain this firing and the guy had absolutely no response to any of the criticisms we were sending his way. He kept dodging the question, saying that there were “multiple instances of tone” in the reviews that he hadn’t been happy about, but that wasn’t Jeff’s problem since we all vet every review. He also implied that “AAA” titles deserved more attention when they were being reviewed, which sounded to all of us that he was implying that they should get higher scores, especially since those titles are usually more highly advertised on our site.

Gamespot insiders were clearly unhappy with what has happened.

Eventually, Gamespot management did address the issue, although they maintain they are legally unable to discuss why Gerstmann was fired, the categorically deny that it was because of pressure from Eidos.

Q: Was Jeff fired?
A: Jeff was terminated on November 28, 2007, following an internal review process by the managerial team to which he reported.

Q: Why was Jeff fired?
A: Legally, the exact reasons behind his dismissal cannot be revealed. However, they stemmed from issues unrelated to any publisher or advertiser; his departure was due purely for internal reasons.

[…]

Q: Was Eidos Interactive upset by the game’s review?
A: It has been confirmed that Eidos representatives expressed their displeasure to their appropriate contacts at GameSpot, but not to editorial directly. It was not the first time a publisher has voiced disappointment with a game review, and it won’t be the last. However, it is strict GameSpot policy never to let any such feelings result in a review score to be altered or a video review to be pulled.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment cause Jeff to be terminated?
A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment cause the alteration of the review text?
A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment lead to the video review being pulled down?
A: Absolutely not.

[…]

Q: Why didn’t GameSpot write about Jeff’s departure sooner?
A: Due to HR procedures and legal considerations, unauthorized CNET Networks and GameSpot employees are forbidden from commenting on the employment status of current and former employees. This practice has been in effect for years, and the CNET public-relations department stuck to that in the days following Jeff’s termination. However, the company is now making an exception due to the widespread misinformation that has spread since Jeff’s departure.

[…]

Q: GameSpot’s credibility has been called into question as a result of this incident. What is being done to repair and rebuild it?
A: This article is one of the first steps toward restoring users’ faith in GameSpot, and an internal review of the incident and controversy is under way. However, at no point in its history has GameSpot ever deviated from its review guidelines, which are publicly listed on the site. Great pains are taken to keep sales and editorial separated to prevent any impression of impropriety.

For years, GameSpot has been known for maintaining the highest ethical standards and having the most reliable and informative game reviews, previews, and news on the Web. The colleagues and friends that Jeff leaves behind here at GameSpot intend to keep it that way.

The problem is, the damage has been done. Whatever the reason for Gerstmann’s dismissal, the appalling way that CNET handled the crisis means that a lot of people now believe that the Chinese wall that separates advertising and editorial has been permanently damaged. That in and of itself means that both Gamespot’s and CNET’s credibility has been severely dented and if there’s one thing that a publisher cannot afford to do, it’s to appear even for a moment to be in the pockets of its advertisers. Readers want impartiality, honesty, transparency, and if they sniff a rat they’ll leave in droves.

CNET should never have fired Gerstmann without thoroughly thinking through the implications of such a precipitate dismissal. Doing so without a strategy in place for addressing the inevitable rumour that would follow was stupid and short-sighted. In any company, that sort of “marching off the premises” style of dismissal is bound to cause a rumpus, especially when the person being fired, as Gerstmann appears to have been, is much loved by their colleagues and readers, and has been there for so long. It shouldn’t have taken a genius to realise that there’d be a pretty strong reaction against it, and that some sort of thought should be given to how to address the rumours early on.

Whether Gerstmann was fired because of Larson, or Eidos, or something else, is almost irrelevant now. The conclusions one can draw are that either CNET’s in bed with its advertisers, or it’s being managed incompetently by someone prone to throwing hissy fits and firing people on the spot. If one were being generous, one might just put this down to an HR/PR fuck-up, but there is a valuable lesson to be learnt by every publisher and every company with externally-facing bloggers: Look before you fire.

12.03.07
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Creative Business: Substitutes and complements

As part of the Creative Business in the Digital Era project, I’m doing some thinking and learning about business models and microeconomics. This post is originally from the CBDE blog.

After my post the other day about business model archetypes, I had a very interesting conversation with friend and ORG Advisory Council member, Kevin Marks, who pointed me in the direction of an article by Joel Spolsky – Strategy Letter V. In this post, Joel talks about the microeconomics he studied at university, stuff like “if you have a competitor who lowers their prices, the demand for your product will go down unless you match them.” The main body of his post discusses substitutes and complements, and for someone like me who has learnt about business the hard way (by doing it), it’s like a little light bulb illuminating.

Like most creative people, I’ve never studied business, and for years I fell in to the same trap that I later saw many of the musicians I used to work with fall into: I didn’t want to learn about business because I didn’t think I needed to. All I wanted to do was write, maybe make a bit of music, but in any case, just do my own thing. Then my career took an unexpected turn, I started my own business, and I was on the lower slopes of the steepest learning curve of my life. Perhaps if I’d known about blogs like Joel’s in 2000, I would have had a better time of it! Anyway, I digress.

A substitute is an item that can replace another item, so I can buy a PC from IBM or Dell, it doesn’t really matter – PCs are substitutable. A complement is an item that, you guessed it, complements another item, so if I buy an iPod, then there are a range of accessories that act as complements, such as iPod socks or remote controls or armband iPod holders for the keen jogger. Joel talks a lot about complements and focuses mainly on the computer industry.

A complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants. In a small town, when the local five star restaurant has a two-for-one Valentine’s day special, the local babysitters double their rates. (Actually, the nine-year-olds get roped into early service.)

How does this apply to, say, the music industry? Well, let’s say that you are in a band. Your main product is music, which you sell in the form of a CD. The complements to your CD are things like gig tickets, tour programs, T-shirts, DVDs. People buy these other products together with your CD, and are very unlikely to buy them if they aren’t also interested in buying your CD.

Joel then goes on to say:

All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.

Let me repeat that because you might have dozed off, and it’s important. Demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease. For example, if flights to Miami become cheaper, demand for hotel rooms in Miami goes up — because more people are flying to Miami and need a room. When computers become cheaper, more people buy them, and they all need operating systems, so demand for operating systems goes up, which means the price of operating systems can go up.

OK, let’s just swap things about a bit. Your products are CDs, gig tickets, tour programs, T-shirt and DVDs. The complement to that is the music itself. (Note that we’re used to thinking the other way round, labelling the music as the product and the merchandise as the complement, because the music comes first and the merch has to come second. But when you view the saleable items as the products and the music as the complement, this all makes much more sense.) Demand for your products increases when the price of its complement – the music – decreases. If the price of your music is zero, i.e. you are giving it away for free online, economic theory has it that the demand for your products increases.

Joel generally talks about companies that are producing complements to someone else’s products, and discusses how important lowering the price of those complements is:

Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company’s strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the “commodity price” — the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. So:

Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.

If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more.

In the music industry the separation between product and complement is more perceived than real – whilst the record company controls the complement – music – the rights required to create products is often licensed out to third parties, such as merchandising specialists, who have to conform to the record company’s terms. From what Joel’s saying, it would be in the interests of the third parties, e.g. the merchandising companies, to lower the price of the music to increase demand for their product – the more people can access the music of MyWonderfulBand, the more fans there are, the more demand for T-shirts. In practice, though, that’s impossible as the merchandising companies have no leverage to achieve such a goal.

But if the same people – the band – are in control of both products and complements, they can create an end-to-end business model that sees them giving away the product and earning off its complements. I’d argue that people like Ani DiFranco have been doing this for years, encouraging people to make copies of her music and then selling merchandise and touring frequently. For a musician, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The more you tour, the more merchandise you sell, the more you bring your music to the attention of people who may want to buy tickets for your next gig or buy a T-shirt or CD. By taking the risk of commoditising your music, you can potentially drive up the demand for the complements substantially, if you can get over the icky feeling of commoditising the very thing you feel most passionate about.

This ties in nicely with Tim O’Reilly’s view that:

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

So how about the other creative industries? Well, in the publishing industry, the product is the book contents, the complement the book itself, so giving away ebooks should drive demand for paper books. Authors don’t seem to do much in the way of merchandising – perhaps that should change, especially with services like Spreadshirt or Cafepress. Films are rather the same – the moving image is the product, the DVD the complement. Photography – the image is the product, the print or the book the complement…

Now, I did warn you that I am thinking out loud here, and I see a problem with all this, and it has to do with substitutes. Remember, a complement is “a product that you usually buy together with another product”. But for many of the products that come out of the creative industries, the physical incarnation is not a complement to the digital version of the creative work, but a substitute. Joel defines a substitute like this:

A substitute is another product you might buy if the first product is too expensive. Chicken is a substitute for beef. If you’re a chicken farmer and the price of beef goes up, the people will want more chicken, and you will sell more.

If the digital creative work is a substitute for the physical instantiation of the work, the whole complement theory falls over. Computers and operating systems are complements of each other because one without the other is sort of pointless – you want the one if you have the other. But with no CD, my MP3 is still listenable; with no DVD, my MPEG is still watchable; with no print, my JPG is still viewable. This is why the RIAA and its ilk have being getting so much in a tizz about the downloading of unauthorised files – they see the digital as directly substitutable for the physical. And if something is substitutable, it can’t be complementary. Can it?

This is, I think, where the lines get a little fuzzy. Technically, an MP3 is a perfect substitute for a CD – you can do pretty much everything with an MP3 that you can do with a CD. (Indeed, the chance are you’ll turn your CD into MP3s as soon as you get it). But I’m not sure that its substitutability is so perfect and I wonder if, as more people experience total music data loss when their MP3 player or computer hard drive craps out, its perceived substitutability will actually decline. It took the loss of 40gb of digital music carefully collected over years and years for me to learn that backing up my music is really important. As the MP3 player market matures, we will see more people loose data when their devices perish or when they try to swap between silo’d devices that do not play nicely together, e.g. trying to play proprietary format music on a non-compatible device. At that point, substitutability will decline slightly and complementariness will increase slightly, although it will be individual context that will define whether a given MP3/CD is a complement or a substitute.

It is an irony that the industry that has been so worried about substitutability also has some of the best complements to it’s main creative output. Bands aren’t reliant on just CDs for income: gigs and merchandise play a significant part in the successful band’s income, and it’s possible to imagine that percentage could increase as income from CDs decreases. Other creative industries, though, are going to need to find some complements, and quickly. The digitisation of creative works is neither slowing down nor going away; and the commoditisation of those works is both inevitable and uncontrollable, driven as it is by the consumer rather than the rights owners. The only way to deal with the commoditisation of your past cash cow is to sell complements to it.

11.19.07
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ORG Day!

It seems very hard to believe, but it’s over two years since the Open Rights Group was started by myself, Danny O’Brien, Ian Brown, Rufus Pollock, Stef Magdalinski, and Cory Doctorow at OpenTech, on 23 July 2005. We rapidly brought Louise Ferguson, James Cronin, William Heath and Ben Laurie on board (and onto the Board), gathered a fabulous group of keen thinkers and technology experts onto our Advisory Council, and recruited Neil Gaiman as our Patron. Then, after many months of behind the scenes work, ORG took its first tentative steps out into the big wide world.

Today, ORG has published its first annual report (although I’ll leave you to make the joke about how ‘annual’ doesn’t normally mean ‘after 28 months’!). This is a really big landmark – this is a sign of how well ORG has matured from a wobbly-knee’d start-up to a real, responsible and well-governed organisation. Indeed, the Report of Activities follows hot on the heels of our recent recruitment of three new Board members, Vijay Sodiwala, Dan McQuillan, and David Harris, each of whom brings new skills to the table. ORG truly is growing up, and as one of the people to have been there from the beginning, I’m really proud of what we have achieved and am honoured to have played a small part in that success.

It’s amazing, how much we’ve done over the last 28 months. We cut our teeth on the Data Retention Directive, managing to get some much needed press attention for a directive that was marched through the European legislature with alarming speed. We’ve helped the UK Podcasters Association defend their rights. We’ve lobbied hard to have the term of copyright on sound recordings protected, as part of a wider project to respond to the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property. We’ve helped the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG, now APComms) understand why we are against DRM. We’ve been one of the first organisations in the UK to observe the use of e-voting and e-counting in England and Scotland, touring our report around the party conferences.

We’ve done consultations, white papers, MPs briefings, press interviews and briefings, radio interviews, TV news slots, events, meetings, conferences, and blogs posts galore. The ORG wiki has become a valuable repository of information on a wide variety of digital rights issues, written mainly by some amazingly knowledgeable volunteers who have given up hours of their time to make sure that the wiki is up to date, accurate and free of spam.

I hope you don’t think that I’m bigging ORG up too much – I’m just genuinely amazed at how much we have achieved in such a short time and with so few resources. But of course, it doesn’t stop here. There is so much more work to do on e-voting, as the government has failed to take on board the severity of the problems identified not just by ORG, but also the Electoral Commission. We are also working hard on the Creative Business in the Digital Era project, examining new and developing business models that involve giving away creative works for free (and also, sometimes, the rights to that work). And there’s a lot more to come – the list of issues we want to tackle just keeps getting longer.

So far, we’ve been funded by our supporters, who’ve dipped into their own pockets and donated a little of their hard-earned cash each month, and through grants from organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust and the London Development Agency. Grants are important – they allow us to focus our efforts on campaigning. But the support from you, the public, is most important of all. Your money doesn’t just provide ORG with a dependable income, it also adds your voice to ours, ensuring that we are taken seriously by the MPs, Lords and policy makers that we seek to influence.

Originally, over one thousand people pledged financial support to ORG, but many did not keep their promise and we’ve never managed to recruit our full Founding 1000. Now, more than ever, is a good time for you to donate to ORG or, if you already are a supporter, to persuade a friend to donate. The Josteph Rowntree Reform Trust is offering us a grant, £10,000 of which is in the form of matched funds, meaning that we won’t get that money if we can’t raise an equal amount ourselves. JRRT will count both one-off donations and the full year’s value of a subscription, whether you pay monthly or annually.

The best way to support ORG is with a monthly donation via standing order. Whilst you can also donate via PayPal, that’s far from ideal, because not only do they charge a fee, but if your credit or debit card expires your subscription is automatically cancelled by PayPal. We have lost a lot of supporters like this, so a standing order really is the best way to go. You can set one up by sending us a standing order form, or using your own online banking (our bank details are on the form).

Danny O’Brien put it well:

So, here’s the most amazing thing. ORG doesn’t do that on a thousand people’s fivers at all. ORG does it on less.

To get our ballpark income, ORG would have had to have converted every single one of the pledge-signers. I think we got around 50%.

So to celebrate two years, I encourage everyone to try and push the membership up to the promised one thousand. No, two thousand.

If you’re an ORG supporter, pressgang two of your friends to join. Find that online pal who is even more fanatical than you in pursuit of digital rights. Tell the blowhards on Digg or Slashdot it’s time to put their pounds where their posts are. Heck, buy one in your mum or niece’s name for Christmas: it’s their Internet too. And check whether your own membership has lapsed (It happens – *blush* mine expired earlier this year, and I missed the memo – I’m back in the black now). Just click here.

Think what ORG can do in the next two years. Think what we can do with 2000 members. Think what we can do with 20,000.

Most of all, think what will happen if we don’t do something.

But giving money is not the only thing you can do. We need to spread the ORG word, so if you have a blog, please write even just a small post about ORG today. If you’re on Twitter, Jaiku, Seesmic, or any other social messaging service, please write or talk about ORG today. If you’re on IM or Skype, change your status to something suitably supportive. If you’re on Facebook, change your status and join our Facebook group. If you’re on Upcoming, there’s a group there too.

There’s so much you can do to spread the world – please be generous with your time and words.

Finally, there are so many people without whom ORG simply wouldn’t be the success it is: our current supporters and our cadre of committed volunteers. I can’t name them all, but they all deserve thanks and a big round of applause.

Support ORG. Help us keep your bits safe.

(Cross-posted from Chocolate and Vodka.)

10.25.07
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Creative Business in the Digital Era

I’m really excited to be able to announce a new project that I’m working on with the Open Rights Group, in partnership with 01Zero-One and funded by the London Development Agency. Creative Business in the Digital Era is a research project examining the different ways in which artists and businesses are innovating around open intellectual property.

Increasingly, we are seeing publishers releasing books simultaneously under Creative Commons license and in print. Authors such as Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig, who blazed this particular trail, are now being followed by many other people willing to experiment.

But it’s not just authors and publishers who are innovating around open IP. Musicians are also seeing the value of getting their music in front of their fans immediately upon release. Record labels such as Magnatune been letting fans download music for free for a long time, but now it’s spreading to the mainstream: Radiohead are giving away their album In Rainbows, and letting the fans decide how much to pay, if anything.

And software companies are also realising just how powerful it is for them to release data via an API, Google Maps being an excellent example of how giving away data enables third-party applications to be developed, with commercial operations licensing the data and non-commercial mash-ups using it for free.

I must admit I’m very excited by this project. So often we talk about how Creative Commons licensing can help businesses and artists alike to flourish, but it’s sometimes difficult to come up with good solid examples. This project is focused on finding and documenting examples of real world innovation, and will culminate in a day-long course and two evening courses to be held in March 2008. In the finest collaborative tradition, we’re doing all the work out in the open so anyone can join up on the wiki and contribute. We really need the help too: the timescale for getting this done is alarmingly short as we need to have all of the material written by February 2008. If you want to help please just jump in!

If you want to keep abreast of what we are doing then there we have a blog and a Twitter stream. And if you see any articles that you think might be relevant, please tag them with ‘org-cbde’ in Del.icio.us.

10.25.07
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Turning off email won’t help

Earlier in the week, the BBC ran a package on its Breakfast programme about how Intel has become “the latest in an increasingly long line of companies to launch a so-called ‘no e-mail day’.”

On Fridays, 150 of its engineers revert to more old-fashioned means of communication.

In actual fact e-mail isn’t strictly forbidden but engineers are encouraged to talk to each other face to face or pick up the phone rather than rely on e-mail.

In Intel’s case the push to look again at the culture of e-mail followed a comment from chief executive Paul Otellini criticising engineers “who sit two cubicles apart sending an e-mail rather than get up and talk”.

As the BBC says, this isn’t new – other companies have been doing this for some time. But I don’t think that Intel’s initiative is going to have that much of an impact, and I don’t think that ‘no email days’ are going to help.

For starters, Intel’s initiative is only aimed at 150 engineers so it’s no more than a tiny pilot affecting only 0.16% of its total staff of over 94,000. Engineers are not a representative sample, either, even for an organisation as tech-oriented as Intel. And in my experience, initiatives that start in engineering or IT do not naturally spread through the rest of the company. Programmers speak a different language to, say, sales or HR, and there aren’t natural migration pathways for viral behaviours to spread from one set of employees to the other.

That’s assuming, of course, that turning off email for a day is the sort of behaviour that goes viral. I’m pretty sure it’s not – it’s actually harder to not look at email than it is to check it compulsively all day. Email overuse works on the same principle as slot machines: repetitive behaviour that results in intermittent rewards is creates the perfect conditions for dependence. As Mindhacks says:

[I]f you want to train an animal to do something, consistently rewarding that behaviour isn’t the best way. The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what’s called a ‘variable interval reinforcement schedule’, work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed.

[…] Checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. Sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. And because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.

Email overuse (I’m trying to steer clear of the word “addiction” because it’s just too loaded) is not a simple behaviour, and simple solutions such as telling people to turn it off for a day will not work in the long term. Attempting to change people’s behaviour – getting them to check email less often, or turning email off for a day – is likely to be futile, even if you understand the psychology of it, because behavioural change very difficult to achieve. Frequently, those who use email in a sub-optimal manner are entirely unaware that they have a problem and see no reason why they should put any effort into changing.

Another reason why days off won’t work is because the main problem with email, apart from the obsessive checking, is overload. Turning it off for a day doesn’t significantly change the amount of email that you actually receive, it just means that it piles up in your inbox whilst you’re off doing other things. If your whole team turns email off for a day, then some communications that may have happened by email will instead be carried out by phone or in person, whilst others issues will remain mentally queued for sending when email is allowed again. Communications from people who aren’t turning email off will continue to come in and, not only will they be waiting for you when you finally do turn email back on, you’ll know that they are there, lurking. This is why it’s hard to turn email off: it’s too trivial to turn it back on again just in case something fun/important has arrived.

A more effective way to tackle business email is to look for specific tasks that are being done on a regular basis and move them to another, more suitable tool. Collaborating on documents, for example, is a really bad use of email. Creating a spreadsheet, Word document or Powerpoint slide deck and then emailing it round to people for comment is a very clumsy process. Not only do you have to collate and hand-merge the comments from the various people involved, you are also duplicating the files in multiple inboxes and (possibly) hard drives across the network, clogging up the infrastructure with unnecessary data. And, of course, one go round is never enough – these emails can fly back and forth and back again for days or even weeks.

Instead, using a wiki or something like Google Documents to collaborate on a document is a simpler and much more efficient way to work. Everyone can see everyone else’s changes, so there’s no duplication of effort; discussions don’t get split across inboxes; sign-off is easily co-ordinated; and you can see who has edited and (depending on software) who has viewed the pages so can nag anyone who needs to be involved but who isn’t. Collaboration done in collaborative tools is significantly easier than doing it over email. And “collaboration” doesn’t have to mean something big – it can be as trivial as asking someone to proof read an email.

Equally, moving regular newsletters that are being sent out by email – and I don’t believe there can be a single big organisation that doesn’t regularly send out newsletters, updates, and other gubbins to everyone by email – onto a blog and letting people receive them via RSS reduces the occupational spam load by allowing people to subscribe to to just those feed that are interesting or pertinent.

The problem is, of course, that it’s easy to proclaim a No Email Day and look like you’re doing something big and important. It’s harder to actually look at what your employees are doing on a day to day basis and figure out how you can help them permanently reduce their email output whilst simultaneously allowing them to do their work more efficiently. That’s not a simple nor quick solution, because the use case differs from group to group, or even person to person, but it’s one that works.

Of course, most companies have no idea how their employees are really using email, and most employees aren’t concerned about how to improve the way they use it. One client of mine did some work to find out how people used their computers, and the results would make your toes curl. People using email as a ‘to do’ list manager, sending themselves emails with the to do item in the subject line; people with 50,000 unread emails in their inboxes; people using their email drafts folder as a file repository by attaching files to emails and saving them as drafts… the list went on.

If Intel really wants to reduce email load, it’s going to have to do a lot more than just ask 150 engineers to turn it off on Fridays. I wonder if it has the smarts – or the guts – to go for a real email reduction strategy.

10.15.07
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It’s not just newspapers

Last week, Kevin wrote about Alan Mutter’s Brain Drain post on how the journalists who most get this new digital era are the people least likely to be able to effect change within their organisations, and how many of them are looking to get out of the media because they can’t see a future for themselves there. Many voices from the journalist blogging community chimed in, and Kevin does a good job of linking to some of the most prominent posts. But I have something really very, very important to say to everyone who reads Strange Attractor who isn’t in the newspaper business.

It’s not just newspapers losing their brightest talent.

I have a lot of conversations with a lot of different people from a lot of different places, and recently a theme has started to emerge. The people who most clearly understand the way that the internet and Web 2.0 is transforming business are leaving jobs that frustrate them with companies that don’t get it, and are either finding other jobs with companies that do get it or are cutting loose completely and going freelance. And I’m not alone in this observation – Dennis Howlett blogs about a conversation he had with a Barclaycard developer who was profoundly unhappy with his job because there was no opportunity to innovate:

I was struck by the profound sense of frustration experienced by this person. Geeks invent stuff. They solve problems. They love puzzles. Stifling the ability to engage in those activities is anathema. It’s like sucking out the oxygen they need with which to thrive. Any time organizations do that to anyone, productivity plummets.

It’s not just geeks, either. On more than one occasion I have been brought in to talk to a company by someone who sits in the room with me and nods vigourously (but often silently) as I speak. When they do talk, I find myself nodding vigourously as well and it becomes clear that they are on the right track, that they understand social software and the changes currently being wrought. One day, I asked one of my contacts, “Why did you bring me in when you so obviously know what you’re talking about?” The response came, “Because they won’t listen to me – maybe they will listen to you.”

These people aren’t journalists or developers; this isn’t about a particular industry or job title. These are people who have a passion for the internet, who see how useful social tools can be, who just want to make small changes that might have a big impact, but they can’t, because management won’t let them. Whether that’s via direct commandments or through an anti-change, anti-innovation, anti-technology culture that’s been fostered by them doesn’t matter – the fact is that smart, innovative people aren’t being allowed to experiment, and they’re getting so frustrated by it that they are leaving to go elsewhere.

It’s not just newspapers that need to wake up to the fact that their middle managers and CXOs just might not have the right skillset and mindset to help them survive the digital era. As far as I can tell, that problem is rife in all industries. And any business that refuses to take notice of its own talent, (or even the knowledge of digital experts – who, it has to be said, may turn out not be white, male and middle-aged, and may even come from outside your sector), is going to find itself very much at the bottom of the heap as their brightest people go off to help more open and aware companies.

10.05.07
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FOWA07b: Me – Preparing for Enterprise Adoption

I’m not really very good about blogging my own talks, and people seem rarely to take notes of what I say at conferences, so I’m going to attempt to reverse the trend, starting with my FOWA slides.

I would strongly suggest that you go and read Steph Booth’s excellent notes of my talk alongside the slides – it’ll give you a bit more of an insight into what I said. I believe there will be, at the least, audio being produced from the talks, so if I ever get hold of that I’ll do a slidecast of the whole thing.

I decided a while back that it might be fun to have a 100% LOLcat slide deck, and it seemed that FOWA would be the ideal place to do it. I experimented with a few LOLcats in a presentation I did a couple of weeks ago (which I need also need to put up online soon) to some HR execs, and they seemed to go down ok. So I spent Monday and Tuesday looking at hundreds, possibly a couple of thousand, of cat pictures on Flickr. Sounds like a chore, but there are so many cute ones that I actually found it very soothing and enjoyable. I then used Big Huge Labs’ LOLcat creator to actually make the slides.

(I would really like to see a better LOLcat creator that gives you the ability to scale the photo, adjust the position of the photo in relationship to the text, and give you a bit more control over text size. Other creators I looked at also insisted that you upload the photo first, whereas Big Huge Labs’ gives you more ways to access the photo, including pulling in from an URL. Some of the LOLcats I ended up with weren’t quite as spot on as I would have liked, but I didn’t have time to sit and use Photoshop or something to do a better job. Hm, maybe a job for Moo… then they could let you do your own LOLcat fridge magnets too. I would so totally buy those.)
Giving the talk was slightly strange, because Carsonified, who organise FOWA, had completely the wrong talk title in all their literature, and I hadn’t realised that until the end of last week. I’d spent the last couple of months thinking through stuff about the adoption of social software in business, and to suddenly discover that everyone was expecting a talk on “the future of blogging” was a little worrying. Indeed, I think that a few people at least were disappointed that I didn’t talk about the future of blogging: From the stage, I couldn’t see the whole room, just the front half, and what seemed like a lot of people got up and left in the middle of my talk. That’s disconcerting, to say the least.

That said, I got a pretty good reaction from the people I spoke to afterwards, so that’s encouraging. I had a particularly good chat with Dennis Howlett about how things really haven’t changed much since the mid-90s, when “the ‘new’ was treated with suspicion and where finding champions was a devil’s own job”. In a way, that’s quite depressing, because it means that I am simply re-inventing the wheel. Still, I hope that the people who stayed did get something useful out of my talk, even if it was only axle grease.

10.04.07
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FOWA07b: Leisa Reichelt

Ambient intimacy
Term to describe an experience that she was having online.

Ambient intimacy, dates to Feb or March this year, associated with a photo on Flickr of Andy Budd’s bedroom, when you compare this to other stuff online, that’s not so intimate. We can learn so much about people, much more quickly than we ever could before. So now we’ve got Facebook status, Twitter, Last.fm, Flickr, Dopplr – gives us a huge amount of info about people.

What’s more amazing is that we’re expending almost no energy at all on getting to grips iwth this info, it’s just there to take it all in if we want. These are the kind of things that represent ambient intimacy that are really lightweight powerful ways to communicate: twitter, flickr, facebooks, myspace, lastfm, dopplr, upcoming, skyype status, IM presence, RSS readers, blog posts, comments, Jaiku…

Ambient – atmospheric, part of your environment, non-directed, no specific purpose, distributed. Not one-to-one, not a conversation but also not broadcast. Messages that are going into a sort of defined area and creating this effect. Intimacy, results in some interesting search terms. Wasn’t thinking about that sort of intimacy when coined term.

Japanese mobile phone research looking into teen usage. Discovered stuff about news generation, personal archiving, etc. But also using text messages to create techno-social system to stay in touch even when they couldn’t be in any oother way. similarto the experiences we have now with these social technologies.

Found that teens were using msging to maintain open social channels. Not important messages, just about awareness of location and activity. This research is 10 years or older. But could be talking about Twitter – using Twitter very similar way to way Japanese teens were using texts 10 years ago.

People have been trying to understand this for quite a period of time. Robin Dunbar has worked on this for a white, but focuses on primate behaviour. Dunbar’s number. Also a great book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language”.

Dunbar interesting re: Twitter because we talk about the human imperative to communicate and create relationships. He says that the reason that our brains are the size they are is to track all our relationships with other humans, so we can outmanouvre them to get food, sex, climb the pecking order.

Grooming, picking fleas, is about forming these relationships. But you can only pick fleas on one primate at the time. Language allows you to “pick fleas” on more than one person at a time. Allows us to keep track of lots of poeple and who knows what and who and how they fit together and how you fit in with them. Explains a lot about why she has the imperative to connect the way she does. But our troupes have expanded, from primates to modern world.

Twitter or Jaiku, use to pick each others’ fleas en masse. Gives phatic expressiveness to a virtual space. Phat expression is speech where the function is to share feelings and be social, not about ideas or information. Hey, how are you? Internet has lots of places for our smart idea, but what it hasn’t had until recently, is a place for “hey, how are you?”. Flickr, Twitter, really amazing in terms of ways that they can transcend time and space to give us micro-insight into people’s lives on a day to day basis.

David Weinberger “continual partial friendship”.

Johnnie Moor” about exposing more sufface area for others to connect with.

About overcoming geographical dislocation that’s part of our lives. But it’s a love/hate thing. Notcied that hte more specifically that an app supposts just ambient intimacy, the more polarised people are. People really do hate or love it.

Kathy Sierra worries that such things are false interaction, that our brain needs a full interaction experience, including body language, tone of voice, etc. but Twitter only does a bit of that, and that causes stress to your brain.

If we thought that ambient intimacy was the only intimacy we would ever need, then there may be a problem. But it’s really part of a balanced diet.

Also an issue of information overload. According to New Scienties, there was an article that said ‘infomania dents IQ more than marijuana’, IQ was reduced by 10 points. Again, Dave Weinberger, says, it helps that hte volume of stuff is to great that there’s 0 expectation that you can keep up.

But all of these things, this possible false connectiveness, and information overload, leads us to think what do we get out of it? Why do we bother?

Small Tom Coates moment, who cribbed it from Peter Kollack:

Why people take part:

1. anticipated reciprocity
2. reputation
3. sense of efficacy
3. identification with a group

List represents great insentives: getting value back from your network, increasing your reputations which helps you get more opportunities, and having a crowd to run with. Crowd you run with online can be more and more valuable as you add to it.

Robert Wright – two types of game, win/lose game, zero sum game where everyone wins. (Also a third game, Test Cricket.)

As you build up the network, the network grows smarter, so you can draw on that network back when there’s osmething tha tyou need. When I need ideas or contacts or experience, and the first port of call is Twitter or Facebook, for both personal and professional stuff. Less about egotistically saying what I had for brekkie, but building a high-value network. Feeding into the network, in ways that can be valuable – it’s not wasting time.

Designers need to take responsibility for designing apps that take into account the fact that we human beings are highly distractable, and to try and reduce congnitive load involved in keeping track of our social networks, and maintaining aareness.

Ambience kicks in again – your app has to be undemanding, but at the same time it does need to be intrusive enough that they are able to pay attention to it, it can’t just ben an app that is installed and forgotten about. Needs to be more like the old-fashioned village green, so you walk through the village green on way to do something else, but on the way will bum pinto people. So needs to support hte people that you see, that your’e waaving to, but without getitng in the way of what you need to get done.

Key principles need to keep in mind. top six: not rocket science:

1. Keep it lightweight – it’ not supposed to be the centre of attention, small footbrint, keep in mind that copious functionality isn’t necessarily a good things, keep it simple.
2. stay out of the way – invisibility, your app is about facilitating a social network, it’s not aobut you or your company or your app, so more you reduce resistance this message being delivered and recieved, the better your app is. So if you send an email to say there’s a message on yoru social network, so you have to log in to see it, then that’s not a good way of staying out of the way. Desktop app that shows me your stuff, that’s better.
3. open your API – not about controlling the way your communication happens. Twitter and Flickr do this, once they opened their API, the innovation that developed blossomed.
APIs support openness between platforms, your app is not an islenad, you are not going to hold people in your space. Need to recognise that people use different apps in a suite, so how can you integrate with that group rather than siilo ourselves off.
4. portable social networks – Think that people use different apps all the time, and i fyou usre more than two or three you know there is no joy in maintaining lots of lists of friends. This isn’t about locking peole in, you are part of a greater environment, so look for ways to make use of other lists, or make your list more portable.
5. use the periphery – small movements, just be there hovering in the background, grab attention only when you need to.
6. allow for time-shifting – whilst its about being in the moment, we do need to be able to go back and catch up on stuff.

Twitterific, designed to use Twitter’s API, so when someone sends a Twitter, it delivers through a little window that opens. Colour is very background, it’s transparent, it’s not demanding and distracting, and f you you don’t interact with it, it just fades away as if it was never there at all.

Refinement of IM, or Growl messaging, and it’s better because of timing – IM messages often flick on and off too quickly. Twitterific have thought more carefully about how long it needs to be there to be useful.

Pretty much all of these are in action, except portable social networks, is being done by Twitter and Twitterific.

Ambient intimacy is more than a passing phenomenon. Can also