On Competition and Procedural Obstacles

Of course, these questions are only valid to a potential market leader like Microsoft - a company with the manpower, resources and intention to actually develop its ideas.

On Innovation and Employment

Next Steps: WIPO Symposium

PatentSim was presented as a game in which the goal is to make as much money as possible. In each environment, subjects combined objects in a "Creation Box" to simulate an invention. Whenever a subject created an invention and clicked on the "Make" button, money would appear in their virtual bank. In the pure patent and mixed patent environments, subjects could also click on a "Patent" button to increase their profit. Each patent was priced at $20 and each use of a lawyer also cost $20. At the end of the study, students had produced significantly more inventions and profit in the commons environment when they were not being penalized for patent infringement or were busy enforcing their patents.

The study suggests that innovation not only thrives in a competitive environment, but that more profit can be generated by inventors in a commons system. Because PatentSim is just a simulation, readers need to take findings with a grain of salt. While the rate of inventions would likely increase without patents, it's tough to tell if inventors would really see unlimited profit potential in an environment free of patents. After all, how many different zipper pulls does the market demand?

Nevertheless, in some cases, the demand for a product or process is all too evident. Imagine the competitive market for hearing aids and prosthetics, or the success rate of farmers who are free to use the best possible processes. And honestly, does HIV really care if it's being treated by Glaxo, Pfizer or a tested generic knockoff?

This study is important in that it might spur policy makers to question how we look at innovation. Are inventions just disparate exclusively-owned products, or should we be sharing them out of necessity to solve our bigger-picture problems?

We've covered his latest move in greater depth over at Jobwire, our site tracking hires in tech, new media and related industries. Join us there for more details on Lessig's latest career change.

This new law creates a high-level office in the White House (the 'Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator'), raises the limits on possible damages in copyright cases substantially, and increases the number of things that can be confiscated.

Better Than it Could Have Been

The only positive aspect of this bill as it was signed by President Bush this week is that it does not include the per-song piracy penalty of the original bill which was introduced earlier this year. Under this provision, an accused pirate could have been charged separately for each copyright infringement, including once for every song featured in a pirated movie, for example.

Remix Culture

Copyright lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig argues that these kind of draconian laws and the obsession with prosecuting copyright violations stifles our culture and that the law should be relaxed in order to create for a thriving 'remix culture.' The ProIP act, however, takes the law into the opposite direction.

The new legislation, which was cosponsored by numerous Democratic and Republican senators, including Hilary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Gordon Smith, and Lindsey Graham, was unanimously adopted by the U.S. Senate and passed the House with a wide margin.

Just before noon on Friday, Sorcini submitted the image on the left to Digg. An obtuse critique of the US Federal Government's economic stimulus plan, the image was apparently on the minds of more people than just MrBabyMan. Just after noon the image on the right was posted by Kimberly Vogt, a software engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Security, girlfriend of Digg QA Analyst Jeremy McCarthy a Digg employee other than McCarthy and a rare non-employee to have reciprocal friendships with many of the top staff at Digg.

Innocent enough, right? It was submitted in the humor category and Vogt now says the image was submitted "all in good fun."

Either way, it provided an opportunity for angry Digg users to lash out at MrBabyMan. At 7:30 Sorcini posted a message to Twitter reading: "If this is how the majority of the Digg community feels, I'll quit. I won't be a part of a group that doesn't want me" - with a link to the critical, remixed cartoon.

By eight o'clock that evening the Vogt submission hit the front page of Digg - two hours before MrBabyMan's original submission went popular. At midnight a link to Sorcini's Twitter message hit the front page with the title "MrBabyMan Might Quit Digg?" By the time the bars closed Friday night more than 2000 people had voted for Vogt's cartoon and there were 750 comments left between the two negative posts. Vogt's was the most popular of all submissions made to the site on Friday. A heated debate raged in comments between Digg users of every degree of psychological maturity and perspective on the issue that you can imagine: should MrBabyMan go or should he stay?

The Charges Against the BabyMan

There are a number of criticisms that Digg users levy against Andrew Sorcini. The primary one, which Vogt's cartoon remix refers to, is that MrBabyMan submits duplicate stories that other Diggers have submitted, knowing that his superior prowess will eliminate any chance that the original submission will hit the front page.

The next criticism is that MrBabyMan uses an unfairly large network of friends and spam-like "shouts" to garner favors and give his submissions an artificial momentum that they don't warrant on merit alone.

Finally, it's frequently whispered that MrBabyMan and other top Digg users are being paid for submitting stories. There are certainly people willing to pay them.

MrBabyMan and Friends Respond

Criticism reaching this peak really upset Sorcini. He and a group of friends who often engage in hours-long group chats on Skype decided to write up a summary of the situation and see if they could find someone to write about it. A contact brought them me. I spoke with the group of six people for more than 3 hours late Friday night.

MrBabyMan's friends say that top digg users never knowingly repost something someone else already has unless the initial post is poorly submitted and not doing well. MrBabyMan says he never sends shouts to promote his stories and he doesn't get paid for what he does on Digg. The relationship between submission, promotion and money is more complex than simple pay for diggs, though.

I came away from the conversation with a number of conclusions. The dominant one is this. Andrew Sorcini's MrBabyMan persona is sitting at the top of a small network of loyal friends, made up of people like SEO marketers, PR agents turned would-be social media experts and other unsavory folk. That circle is further surrounded by an even larger network of millions of Digg users who try to have fun on the site but also wish they could find success there. Many of them no doubt with they too could find a way to make a living in the snake-oil filled circus that is "new media marketing," as many of the top Digg users have done.

In the middle of all this mess, though, MrBabyMan is one of the most warm hearted, genuine and in many cases naive people that you will meet anywhere. The Emperor is the only one wearing clothes.

Is He Gaming the System?

MrBabyMan says he has added friends to help promote stories because that's how the rules work, if he didn't need to do that he wouldn't. He believes that most of his critics are new users who haven't had enough experience yet to know how the site works. He says he's totally accessible and can be reached by anyone who wants to talk to him - though he didn't know that the email addresses on his profile were visible only to his friends until it was pointed out to him in our conversation.

"All I ever wanted," he said, "was just for the stories to live or die on their own merits. If everyone was on a level playing field I would love that - because I still have the skills to find the great stories...I'm not complaining about the algorithm, but I don't want to be vilified for working within the parameters of it."

Money and Digg

While Sorcini's editorial genius has put him in a place of total dominance over a site that symbolizes success for a world of marketers facing disruption of traditional media - MrBabyMan is one of the few people in the upper echelon of the Digg community whose income is completely unrelated to his activities there.

While mid-tier Diggers are far more likely to be engaging in pure pay-for-play, other people at various points in the hierarchy are building careers as "new media experts." The experience that lands them the consulting contracts they live on? A demonstrated history of success in promoting stories on sites like Digg. These people aren't being paid to Digg stories - they are being paid to do other things (like advising on social media strategy) because of their success on Digg. There may be nothing wrong with that (this author has a private consulting practice in vaguely related matters as well) but to claim that top Digg users invest as much time and energy into the site as they do entirely "for the love of it" and "to share good stories with people" - with no economic incentive, short or long term, is a cynical joke.

MrBabyMan may be one of very few people in the upper echelon for whom that is the case. He says he does no outside consulting and gets no payment for his activities on Digg. He's got a good job working as an illustrator for Disney. You could say the man helps create fairy tales on Digg, as well. The story of the democratically based user generated news site, driven by people in it for the love of the community, may be one fairy tale Sorcini helps propagate.

Surprisingly, the man doesn't have the sense to monetize what he does do online very well at all. He's the host for the excellent social media podcast The Drill Down, where the most successful users on sites like Digg discuss what's in the news and often news about the social media sites themselves. A small audience of rabid, new media savvy listeners get The Drill Down as a podcast or watch it streamed live on UStream video.

That's genuinely not what it's about for MrBabyMan, he's not in it for the money. He just likes Digg, and he probably likes all the power he's got at the site - even if he does have to fend off a hostile cartoon from National Security geeks who happen to be a Digg employee's girlfriend sometimes.

He's human, too, so sometimes he fudges a little. "The only promotion I do," he said, "is Digging the stories my friends submit and keeping the chain of Digging going. That's the same thing everyone does and that's the system Digg has set up." Blind digging of friends' stories because they're your friends' stories, if that's what Sorcini is talking about, is frowned upon as contrary to the supposed essence of the site.

Generally speaking, Andrew Sorcini appears to be honestly dedicated to delivering value to the people of the Digg community. By being an entirely un-paid player in the game - he may be almost the only person in his circle whose exclusive motivation is benevolent. There's nothing wrong with making a living as a social media expert, though the term tends to be very loosely defined, but in their revolt against the financially incentivized, conspiratorial gaming of social news - those unhappy Digg users may have picked the least logical target in the guy at the top. There's no shortage of creeps in that scene but by all indications, MrBabyMan isn't one of them.

Is the kind-hearted MrBabyMan just a patsy for a shadowy world of less honest Digg power users? Is part of his job as top dog to be the fall guy when mass user distaste of other peoples' influence peddling and grey-hat tactics needs a scape goat? All of that seems possible. More likely, though, there's no one way to look at this story. The only constant, when I look at these events from different perspectives, is that Andrew Sorcini is a uniquely valuable member of the Digg community - whether they always appreciate him or not.

The new Board is made up of an all-star cast. Copyright and corruption fighter Larry Lessig, tech pioneer Esther Dyson and brilliant social network analyst danah boyd make up the group, along with Brad Fitzpatrick, whose work has been key in the development of LiveJournal itself, OpenID, social graph theory and the Google-led OpenSocial. That's hot.

It has always been one of the leaders in innovation, but it's not been the cash-cow that other leading social networks have been. It's also faced more than its share of controversy, blatant breast-feeders had their avatars struck down (not without a fight) in May 2006 and a scorched-earth campaign against sex themed groups knocked some "legitimate literary discussion" off-site in May of 2007. You know what that means: danah boyd is going to be a key asset for LiveJournal, especially in the month of May.

Why is this an exciting announcement? Because a large, important social network just got some of the best minds on the web to engage with it in this formative time of social networking acceleration and change. That means LiveJournal is going to do some very cool things, if they take the Advisory Board as seriously as they should.

Readers unfamiliar with the work of these luminaries should check out their blogs and Wikipedia pages.

• danah boyd's blog, Wikipedia page and the most popular URLs tagged danahboyd on Del.icio.us


• Larry Lessig's blog, Wikipedia entry and Techmeme discussion this week on his decision not to run for US Congress. (Too busy with LiveJournal, just couldn't tell anyone yet.)


• Esther Dyson's blog, Wikipedia page and tweets about Dyson
]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/livejournal_filled_with_awesom.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/livejournal_filled_with_awesom.php Social Networks Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:58:40 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick We've written a lot about the Internet's role in American politics over the past six months as the US heads toward presidential elections next fall. How the web is playing a key role in this election cycle is a fascinating story, but the Internet is having a profound effect on politics in other parts of the world. We've focused on the US mainly because elections there are the most well publicized worldwide, and because the majority of RWW's lead writers hail from America. In Malaysia, though, web users have been able to draft three popular bloggers to stand for seats in the country's parliament.
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]]> The bloggers, Jeff Ooi, Tony Pua, and Badrul Hisham Shahari are all running on tickets in opposition to the ruling party that his been in power for about fifty years. According to Reuters, the three are hoping that popularity on the Internet will translate into support at the polls.

As we've seen in the US, going from Internet popularity to votes cast is a tall order to fill, and in Malaysia especially, the bloggers-turned-candidates will face a tough uphill climb to get elected. Only about on fifth of Malays have access to the Internet, yet about 42% of the country's 26 million people are registered to vote. Because getting press attention outside of the Malaysian blogosphere is nearly impossible for these candidates, making an impression on voters will be difficult.

Though the bloggers have found a devoted readership outside of the largely pro-government mainstream press, there isn't much faith in their ability to make much of an impact on March 8th when polls open. "Beyond the major cities like Kuala Lumpur and Penang, there's not much the bloggers can really hope to accomplish," Mohamad Norza Zakaria, a leader in Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's UMNO party, told Reuters.

In the US last week, another blogger was nearly drafted into the political arena. Popular blogger, author, columnist, and law professor Lawrence Lessig was said to be contemplating a run for the US Congress in California's 12th district after a Facebook group urging the run attracted over 4,000 members. Lessig announced yesterday that he would not run.

But bloggers have become the thought leaders for a new generation. Blogs are increasingly becoming hubs for political and social discourse, so it makes sense that people see bloggers whose ideas they respect and admire as viable political candidates. We've had an actor become president in the US, why not a blogger?

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/malaysian_bloggers_become_politicians.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/malaysian_bloggers_become_politicians.php Trends Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:19:23 -0800 Josh Catone