Bloggasm

If they’re old timers, they have probably already vested, which means they have plenty of “eff you” money, and are working solely for the plaesure of it. You better not bore them because its you versus Maui.

If they’re new, they just got through turning down offers from every other hot startup in the Valley, and probably Google too. And now you’re going to make them do work they don’t want to do? Hah.

If they’re new, they probably just graduated at the top of their class from MIT, Stanford, or Harvard. Or, Facebook just bought their last company for a couple million dollars. Try telling them you know better.

The war for talent in the Valley is so intense, that each of your chargers could probably land an offer from marginally less desirable workplaces at Google, Zynga, or Twitter with a snap of their fingers – and get a quick counter-offer from your higher-ups. That will make them act a little bit entitled.

Why It’s Impossible To Manage Facebook Engineers

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Though some of the articles published in The New Yorker each week are free, it still shelves many of them behind a paywall. But on my Facebook news feed I just caught a glimpse of a new roll-out from the magazine: web content only available on its Facebook page:

And when you click on the link it takes you to a very New Yorker-esque Facebook version of a Jonathan Franzen essay:

I spoke briefly to Alexa Cassanos, The New Yorker’s director of public relations, about the decision to launch the Facebook-only version.

On what made The New Yorker staff decide to post the essay on Facebook:

We’ve been talking about doing something on Facebook for awhile, and I know a lot of people have been talking about the idea of doing original content for Facebook. For various reasons we decided that wouldn’t work for us. And someone suggested this … We bounced around the idea for a couple weeks, and we decided on the Franzen story just because we felt like — I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it yet — but it’s a brilliant story. What we wanted to do is find some kind of content that would allow us to engage with people who would want to engage with our content on a long-term basis. We didn’t want to just choose something that’s a flashy story. What we were looking to do is obviously broaden our reach, but we wanted to do it with a story keeping with what The New Yorker does really, really well.

Why Facebook?

We have a million subscribers, but we only — I shouldn’t say ‘only’ because it’s a great number — but we have about 200,000 fans on Facebook. Obviously we think that that number could be bigger. And we’d also like to have people ‘like’ us or engage with us who aren’t subscribers. Who are maybe fans of Jonathan Franzen, or who love fiction, or who like David Foster Wallace, or people who may have had no idea that The New Yorker was on Facebook.

On how The New Yorker will measure its success on Facebook:

I don’t know. We’re going to have to see how it goes. Ultimately we’re going to try to create more fans of our page. That’s what we’re going to look at to see how successful it is. This is the first time we’ve done it. We’re going to see how it goes, and it’s something we may do again. We’ve talked about experimenting with different kinds of stories.

The essay will be up for one week. The page is currently liked by about 202,000 fans, so it’ll be interesting to monitor the growth over the next several days.

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In a recent piece for The Next Web, I detailed how Alan Rosenblatt from the Center for American Progress aided Nadine Wahab in protecting the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page. “Because Facebook does not allow anonymous users, there was fear that Mubarak’s supporters could use this rule to either oust the page’s creator or get the page shut down completely,” I wrote. “Rosenblatt has connections with Facebook employees and after introducing Wahab to them they were able to secure the page while also protecting her identity.”

This incident highlights the problems American social media sites face in countries that have strict restrictions on free speech. As the New York Times reports in a recent article, activists in these countries are having a hard time navigating around rules that were put in place to guarantee authenticity; when using your real name can mean imprisonment and even death, it’s easy to see why activists would be hesitant to use their real names.

Part of the problem not mentioned in the piece is that these major social media sites are not in the customer service business. Their success is based on their ability to scale, to gather a large number of users per employee. It’s very rare that the average Facebook or YouTube user can get an employee on the phone to help him with his individual problems. To avoid this, these sites must create strict rules and guidelines in order to quickly dispense judgement on what’s kosher and what’s not. The Times article mentions an incident in which Facebook doesn’t want to wade into the Israel/Palestine conflict, but it doesn’t mention what’s possibly a major reason for why it wants to steer clear of moderating Palestinian and Israeli activist pages: the human resources it would take to do so.

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The Next Web reports that Warner Brothers is going to be opening a movie rental business via its Facebook fan page. Users can pay for “Facebook credits” and somehow utilize them to watch a movie through the page.

For 30 Facebook credits or $3, users will be able to view movies on its official fan pages while simultaneously being able to browse the social network. They will have 48 hours from the purchase to watch the movie, which can be viewed full screen and also paused and resumed within that period.

The first movie that will be made available is Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film The Dark Knight, but we can expect more available for rent or purchase in the months to come.

Would this be a potential market for other entertainment companies, including those that own television and music studios? More importantly, does this provide an avenue for Facebook to encroach on Netflix’s market, which already has Amazon nipping at its heels?

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Today we received the stunning news from All Facebook that “83 Percent Of Prostitutes Have Facebook Pages.”

I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of every single “Facebook study” that emerges, especially since few of them actually give any insight into how the scientist collected data. The findings in this prostitute study are unclear: Is he saying that 83% of prostitutes have Facebook profiles or pages? If it’s just the former or a combination of the two, then that’s relatively unremarkable given that Facebook is ubiquitous in the US. That’s like telling me that 83% of prostitutes have used Google. If it’s the latter, then I’m extremely skeptical that 83% of prostitutes are advertising their services on a Facebook page given the difficulty of collecting such data. How was he able to accurately poll prostitutes who simply work on the streets (as opposed to working for escort services)?

More importantly, when is every social media blog, from Mashable to All Facebook, going to start showing some real skepticism toward every yokel wanting to get a quick shot of publicity by throwing up a poorly researched Facebook case study? The New Yorker recently published a piece on the decline effect with the scientific method, but at least its story focused on peer-reviewed studies. In the tech blogosphere, we never even have to learn a study’s methodology.

UPDATE: TechCrunch commenter MelanieR hit the nail on the head with this lazy sensationalism with these studies.

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For the last several years, thousands of blogs — many of which are anti-war — have displayed a small widget on their sidebars with a wildly fluctuating number that jumps up by several thousand nearly every second. The widget comes from Costofwar.com and purports to detail the money spent thus far on both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. If you happen to be for one war and against the other, you can choose which cost to display, and if you’re against both it includes a widget logging the combined cost.

At the current rate of increase, the combined cost of these two wars reported on this site will reach $1 trillion on Sunday, May 30, the day before Memorial Day. Of course the true monetary cost of war, just like estimating casualty from wars, is a hotly debated topic, one in which the factors calculated into the number make all the difference — the money spent caring for injured veterans for years after the war has ended, the cost to the government by the rising price of oil that comes as a result of a war in the Middle East, etc. In the case of Costofwar.com, it claims that it’s just calculating the spending allotments passed by Congress that go directly toward the war. It then projects the rate of spending of that money by dividing it by hours, minutes and seconds — hence the continually scrolling number.

But while we won’t ever truly know when we’ll pass the trillion dollar mark — or whether we’ve already passed it — Internet activists won’t let the May 30th date go by unnoticed. The Brave New Foundation — a progressive non-profit affiliated with Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films — has launched a new interactive Facebook app that the group hopes will educate users on the true cost of war — and where that money could be better spent.

“It does act as a symbol,” said Derrick Crowe, political director at Brave New Foundation, referring to the Costofwar.com counter. “I’m looking at it right now, and we’re at 999 billion and 300 million and some change. As you watch these numbers fly by I don’t think unless you’re looking at something like this it’s possible to comprehend just how fast the wealth of our country is flying out the door for these wars … The idea of spending a trillion, it’s the reason why when you look at an infomercial and the price is always $19.95. It’s because $20 sounds like a lot more. For us, with the trillion dollar mark we’re crossing into a different order of magnitude now.”

The Facebook app provides an online shopping cart — similar to what you’d see on Amazon — that allows you to choose from a variety of spending options. You can “hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year” (COST: $12 billion), pay for “health care for 1 million children for one year” ($2.3 billion), or even “buy out Bill Gates and Warren Buffet” ($133 billion).

“There are two reasons for doing this,” Crowe told me. “One is to show the opportunity cost for this kind of spending. When you go to our app, just take one of these trade offs. If you, for example, bought 10 million university scholarships for graduating seniors this year, and you add that to your cart, that leaves you with $920 billion left to spend. You haven’t even begun to put a dent into the total amount we’ve spent in the war. That’s the thing we’re trying to drive home, is that you could make an entirely new country with this money, you could change the face of the United States if you prioritized these other things and spent the money here. Can you imagine 10 million federal government scholarships, what that would mean for the level of education and the skills for our future workers if we decided to invest the money in them? That’s one piece, the second is to kind of come at it from a negative way at the same time. As you’re tooling around with this, it’s really hard to hit the trillion dollar mark. And when you spend about five minutes on here, and you use this really comprehensive list, and you go to your cart and find you’ve only spent like $300 billion, and you’ve already done things like buy out Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, a private island, and fund a new Apollo program and things like that, it really drives home just how much a trillion dollars is. Folks have done graphical illustrations showing a stack of bills to the moon and back or something like that, what we wanted to do is to show you just how difficult it is to spend this kind of money when you’re not dumping it on a war.”

The fact that the trillion dollar mark comes on the eve of Memorial Day, Crowe said, helps drive home the group’s message even more. Brave New Foundation is promoting this primarily on Facebook — its page has over 30,000 fans — and on outlets like HuffPo and Alternet. This activism also happens to come right before Congress votes to appropriate even more money for the wars.

“While that’s going on, we want to make sure voters and constituents and people in general understand that when they’re talking about adding billions, that’s on top of $1 trillion that we’ve spent on these two wars.”

Given that the GOP recently launched its own website, America Speaking Out, to crowdsource its spending agenda, one would think Congress would be open to such suggestions. But it’s worth noting that in past talks of budget cuts suggestions to decrease war spending are few and far between. Whether placing a $1 trillion price tag will sway voters on war spending depends on if it can overcome what many consider to be an untouchable target of budget cuts: the American military.

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On the day the AP Stylebook announced it would change the requirement that its users refer to online destinations as “web sites” to the more widely-used “websites,” I sent a message to a person named Justin LaBerge requesting a phone interview. He responded quickly saying that he was “about to go meet up with my GF for our Friday night plans (In light of today’s event, we have much to celebrate!)” When I spoke to him a few days later he said he was mostly kidding about the celebration part (he had been planning to go out with his girlfriend already) but that they did raise their glasses to “toast” the news. “You wouldn’t believe how many emails and Facebook messages I got when people saw that,” he told me.

Back in 2008, LaBerge had created a Facebook group called “Dear AP Stylebook: Could You Please Spell ‘Web site’ Like a Normal Person?” Working for a Missouri PR agency, LaBerge said that he had become frustrated after constantly sending copy to clients with the “web site” spelling only to have them send it back edited to include the more widely-used “website.” “I just get sick and tired of having to spell and explain why we spell ‘web site’ this weird way,” he said. “I am the AP Style writer in the office. I really like AP Style, I’m a fan of it, and I use it, and when something you love messes up, it almost hurts you more than when something you don’t care about messes up.”

So LaBerge created the group and he sent invites out to a cadre of other PR people he knew regionally encouraging those who really believed in the issue to then forward it to their friends. In the first month or two it amassed around 200 to 300 people and continued to grow from there. When I checked in last week it had reached 700 fans.

LaBerge had used other methods to lobby the AP Stylebook to no avail, including emailing the book’s top editor and also a magazine journalist who had interviewed him. But he saw his golden opportunity when the Stylebook made an open call for user input into changes it should make, specifically in regard to social media.

“They said we’re going to make some changes to AP Style, specifically social media, and a woman who is a member of our group saw that and forwarded it to me and I forwarded it to the group and said, ‘here’s a website where you can go and they’re actively soliciting these requests, tell them you want them to change ‘web site.””

Though he didn’t remember the name of the woman, it most likely was Tracy Russo, a DC-based Twitter user who had begun her own campaign — in this case on Twitter — to get the AP Stylebook to change its policy. Russo told me via email that after seeing the AP announcement soliciting input she had messaged Justin. But her lobbying didn’t stop there. “I submitted my own comment, but then wanted to rally friends and colleagues as well. So I e-mailed 200 or so friends, most of whom work in online or political communications and asked them to chime in as well.” She also began directing Twitter users to the suggesting form, tweeting things like, “Tell the @APStyleBook “Web site” (2 words, capital W) is lame. It should be “website” (1 word, lowercase w),” and “Have you told @APStylebook it should be “website” instead of “Web site”? ”

Obviously, the demographic that felt passionate about this style usage was relatively small, but the above demonstrates how one can funnel a small but eager audience into a very targeted campaign, one that produces results.

“You can see there doesn’t appear to be that many,” Russo said. “But a clear coordinated message offered up an obvious correction that a lot of people are excited about today.”

And that’s how your AP Stylebook sausage is made.

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