It’s been going on for over a week - I think I’m going mad.  At dusk through twilight, every night. I’m faintly aware of some rustling - a movement behind me or beside me. Focused, as I am, on the computer screen in front of me I only catch the narrowest of glimpses as I turn sharply to look where I thought I heard something.

I think I see things in the corner of my vision - darting hither and yon. I start questioning my grip on reality - things are beginning to crumble.

Then one night I awake in a start. Fully awake in that semi-panicked lucidness one experiences when alarms go off. Only, there were no alarms, merely a scratching. The scratching against cardboard. I thought it was coming from the alley-way outside my door. This was odd, certainly, but it seemed truly bizarre my brain could interpret that as a threat.

Then I realized, ominous, that the scratching came not from the out of doors but from my kitchen.

So, with trepidation I enter the kitchen and reach for the lightswitch. As soon as the lights blink on there is silence, merely the softest of thuds punctuating the cessation of the infernal “scritch scritch scritch”.

Nothing stirs. I cast about looking for a probable source - bleary eyed fatigue coming upon me rapidly. I find nothing. Frustrated and more than a little wary, I return to my quarters - closing the door and blocking the threshold.

This evening, I sat, aglow with the victory over a vanquished final exam.  Feasting on the finest muffins and donuts in all the land I luxuriated for an evening’s recreation on the internet.

My reverie was perturbed by the rustling of plastic - like someone stepping on a grocery bag. Then from the crevace between a Rubbermaid container tub and my counter something emerged.

From the shadowy depths it came, unhurried, unafraid. It came out, blinking, into the low-carbon footprint light and cast its gaze upon me.

I stopped what I was doing to turn and face my foe.

He was filled with trickery, he’s beady black eyes filled with the mischief of thousands of generations of his kin. I stared silently back at him. Neither of us knew what to say - so we said nothing.

We knew then, the war was on.

In this first phase I’m attempting an end-run. I hope to take him alive, so I may parade his shame before he is exiled.

As you can see here - I’ve made a fiendish entrapment device to capture my devilish adversary.

He merely alights atop my strategically placed box of Pirates of the Burning Sea CSG to gain access to the device wherein lies the butter of peanuts.

He simply slips through the aperture and his fate is sealed.

This is but the first phase in what may be a prolonged battle of attrition against a wiley foe.

While the odds are not good, I am confident that in the end - I shall be victorious.

The forces are arranged, gambits made - and so, the game begins.

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I should disclose that I do not own a television and haven’t read a newspaper with intent for at least a couple of years - I’ve perused some online articles of various publication (almost all American) but a physical dead tree hasn’t smuged my fingers in a long while.

Do I miss it? No - I don’t miss dealing with heaping piles of recycling. I also don’t like mucking about with the physical paper itself.

When the National Post publishes articles like this one (thanks David Eaves). It really cements some journalists as ignorant blowhards with an incumberance of verbiage and a dearth of knowledge and capacity. They still haven’t figured out that their job is easy, that’s why everyone is doing it.

I think people tend to forget that newspapers are assembled by former journalism students, not domain experts. People writing in papers are not exactly the brilliantly intelligent geniuses who go off and discover DNA, invent the world wide web or micro-loans - they write stories about stuff they saw or stuff other people saw. Hardly the premise for expert analysis.  How else could one explain the painful factual errors? The jaw-dropping oversimplifications, or glibness toward a force that will put every self-important key-puncher out of a job in no time flat? Either they are insane, stupid, or liars. They can pick, I’d believe any of the three.

Given that their job is to report on things it’s amazing how poorly they perform even that function - so poorly in fact, that readers are willing to forgo institutional authority to get the news they want rather than what some decrepit out-of-touch editor thinks we need to hear.

The pathetic ego-stroking exercises like the one in the National Post really drive home the fact that journalists actually think they’re smarter than the rest of us - when the simple fact is that journalists are at best as smart as you and me and probably less smart (after all, they’re clinging to a dying business model).

“the market place of ideas is going to be more superficial and unedifying than it already is.”

This is the kind of remark that would get one’s ass kicked in highschool, and for good reason. It’s astonishingly arrogant to suggest that newspapers stand between the world and some alarmist mythology of superficiality. Newspapers are the primary culprits of this insertion of idiocy - how else can you explain Margaret Wente?

Here’s the kicker, the evidence Kay cites in support of the web is regarding investigative journalism - which is the one part of newspapers not under threat. He also talks about resource investment; the whole point of citizens journalism is that they don’t need to invest resources - everything is cheap; that’s how it wins.

Who will be firmly unemployed by the blogosphere? Jonathan Kay and people like him - under-informed op-ed writers who think they’re smarter than their readers. Kay has demonstrated himself incapable of providing sound evidence for his argument, misinterpreting the reality of subject on which he is opining and capping off his demonstration of ignorance with a display of arrogance that puts mine to shame.

People like Kay are killing newspapers faster than the blogosphere - alienating audiences by insulting them is hardly a way to win their loyalty.

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It’s been a while since I wrote about something entirely frivolous so I thought I’d step into the eye of what is turning into a ridiculous storm of controversy - the reaction to the art direction of Diablo III.

One camp loves the new direction and finds it refreshing, original and polished. The other camp argues that it’s only one of those things and is, in fact, Diablo done in the style of World of Warcraft.

Firstly, anyone who argues against the latter is plainly not paying attention. The colour palatte, modelling methods, animation and textures all have a very distinctive Blizzard-fantasy esthetic. That to me, is a neutral statement regarding its quality - some people really like the Blizzard style.

I for one, do not like it in Diablo II. I find it verges on the cartoonish far more frequently than it should - it feels more in line with a saturday morning cartoon show, rather than an M-rated Gothic-fantasy horror RPG . A great deal of effort in Diablo II was placed in establishing atmosphere, place and a real sense of evil in the world around you. This seems like it’s disrupted severely by the design choices made by Blizzard creative staff.

This is hardly surprising, the Schaefer brothers (Creative leads for Diablo) are gone, as is the entire art staff. Chris Metzen and Samwise Didier (Blizzard’s creative leads) are not Diablo artists, and neither of them are particularly flexible illustrators. Each has a very definite style that either works or doesn’t for the material - StarCraft and WarCraft work, Diablo doesn’t. Further, the artists at Blizzard have honed a very particular art style - they’ve literally crafted an entire virtual world with dozens of creature types, scads of items, weapons and armour, mounts, buildings, doodads etc. One can’t expect them to suddenly latch on to a totally different style - especially if producing too much stuff that “doesn’t work” could cost them their jobs.

Good design cannot be rated in a vaccuum - execution should be compared to the message intent. If Blizzard intends to transform Diablo III into something it wasn’t before in terms of its styling, they have probably done the math and found people will like this direction more - Blizzard makes games that sell, if nothing else.

However, my hackles are raised when Blizzard employees claim that the look hasn’t changed - which is a patent lie. It has changed, drastically, to deny it is to deny that I have working vision. They’ve made some mutterings about not revealing content that might be more in keeping with expectations - the fact that this wasn’t what they released tells me it doesn’t exist yet and they’re scrambling to make it.

That’s irrelevant really, they’ve already locked themselves into a great deal of assets of a style inappropriate for Diablo as it was.

The fan reaction against the art direction has been, at best, painful. Too many young men who like loud music have posted on the internet various ill-phrased treatises that have diluted what is, I believe, legitimate concern over the repurposing of a beloved game-franchise.

I like cheese, quite a bit really - but liking cheese doesn’t mean that I want it with everything. The Azerothian art-style has a patina totally ill-equipped to deliver the moody foreboding and horror of Diablo.  Blizzard denying that they’ve WoW-ed Diablo took them down many notches, it’s difficult to respect a company that insults my intelligence. Their partnership with Activision clearly came with that company’s PR indeptitude.

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Many media sources, including MIT’s Technology Review,  arguably a best-in-class publication, believe social networks (like Facebook and MySpace) are not viable businesses. Some go as far to say that social networks don’t make money. (As it says on the cover of the August issue of Tech Review).

Obviously such statements are more supposed to piqued interest more than summarize the reality of the situation. Social networks make piles of money - MySpace will accrue $650 million dollars this year. I can do a lot with $650 million dollars, can you?

To argue that this is “no money” is insanity - the only rational argument that could be presumed is that this sum is less than the potential revenue. This is usually the reasoning of most analysts - using advertising performance metrics of social networks relative to other systems reveals that the CPM (revenue per thousand page-views (literally Cost Per Thousand)) of Facebook and MySpace is significantly less than other content sites.

For anyone familiar with online marketing this is hardly surprising. Any site or application which has a broad, general audience will have a significant dilution in value. Facebook isn’t Google, they don’t have literally everyone of all stripes using their product - they only have the demographic willing/wanting to use social networking sites. This demographic (very young, highly tech and media savvy) is notoriously difficult to monetize using normal CPC advertising - they don’t click on ads and if they do they don’t buy anything when they land; this is bad news for advertisers and lowers the willingness to buy ad space.

Google can benefit from network effects because they cast arguably the widest net on the internet - fat white financiers use Google and so do single-moms; the same can’t be said of MySpace and Facebook with the same degree truth.

Moreover, MyBook has fewer revenue dimensonalities than something like Google - there are advertisers and users - as far as I am aware, application developers can’t hook into MyBook’s advertising and must do it themselves (this may have changed since I last looked into it). So there isn’t a socially networked version of the AdSense, AdWords, AdRank system that creates this amazingly profitable cycle Google has perfected.

MyBook, needs to stop using their audience as the currency and start developing partnerships with application developers through revenue sharing of advertising. In the same way Google gives away approximately 30% of its ad revenues to partners MyBook should be able to accommodate application developers.

Following that they need to produce their answer to AdWords - anybody with 5 minutes and a credit card should be able to launch socially networked intelligently distributed advertisements across the platforms. With distribution based on user behaviour and profile data rather than keywords. If Facebook provided an auction system like Google’s AdWords keyword auction AND an AdRank system they’d see massive increasing ROI on their network - perhaps outstripping MySpace’s earnings due to their less “diluted” audience (MySpace tweens aren’t in command of Visas).

Many observers make an argument like this one. Essentially they argue that social networks need to develop a novel delivery system for advertising content - one that folds into their existing content stream. Curiously, they often cite Google as an example. However, I would note that Google is fastidiously careful about delineating paid advertising from standard content; there’s never any ambiguity. Google won its marketshare because of it had the trust of users (and it melted the stoney hearts of tech journalists) - it did this by not tricking anybody. Facebook contravened this wisdom with it’s disasterous Beacon project.

There’s also the simple argument from the side of advertisers - the administrative overhead of a novel (probably unique) delivery system adds cost to a campaign. They’ve got to re-engineer their creative, adapt to a system and negotiate details particular to just that campaign. Account managers want to make sales and get contracts signed - not handle the configuration minutia of a specialized system.

Deploying a system that uses existing creatives and traditional measurement metrics brings both a simplicity and credibility that a totally new system would lack. Anyone who works in business development needs to compare the opportunity cost of campaigns readily and will often avoid “misfit” campaigns because they can’t know if they’re succeeding or not.

Obviously something like Beacon needs to be deployed to realize the true monetization potential of social networks - but it will probably take the form of socially networked store-fronts embedded into the platform rather than completely external systems. In this sense users would assemble their own virtual shopping-malls by connecting themselves with brands and retailers.

This does not, however, eliminate the need for standard advertising - these methods need to be improved and optimized to leverage the kinds of things social networks know that other content sites don’t or can’t.

The revenue potential for social network sites is tied directly to the trust users have with their social network provider - which MySpace and Facebook have both failed miserably to engender to the same degree as, say, the omnipresent Google.

That said, if such attachment and loyalty can be engendered rather than enforced via walled-garden systems, the earning capacity of social networks is arguably the greatest of the current stock of content channels.

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