Walter Frick

Minus the Wonk

2010-03-03T10:05:00.002-05:00

I'm a huge fan of both FactCheck.org and Politifact. Both do great, important work. So I'm pleased to see that FactCheck.org featured an email from me in this week's Mailbag!

Unfortunately, I'm guessing due to space or time constraints, they chose not to publish the full email which included a bit more information and analysis on what I felt was a missing component of their coverage of the healthcare summit.

I've copied my full email below for anyone interested:

Factcheck,

You did a great job covering covering the healthcare summit and I was particularly pleased to see your section "Premium Costs, Up or Down" laying out the facts on the exchange between Obama and Alexander. I dug into this subject myself, debating with a friend, and found your analysis to be quite accurate.

There was one thing, though, that was missing that I wish you'd taken up. Obama basically suggested that the reason average premiums go up in the individual market is because people are paying more for more comprehensive insurance. As you note, this is partially because of the mandate and partially just because if people can suddenly afford better plans, some will opt for them.

You also write:

And as we’ve seen, the bill generally would require more generous coverage than is currently provided, at higher cost. Overall, premiums in the individual market would go up, not down. Some in the nongroup market might choose to keep their current policy, with no changes. The legislation would permit that for a few years.

But I would have loved to have seen you take up what happens to the price tag of a policy in the individual market, comprehensive enough to meet the mandate, if the legislation passes.

In other words, Obama pointed out that people are paying more because, for various reasons, they're getting more. Hence the story of "average premiums" rising. But what happens to the price tag on a comprehensive individual policy if the bill is enacted? If I'm reading this paper (pdf) by Jonathan Gruber (based on CBO #s and analyzing the Senate bill) correctly, that price tag goes down significantly - by about 20%.

But I could be misinterpreting something. I would love to see you amend your post to include just a couple sentences on this count.

Best,

Walter Frick

As I noted, I could be missing something. However, Politifact covered this as well, and addressed my concern. Here they are relying on CBO numbers, as is Gruber in the paper I linked to above:

• Average premiums would be 7 percent to 10 percent lower because of a net reduction in costs to insurers, mostly from the changes in the rules governing the individual market.

• Average premiums would be 7 percent to 10 percent lower because of a shift in the types of people obtaining coverage. Most of that change is tied to an influx of healthier people with below-average spending for health care, who would purchase coverage because of subsidies and a new tax penalty for failing to purchase insurance.

As Politifact notes, this was the basis of Obama's claim that individual premiums would decrease 14 to 20%.

UPDATE: An AP fact check examines the issue.

Class is over

2009-05-06T00:27:00.002-04:00

My Social Networking & Business class is over now, so it's unclear whether or not I'll be updating this blog with any frequency.

I'm planning to launch a new blog in the near future, focused on the internet and the public sphere. In the meantime, while that is in the works, I may post intermittently here. Or you can follow me on Twitter @wfrick, though I am not a particularly prolific Twitterer.

Re: my previous post - Second Life was absolutely fascinating/insane. It was like World of Warcraft + The Sims + a chat room. I don't know that I really found it all that enjoyable, but I am going to try to make time to log in again soon and explore a little more to try to make sense out of the whole thing.

Blogging for this class has been a lot of fun and I appreciate all those who have come by the site and especially those who have left comments.

The "Avatar Age"

2009-04-27T01:24:00.003-04:00

This Wednesday I'll be trying Second Life for the first time during the final session of class. While my professor and classmates will all be in on campus trying it out, I will be in Baltimore at a conference and so I'll be joining them "in world."

I can't say that I really know what to expect. I don't know where to place virtual worlds like Second Life within the broader Web 2.0 phenomenon. What really distinguishes a person's or a company's presence in Second Life from their presence in the blogosphere or on social networks? An avatar? I'm guessing it's much more than that and I hope to have a better sense of what it's all about after Wednesday's class.

Jackie has a post about how "in world" meetups differ from in person meetups but I guess I'm even more interested in how virtual worlds differ from other types of social networking platforms.

What can you do in Second Life that you can't do elsewhere on the web? I know you can buy things, talk to people, and even attend classes "in world." But you can do all that online with a variety of other tools as well. So other than the avatar, what is it that makes virtual worlds useful?

Anyway, I'm definitely still in the "I don't get it" phase with virtual worlds. But unlike Zaid, I won't knock it til I've tried it!

With 'experts' like this, who needs amateurs?

2009-04-19T21:26:00.007-04:00

Andrew Keen is one of the better known pop-critics of Web 2.0 and he is worried that the internet is creating a culture that no longer values expertise.

Keen is completely dismissive of claims by so-called "digital utopians" who he believes see in Web 2.0 the fulfillment of their Marxist, libertarian, relativist, post-modern, or counter-enlightenment philosophies. (If web 2.0 could create agreement between all of those camps that in itself would be impressive.)

Says Keen:

These enabling technologies have simply reopened America’s old wounds about the role and meaning of intellectual authority, economic privilege, social class, cultural authority, and political power. The debate about the value of social media is really a conversation about the legitimacy of our free-market meritocracy.

and:

I believe in a meritocracy in which our individual worth is valued by our professional accomplishments.

But regardless of whether or not you agree with him about meritocracy, Keen's arguments are simply not convincing on his own terms. Even if you accept his preference for traditional expertise, his analysis of the web gets it wrong on both the theoretical and the practical level.

First, the theoretical:

I argue that Web 2.0’s gatekeeper-free media—without professional fact checkers, grammarians, and publishers—is by definition less accurate, reliable, and honest than professionally edited newspapers, encyclopedias, or books.

There are a couple of things worth noting about that statement. First, the claim that we now live in a gatekeeper-free media environment is controversial. Sure, everyone can publish their views, but not everyone's views are heard equally. Google is a new kind of gatekeeper, but Keen doesn't bother to consider what this means for his argument.

Second, I take issue with the claim that today's media environment should be viewed as, by definition, less accurate, reliable, and honest than our pre-2.0 media.

Personal blogs, Twitter, and Wikipedia exist in a media environment alongside traditional sources of "expert" information like The New York Times. Keen refers multiple times to Harvard professors whom he trusts more than anonymous teenagers. But the web has empowered the Harvard professor every bit as much as it has everyone else. (He admits as much towards the end of the article.)

The question, then, is whether an information environment containing both traditional experts and amateurs is intrinsically worse than an information environment that contains only the former.

I argue that it is not.

In practice, Keen is concerned that all the amateurism of web 2.0 is keeping us from finding quality expert content:

We really are all journalists and writers and filmmakers now—which means, in practice, that genuinely valuable journalism and writing get lost in all the self-authored junk on the internet.

But this statement isn't borne out by the literature on the structure and organization of the web. If anything, it's the self-authored "junk" that gets lost in the process of organizing content through search and through link patterns, which follow a winner-take-all power-law distribution. (Expert analysis on this topic here here and here.)

In fact, it's never been easier to find expert content. Universities are making their courses available for free online and professors from all over the world are blogging.

Thanks to the web, we are living in the age of Public Intellectual 2.0.

But Keen seems content to ignore the fact that amateur expression lives alongside of expert content, and that the web makes it easier, not harder, to find experts.

He'd prefer to exist in his own narrative in which he stands for the preservation of quality, culture, and intellectualism.

And that's fine. Thanks to Web 2.0 he can publish all he wants.

But given how easy it is to find more serious (and, yes, more expert) analysis of the way the web really works, I won't be adding Andrew Keen to my RSS reader any time soon.

Elite Social Networking

2009-04-12T23:56:00.003-04:00

In the fall of 2006, during my senior year of college, I took a career class that aimed to help students recognize their interests and successfully navigate the job search process. During the course my teacher invited us to join a new, invite-only social networking site called Doostang.

At the time, the invite to Doostang seemed like a great opportunity. Time Magazine said it was "Facebook for the Morgan Stanley crowd." Though I had no interest in Morgan Stanley or the world of finance, the exclusivity of the site still somehow seemed to be a feature rather than a bug.

But the site proved difficult to use. Many of the job listings could not be accessed unless you had successfully brought in 10 new users to Doostang. This was only a couple of years ago, but most of the people I knew thought of social networking as a quick way to lose a job, not get one.

Unable to attract the requisite number of new users, I soon stopped signing into Doostang, and I had completely forgotten about it until the class reading on LinkedIn.

It appears that Doostang still exists, and perhaps it fills a niche. But I think I'd of been better served if my teacher had just sent me to LinkedIn and insisted I join.

Just say NO to social media

2009-04-09T13:08:00.002-04:00

This article in BtoB, a marketing magazine, outlines a few situations in which companies should avoid using social media:

You're in a high-ticket business. If you can count your customers on your fingers and toes, and if those customers spend tens of millions of dollars with you each year, you're probably better off using the phone, the golf course and the dinner table to deliver your message. This also goes for financial services firms with wealthy customers who prefer to keep their activities—and that of their financial advisers— private.

You fight with your employees. I recently consulted for a client in the heavy equipment industry. More than 80% of its work force is unionized, and management-labor strife is a constant. This is not an environment for encouraging direct interactions between employees and customers. While opening up the lines of communication may work in industries with a motivated and highly technical work force, it's a potential disaster if employees use that channel to trash management.

Management skepticism. In a recent study of 50 early adopters of Web 2.0 technology, McKinsey & Co. concluded that the key characteristic of successful organizations was high-level support. Social media strategies demand transparency, and employees accustomed to years of careful message filtering are understandably suspicious of being asked to speak openly. If management doesn't encourage and reward participation, the initiative will fail.

Strategic vacuum. One of the most common mistakes marketers make is to launch a social media campaign without having any idea what they're trying to accomplish. Very often this approach is driven by fascination with a tool, but tools are no good unless you know what to do with them. If you don't have an objective, then you don't know what to measure, which means you have no way to determine success. Your social media project will be cut in the next round of belt-tightening. And an objective shouldn't be to launch a product or distribute a press release. If you do it right, conversations should continue for years.

Privacy and regulatory concerns. While a few health care companies have started blogs and social networks, most are proceeding with justifiable caution. If you're in an industry where people can go to jail for what they say in public, you should be careful. Much as I hate to say it, you should probably get the lawyers closely involved.

Items 1, 2, and 5 seem to me to be good reasons not to use social media. But items 3 and 4, Management Skepticism and Strategic Vacuums, are just reasons not to jump into social media right now. They're not necessarily proof that social media won't be valuable.

So convince management, come up with a coherent goals-oriented strategy, and get to it!

[Via ReadWriteWeb.]

Hey Google, get off my lawn!

2009-04-07T22:33:00.005-04:00

There are plenty of reasons to worry about the hegemony of Google. This is not one of them:

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

Sigh.

According to the author, Google is "a parasite that creates nothing" and "has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content."

We desperately need copyright reform that takes seriously the information ecosystem of the 21st century. That said, the creation of content has undergone a fundamental and structural change. And while violation of copyright must be taken seriously, it's also clear that industries with skin in the game are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid admitting that they simply don't create the value that they used to.

Sadly, with newspapers in decline, much of the media old guard seems sympathetic to just this sort of desperate clamoring.

[Via Kevin Drum]

Two Parodies of Twitter

2009-04-07T16:14:00.002-04:00

One by CurrentTV

One by Slate

Buying Conversation

2009-04-05T22:38:00.007-04:00

This post is a sponsored post on behalf of Kmart via Izea. The opinions are mine.

The text above stirred up a lot of controversy when it appeared before a post about Kmart by social media blogger Chris Brogan.

It's an example of "sponsored conversation," when a company pays a blogger to post about its products. To many, something about this seems wrong. But in March, Josh Bernoff, author of the best-selling social media book Groundswell and VP of Forrester Research, blogged in support of the idea, so long as it is done carefully. Writes Bernoff:

The challenge, of course, is can bloggers do this and retain any credibility?
We believe they can, if -- and only if -- they obey two rules.

1. They must disclose that they are being paid.
2. They must be able to write whatever they want, positive or negative.

Brogan also emphasizes disclosure in a lengthy post defending himself and his Kmart post.

Not everyone agrees. ReadWriteWeb responded with a post titled Forrester is Wrong About Paying Bloggers, arguing that:

Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with "pay for play" pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.

I, too, am greatly troubled by the thought of bloggers competing to write sponsored posts about products, because of the inevitable pressure they would face to write positive reviews in order to continue to receive sponsorship opportunities.

I also think that Bernoff and Forrester are right that the big question is whether or not a blogger can participate in sponsored conversations while maintaining authenticity. If it turns out that it's not really possible for a blogger to balance the two, then sponsored conversations won't make much sense for either bloggers or marketers.

But what if the practice persists? Should we accept it? Or should we frown upon it and remove sponsored bloggers from our daily reading?

Is Wikipedia Crowdsourcing?

2009-03-30T16:56:00.005-04:00

In my previous post about crowdsourcing I interpreted the definition of the term narrowly, to refer specifically to when a company outsources a task to the crowd. So Wikipedia wouldn't be crowdsourcing because the tasks done by Wikipedians aren't being organized or directed by a formal organization.

I used to use the term much more broadly to refer to various types of online collaborative processes, including projects like Wikipedia. I also noticed that my classmate Nisha referred to Wikipedia as an example of crowdsourcing on her blog.

My guess is that most people use the term in the latter fashion, to describe all sorts of online collaborative projects, regardless of whether or not they are directed by a formal organization.

But I now think I prefer the first, more narrow definition. I like that it refers to a specific type of collaboration and that it excludes Wikipedia, which I think could be better described using another term. (My vote is for 'commons-based peer production' though I know it's a mouthful.)

Obviously there isn't a right or wrong definition. But which is more useful? Is it worth restricting the use of crowdsourcing for the sake of clarity? Does it even matter?

*UPDATE* I should have mentioned from the outset... the issue of how the project is licensed seems relevant to this discussion. Think Creative Commons and the GNU General Public License versus proprietary projects/content controlled by companies or other organizations.

Crowdsourcing turned inside-out

2009-03-29T20:38:00.007-04:00

This is a long post, so let me summarize: crowdsourcing lets companies outsource tasks to the crowd. But there's another new production model that does just the opposite by allowing communities to outsource tasks to corporations (without paying them a dime.) Interested? Read on.

According to Jeff Howe, the author who coined the term, "crowdsourcing" is defined as "when a company takes a job that was once performed by employees and outsources it to the crowd." Threadless, an online t-shirt store that Howe uses as an example, harnesses a community of artists to design its shirts. The community votes on the designs, and artists whose designs receive the most votes win a cash prize. In this model, the company draws on the ideas of the crowd to create products and services on which they can profit.

Another example of crowdsourcing is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for "Human Intelligence Tasks," where companies pay workers across the globe to complete minor tasks for which computers are ill-suited. (More about Mechanical Turk here.)

It's easy to see why this model would appeal to corporations. Crowdsourcing allows them to gather ideas for products and services, and even to complete mundane tasks, all at little or no cost.

Yet while companies are harnessing the crowd to increase profits, the crowd has also demostrated its ability to coordinate on its own, without a corporation to guide its work. Wikipedia is a classic example of this sort of commons-based peer production, in which people come together to create something useful without the structure of a traditional organization.

Author Clay Shirky has written a book on this subject entitled Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In it he demonstrates how the internet increasingly allows large groups to coordinate effectively without help from organizations. (Shirky discusses the basic premise of his book in short videos here and here.)

While Wikipedia may allow users to collaborate without the guidance of a corporation, some open source projects completely invert the logic of crowdsourcing by opening up the collaborative process such that corporations actually work for the community without being paid.

Linux, the open source operating system, receives contributions of code from many talented programmers, all over the world, driven by a diverse range of motivations. Many of those contributors work for companies that depend on Linux, and thus pay their programmers to contribute to the project.

Just as corporations can outsource tasks to communities of users, so too can open-source communities outsource tasks to corporations. Both models are fairly new. My bet is that both will grow in importance in the coming years. But is one more important, or more promising, than the other? Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Assorted Links

2009-03-25T13:58:00.002-04:00

Don't judge a post by its comments - Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber responds to Ezra Klein about the relationship between quality blog posts and number of comments.

Brevity didn't start with Twitter. - from The Smart Set, via NYT's Ideas of the Day

Teaching kids Twitter and Wikipedia in school. - The Guardian reports on teaching primary school kids "modern media and web-based skills."

Online or in person? We can (and do) have it both ways

2009-03-24T15:22:00.010-04:00

A few of my classmates have written posts that seem to suggest a trade-off between interactions in person and interactions online.

Brightinspiration says "actual physical engagement amongst people is much more effective than virtual."

Zaid asks "does all this virtual activity replace the traditional networking methods of going to an event and meeting a person face to face?" and answers that "In a way, yes it does."

Bronislava worries that people are no longer comfortable confiding in each other and instead only trust their keyboards.

It seems to me that the underlying assumption in all of these posts is that online interaction takes place at the expense of in-person interaction, and vice versa. I think it's worth pointing out that in practice this doesn't seem to be the case.

A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that:

Contrary to fears that email would reduce other forms of contact, there is “media multiplexity”: The more contact by email, the more in-person and phone contact. As a result, Americans are probably more in contact with members of their communities and social networks than before the advent of the internet.

In his book The Wealth of Networks, Harvard's Yochai Benkler surveys the literature and comes to the same conclusion:

Relations with one's local geographic community and with one's intimate friends and family do not seem to be substantially affected by Internet use. To the extent that these relationships are affected, the effect is positive....
...Connections with family and friends seemed to be thickened by the new channels of communication, rather than supplanted by them. (Chapter 10)

This fits with how most of us use the internet, and with how we use social networking. Online communication supplements in-person interaction. We keep up with friends whom we might otherwise see only once a week or month using Facebook, Twitter, and email.

Just as online communication supplements in-person interaction, online communities frequently organize in-person meetings to strengthen their online ties. The progressive blogosphere comes together annually for Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos) and countless groups use Meetup.com to coordinate meetings and events offline.

Here's the best part... Where do we get all the extra time to augment our relationships with email and social networking, according to Benkler? By watching less TV!

Fun With Social Network Theory

2009-03-22T21:20:00.005-04:00

What better way to dive into social network theory than to apply it on our very own network: the ITEC656 class blogs.

If the nodes in this network are the blogs of the class participants, what sort of network are we dealing with? Is it ego-centric? Socio-centric? Open-system?

Well, depending on the types of connections we are interested in, it could actually be described as any of these. Ego-centric networks are connected by a single node or individual. In the case of the ITEC656 blogs, they are all connected by Prof. Melander.

We could also classify our blogs as a socio-centric, or closed system network, because we are all students in the same class. Finally, since we are publishing content alongside of every other blogger out there on the web, we could also be considered nodes in that massive and amorphous network, "the blogosphere", an open-system network.

As the class goes on and we link to and comment on one another's blogs for the class, I'd love to see a map of how that network develops. Does anyone know of any good software for this purpose?

Welcome to Walter's ITEC656 blog!

2009-03-18T19:09:00.000-04:00

This is my blog for ITEC-656-001B, Social Networking and Business, at American University's Kogod School.

I'll be posting [at least] weekly for the course.

On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own.