• create your own post types from within the admin panel (#9674 (Better support for custom post types) – WordPress Trac)
• BuddyPress will become a feature for standard WP.org installations
• Custom taxonomies are becoming progressively easier to implement
• It’s getting progressively easy to work with custom fields.
• There are two WP Google Summer of Code projects dealing with AJAX inline reordering of pages on the manage post screens.

That said, I’m not sure I really need the media handling improvements now the focus of the WP 2.9 development. But I think it’s a generally a good thing. Now if they only allow easy flickr integration or API searching of pictures from the edit screens and improve the internal linking features, I’d have a hard time to find a lot of thigs I still don’t like about WordPress…

The funny thing is, though, that, apparently – quoting the WP developer blog – the design has mostly been done by Matt Thomas and Andy Peatling (who is otherwise the buddypress guy at automattic) over the course of the last week. Which – for all the excitement – begs the question: why not earlier?

To have a look at some mockup screens and read even more about this, check out the link below.

The Visual Design of 2.7.

Welche Konsequenzen wird es haben, wenn jede halböffentliche Bemerkung eines Politikers aufgezeichnet und per Internet verbreitet werden kann?

Niemand weiß es. Das Problem sind dabei vermutlich auch weniger Ausraster wie die Sarkozys – wenn dieser Auftritt nicht in ein zunehmend von den präsidentiellen Eskapaden genervtes (europäisches!) Umfeld gefallen wäre, wäre das Video nicht mal halb so interessant – sondern die Unmöglichkeit unterschiedliche Zielgruppen mit spezifischen Botschaften anzusprechen, ohne dabei komplett kryptisch zu werden. Bestes Beispiel hierfür ist doch die Tatsache, daß der amerikanische Präsident in Texas kein “texanisch” mehr reden kann, wenn er darauf achten muß, daß seine Äußerungen in Crawford keine Probleme in New York oder in Brüssel kreieren.

Vielleicht finden sich Hinweise darauf in der Forschung von Kommunikationswissenschaftlern wie Danah Boyd (papers, blog) aus Berkeley, deren Vortrag zum Privatsphäeren-Management von Teenagern ich vor einiger Zeit in Paris hören konnte.

Erklären Teenager auf facebook die Zukunft politischer Kommunikation? On verra…

“In the March issue of GQ, Wil S. Hylton argues that Vice President Richard Cheney should be impeached for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Now I suppse there was a small chance for this to appear in Hustler magazine, although Larry Flynt is better known for being sued that for suing. But GQ? I’m confused. Maybe they just want to give everyone an good alibi, you know… I’m just reading Playboy for the interviews…. and I’m just reading GQ for the impeachment proceeedings…

Naja, besser spät als nie. Sollte sich jemand von dort hier her verirren – ein paar einleitende Worte zu Blogs und der journalistischen Ausbildung finden sich hier.

This is a must read, of course, not least because their treatment on blogging and journalism in the fall of 2003 was the first serious take on the issue and that, hailing from Mainz like Gutenberg himself, I can’t exactly agree with the title…

Interestingly, they have also renounced to a pdf-version of the current report, while all back issues are available as such.

“Sie lesen eigentlich keine Blogs. Blogs finden sie Scheiße. Mit Blogs verdient man kein Geld. Im Internet ist 99 Prozent Dreck. …”

Mal sehen, wie lange diese Einstellung sich noch hält – denn einer von denen, bei denen die zukünftige schreibende Elite vermutlich gerne arbeiten würde (ja, auch ein Praktikum wäre toll…), Bernd Kundrun, seines Zeichens Vorstandsvorsitzender der Gruner + Jahr AG, dürfte, zumindest offiziell, nicht mehr so begeistert sein von solchen Ansichten. Laut Branchenblog turi2.de sagte Kundrun am vergangenen Donnerstag der Werbe- und PR-Fachzeitschrift W&V -

“Es wird notwendig sein, in den nächsten zehn Jahren das Berufsbild des Journalisten schrittweise neu zu definieren. Die bisherige Vorgehensweise ‘Ich besitze den Content und Du konsumierst ihn’ wird sich ändern in Richtung “Ich lenke, strukturiere und produziere, aber Du bist eingeladen, mir dabei behilflich zu sein.”

Auch wenn das eigentlich eine Debatte ist, die zumindest theoretisch schon mal Mitte der neunziger Jahre abgehandelt wurde (“daily me”, irgendwer?), erscheint die Aussage angesichts der erkennbaren Resistenz dysfunktionaler Rationalitätsmythen irgendwie revolutionär.

Glücklicherweise ist das Erkenntnisziel gar nicht so schwer erreichbar – wie Wolfgang Harrer mit seinem Kommentar beweist.

“Die Trennlinie ist also nicht Old Media vs. New Media oder gar Blogger vs. Journalist. Die Trennlinie ist Qualität vs. Schrott; und diese Trennlinie hat erstaunlich wenig damit zu tun, ob ein Autor für seine Arbeit bezahlt wird oder nicht.”

Und was fehlt noch an dieser Stelle? Ganz klar – der Link zum Qualitätsblog. Und der schücherne Hinweis auf die Tatsache, daß der Tausendkontaktpreis dort gerade mal ein sechzigstel dessen beträgt, was bei Spiegel Online International zu zahlen ist…

The SEO Blog: Google News Credibility Foiled By 15-Year Old

“Reading through SEO focused blog entries, Vandetta found an article that explained how to fool Google’s news system by writing fake press releases. Sensing an opportunity to experiment and play a joke on his friends, the self-described “Google fanboy” decided to see what would happen if he submitted a fake Google press release claiming the 15-year old New Jersey student was Google’s youngest employee.

The press release was issued through the free service I-Newswire and contained a number of spelling mistakes. Short and to the point, the release, which appeared to have been sent by a Google spokesperson Sonya Johnson (who’s actually existence is unconfirmed and is assumed to be imaginary), read:

“(I-Newswire) – 15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant’s offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw’s in Google’s beta e-mail service, “Gmail”. Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student’s blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta’s expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.”

A few hours after posting the fake press release, Vandetta logged into the news search tool Digg after receiving an automated email from MAKEBot (Digg’s Spider), to find his practical joke had become a credible international tech story. Google was even displaying reference to the press release in Google News and at in the news results placed above search results relating to Google employment or hiring.

At least that’s the hypothesis – and in order to find out more about the endangered species “German blogger”, Jan Schmidt at the University of Bamberg is conducting a survey called “Weblogs 2005 – Bloggen im deutschsprachigen Raum”.

So, whether you’ve started yesterday or in 1999, or, like me, in 2002 – fill out the survey to demonstrate clearly that the claim is actually true : Germany blogs!

I was inclined to think that someone like him would be most confident when it comes to Schumpeterian processes, the creative destruction and recreation of social and economic governance mechanisms. Well, I was wrong.

Maybe his – in my view – unwarranted pessismim about the state of the economy and, clearly, the country in general are simply a consequence of the persistent common German habit of badmouthing Germany. Some do it for strategic reasons, because they believe depression is a necessary precondition for the medication to have some effect. Others – most – do it because it has become the socialised myth of rationality de jour – a rather distant relative of truth, if you will.

True or not, this kind of talk has some effect. Depression-caused anxiety can be witnessed everywhere. And just as so many others, my parents’ friend – who once teached command economy and only fourteen years ago successfully managed to weather a most dramatic social change – now has fundamental doubts about the ability of our economic governance mechanism to adopt to the challenges of the future.

At times I tend to believe such pessimism is the contemporary version of the anxiety people pre-Copernican times must have felt when the days became shorter and shorter and colder and colder as the year progressed – not knowing, just expecting – that the days would become longer and sunnier again after midwinter.

If you browse through the archives of this blog or read my posts over at AFOE you’ll see that I am also very much concerned about some fundamental changes in the underlying structure of the way we live and exchange apples for pears at the edge of the forrest these days. What is happening to societies based on extensive division of labour in the wake of continuing labour supply shocks or increasing uncertainty about the continuing existence of crucical prerequisites for market interactions with respect to the reduced excludability of information goods? Important questions to which no one has an answer yet.

But those worried about the future – like my parents’ friend – should remember our ancestors who trusted in the occurence of the next sun-cycle in the absence of an explanation thereof, and eagerly waited for the first ray of sunlight and the first snowdrop to surface. I’m not sure whether Josh Marshall’s announcement that he is hiring (another) intern for his blog TalkingPointMemo can be interpreted as a surfacing snowdrop of the digital age. It’s clearly too early.

But there’s a chance.

When I went to meet him and some other bloggers I had never seen or even heard of before, I was not too sure what to expect beyond a pint of wheat beer. But what developed were indeed very intristing debates about the future -as we develop it.

No doubt about it, blogs, or personal publishing, is quickly changing some parts of the communicational transactional infrastructure of the societies we live in. But what exactly is going to happen – no one has really figured that out yet.

It is great to be among people who are fascinated by what they do, people who firmly believe that they are true revolutionaries, tearing down the old walls of informational constraints and top-down control. Ideas really are a powerful motivator.

Yet just like love can make us blind with regard to things we do not want to see or know about our loved ones, enthusiasm tends to blind us with respect to the nasty little details. I am mentioning the German technological adventure “Toll Collect” only for the fun of it.

On Monday, Loic LeMeur was asked about the future of printed newspapers and magazines by one of the attending non-bloggers. His reaction could not have been faster – it’s dead, he said, and I am sure, he firmly believes this.

However, I am not so certain about the future of printed paper. The medium has certain qualities that are not yet easily replicated by electronic media – most doctors’ waiting rooms still feature papers and not free W-Lan. And while this may even change sooner than I imagine, there will a market for printed information and commentary, and if only because the higher cost will serve as a signalling mechanism for quality – in whichever changed format this may be the case – the “RSS-Times -once a week, the stuff that is actually worth reading”

Ross Mayfield apparently also starts to think that blogs are different, and therefore a medium with a very specific set of core competences: Broad coverage, he writes today, is not one of them. He’s (mostly) right – coverage of important events involved an infrastructure and professionalism that (most) blogs simply cannot and do not possess.

Things are different in situations, where no infrastructure is present. I remember the advantages of neighbourhood bloggers over the established media last year when half of California burnt down. But when it comes to attending press-conferences and filtering official information like, say, following the Madrid attacks, it becomes obvious that journalists and bloggers are still operating in largely distinct, though complimentary market segments.

Op-Ed journalists should be far more afraid of all the opinion that is now out there.

“A heretofore unknown candidate named George Schwartzman placed ninth statewide. Although the San Diego County businessman insists his fresh ideas won him those 11,000 votes, his stellar showing more likely results from a case of mistaken identity. Voters no doubt confused George Schwartzman with Georgy Russell – the candidate who marketed herself on thong undies.”

“Don’t get me started on the Blaster virus sabotaging Microsoft systems, or the cram of spam reminding us that the average American is an impotent, insecure, overweight, tired, depressed loser desperately seeking to refinance. The most telling sign that the Internet is no longer the cool American frontier? Blogs, which sprang up to sass the establishment, have been overrun by the establishment.” (from the NY Times)

“What comes out of this: A hundred Salam Paxes. A thousand Salam Paxes. The intelligent, caring, involved future of Iraq will come online to share their experiences and opinions and hopes and fears and Iraq will be better for it; so will the world, for we will build bridges to Iraqis online. History has never had a better, cheaper, easier, faster means of publishing content and distributing it worldwide. Now is the time to take advantage of this for sake of democracy and freedom and nothing less than that.”

I am not too convinced that the outcome of setting up “blogspots” in Baghdad would necessarily be the creation of a happy modern all-Iraqi civil society, even assuming that enough people would care to learn how to use the technology. I suppose there is hardly anyone who would be able to tell how blogging would fit into institutionalised Iraqi patterns of societal communication.

Thinking of the almost violent way the pro-/anti-war debate evolved in the western blogosphere in the first few months this year, I would say that there is no guarantee that blogging does enhance the way any civil society works – just read my post about Rebecca Lucas below. In fact, remembering how Karl Deutsch has described long ago in “Nationalism and Social Communication” that increased communication does not per se translate into more understanding between the communicating parties, one might be tempted to think that blogging actually requires a significant amount of civil society and mutual understanding to start with in order to deal with all the Rachel Lucases around. Otherwise, it might just ignite a fire no one wanted to light.

I am not saying this would be the case in Iraq. But given the way a “modern/pseudo-socialist” authoritarian government has been superimposed on a semi-tribally-organised, ethnically and religiously diverse country I’d say that there is a certain chance for a negative development.

So while I think that the idea put forth by Mr Jarvis is clearly worth to be tested, those involved would have to be very attentive and careful not to become too hopeful about the possible positive effects of such a project.

“If you make self-defense illegal, or even problematic, you’re making life easier for criminals and tyrants.”

Well, if I were living in a Hobbesian state of nature I would probably have to subscribe to the strict version of that theory, too. But, luckily, I am not. Maybe she is – she lives in Texas, according to her webpage – that would explain her position.

In the real world however, it just doesn’t make much sense. But just like I am, Rachel and everybody else is entitled to tell the world about his or her opinions.

So when there’s nothing to argue, what am I doing here? Well, I am not really concerned with the substance of her rant, but rather with the style.

Unfortunately, Rachel (although she’s far from the worst) seemingly believes in the bizarre discourse theory a lot of bloggers, in my experience predominantly American right-wing bloggers, are spreading these days – that calling people who don’t share their opinions “idiots” as frequently as possible is making their points more convincing. Generally, they seem to follow the rule “the more aggressive, and insulting, the better.”

Rachel herself admits this practice on her FAQ page

“Q: ‘How does Rachel expect to make her point by insulting people she disagrees with?’
A: Easy. I don’t expect to make my point to people who can’t see past the insults. Also, this is just a blog, not the New York Times op-ed page.”

Don’t get me wrong here, there are instances for the application of “idiot”. But the word’s inflationary use is a kind of verbal pollution, is simply annoying, and possibly preventing a good deal of the debate theoretically made possible by advances in communication technologies – who likes to talk to people who begin the discussion by saying “shut up, you idiot”? In Rachel’s words – why should they want to see past the insults?

I wonder if some phd student is already trying to capture the early changes personal publishing is making to the style of written opinion in general – can anyone imagine a NY Times op-ed headline that reads “Stupid, stupid, stupid idiots”? Probably not – for the time being. But who knows what the future, and the effects of personal publishing will have on other forms of media?

Yes, replacing permanent contracts with temporary contracts on a massive scale (what outsourcing actually is) does reduce the journalists independence and is likely to increase the worlkload for many of them. There are areas in which this could possibly lead to weaker journalism.

But on the other hand, it could well turn out that the public is quite content with the cheaper version in many cases and that some people were having a cheap lunch before. I mean, there are quality newspapers in this country which seem to rely to large extent on unpaid interns for their local pages – without a significant reduction in quality, it seems.

“Critics of media concentration will now wonder how much more wheeling and dealing can go on before there are but one or two juggernauts controlling every image, syllable, and sound of information and entertainment.”

He also explained why he believed that more hierarchy would not yet pose a problem for the world -

“Actually, the industry has a long way to go yet before it reaches that point. There are more than 100 media companies worldwide, with more than $1 billion in revenues; and entertainment and media are still fragmented compared with other industries such as pharmaceuticals or aerospace.”

That was last year. Just when the whole Iraq thing started. And last year, I think I agreed with Mr. Wolf’s efficiency conclusion and pharmaceuticals analogy, arguing like he that

“[w]hile the media mogul archetype may be Charles Foster Kane, the better analogy is Jack Welch in his early GE days, in pursuit of strategic fit and maximum returns…” -

or, to make the argument more fun, along the lines of Michael Kinsley’s brilliant article “Six Degrees of America Online” (which is now premium, how surprising…).

Kinsley’s still rather useful point was that hierarchical control of today’s media conglomerates is probably not as dangerous as many may think because, well, it’s incestous and competitive at the same time. AOL owns a chunk of this parent of that joint venture with Microsoft who are in bed with Murdoch in Asia and cooperate with the state run television in Bulgaria. And never forget the promiscous EMI. Kinsley had a point. Upstream or downstream, the convergence value chain does look like a conglomerate soap opera. Or, if you prefer the same conclusion in McKinsey-speech -

For a German example of this just look at some of the people who are going to be on the ProSiebenSat1 Media oversight board once Haim Saban will have finalised his purchase of roughly 25% of the German eyeballs in early June this year. His Malibu neighbour Thomas Gottschalk, who’s a host on ZDF television, and Helmut Thoma, former CEO of RTL+, part of the Bertelsmann owned RTL group, for which he is still apparently still consulting.

But now, after seeing the enourmous power the media had in establishing what behavior is right or wrong on both sides of the transatlantic media rift, I no longer agree. Of course, it is not hierarchical control of large chunks of access to people’s brains per se that is problematic. But I’d say, it does become a huge problem if some big players succeed in setting the agenda for everyone else. Think of the American “WarNow!LetsGoAndKickSomeAss”, or its European antithesis, “NoWarEverBushIsSaddamInDisguise”.

There comes a point when deescalation is just no longer possible, when myths of reality established by the media become an imperative for themselves. When whatever could be true becomes true by pure repetition. And having more, and more smaller, media entitites will allow for a slowdown of this process.

Media is a content business where there are economies of scale primarily in the realm of risk structuring and distribution. Economics of scope primarily exist in cross-media publishing and promotion. So there are reasons for integration. But having witnessed the consequences of the described mechanism on a previously unintelligible scale, I believe efficiency considerations for media corpoations have to be looked at from a different angle if a merger is considered the appropriate therapy.

I am not proposing any policy here. But I’d say media concentration control has become more important now than ever. I am not proposing state interventionism per se – that would probably cause as many problems as it would be trying to solve – but there must be other ways to ease the economic pressures than merging. Less taxes for tv? I don’t know. But I think this is an issue that should be put on the public agenda here, there, and everywhere rather sooner than later.

Having just written this, I can already hear people scream – yeah, but what about the end of the bandwidth restriction, what about the internet, what about those amazing new context filtering technology, blogging – isn’t that offsetting the Murdochs of this world?

Hmm, well. As much as I like doing this, I’d have to say ‘blogging-schmogging‘. The internet is not as decentralised as one would believe (how many internet booksellers do you know off-hand?), and for the time being – despite all the blog-bubble-induced discussion how it is changing the face of journalism on this planent – much of blogging is predominantly a different, extremely useful, qualitative (ie, non statistical) kind of collaborative filtering (like the amazon recommendations), bringing together people – “Other people who looked at this blog also read this article in the NYTimes.” I’m not saying it can’t work.

But it cannot offset the reality shaping power of conventional publishing. At least not yet.

But as everyone knows, there’s no free lunch. Mr Reynold’s said he has begun to suffer from his successes in the blogosphere – admitting and warning that blogging can easily become an addition – “Today, I was in the gym, on the treadmill, watching CNN [...] And as I was watching it, I was composing a blog entry in my head. Then I thought, ‘This really isn’t normal.’”.

Well, it may not be normal yet. But there’s a good reason why it should: Blogging does make a difference.

More precisely, blogging makes the difference between speaking and writing – for two reasons. Firstly, in a personal conversation, people will often say things they haven’t really thought through. That’s because speaking is such a fast, and flexible, way of communicating. Writing usually does take longer than speaking – time usually used to think about what one is actually writing. Thus, once people decide to put their opinions into writing, these opinions will very likely become better formulated as well as better thought through, simply because they spend more time thinking about them.

Secondly, I suppose, forming opinions on the treadmill is more common than Glenn Reynolds thinks. I believe most people will form some sort of opinion when watching CNN in the gym – well, let’s say there was a time when people could rely on CNN to supply sufficient reliable information to be able to form some sort of opinion while watching it in the gym. Thoughts are still free – so as long as they keep their opinions to themselves, they do not need to be neither coherent, nor correct nor concise. But as soon as they tell a friend about an opinion, it is out there, and it might be challenged. They put themselves on the spot.

Enter blogging: In the Blogosphere, they might just talk to a friend over a virtual pint. But chances are their opinions will (possibly) be read by more people than they would talk to in a gym. And chances are, they will be challenged by a larger and therefore more informed public than will usually available in a gym. And once again, I need a better argument to make a point.

Of course, the proliferation of blogging might counteract this effect to a certain extent. Emailing is not considered equal to a hand written letter. So blogging will probably not create the same incentives that writing a comment for the NYTimes would. But nonetheless – if blogging is actually addictive, it is certainly a socially useful addiction. So c’mon. Go and get your fix. Sign up and start writing today.

Let’s face it, it’s not really the case that the amount of possible interpretations of “reality” increase proportionally with the amount of people transmitting and reshaping them. Of course, it’s probably true that some interpretations are plainly wrong and proportionality should not be expected if those we rely on to present a fair picture are actually worth their price. But I would argue that instead of mutual control and even possible cross-fertilisation we can witness a lot of autocatalytic feedbackslopes.

As soon as one possible scheme of interpretation has become predominant, it becomes indeed very difficult to argue against it. This is as true for general media, as it is for scientific paradigms. This is basically what Thomas Kuhn said about scientific progress – it’s about being on the right side of the argument at the right time, not about being right. Because there is no truth apart from what we make true. Now consider the opportunity a general media hype presents for a scientific community in search of outlets for their vision of the world. What would happen?

One possibility is the “New Economy“. Whatever the possible economic content embodied in that concept, there was a time in the late 1990s when everybody wanted to believe that humanity had indeed reached “Business 2.0” (I’d say, if anything, it should have been business 4.0, version 1 being hunting and gathering, 2 the agricultural economy, 3 industrialisation). When the bubble burst, the public felt devceived by the prophets and turned to those whose opinion had been largely ignored just a little bit earlier, those who now sensed that bashing all about “new economy” was the right thing to do (now here you realise why stock market analysts are a high risk group for schizophrenia, being obliged to do bash now and justify their earlier recommendations). I’d say, we’re still in the latter phase of dealing with the recent economic past, as, eg, this article in this week’s Economist demonstrates.

The article reviews a book written by by Stan Liebowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, “and a long-time sceptic of the view that the Internet changes all the rules…“. And it seems to cover a broad range of issues –

“the exaggerated advantages of Internet retailing over conventional retailing; the false claim that the Internet’s lower costs would give Internet firms bigger profits; the inadequacies of the broadcast-television model of advertising revenues; the poorly understood questions of copyright and digital-rights management. But the crux of the book is two chapters devoted to attacking the theory of lock-in. This was the notion that caused the biggest mistakes – and the area where many economists were most at fault.

The Economist’s author clearly believes in the last notion as the rest of the article is devoted to an explanation thereof. But I don’t. Quite to the contrary, I’d argue that the argument was (and thus is) right and that all the other problems (of business judgement) have been far more serious.

It’s not that economists have been wrong to point out that network effects are crucial for a lot of information based business models and being first to market is thus a crucial element in a business strategy. Likewise, if that is case, there is a possibilty for customer lock-in because of high switching costs which will offset the losses incurred during the roll-out phase when getting to a critical mass of customers was the most important thing. There is nothing wrong with this argument.

Liebowitz’ argument is based on a distinction between weak lock-in and strong lock-in. In the Economist’s words:

As the story was told, Internet lock-in happens largely because of network effects. When the value of a product to consumers increases with the popularity of the product, that is a network effect. (A telephone is worthless if you own the only one; the wider the network, the more useful a phone becomes.) Given strong network effects, a company that gains a big share of the market will be protected from competition from late-movers. Even a plainly better product may fail, because people, much as they may prefer it in itself, will wait for others to buy it first. The implication for business is that moving first is all-important. In refuting this, Mr Liebowitz emphasises the distinction between two kinds of lock-in. The question of compatibility is central to both. One kind of lock-in arises simply because switching to a new product involves a cost beyond the purchase price: costs of learning how to use it, for instance, or the difficulty of using it alongside products you already own. Mr Liebowitz calls this self-incompatibility, or weak lock-in. But there is also strong lock-in. This arises if a new product is incompatible with the choices of other consumers – and if, because of network effects, this external incompatibility reduces the value of the product.

The point is that weak lock-in is very common, indeed pervasive. Many new products have to overcome self-incompatibility. People do not buy a new computer every three months even though the product is improving all the time. Learning to use a new word processor is a bore; for most users, a rival has to be much better, not merely a bit better, to be worth the trouble. Note that if slightly better products are rejected because of self-incompatibility, this is not inefficient: it would be inefficient to buy such a product, incurring all the costs, unless the improvement was big enough to justify it. To repeat, weak lock-in is nothing new.

Strong lock-in is different, because of the network aspect. Strong lock-in means that consumers won’t move to a new and much better product unless a lot of others jump first. If they could somehow agree to move together, they would all be better off. But they cannot. Strong lock-in reflects a failure of co-ordination, it causes economic losses, and in theory it does create opportunities for decisive first-mover advantage. But how common is it, even in the new economy? Mr Liebowitz is forthright on this. Strong lock-in is not merely uncommon, he says, there is actually no known instance.

The lock-in literature leans heavily on just two examples: the persistence of the supposedly inferior QWERTY keyboard (see article) and the triumph of the VHS video standard over the supposedly superior Betamax. Both examples, Mr Liebowitz shows, turn out to be bogus. The QWERTY keyboard is about as fast to use as the most plausible alternatives, and VHS had important non-network advantages over Betamax – notably, longer tapes. Neither case shows strong lock-in.

OK, now let’s see – there’s about a hundred different stories out there concerning the alleged efficiency or non-efficiency of the QWERTY keyboard (which was allegedly designed to reduce typing speed because of technical issues in mechanical typewriters). Pick and choose your preferred one. And VHS? longer tapes than Betamax? From a band-length perspective Siemens’ Video 2000 was clearly the best product. I still have an eight-hour-tape somewhere. VHS is a clear example of network effects, but the explanation is not technical superiority. It was content.

Don’t ask me why but there were much more films available on VHS than on Beta or any other system. So more and more people picked VHS to be able to benefit from that choice. The more people chose it, the more attractive it became to even more late adopters. VHS is a clear example of lock-in. Strong or weak? I don’t think that dichotomic distinction is useful. There are weaker and stronger lock-ins. VHS is an example for a stronger one. Microsoft is an example for a stronger one – one could say, one with a interperson compatibility issue, as opposed to an “intra-person” compatibility issue, as the word processor example used above.

And these aren’t common effects? Think of Amazon.com’s recommendations, a service I have often used. They are based on a system called collaboritve filtering, which relies heavily on a critical mass of consumers. Think of p2p applications – you need a lot of people in such a service to be able to find the stuff you want. The more people find the stuff they want, the more will use the service.

Now switching file sharing applications is not particularly difficult for most users. But there’s a reason only a handful of useful filesharing applications exist at a time, some in niche markets, like Edonkey, where a lot of (pirated) movies are swapped.

You get my point. It’s not the wrong principle. It has been the wrong application which has caused financial desaster in so many cases. Network effects/rising returns and lock-in (in whichever way) are a lot more important for information based businesses than for car manufacturers. They have very limited problems of collective action, most of which have been dealt with in a legal way.

But it is important to emphasise that neither network effects nor customer lock-in are the only conditions for success in the cyber space. For some businesses they may be sufficient, but a useful product or service is still what people pay money for. As long as it is free, a lot of people will consume a lot of stuff. If they have to pay for it, things are different.

But let me say it again. The failures are not about wrong economics. But about their misapplication.