A walled garden often serves as a safe haven to rapidly grow a business. In the 90s and early 2000s, we saw AOL expand to near synonymity with the Internet using a walled garden approach. When it stopped working, they faced a choice: Struggle to hold on, or open it up. They chose to keep the walls up, and now AOL is sailing into obscurity, to be quaintly remembered in VH1 specials about the 90s. The new champions of the tech industry now rally behind openness, or at least reluctantly accept it as the only path.

We’re now seeing an attempt at reversing the trend, with efforts spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch to build new walls around a garden that they deem to be too open: The news. They’ve seen walls crumble in the past and they don’t care.  It’s not just posturing; they’re serious. They want to build walls (with payment-based entry) around the news.

The damnedest thing is: It just might work.

If enough credible news sources get on board, paying for news online could become the new way we consume news. Naturally there would be holdouts among consumers, but there have always been those who just pick up a used newspaper and read that. Social media and the Internet makes the news age faster, but let’s not forget that it already aged pretty fast through telephones and word of mouth. The biggest problem is getting enough sources under the banner of payment. Unlike AOL’s low quality, keyword-powered knockoff of the Internet, there’s real value in what Murdoch and co. supply.

Is it enough value to hold together a walled garden? I guess we’ll see. If they attain some small measure of success, they could recruit more news sources to their cause, eventually seeing even more success. The snowball could grow large enough to make paying for the news a smart choice for the consumer.

If it saves investigative journalism and the other services that well-paid journalism provides a society, then it just might be worth the price.

Except, of course, for the part where everyone seemed to miss the most important snippet of the guidelines: Bloggers must clearly and conspicuously disclose any compensation. To me, the entire argument has completely overshot its landing. The consumer, the one to be protected by these rules, is being left out. Terrible assumptions are being made. No guidelines are being put forth.

What ‘clearly and conspicuously’ shouldn’t mean

There’s a certain gestalt to other forms of media that makes disclosure incredibly easy. This is the fine print at the bottom of a magazine ad or the “Paid Actor” notification in a TV commercial. It’s a package deal with the message right there at the bottom. Even if the consumer doesn’t read it, he or she is aware it’s there.

Blog posts, meanwhile, are like the black guy in a horror movie. Shortly after making an appearance, they’re brutally chopped up. After that, most people just see the head, or maybe the head and a trail of blood, then scream and run away.

There’s no gestalt to blog posts, and especially not to blogs as a whole.

• Disclosures at the bottom of posts mean nothing to most users. It’s not like a television ad with extremely small text. Disclosures at the bottom of posts (and especially those that are below the fold) just don’t (and won’t) get read. Much of the time, they won’t be seen.
• Disclosures on another page on the blog are simply ludicrous. Any blog with a bounce rate of less than 50% is doing well on attracting users to other parts of the site. Fedorable’s bounce rate is usually around 60%. That means only 40% make it to another page on Fedorable before leaving, and most of those aren’t going to the About page. In the end, only about 3-6% of Fedorable readers click to get there. This is equivalent to TV commercials only having to disclose 1 out of every 20 times they aired.

Sadly, a lot of bloggers are simply planning on putting two sentences on the end of their thirty-page, boring-as-hell About page. The less people who read it, the better. That’s just unfair to the consumer.

Blogging (and the Internet in general) is a different beast. If we’re going to put forth disclosure guidelines, let’s get it right. Here’s my take on ethical disclosure– not so  much the when or why, but the how.

Guidelines for ethical disclosure in blogging: The abbreviated disclosure message (v1)

Placement within the blog

• Disclosures should be placed after the headline/subheadline but before the content of the post.
• Related disclosures must be on the same page as the content of the post. Abbreviated posting (such as listings in a ‘Related Posts’ widgets) do not need to carry a disclosure. The actual text of the disclosure must be on the page, not linked from elsewhere.

Disclosing for the semantic web

• Disclosures should be placed within <em> or <strong> tags to signify their importance in the document.
• Semantic placement within an article should follow the visual placement (noted above). Disclosures must be part of the page source, and not added with javascript. This is to ensure that users with screen readers or users foregoing javascript have access to a standard method of disclosure.

Abbreviating disclosures

• To retain stylistic flow in their blog posts, bloggers may hide disclosure statements with javascript.
• In place of the message, a standard, short notification of “There is a disclosure associated with this post” with a Read More link can be used.
• The Read More link should reveal the entire notification, which is already semantically part of the document (and not added content from javascript).
• The message should be both hidden and displayed with javascript. Messages should not be hidden by default, unless a suitable alternative means of accessing the disclosure is available for non-javascript users.

Style considerations

• Disclosure statements should maintain the same readability as the body copy of the article including relative font size and background contrast. Disclosures may be plain, bolded or italicized.

Let’s aim for v2

I think my guidelines work pretty well. They make for the same “grain of salt” effect generated by the fine print in TV commercials. The abbreviated disclosure message as a standard would quickly inform consumers that there’s something else to know, without messing up the overall flow of a blog post. It also covers screen reader users or people who are quickly scanning through the blogosphere to find info about a product.

Of course, I might be forgetting certain situations. I do want to fight for the consumer here, but I also don’t want to leave the bloggers out in the cold. What do you think? What would you change or add?

But nope, look elsewhere: It’s farming, of all things.

A succession of popular farming games has hit Facebook this year, starting with myFarm, with the crowds seemingly then jumping to Farm Town, and now pouring into the mega-hit FarmVille. Despite (or because of) its popularity, Farmville has caught some flak for not being an original idea

I’d argue that farming games are clearly now a genre, but that point’s moot anyway, because in my eyes they’re all following in Harvest Moon’s footsteps.

The predecessor

Harvest Moon, developed by Natsume, was released for the Super Nintendo around the time AOL got the idea to start charging a flat monthly rate. Yes, it’s that old but it was truly a great game for its time.  The player managed his or her own farm, growing crops and taking care of animals. There was no social aspect to it at all, of course. In 1996, multiplayer for console games still meant huddling around a TV together with controllers, a feature which Harvest Moon still lacked.

The game was a hit in Japan. There’s been an iteration of the title on every major Nintendo console since then.  It didn’t see as much success in the states, a point which gaming publications attributed to a difference in culture. The Japanese public lived an ultra-urbanized life; Americans didn’t, or at least not to the same degree. Therefore, Americans didn’t want to sit around playing a farming game.

Clearly, they were wrong. Or maybe things have changed that much in the past 13 years. Regardless, the Harvest Moon experience lives on, and not just in the latest installment on the Wii. You have to wonder if Natsume looks at something like Farmville and asks, “Why aren’t we doing that?”

Farming in games

Farming plays a part in a lot of games— not just those with crops, tractors and chickens. Gamers have used the term farming for years to refer to any in-game action which can be repeated over and over to acquire items in a game. In any big online game, you can farm for experience points for your character,  new shiny weapons, and gold too. Gold farmers do this as a full-time job and earn real money for it. Farming will usually fill a large portion of a player’s in-game time— even in a game that, on the surface, deals with fire balls and acid-breathing dragons.

It’s curious then, that farming games, games that make no effort to hide the farming behind a fantasy gameplay mechanic, are such a hit. It could be that farming games offer the simplest analogy to the non-gamer. They simply say, “In this game, you farm for stuff. Like a real farm.” It’s an easier concept to swallow than “In this game, you kill ogres, which give you a mix of items, gold and character experience which you can collect over time.”

They’re both farming in the gaming sense. Just one is literal. Sort of.

Are farming games pulling in casual gamers? Yes. Are they educating them about gaming in general? Certainly. Will these players get tired of the basic analogy and move on to different games? Well, I hope so.  That’d be great for gaming.

Looking elsewhere

Farmville isn’t the only mega-hit farming game, nor is the farming game trend limited to Japan and the United States. Happy Farms, a Chinese online farming game, is seeing exactly two million sign-ups a day.

Why “exactly”? Well, because they had to limit their sign-ups to avoid drowning in a sea of new players. You can read all about it in this interesting article. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes: People are going crazy over this game. It seems to play like Farmville or the others, but with a feature that lets you steal crops from other players. Players remain logged in for hours and hours to drive away potential thieves.

It will be interesting to see if any of the American games copy the stealing mechanic. People are already addicted to facebook; I can’t imagine how bad it could get with virtual eggplants at stake.

After mulling it over, I can’t help but think it’s bad advice. Here’s why.

The wisdom of crowds

We will often handwave the mindless comments from naysayers, only to turn around and happily embrace the equally mindless comments from people who seem to do nothing but compliment. There’s no difference in the value of the comments, but one flatters our egos, and thus is recorded.

In the end, we shouldn’t be dismissing anything, especially when it comes to feedback from a large body of commentators.

Plop a jar of marbles in front of someone and ask them to guess the count, and they’ll probably be completely off. Average the guesses of a hundred people, however, and your result will be pretty close to the actual amount.

Some people will guess way too high. Some way too low. But look at the big picture, the average, and suddenly you realize that their guesses all made a meaningful contribution, even though on an individual level they each would be pretty useless.

The middle way

In Buddhism, they call it the middle way– a path of moderation that sits between two extremes.

Look for it when you receive feedback online. The extremes will always be there, and the answer will always lie somewhere (usually directly) in the middle.

Don’t get upset with the trolls or overly delighted with the yes men. Accept both and use them to paint a picture of how people (with an emphasis on the plural) feel about your product.

And remember: You only run into trolls when you cross bridges. If you encounter them, you at least know you’re getting somewhere.

We decided not to use the IvyLees theme (that would be trite, right?), instead opting for something a bit more plain and clean-cut. So we went to the Release Style tool in our social media newsroom and changed it to the “IvyLees Lite” preset, with the “Plastic” column style.

And here’s what the release looks like after the change:

Looks great! Since the colors are customizable, you can get any look you want. Here, we see a softer side of IvyLees:

Your release styles are local to a newsroom, so when you change it once, it applies to all of your releases: past, present and future. Changing it again is just as easy. It’s also one of our free features. Isn’t that neat? Have fun customizing!

It’s conversation vomit. It’s when an aggregator eats everything around the Internet about a blog post, comes back to the blog post, and pukes it all over the real, actual conversation happening there.

When it comes to comments on the Internet, context is everything. Hacker News will give you a certain type of comment. Digg will net you other types. Twitter will get you a bunch of retweets that are, for the most part, duplicates of one message. And of course Youtube comments will slowly chip away at your faith in humanity. Don’t subject your blog readers to that.

Leave these comments where they belong: in their communities, the places that provide context.

Disqus is a great example of a product that separates the comments after aggregation. If you really need to include your Twitter mentions, it’s a must-have. For an example, see how Chris Brogan uses it effectively on his blog.

If you haven’t, here’s a summary: Guy watches guitar get broken by baggage handlers. Guy gets nowhere with customer service. Guy makes suspiciously-high-production-value music video on Youtube complaining about his treatment.

And the crowd goes wild. It’s at nearly 400,000 views already.

I have to wonder if Dave Carroll, the man behind the video, was just that pissed, or if he’s some kind of marketing genius. Or maybe a little of both.

United has since responded in an attempt to suppress the raging wildfire. I don’t know exactly what they did and I don’t care. It’s too late now.

I used to think I was alone in this harsh insensitivity towards corporate responses like this. After all, they’re doing something, right? A quick glance at the Youtube comments, or at many of the blog posts on this ordeal, shows me I’m actually among the least angry now.

Too little, too late. Is this the new face of social media? Should big companies start investing more in prevention, and less in cure?

Then again, for the viral video, perhaps it’s appropriate that there is no cure.

Does this smell like bullshit to anyone else?

I’ve looked around the net for statistics on just how many online, on-site (i.e. sites like Amazon or Newegg) reviews are real, written by users who had no conflicts of interest. I can’t find anything. Are 10% of reviews planted by scoundrel “marketing” firms? 25%? 50%? Even more?

How could we even find out? Where do we start in this epic fight against evil? I have some ideas.

Language

You can guess, with 83% accuracy, whether the writer of a given text is male or female. Surely we can use a method like this to detect when people are raving a bit too much about a product, or recalling way too many details about their recent dining experience.

Men and women are mostly the same. Online shills are the lowest form of human life. They should stick out like a sore thumb.

Location

We can tell where reviews are coming from. If we have particularly prolific IP addresses pumping out reviews, can’t we weed them out? Joe P. Normal isn’t going to write 200 reviews a week for a select few products across multiple websites.

I’m sure that some of the major sites are doing this already, but once again I can’t find much information on it. This is something that should be publicized more. (And, please, if you have information you’d like to volunteer, comment!)

Fighting online shills is a noble cause. If you’re doing it, let the world know!

Shame

It’s no longer enough to simply delete shill reviews. We have to do something to discourage the practice in general.

My first suggestion is simple:

We can’t really bring the stocks back (right?), but the concept of public humiliation as punishment is still very real, especially in the realm of public relations and online marketing.

And there’s another problem here: These shills, as I’ve already noted, are some of the most despicable people alive. They’re shameless, leaving us with just one target: Their clients.

Even the most unscrupulous PR people around know that it usually pays to tell the truth. Why? Because if you lie and it gets out, it’s that much more damaging (and thus, expensive). We need to make it so there’s a high cost associated with shilling.

Let’s fight back

In a world that’s all a-twitter, the problem of shills is going to grow just as fast, or even faster, than the expanding sphere of social media. We need a system set in place to fight back and protect the integrity of online opinion.

What do you think?

Every now and then, someone tells us, “But you’re not helping with this!” (Or that. Sometime’s it’s that.)

Well, I assure you: We’re planning on it. Right down to the iHandshake, an app for the iphone that shakes hands for you. (If you steal this idea after reading this blog post, I’m coming after you!)

After that, we’re asked, “Why start with Presskit’n and online newsrooms”?

And the answer always boils down to one thing: Presence.

Presence is incredibly important online. You can be present in a lot of places, including Youtube, Facebook and other such sites. When it comes to standardizing your message and getting it out into the world, the first presence you should have is an online newsroom (Well, before that, a website, but we’re talking specifics here).

So, before you conduct a PR campaign, ask yourself: Am I present?

And now, today, at this moment, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them.

From the PR side of things, they seem pretty pointless. If you boneheadedly send them out to enough people, your pitches will probably get you the wrong type of coverage. Mediocre press releases also won’t make for good portfolio material. Usually, the writing style employed in these types of releases doesn’t even leave room for any creative Oomph.

On the management side of things, however, the ever-so-boring “Vice President of _____ hired to re-energize _____” releases start making a lot of sense. They’re good for morale. They make the new hire feel like part of the team while letting all the non-newbies get a feel for who the new guy (or gal) is. Finally, they’re a piece of the company’s history.

One of the wonders of social media is that it molds to so many uses. With a social media release, we can share our company news with pretty much the exact people (and amount of people) who would be interested in it, without personally alienating the rest. Easy online newsroom technology takes care of the chronicling, so we can easily look back and see what happened when.

This concept is not limited to public relations. On the Tonight Show, Conan O’ Brien has been running a great segment called Twitter Tracker (see it on Hulu) where he makes fun of how mundane and boring a lot of the “best” tweets are.

One of the tweets “tracked” and read for the benefit of the Tonight Show viewership is Ashton Kutcher tweeting about getting groceries. As mundane as it is, it works in social media simply because somebody will be interested. And most of those somebodies are the people subscribed to Ashton Kutcher. I won’t report the number here, because by the time you read this it will be off by tens of thousands. That’s a lot of mediocre.

So go ahead and publish that news release in a social media setting. Some might make fun of you “getting groceries” but they’re probably missing the point– and also probably not subscribed to your newsroom.