The Promise of Future Revenue

I couldn't have said it better myself: Except that there are ways to be fairly compensated for creative efforts now, of course. YouTube isn't one; but Zango is. It's all about the content economy, baby.

Deconstructing Socially Generated Knowledge in Realtime

It's been a fascinating couple of days. I've been too busy to post to my blog much recently, but I just couldn't help myself on this one.

A couple months ago, I wrote about "The Limitations of Socially Generated Knowledge", which dealt with the tendency of Internet communities to arrive at conclusions that, to speak colloquially, "just ain't so."

This last week, I've observed another highly inaccurate consensus developing in realtime – and again, while from a philosophical point of view it's fascinating, it's rather frustrating from a business (and accuracy, reality, and truth) perspective.

On January 2, security vendor Fortinet posted an advisory, warning users of a "Facebook Widget Installing Spyware". I will grant that the title of the advisory is at least 50% accurate: the advisory does indeed describe a Facebook widget. (Hint for those of you following along at home: the widget doesn't install anything, and Zango is no more spyware than the Google toolbar is.) If you ignore the title, and actually read the advisory, I have to believe that the bare facts described in the body were likely correct: after the "Secret Crush" Facebook widget was added to a profile, the next Web page in the process showed ads, one of which (for the reasons discussed in more detail below) could very well have been for a Zango application.

I should note that the security team at Zango, after much trying, wasn't actually able to reproduce the scenario Fortinet describes. Nor, best I can tell, has anyone else – including Fortinet. But that's not surprising. To understand why, I need to back up and explain more about how Internet advertising works.

If you visit a site (say, http://entrepeneur.com), you'll typically see a variety of different ads for a variety of different companies, goods, or services. Now, where do those ads come from? It would be horribly inefficient for a small website to maintain a sales force to sell its advertising inventory directly to advertisers – and it's just as inefficient for advertisers to directly place ad buys with thousands of small websites. People figured this out very early in the days of the Internet, and thus was born the idea of an "ad network" (e.g., DoubleClick, ValueClick, Right Media, DrivePM, and so forth). Webmasters who want to show ads on their sites sign up with ad networks, as do advertisers who want their ads to be shown. The ad network takes a cut and automatically places ads from advertisers on websites from publishers. They typically give advertisers some control over where and how they want their ads to be displayed, but it's limited, if only because the ad network ultimately has to trust the web publisher, e.g., not to put anything inappropriate on the page displaying the ad. And of course, it doesn't stop here, with just one intermediary: for many reasons, too complicated to go into right here, there are often lots of intermediaries between the advertiser and the final website.

So, this is how Internet advertising works. Zango, like nearly all companies that do their business online, purchases display advertising through some of these advertising networks, and our ads are displayed on thousands of different sites. And like other online companies, Zango can find it complicated to control exactly where those ads are shown. (Just ask any airline whose ad has shown up next to a news article on the latest airport disaster.) Don't get me wrong: we have standards, and it's against our code of conduct for any of our partners to display Zango ads on a social networking site that prohibits such ads. We do our best to enforce those standards, but our advertising networks have partners as well, and when it comes right down to it, they don't always know where the ad is being displayed. This isn't something nefarious about Zango: it's just how the Internet advertising industry works. Ask anybody.

The end result is that even though our security response team wasn't able to document it, it's not at all unlikely, a priori, that an ad for a Zango application may have been displayed by a Facebook widget. But of course, if a user clicked on the Zango ad, he or she would have been taken to our website, where we have sophisticated mechanisms for ensuring that every user receives appropriate notice and consent before installing the Zango software that provides free access to the Zango application. No user installed Zango who didn't have the opportunity to be very well informed about what he or she was installing. Period.

So these are the bare facts: some individual creates a "Secret Crush" widget that, like many Facebook widgets, is better at getting people to install it than at doing anything interesting or useful. Since this widget happens to displays ads, he hooks up with an advertising network to select those ads for him, and one of the ads randomly displayed was for a Zango application. Unless you have a blanket objection to all advertising in principle (an objection I can at least understand), or have an aesthetic distaste for silly Facebook widgets (a distaste I fully share), it's hard to see anything particularly scandalous in this. It's the way Internet advertising works, and there's absolutely nothing newsworthy about it.

But take a quick look at how this bare set of facts has been repeated and distorted, first in the original Fortinet posting and thereafter throughout the web and blogosphere. Here are just a few examples culled from literally dozens and dozens of posts, articles and conversations, nearly all reiterating (and some exacerbating) the same mistakes:

• 'Installs Spyware.' As I've already mentioned, the original Fortinet posting claims that the widget "installs spyware". It should be clear that the widget didn't install anything – the user did, if and only if he or she wanted to do so. Nor does it make the slightest sense to call Zango "spyware". If Zango is spyware, the term has no meaning. There is such a thing as spyware. But Zango isn't. I should also note that this one advisory aside, Fortinet acknowledges as much: their own security applications classify Zango as adware, not spyware.
  
• 'Adware Distribution Scheme.' Matt Hines, of InfoWorld, calls it an "adware distribution scheme", and later lumps Zango in with "badware". Throughout the article, he implies that the makers of the widget were specifically out to install Zango, which, so far as I can tell, is absolutely incorrect. (It certainly seems like the widget maker just wanted to show some ads and arranged to do so via an ad network; one of those ads happened to be for a Zango application.) Hines also goes on to confuse the Facebook widget with the Zango download, by saying:

  "The Secret Crush program also tries to lure people who download the file to pass it along to other Facebook members they know, according to Fortinet's research."

    That's not true, nor even what Fortinet's research said.

• 'Spyware' with weak notice and consent. Thomas Claburn, of Information Week, repeats the "spyware" charge and implies that Zango has weak notice and consent policies. (If he'd perhaps bothered to install Zango's software, he would have been made aware of his mistake – he doesn't appear to have ever done so.)
  
• 'Notorious' malware. InternetNews follows the original (spurious) Fortinet claims, adding that Zango is a "notorious adware distributor" and calls the application itself "malware". Like the original posting, this one fails to recognize that what's being described is nothing more than a widget showing ads; and it fails to acknowledge that any install of Zango software promoted in any rotating ad shown by the widget absolutely followed our strict and thorough notice and consent policies.
  
• And more silliness.
  
  • ITbusiness.ca calls the episode a "hack", an "attack", and a "threat".
  • The Malware Adviser blog calls it a "backdoor".
  • TechnoSocial calls it a "worm".
  • The Happy Geek calls it a "security threat" and a "worm".
  • AppScout calls Zango "an undercover malicious spyware program" and a "virus", and implies that 4% of all Facebook users had installed it.

And I could go on, but it gets boring. All this effort, all this indignation and pontification for . . . an ad? Wow.

It would be amusing how quickly the Internet arrives at a consensus if that alacrity wasn't so scary. This is admittedly a pretty minor issue in the big scheme of things – but take a few moments and ponder how the same dynamic is at work for much more important questions.

I have to add, as a postscript if nothing else, that PaperGhost alone seems to have recognized the insanity generated by Fortinet for what it is:

They [Fortinet] also posted up a screenshot that seems to show the application merely showing randomly selected adverts - not just an advert for Zango.

If that's the case, then this whole thing just puzzles me because it immediately looks more like

Install application > application opens popup advert > popup advert calls adspace purchased by companies to display random advert and less like:

Install application > GET JACKED BY ZANGO, LOL

...so, once and for all, can anyone who played with this thing - because I haven't - set the record straight?

In it's original incarnation, did this application

A) open a box for Zango and only Zango every single time it was tested, or

B) did it just happen to randomly show a Zango advert (out of a big pile of other things it could have displayed)?

Chris: Because nobody (at Zango or elsewhere) has been able to replicate the scenario Fortinet describes, I can't say definitively how the widget functioned when Fortinet did its testing. But, internally here at Zango, we can tell that the URL referred to in the Fortinet posting was for an ad network, not for a publisher, so the answer is almost certainly "B". In other words, Zango had no relationship with the Secret Crush widget maker, and he or she had no incentive to see Zango software installed.

The Limitations of Socially Generated Knowledge

For some years, I've been interested in studying "how we know things". In philosophical circles this is known as epistemology, though it has a somewhat more practical cousin called cognitive science. The whole discipline is wonderfully circular, since nearly the first question you have to ask yourself is, "How do I know that I know how we know?"

Over the last half century or so, there's been a growing consensus (though certainly not unchallenged) that most knowledge has a social or communal dimension to it. Some people even say that all knowledge-claims are socially constructed, or that any claim to knowledge is really just a disguised claim to power. But you don't have to go that far to recognize that most questions humans are interested in presuppose a plurality of humans asking the question. Still, while acts of knowledge must always take place against a backdrop of community, if knowledge is to be counted as real knowledge, in the end it must bump up against real things. Knowledge that is accessible only to a special community (whether that community be Marxists or Mormons or bloggers) will not last. Lasting knowledge both forms and is formed by a given community, but it must also reach out beyond the original bounds of that community.

One of the interesting ways in which this epistemological consensus has taken form is on the Internet. It's variously called "web 2.0", or "wikinomics" or "the wisdom of crowds," but the phenomenon described is roughly the same: using a widespread community and mass collaboration to generate knowledge. Wikipedia is probably the best-known example, but the same process takes place on thousands of forums, hundreds of thousands of blogs, and millions of email exchanges each day. People contribute what they know to a vast pool of information, and eventually, out of that sometimes maddening cacophony, consensus arises, conclusions are drawn, and very occasionally, work gets done.

I should state for the record that as a blogger and Wikipedia junky, I'm a huge fan of this, what I'll call "socially generated knowledge." It's wonderfully astonishing how well it often works. When I want to research a company, or need to understand an algorithm or mathematical concept better, my first stop is always Wikipedia; and I spend more time than my wife would like either reading blogs or contributing my own postings.

But my experience over the last several years has also brought home, quite clearly, some of the problems inherent with using mass collaboration to generate knowledge. In particular, one debate to which I've had a front-row seat illustrates quite clearly some of its limitations.

A great deal has been written about Zango in various online forums. Over time, a consensus has emerged about what Zango's software does, the value that it adds (or doesn't add), how it is generally installed on your machine, and how it is best uninstalled. In other words, this Consensus (it deserves the capital letter) can reasonably be claimed to represent the result of a wide-ranging, "web 2.0," communal search for understanding: socially generated knowledge at its most robust.

Here's the part that's interesting to me. When it comes to these issues, I sit in a rather privileged position, having supervised, designed or written a great deal of Zango's software myself. I actually know first-hand what Zango's software does, how it's installed, and how best to uninstall it. When it comes to knowing how Zango's software works, it's not a matter of community knowledge: I was there, elbow-deep in code, strategic decisions, debugging and implementation. And thus I happen to know from direct experience that much of the Consensus is simply wrong. And that's worrisome.

To put what I'm going to say into context, you have to understand that you've always been able to uninstall any of Zango's software by going to Add/Remove Programs. The steps you follow once you get to Add/Remove Programs have changed over the years, and we've simplified and standardized the process – but it has always been the case that if you go to Add/Remove Programs and you follow your nose, Zango will uninstall cleanly. (I encourage you to try it yourself, if you're so persuaded.) Furthermore, this is not only one possible way to uninstall Zango: it's without a doubt the easiest, and by a long, long shot, the safest. If you try to uninstall any modern application manually (by deleting files, registry keys, etc.), you run a fairly reasonable risk of screwing up your PC; and while a $30 scanning application is probably more thorough than doing it by hand, even they often fail to uninstall Zango completely or cleanly. They just don't know Zango's software as well as Zango's own engineers do. So that's the undeniable state of affairs: if you want to uninstall Zango, go to Add/Remove Programs. Period.

But to put it gently, that's not the impression you would get from a Google search on, say, "delete Zango". To show you what I mean, let's do just that, and take a look at the information out there about uninstalling Zango. This thread is typical of what you'll see:

Zango. What is it? by Y4 - 7/8/04 9:30 AM Hi, None of my spyware programs detected Zango.exe on my PC. This program loaded on my PC covertly. Completely unwanted....Desktop short-cut, and all. However, when I ran a McAfee scan it detected Zango as a potentially unwanted application, and listed it as a variant of "180solutions", known spyware! It even comes with an installer, that will reload the program onto your computer if deleted from "Add/Remove programs". The only program that detected it, and removed it successfully was McAfee. Has anyone else ever had the "Zango experience"? What the heck is it?

I suppose you'll have to take my word that much of what the posting describes is simply not true. Yet the contention that Zango reinstalls itself is posted as fact on numerous public forums, where it becomes the source for much additional "knowledge", and with the help of Google is referenced explicitly or implicitly by many subsequent posters.

This posting, from the same thread, similarly contains a great deal of misinformation:

Re: Zango. What is it? by Y4 - 7/8/04 10:04 AM In reply to: Re: Zango. What is it? by Marianna Schmudlach Marianna, I ran Adaware, and spybot on my PC. Adaware recognised the Zango.exe, but could not remove it. I tried removing it at start-up, but to no avail. I then ran spybotS&D, it too recognised the 180solutions variant Zango.exe., and removed it successfully, however, it failed to recognise the Zango installer, and at next boot-up, BAM! There it was again! That's when I ran McAfee8, and it detected, and removed both Zango.exe, and the Zango installer. My PC is now free of the pest. This pest is a tricky one. I've done a little research on it, and from what I've found....it tries to HiJack your explore.exe, and iexplore.exe applications. If the HiJack is successful, you would in turn delete your browser application if you delete Zango from "Add/Remove programs". This, in my opinion, is spyware nearing virus potential! BEWARE!!Thank you for your attention in this matter.

I can't swear that the scanning apps referenced didn't behave that way, because I didn't design them and I can't tell you for a fact what they can or can't do. (Though I do know that once they start messing around with a Zango installation, all bets are off as to whether Zango will still be able to uninstall itself correctly. We can write all the uninstall code we want, but if a scanning app removes that code, we have precious few options left.) But the post is most interesting to me in an epistemological sense for a different reason. The writer claims to have done "a little research", i.e., has drunk at the well of socially generated knowledge. I'm in a position to know that it's precisely this received knowledge which is most baldly inaccurate, and leads finally to the amusing (and completely untrue) claim that uninstalling Zango will delete your browser.

And so it goes. Forum postings like these are to be found everywere, but blog postings that encourage painfully manual uninstalls are common as well. Most egregious are the official-looking postings from various online security companies which insist (explicitly or implicitly) that Zango can only be safely uninstalled by shelling out $30 for their product.

To be fair, over the last year or so, some postings (here, here and here, for instance) do recognize that the best way to uninstall Zango is to go to Add/Remove Programs. Given that the process these posts describe is not only the right process, but also the cheapest and easiest by several orders of magnitude, it's rather astonishing how few and far between those posts are, and how long it's taken them to start showing up. And perhaps most troubling, despite quite a bit of searching, I have yet to find any post that explicitly corrects the Consensus. Nobody ever says, "Nah, you don't have to spend all that money, and you don't have to spend an hour mucking about with your registry. Just find Add/Remove Programs and follow your nose." Even those contributors who apparently know better don't seem to mind that the Consensus is quite wrong, and that's quite puzzling.

At some level, this rather shocking discord between reality and the Consensus calls into question the reliability of the entire "web 2.0" project. (Though please note that I explain "web 2.0" with a reference to the archetypal web 2.0 site – who said irony is dead?) In further postings, I'd like to explore the reasons why so much that is said about Zango is so inaccurate – and see if that can help us to understand better the strengths and limitations of socially generated knowledge.

Wizard of Id

Last weekend I drove down to Mt. Adams with an 18 year old friend who recently graduated from high school. It was his first time backpacking, and for it being his first time, he did very well: he made it over the 10,000 foot level before deciding he'd had enough. I continued on and summitted a few hours later. The weather was astonishing and clear, and counting the one I was standing on, I could see six glaciated peaks of the Cascades. I'd have some nice pictures to post here if it weren't for the fact that I was a serious dumb-ass and left my camera in the Cold Springs parking lot. Sigh.

Since I got back, though, what I've spent the most time thinking about isn't my summit (though that was nice), but the music we listened to on the five hour trip each way. I've known for a long time that most rap and hip-hop is pretty raunchy, but I've never sat down and actually listened to the music with someone who listens to it regularly. And although I couldn't understand most of the lyrics, what I could understand was fairly shocking. Nobody who listens to it would be surprised, but I guess I was.

Here's a sample of a given set of lyrics:

money, hoes, cars and clothes,
thats how all my niggas know
blowin dro on 24's,
thats how all my niggas roll

Or:

Girl, you looks good, won't you back that ass up
You'se a fine motherfucka, won't you back that ass up
Call me Big Daddy when you back that ass up
Hoe, who is you playin wit? Back that ass up

Or:

Nigga came at me wrong so we got him done
Fuckin' with the fam', I'ma give him some
Spent that co'ner, he didn't run
Sunday had a whole church singin' a song
"Why'd they have to send my baby home?"

My friend could tell I was a bit surprised by these songs, and asked me if I was offended. I wasn't really – it takes a lot to offend me – but I was certainly mystified.

One way to describe most of the songs that shocked previous generations is to say that they lacked a super-ego, e.g., they didn't exhibit any particular morality. When Prince sang about "Darling Nicky" masturbating with a magazine, he was certainly lacking a substantial moral sense, but he still (however passingly) was interested in a particular woman. And I believe that just being interested in a particular woman, for whatever reasons, has something of good in it, however short it falls of the sort of patient, giving love that has to be the foundation for marriage, family and indeed, society. "Darling Nicky" is a real person, is a person, and to that extent is good.

What's astonishing about these songs is that they lack not just a super-ego, but really, any hint even of "ego". They're not just missing out on patient, sacrificial, self-giving love: they're unaware even of the concept of "enlightened self-interest". They're not ego, let along super-ego: they're sheer, unadulterated id. They celebrate nothing recognizably human: at best a woman is a "girl", but more typically a "ho" or simply an "ass". These songs don't even celebrate casual sex: there's no celebration, no ego, only rage and anger, only id. Everywhere is a nihilistic despair, barely hidden, barely under the surface. No person living by these ideals could possibly be happy.

I should also note that these songs are ultimately self-contradictory. To take one almost innocent example, they celebrate the autonomy of the person who can afford large, flashy wheels on his car ("24's") – and fail to acknowledge that these wheels are symbols that have meaning only in the context of a particular society. In other words, the symbols of the individual's freedom from society are themselves dependent on that same society for meaning.

But most especially, as I think back on these songs, I feel sorry for my friend. He's grown up in a world where these songs could reasonably be understood to represent life as it should be lived. That's as sad as it is frightening.

Two Holy Men

A couple months ago, when my cousin Brian was on his way to climb Mt. Everest (see pictures here, here and here), he ran across the Indian holy man below:

I've never been to India, but I understand that they're a common site.

I had occasion to think of this tonight, when I was with my friend Doug at a Devereaux concert, during the Bite of Seattle. I noticed a very similar gentleman, presumably homeless, dressed largely in what looked like women's scarves, twirling and swaying, sort of in time to the music. A group of hip looking teenagers were not-so-subtly laughing at him.

My suspicion is that the two men are alike in more than appearance, i.e., I suspect that by traditional medical standards they both suffer from some form of psychosis. But they differ in one key way. In India, there's a place for people like that. They know how to fit them into their culture, and in their own way, they are respected. I doubt that you want your son to grow up to be like that: but if he does, you know that he's not going to begging for change down on skid row. There's a way for that person to be understood, to fit, in a way, into society. And of course, in America, we don't. They're a problem to be solved, not a holy man to be revered. They carry the whiff only of spirits, and never of the Spirit. Think on that for a while, and ponder what we're missing.

Doctors with Borders

I was rather disappointed with this article on MSNBC.com, about doctors whose attempts to be faithful to their moral and theological traditions require them to decline to offer certain treatment options. I should make it clear, of course, that I don't always agree with those doctors about what is right and what is wrong. (I'm enough a child of my culture that I can't quite figure out why Catholics are against birth control – even Chesterton's explanation hasn't quite sunk in.) But it's my starting assumption – clearly not shared by the author of the article – that faithfulness to your beliefs is very nearly the highest ideal to which a human can subscribe. It's certainly more important than someone else's feelings, as important as those are.

Indeed, the "hierarchy of needs" implied in the article is perhaps the greatest lie perpetrated by our culture. Nearly everything we read, see, or hear in our popular media is predicated on the idea that religious faith is a private matter, to be subordinated at every turn to, well, everything else: medical advice, entertainment, political expediency, or for that matter, business requirements. Like Lewis' "mountain apple", this poisonous unquestioned assumption pervades nearly every aspect of our public discourse, and any attempt to question it sounds odd and discordant, even to my ears.

On NPR last night, they were talking about the website WorldWithoutOil, an interesting attempt to imagine how our world would change in the weeks following a severe energy shock. It would be fascinating to engage in a similar exercise, imagining a world where we took faith seriously, in all its dimensions. Lots of people think it would end up looking like The Handmaid's Tale, and because I remain a firm believer in original sin, I don't really disagree with them. But resulting dystopia would still be the result of not taking our faith seriously enough, not of taking it too seriously.