This week Tamiz made wave with an appeal against Google, which he was trying to sue over defamatory comments about him made on Blogger posting. In a case that goes back to 2011, Tamiz had argued that Google was effectively the publisher of a series of comments calling him, falsely, a thief and a drug dealer, and should have deleted them as soon as they were made aware of them. Google did delete the comments, but only after a five week gap.

Tamiz is familiar with online controversy: one reason he was a lightning rod for angry comments in the first place was because, he stepped down as a local election candidate in 2011 after calling Margate’s women “sluts” on Facebook. And so, when he did not originally win his case — the first judge ruling that Google was not the publisher of the comments — he appealed to a higher court. There Google’s inaction was found to be troubling, though it did not actually overturn the libel ruling itself.

As the Financial Times reported:

Although Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Sullivan agreed with the original ruling that Google was not the primary or secondary publisher of the content it hosted, they said it was “at least arguable that some point after notification Google became liable for continued publication of the material”.

The Lords Justice likened the situation to a 1930s court case in which a golf club was held responsible for defamatory material left on its noticeboard because it failed to remove it after it was notified.

Cue the shrill sound of the press screeching into action. “Blogger.com libel case opens door for internet giant being required to monitor users’ posts”, squealed the Daily Mail with barely contained delight. Except, as it outlines in the story, the headline is essentially trolling — Tamiz was denied his libel claim and asked to pay 50 percent of Google’s legal costs: likely to be a tidy sum. And it’s a stretch to suggest, as much commentary does, that this is another step towards internet regulation — asking a company to respond to notices of illegal content may not be popular (just see the DMCA) but it is reasonable to expect them to comply with local jurisdiction.

Still, Tamiz — and the kerfuffle around his case — does show the amount of energy being expended around online libel in Britain right now.

Defamation laws in the U.K. are notoriously harsh, in large part because they lean in favor of the plaintiff and put the burden of proof on the defendant: it’s a case of “prove your comments were true” rather than “prove their comments were false”.

And the precedent for defamation in online publishing stretches back 15 years, to the case of Godfrey v Demon Internet Service, in which a physics lecturer sued an ISP over comments made in a Usenet group it hosted: the ISP settled the case, because a pre-trial ruling intimated that it was potentially culpable since, despite knowledge of the situation, refused to act for 10 days. Although the award was small — just £15,000 in 1997, the equivalent of around $33,000 today — it has laid the groundwork in Britain.

It’s one major reason many media companies employ battalions of comment moderators, and carefully police the comment threads on their own stories.

But remember, we are all media companies now. And that means that we are all open to the same set of rules. There have also been plenty of high-profile cases on Twitter and Facebook against individual users, but so far there has not been much success in taking on platform providers themselves. Just last week a judge in Northern Ireland ruled that while anonymous comments made on Facebook were defamatory, Facebook itself was not liable.

Still, with Godfrey in the background and more and more cases coming along, you can understand why people see Tamiz’s case as another push at a brick in the wall between platforms and publishing.

Yes, everyone’s a media company now: and eventually that will go for Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest as much as it does you and me.

Let me say that again: a door-to-door salesman.

I think that’s a first, for me at least. While lots of internet services market heavily — television ads, radio spots, billboards, leaflets and print — I have never come across this sort of feet-on-the-street approach before. Trying to prevent customer churn is one thing, but this just has the ring of desperation about it… and comes as another piece of anecdotal evidence that suggests Lovefilm’s feeling incredible pressure from Netflix.

When Netflix launched in the UK and Ireland a year ago, it was a clear who would be in its sights. Reed Hastings and his team may say they are targeting the bigger pay-TV services, such as Rupert Murdoch’s Sky, but their first hurdle was undoubtedly trying to surpass the Amazon-owned rival.

Lovefilm has been competing where it can, particularly in trying to head Netflix off at the pass by signing exclusive content deals with Universal, Fox, and others. But it’s also trying extremely hard to defend itself by stopping customers from fleeing: when I tried to unsubscribe a while back I realized it was one of those irritating services that forces you to phone up to cancel (a surefire sign that I will never go back).

And you can’t blame them: it would take a brave gambler to bet against the American company right now.

Netflix is storming on almost all fronts, from its acclaimed original programming, to its balance sheet: Wall Street loves it again, as it finally recovers from the farcical series of events it inflicted upon itself in 2011.

And that is having an impact on its rivals.

Former Lovefilm boss Adam Valkin told me last year how the company had feared Netflix since 2004. And though Netflix still has some way to go — it’s still unclear whether Netflix is making inroads against its real targets, the broadcasters, and claims almost dubiously high membership numbers across the British Isles — it definitely has some crucial competitors, at least, running scared.

The Nieman Journalism Lab called it a “movement”, which seems quite a grand term for two sites announcing similar but different things on the same day, but both Politico and TechCrunch are opting to move their commenting systems away from Facebook. At the very same time, waves were being created in the UK as the newly-relaunched Manchester Evening News shifted to a commenting system that required users to have a Facebook account. At the heart of all this is the old canard — would forcing users to comment with something closer to their real identity reduce instances of trolling?

It seems to me that what Politico and TechCrunch have in common is a stubborn belief that the quality of debate underneath their articles would improve if only they could find the right commenting platform.

At Politico, Dylan Byers is putting his faith in technology:

“Disqus gives you the ability to up-vote and down-vote comments and thread responses. By default, high quality comments will filter to the top, and poor quality ones will not show up on the page.”

A view immediately debunked in the first comment left on the piece, where Adrian Lowe pointed out:

“That’s if people actually vote for them. And if people are trolling in voting, then low quality comments will be seen at the top. So, ‘by default’ high quality comments will not necessarily rise to the top.”

You only have to look at the green and red arrows on the MailOnline site to see how sometimes it is the scum that rises, not the cream.

TechCrunch’s attitude to their below-the-line contributors was made clear by the image they chose to accompany their announcement: “I miss you asshole”

They seem to be ascribing the behavior of their users to the platform they employ, not to the way they are goaded into commenting by the articles they write. As my ex-colleague Meg Pickard says:

“If you write a provocative article, you can expect people to be provoked.”

The Manchester Evening News move is in the opposite direction, hoping that a shift to using Facebook identity will improve the commenting experience on the site. There’s no doubt that restricting people to only using Facebook identities will exclude some users, but David Higgerson wrote an eloquent personal blog post about the shift: “Much ado about Facebook”.

“Most of the people who have complained…seem to come from a starting point that news websites should allow free-for-all comments on all stories, and that the ‘community’ can say what it likes under any name it likes. I don’t see it like that.”

My own experience with using the Facebook comments plug-in under news content was within the Guardian Facebook app.

I had rather hoped that by opening two commenting threads underneath each article — one on Facebook, and one on the Guardian site — we’d be able to prove once and for all whether one or other led to better interaction. In the end, it appeared that actually the tone set early on in a comment thread looked like it influenced comments much more than anything intrinsic about the format or identity system used.

There’s no doubt that software design and features do influence community behaviors, but not as much as decent community management and personal engagement from journalists does. In 2011 my friend Mary Hamilton wrote a very thorough blog post looking at the responsibility of news organizations to not just provide a commenting space, but to also participate and join in that space:

“If you don’t set examples of good behavior, or reward [commenters], or empower the regular visitors to police their community by telling them the rules, your community will make its own rules, and chances are you won’t like them.”

She described switching tech platforms in search of an answer to bad community problems as akin to “laying Astroturf over an unkempt, unmaintained garden because you don’t like the color of the wildflowers.”

She also said:

“The news industry can’t simply automate away its duty to respond to users. Small publishers and bloggers for the most part understand this, and — more crucially — so do our users. These are human beings at the other end of the internet, talking in our spaces, and we need to start treating them that way.”

Still, the golden rule of newspaper website comment systems is “Don’t be a dick” — and no technology choice can enforce that.

This was first posted at Martin’s personal blog, Currybet.

Martin is principal consultant at Emblem, which provides user experience design and training services. He was previously UX Lead at The Guardian, which included working directly with Facebook on the news organization’s Facebook app. Martin also currently provides some design and consultancy services to Trinity Mirror, publisher of the Manchester Evening News.

Guardian News and Media Ltd., the parent company of the Guardian newspaper, is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media

The site, which lets people share their favorite music track-by-track, has proven an underground hit online less than a year after launching publicly: more than 100,000 users have signed up, sharing over 900,000 songs. But the London-based service was started as a pet project inside music data company The Echo Nest — and it’s now exploring what happens next.

“Up until this point we’ve been incubated by The EchoNest, but now we’re looking at options for spinning out in our own right,” creator Matthew Ogle told me.

It’s been an unusual course for This Is My Jam so far — in fact, Ogle says that the site “wasn’t supposed to happen for a whole bunch of reasons”. Chief among them? The fact he’d decided to move out of the online music industry after leaving his role as head of web product at Last.fm back in 2010.

“Despite swearing off online music forever, in less than a year I’d been convinced by the awesome folks at The Echo Nest that we could do some cool stuff together,” he says. “They didn’t hire me to make Jam, they hired me in a dual role to be their man in Europe — evangelizing at hackdays, talking to developers — and also to be a kind of internal product skunkworks, prototyping stuff based on new APIs and using that to spark new direction that The Echo Nest could be going with their data.”

But when it turned out that Jam, an idea he’d been throwing for a while, had more going for it than the other skunkworks proposals, Ogle’s focus switched and the parent company funded development. Jam now has four full-time staff, as Ogle brought on former Last.fm refugee Hannah Donovan, and engineers Ralph Cowling and Andreas Jansson.

The failure of frictionless

The site is one of my favorite services to have launched in the last year or two, and it’s one I’ve found myself going back to more often than I expected. Posting your favorite tracks and browsing the tracks of others turns the site into a curious mixture of status update and radio station. It’s a great tool for telling people about the music you like — lots of people use it to showcase their mood, for example. But it’s also a treasure trove of music, allowing you to dig around in the tastes of others. Because it’s almost exclusively focused on what people are listening to now, it has a real-time quality to it… yet the conscious decision that goes into making your choice means that the end result is more personal than Pandora but way more curated than Spotify’s frictionless sharing.

In fact, says Ogle, the failure of frictionless sharing to provide anything more than a fleeting dip into a raging river of data left an interesting gap for Jam to fill.

“I couldn’t quite believe that in 2011 that social song sharing wasn’t just a solved problem,” he explains. “One thing that we talked about at last.fm a lot — you know that amazing moment in real life when someone grabs you and say ‘you have to hear this song, check it out’ and they put the headphones in your ears or put a record on. Anyone who cares about music even a little bit has had that moment.”

“We’re in this golden age of social media, we’re always connected to all of our friends at all times, and there’s big data around music — Spotify and Facebook have basically taken scrobbling to the mainstream — [so] there should be more ways than ever for me to go ‘I want to hear some new tunes, what are my friends listening to?’ and get good stuff… not just whatever they happened to accidentally listen to on Spotify. Conversely there was no way for me to share a song that people would still see five hours later. Everything was being forced in real-time.”

Curation/exploration

Donovan, who heads up the site’s design, points out that isn’t just vanity that drives — the performative aspect of social media where you are showing off your taste to others — but a sort of shared curation where users collaborate to uncover interesting tracks, point to classics or dig up forgotten material.

“This was actually really cool when we discovered this happening, because there’s no other music service on the internet where it’s OK to have old stuff mixed in too,” she says. “Either everything is organized around the music data thing — singles live inside albums that live inside artists — or it’s promotional in some respect, in which case they’re always pushing the latest album or the latest single that just came out.”

“On top of that I think there’s something around our culture today that’s driven by newness, and how things on the internet always have to be the latest and the newest. I heard somebody say when you’re curating something, you don’t necessarily want just the latest or the newest, you want to dig up old things that were really great and put them back in context alongside newer things, or mixed in with other stuff. That’s the job of the curator and that’s what makes it really enjoyable for the user or the observer.”

“We thought about curation a lot when we were starting Jam. The overall effect is that our users became the curators of this music, and we wound up with this lovely space where you could get Prince and Fleetwood Mac right next to the latest trendy pop band.”

That is, in turn, helping the product develop further forward. Coming very soon are some new additions to the site’s Explore pages, which will offer up some new ways for users to browse the site. Explore categories will include “Breaking” (songs that have been jammed for the first time recently, and subsequently shared), “Rare” (songs that have been jammed only once), and another one that lists just the first jams of newly-registered users. Although it could act as a way for users to introduce themselves to the service, the first jams could also become a sort of Greatest Hits package.

“A lot of people sign up and start with their favorite song of all time,” says Ogle.

It’s already been documented that much of the information spreading through mainstream and social media at the time was incorrect, but there was one particular moment that stood out for me: the misidentification of the shooter.

As events unfolded, everybody rushed to find out who the killer was. Law enforcement, confused themselves, appeared to name a New Jersey resident called Ryan Lanza as a possible suspect. And once the media had a name, they did the next natural thing: they turned to Facebook.

Fox News happily splashed the face of Ryan Lanza everywhere that “sources identified Ryan Lanza, 24, as the gunman”. And here’s a tweet that went out to CNN’s 6.7 million followers:

CNN’s @susancandiotti reports the suspect is Ryan Lanza and is in his 20s. The latest on @cnn TV and our live blog: on.cnn.com/WbG4H9

— CNN (@CNN) December 14, 2012

At this point, my stream — like yours, probably — was filled with links to Ryan’s profile page. Suddenly a huge lens was focused on the man’s Facebook presence, and by extension that spread to his contacts. Ryan, meanwhile, protested his innocence as a huge swell of incoming messages. One Redditor said that even Ryan’s friends were receiving “hundreds (literally) of hate-filled messages.”

Except, as we know now, it was not Ryan who had committed the atrocity at Sandy Hook: it was his brother Adam, who had murdered their mother before going to the school and opening fire.

The media had got it all kinds of wrong.

Facebook: the lazy researcher’s dream

Whether or not Ryan Lanza chooses to act against the media organizations, agencies and individuals who misidentified him, I don’t know. He’s probably got a lot to deal with right now: the deaths of two family members, trying to comprehend how or why his brother committed such an appalling crime.

More broadly, though, the incident casts some important light on a problem that’s coming up more and more: the increasing reliance on Facebook as a primary research tool for journalists stuck at their desks.

As Facebook has ballooned, it has become the biggest open identification mechanism in the world. That means it’s also become the first port of call for anyone wanting to get information on somebody — things like personal details and photographs — fast. Scanning somebody’s profile for information is a tool deployed by reporters, editors, bloggers, stalkers and busybodies alike.

Sometimes it’s accurate, important, and revealing… especially when triangulated with other information. But often it’s a crutch for those who are rushing to get information, or who are too lazy to do independent confirmation or research.

There are plenty of other examples of prior art here. Most recently, the Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman went hard at Buzzfeed after it ran an unflattering profile piece that seemed to be built in large part around a fake Facebook profile.

The more Facebook becomes our de facto identity service, the more often this is likely to happen — even if the way we’re using it is wrong, and often wildly irresponsible.

Truth or consequences

The problem is that Facebook isn’t just a photograph, or a name, or a location. It’s a conduit directly into somebody’s life. Once you make people searchable, you make them contactable — and sometimes that can be like standing at the gates of hell. The hate mail, anger and invective that can be directed on an individual online is something nobody should underestimate.

The sort of intensely-focused attention that the media can suddenly dump on somebody’s head can be devastating. You only have to look at the sad suicide of Jacintha Saldana, the nurse who fielded a prank call to the hospital housing the Duchess of Cambridge to see how it’s impossible to predict how somebody will react to being in the eye of the storm.

Sometimes, the way social media smooths the path for big errors can be tackled. In Britain, the case of a politician wrongly implicated by the BBC in a child abuse scandal has led to legal action against those who named him on social media — and reverberated so profoundly that the chief of the BBC resigned over the mistake.

But while people may claim that the internet is self-correcting, others have explained that such a belief is little more than a myth. Errors, even brief ones, can live for a long time — and getting it wrong can have serious consequences.

So what do we do?

In a broader sense, we cannot stop errors from happening — as Mathew said yesterday, it’s just the way the media works now. You can’t stop the police getting the facts wrong, and you can’t stop CNN reporting the wrong name.

But on an individual basis, we can make a difference: by realizing that our actions do have consequences.

Posting somebody’s personal details online is often little more than incitement. Leaving an abusive message on their Facebook page, or tweeting abuse, helps nobody but you. And in cases of mistaken identity like this, your actions can actively make the situation worse.

I don’t know that we’ll ever stop these mistakes. But just because everybody else is doing it, you don’t have an excuse. A mob is formed by individuals — and if you don’t want to be culpable for the mob’s mistakes, then it’s your responsibility not to join in.

And yet, for all that text, there was very little heft. It detailed problems and offered a few solutions — but at no point did the inquiry really attempt to tackle the deep questions.

Sure, the report recommends replacing the UK’s current system of self-regulation for print media with a new, officially-sanctioned body that’s intended to guarantee freedom of the press while also holding outlets accountable for decisions. Beyond that, however, it feels like there was little to no understanding displayed of how the publishing world is changing — and how that is disrupting the news business it was supposed to investigate.

And this position isn’t just ignorance, either.

It seems to be deliberate.

Robert Andrews had a great blow-by-blow on how inquiry chair Lord Justice Leveson had specifically avoided many of the most important questions that news organizations are trying to address right now.

The world of online publishing, surely the future of almost all the organizations he was looking at, was dismissed with a careless wave. Questions that need answering were ignored: Where do the lines blur between news and not-news? What is the role of social networking? How is information being liberated from its traditional forms? What constitutes an act of journalism? These are topics that pre-occupy many forward thinkers in the media and yet none of these seem to have been dealt with because of the misguided opinion that “most blogs are rarely read as news or factual, but as opinion and must be considered as such”.

In fact, we all know information flows in ways that go way beyond the capability of traditional news-gathering organizations. Newspapers are weak, dying or dead — and those that are not are turning into something very different.

They have been broken by changes in supply and demand, turned upside down by the free availability of information, and knocked sideways by the internet’s ability to crush borders and barriers. And yet here, a huge public inquiry focused on wrongdoing ended up focused one tiny sliver of a much broader industry.

Leveson should have thought hard about the way that change has happened, because it is important to help the press be better in the future. Instead, he abdicated responsibility and focused on problems that already have solutions.

After all, there are many other ways to right the wrongs of phone hacking and invasions of privacy — and I’m not even talking about leaving it to the market to decide. The market’s role as a righter of wrongs is largely mythical: after all, if the market was able to reflect the moral outrage of phone hacking l, it took Rupert Murdoch just a few months between Rupert Murdoch’s decision to kill The News of the World and the launch of a Sunday edition of The Sun, which has already become Britain’s most popular weekend outlet. The market is not a perfect machine: it can be perverted.

No, I mean that there is plenty of legal recourse available. Breaking into people’s voicemail is criminal activity: it can be punished as such (and it is). Wrongly inferring that public figures are pedophiles is something the courts can deal with (and they are).

Instead we got a report that apparently made no effort to understand the deep corruption at the heart of many media organizations, or the pressures on them that encourage unethical behavior. We got a report that seems to believe that trying to control “the press” is the same as trying to control information. We got a depressing, obscurantist read focused on the worst excesses of a dying industry — not something that tried to understand the interplay between different forms of communication.

Agreeing to the new regulatory proposals is the equivalent of a deathbed confession over a crime committed long, long ago. It’s a way to expunge a feeling of guilt by someone who is on the edge of oblivions: it doesn’t make up for the original infraction and it doesn’t make tomorrow any better.

We all crave a better understanding of how those issues play out, because those are the guidelines that help regulate the future. But in the end, the world doesn’t need Leveson, because the world has already moved on.

I’d argue that both of these very smart guys are obsessed with the wrong problem and, on this topic at least, they are as stuck in the past as major labels are.

They both make the mistake of focusing primarily on start-up business models that revolve almost exclusively on getting publishing or performance rights to stream or download music. And by getting tangled up in that mess, they miss the forest for the trees.  They’ve forgotten that the music industry isn’t — and has never been — just about recorded music.  Sure that part is hard and it’s been shrinking for the last decade, but that aspect is only a part of the bigger picture.

Don’t believe me?  Here are some forward-thinking companies who are wisely focusing on other parts of the music world and not just whining about the high cost of licensing music. So what are they doing right?

They focus on live music

Live music revenues have eclipsed recorded music revenues and while a lot of that money is flowing through LiveNation or AEG, both of those companies are ripe for disruption. Live experiences are hard to pirate and commoditize. As the money drained out of recorded music sales, money spend on music has moved products and services that are harder to mass produce and offer intimate access to their favorite musicians.  And fans are willing to pay for these experiences, in stark contrast to the smaller segment who are willing to paying for downloads or subscription music services.

This is what start-ups like SongKick and BandsInTown understand as they build communities and tools for live music.

They are making promotion and discovery better for artists

The truth is that 90 percent of musicians don’t have a piracy problem, they have an obscurity problem. The people who should love their music just don’t know it exists. The old channels of videos and radio are still there, but the internet exploded everything and diffused attention. In many ways it’s harder than ever for artists and fans to connect. While Peter scoffs at the value of a start-up based on bands without music contracts, it’s where the future Radioheads and Beyonces are going to come from. And plenty of new and old artists who DO have label deals also need these services and will pay for them.

This is what Soundcloud (CEO Alex Ljung pictured) is doing by proving easy-to-use tools for artists who want their music to be heard by more people in more places. Or WebDoc, which creates a platform for artists and their fans to collaborate and share creative projects.  Or The Hype Machine, which has harnessed the power of music blogs to amplify discovery of new music. This is also the area that my old company, Last.fm, SHOULD be pivoting toward…but don’t get me started on that.

The opportunity to partner with brands here is also amazing. It’s also a place where you can get the labels to work with you instead of sending their shark-like lawyers to negotiate with you.

They are making the whole ecosystem better

The value of music for fans isn’t just listening to it.  It’s about the connections you make with other fans and to the artists themselves. Or by disrupting the number of middlemen who take a part of each dollar an artist gets from fans. Fans want to pay artists, particularly when they understand that the artist gets a larger piece of the pie than they did with the old-school record labels.

This is what Ian Rogers has been preaching forever as TopSpin pioneered the direct-to-fan platform. Or what Benji Rogers is doing with his alternative funding platform for artists, PledgeMusic. Or what Bandcamp does when they create a better deal for artists by letting them sell direct to fans.

They created simpler and more intimate services

While the first generation of services that Pakman and his generation ran were based on the size of the catalogs they offered and on trying to be all things to all users, a music services doesn’t have to be massive and complicated to be valuable.   This is what Hannah Donovan and Matt Ogle, formerly at Last.fm, are doing with This Is My Jam, which you an think of as Instagram for music. Watch them closely.

They move their focus to mobile

Mobile phones are already the most personal technology we own these and so they have already become central to many people’s music listing experiences. The opportunities to expand that to other music-centric features like with ticketing, new music discovery, fan/artist interactions are all fantastic. Location and hyper-local services around music are also untapped. Improving and enhancing music playback of music we already own is also under-developed as an opportunity.  Apps have become a new medium for artists like Bjork and Brian Eno and there is more room for innovation here, even as it gets even more crowded.

This is what Mobile Roadie recognizes as they build a mobile-first platform for artists who want to want to reach their fans directly.

They build B2B services around the music

Every label and artist manager, large and small, is struggling to understand audiences and to collect data around how music is being used. And it’s not just labels who want this data. Brands and advertisers want it too. This is where Next Big Sound and MusicMetric live, providing important analytics and tools to create “actionable intelligence” in the fragmented music world.  The Echonest, meanwhile, is also building data-driven services and commercial APIs to help small and big companies to make their music products with data, play listing, and recommendations.

And that’s not all

Here are other areas that haven’t really been touched yet:

Sync rights

 - the licensing of music to TV, games, advertising and film  is one of the most lucrative parts of the recorded music business.  Creating a better marketplace for sync rights could make it even more valuable, particularly if you can make it faster and simpler for companies to do it.

Merchandising

 The company that really fixes the “merch-table” for bands and creates the Threadless or the

Etsy

 for music fans could clean-up.  TopSpin and BandCamp are doing this now too.

Royalties and payments to artists

  The accounting system that underlies the publishing and performance rights is one of the most rotten and complicated things about the industry. It’s only getting worse as are more digital products and services are created. A few companies like

Kobalt Music

are trying to start again from scratch.  A music start-up built on transparency, great analytics and paying artists faster and more fairly would be the most disruptive music business ever.

Start-ups create the most value when they carve out new business models and transform the way we used to do things.  They are less valuable (and thus less viable) when they just wringing the last drop of money out of old models.  The truly great ones transform industries and build new opportunities, growing the market for everyone.

Kafka and Pakman are right about one thing:  trying to licensing music is hard and the corpses of many start-ups litter are littering the battlefield.  So be smart and don’t play on that field.  Move to a new one or make your own field.

Matthew Hawn is product development and strategy consultant based in London, and previously VP of product at Last.fm

You only have to look around you and see that the power of a lie is stronger than ever — in politics, in propaganda or anywhere else. And forget the shoes: some days it seems as if the truth hasn’t even found its pants on by the time a lie is racking up the air miles.

Just take the case of Lord McAlpine, once one of the most powerful politicians in Britain, who was taken by surprise when the internet launched a virulent — and completely misguided — campaign to label him a child rapist.

Just in case you haven’t been watching this mess exploding across the British media over the last few weeks, let me recap briefly. At the start of November, the BBC’s Newsnight program — already under fire for not running a story about allegations of pedophilia against a now-deceased BBC presenter — decided to prove its mettle by running a report claiming that a senior politician from the 1980s was, in fact, a child abuser.

While the report did not name the individual, speculation (inevitably) spilled out onto the net and the culprit hinted at in the report was widely identified: McAlpine, the man who helped finance Margaret Thatcher’s decade in power. Except it turned out the BBC had the wrong man, in a genuine case of mistaken identity that was blown up to mammoth, excruciating proportions by a series of basic journalistic failures.

Ouch.

Heads rolled: big ones. The BBC’s new boss George Entwistle (pictured) resigned, sending the corporation even deeper into turmoil and leaving some — including our own Mathew Ingram — to even question the validity of its role as a state-sanctioned broadcaster at all.

It is, as they say around these parts, a right old mess.

But how do you fix it? How can you make the truth more powerful than a falsehood?

McAlpine and his lawyers have decided to take recourse to the law and hold the internet accountable, by chasing “a very long list” of people who mentioned McAlpine’s name on Twitter and elsewhere. Here’s what they said:

“We know who you are; we know exactly the extent what you have done and it’s easier to come forward and apologise and arrange to settle us because this is cheaper’.”

I can’t fault McAlpine for wanting to recover his reputation. Who wouldn’t? But however many legal actions he launches, it is not the courts — or the threat of the courts — that will correct the wrong done against him. McAlpine — a millionaire who lives in Italy — doesn’t need the money. And the apologies don’t carry much weight really, since they come from people he has not met and never carry as far or as loud as accusations.

Not exactly free speech

British courts have found one, drastic way to try and curtail social media abuses. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a rash of court cases and even imprisonment resulting from offensive messages on social media: for racist comments about a sick sportsman, joking about a missing 5-year-old, saying soldiers should ‘go to hell’.

McAlpine’s fake accusers are unlikely to see a prison cell, since these would be civil actions — though you can never be sure the UK’s legislators won’t try and find a way to make it so: they wanted to shut down Facebook and Twitter after last year’s summer riots, after all, despite no evidence that they were used to incite violence.

In fact, however, the truth is that the fix has already been identified and deployed, because the lie has become news in and of its own right. The fact that McAlpine was wrongly implicated has, in fact, become a much bigger deal than the original report ever was. But it is only successful because of the very specific context (that it happened within the BBC, which everyone has an opinion about) and the severity of the response (that it led to the Beeb’s newly-installed boss performing a sudden act of seppuku).

The information network that so readily slandered him has stepped in to take action action because the fact the slander was wrong became more interesting. What the network taketh away, the network giveth, so to speak.

Unfortunately, while this may work for Lord McAlpine, but it won’t work for everyone. The trouble is that information is not self-correcting unless the truth is more interesting than the untruth. There are very few times that happens, and usually it’s because the lie is so big and dangerous that the blowback is violent.

The fact is, there aren’t many lessons in this mess. Perhaps if you want your indiscretions to get corrected, make them drastic enough that they can’t be ignored. Or, if you want a big lie to get skewered, make sure an international broadcaster is there to take the blame.

In the end, though, these are pretty tough conditions to replicate. And until you manage to do that, Mark Twain looks more and more right as each day passes.

Perhaps it’s no surprise for the Harvard-trained virologist, who traded in a promising medical research career to launch the social network for scientists. But still, in a world where the impact of social networks is usually measured by how many news headlines they can generate, he prefers success stories that have a more direct impact.

Take the example of Rafael Luque, a chemistry professor at the University of Cordoba in Spain. Luque found a collaborator on ResearchGate that he’d have never come across in the real world: a post-graduate student in the Philippines called Rick Arneil Aracon. After using the site to connect and discuss some ideas, together they discovered a novel new method of helping to make biofuels from the leftovers of corn cobs.

The technology is still in development, but it’s evidence of real impact for the site — and a hint at the substantial change that’s happening in the way scientists can work online.

“When we started, people told me you have to get all of the big professors on board,” says Madisch, as we sit in the company’s Berlin headquarters.

His answer was precisely the opposite.

“No,” he says. “If you get all the people who will be professors then it will succeed. We have people who joined four years ago who now say they use ResearchGate for communication in their lab: that’s what I want.”

It’s been a big few weeks for the network, which recently announced that it had broken the two million user barrier. That marks a serious milestone, even if it seems small in comparison to the billion citizens of the United States of Facebook.

It may be dwarfed by Zuckerberg’s empire, but Madisch and his team — including former Facebooker Matt Cohler, who sits on the company’s board — think that they can punch way above their weight with a much smaller community. Why? Because their couple million users are all professional scientists and academics who are all trying to change the world.

So what’s next?

“The next big thing,” says Madisch, “is reputation.”

“We want to try out a community review system: I’ve had it in mind for years now, and I want to see if people will accept this way of reviewing data and sharing data.”

In the end, he wants ResearchGate to be a place where researchers publish their papers, make their full results accessible and gather reputation. That in turn, he thinks, could make the site’s ratings a reference for outside funders, governments and the science community at large.

“My goal is that at one point I’ll talk to the larger funding agencies, and if they are accepting our score at some point, every scientist can think ‘should I publish in Nature and pay a lot of money for it and only get reputation for part of the data I created’ or ‘should I publish it all on ResearchGate and get reputation for everything?’.”

Most German startups are ‘shit’

It’s a big ambition, and one that goes way beyond the scope of many German internet startups — many of whom are happy to coin it in with clones or copycat services.

This is a problem, says Madisch, and he doesn’t mince his words: whether or not unoriginality is ethical, he believes the fact that so German startups are built by MBAs rather than passionate experts is dragging the country’s web scene down.

“Most of it is shit,” he says. “If you look at the people who are founding companies in Germany, you have many people who come from the business world, and they think as business guys: What models exist? What can I do efficiently the same way without changing a lot? If you look at other countries, especially the U.S. or England, the people are coming from the industries: they know what they’re doing.”

He feels particular kinship with the other exciting consumer-focused startups graduating out of Berlin’s over-hip scene: the likes of Soundcloud and Gidsy. They are building services that do new things, not copying the examples set elsewhere — and they have a lot to share with each other.

“We talk to each other,” he says of the cadre of CEOs now operating in the city. “We talk and we meet regularly for coffee or dinner, we’re somehow in constant conversation if we need something or if we think we should talk at some point.”

Still, ResearchGate has benefited from the clone culture, albeit indirectly: it hired a significant number of staff members from StudiVZ, the Facebook copycat that imploded spectacularly earlier this year. Their loss is his gain, and it’s perhaps a sign of what might come after a generation of engineers graduate from building copies and start branching out on their own.

But while a big vision may be unusual for Berlin, ResearchGate is not alone in its ambitions to upturn the stuffy and defensive world of scientific publishing.

Mendeley, another scientific startup with German origins, is also trying to use data to disrupt the existing academic structures.

However, the fact that there are two major rivals in Europe both around the same size is not a concern to Madisch.

“I’m more afraid of the ones coming than the ones who exist already,” he says. “And I’m more concerned about what the publishers will do in the future than really having competitors in the online world.”

But while Reddit’s influence in politics may be growing, and its role in shaping internet culture is already significant, there’s another area of life that also relies heavily on the site: journalism.

It’s not news that journalists love to get linked by Reddit, which can drive huge amounts of traffic to a site — so much that some even try to game the system. But what’s less widely acknowledged is how much it gets used as a source of stories.

Over the years I’ve spoken to dozens of journalists, and heard of many more, for whom Reddit is a wellspring of ideas and inspiration. Sometimes they use it to spark new commissions, and sometimes they just rip it off, but the fact is that nearly every news organization is watching the site closely and using it in some way.

“Journalists everywhere are using it to get ideas for features,” Benji Lanyado, a freelance writer based in London, told me recently. “Stories appear on Reddit, then half a day later they’re on Buzzfeed and Gawker, then they’re on the Washington Post, The Guardian and the New York Times. It’s a pretty established pattern.”

Reddit as ‘inspiration’

In fact, calling it a pattern is an understatement: it’s more like a routine. These days Reddit is probably the meme factory that’s most heavily used by news professionals to generate material, even though they rarely like to admit it.

Much of the “inspiration” is simple: journalists trawling Reddit and simply lifting ideas, photos or quotes: sometimes with credit, oftentimes without.

Buzzfeed, for example, happily republishes pictures with even less context than the original posts, while Britain’s Daily Mail — the biggest online newspaper in the world — regularly churns out Reddit-inspired stories.

But it’s more than just a source of material for aggregators, copycats and rip-off artists. Look a little deeper and Reddit’s news filter is also influential in other, less visible ways.

The site’s huge traffic (now more than three billion page views a month) means that it pushes through a lot of attention. Stories that rise to the top of the site can suddenly get propelled into the stratosphere — meaning that other media outlets, including TV news, have a greater chance of spotting them. The voracious, skeptical approach of many redditors also acts as a sort of built-in fact checking service for journalists too lazy or time-poor to do the legwork themselves:

And then there’s the site’s original content — things like the AMA sub-section, which has turned into an interview slot and confessional all in one. These real-life stories have helped turn Reddit from a simple link machine into something that creates its own stories, with the result that it’s constantly driving headlines.

Reddit for the rest of us

The utility of Reddit for journalists is such that Lanyado has decided to build The Reddit Edit, a skinned version of the site. It’s aimed, at least in part, at that diminishing cadre of media workers who still shy away from the site. It looks more presentable than its parent, and puts forward only the hottest stories across a variety of topics: if Reddit calls itself “the front page of the internet”, then The Reddit Edit would be the 60 second news bulletin.

Launched in July as a teach-yourself-coding project, traffic on the site is modest, but it has fans — not least because Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian gave it the seal of approval back in July.

Lanyado’s inspiration came when he realized that Reddit was, effectively, a news service in and of itself. Much like other small projects like Evening Edition, he decided a little bit of aggregation could go a long way.

“I was using the iReddit app and I suddenly had the idea that this was really a newspaper feature section,” says Lanyado. “I want to show off Reddit and how fascinating, fucked up and amazing it is.”

Washington’s seal of approval

And it’s no surprise that the Reddit Edit appears at a time when journalism’s relationship with the site is shifting.

One of the most peculiar things about Reddit has always been the love-hate relationship. While newsrooms are regularly using it to boost their own output and traffic, much of the direct attention the media has given the site over the years has been pretty negative.

Think of Anderson Cooper’s angry expose of the /jailbait sub-reddit, or claims that the site is sensationalist or misogynistic.

These criticisms are not untrue, but they represent only a small section of the site: like any large community, it has unsavory elements. It’s hard to imagine that the perceived threat that some newsrooms feel from services like this has not played a part in this negative coverage (indeed, it’s reminiscent of Craigslist’s negative press over the years).

Truth is, there’s nothing shameful in journalists using Reddit as a source of ideas — after all, the site is really just a machine that links to stories elsewhere anyway. But it’s only now, thanks to Obama, that the mainstream media is starting to realize it doesn’t have to be their dirty little secret any more.