A new video mash-up culture

Vine exists because of new smartphone technology but it also replicates older forms of mashup culture. In particular, it mirrors what pioneering hip-hop artists started to do in the 1980s — taking sounds from myriad sources and sharing them through records like Paul’s Boutique and Ready to Die. Those hiphop records are aural tapestries that today stand as monuments to a new form of music and community. In the 2000s, however, copyright collectors came along and sued the rappers — resulting in a drawn-out debate over where to draw a line between culture and intellectual property theft. Hip-hop  largely prevailed but was damaged in the process. Now, a fight over a Vine video last month suggests history may repeat itself but this time, on the video front. The dispute involved the musician Prince using a law called the DMCA to force Vine to take down six-second concert clips posted by a fan. The fan didn’t oppose Prince’s takedown demand, meaning no has ruled on whether a six-second clip actually infringes copyright. But if a court did look at the Vine case, the decision process would lead right through hip-hop.

Hip hop, copyright and six second samples

In the 1990s, hip-hop artists called the sounds they use “samples.” Copyright owners, however, called it theft instead and sued the musicians. The conflicts led to important court decisions about music, but whose principles apply equally to Vine. As the Disco Project explained in a thoughtful analysis of the Prince case, the most relevant precedents involve the Notorious B.I.G. and the Beastie Boys. Both were involved in famous cases involving short samples. In the case of the Notorious B.I.G., a Tennessee court shut down store sales and radio plays of the late rapper’s “Ready to Die” album, and a jury awarded $4 million in damages — all over a three note horn riff. An appeals court, which had earlier written “get a license or do not sample,” upheld the verdict in 2007. As law professor Tim Wu explained at the time, the case and others like it were especially absurd because the copyright owner was not even a musician but a one-man corporation who had obtained the music rights under shady circumstances. Fortunately, in the case of the Beastie Boys, a California appeals court took a more rational approach to the issue and ruled that a six second (the same length as a Vine video!) flute sample on the song “Pass the Mic” didn’t infringe on copyright. The Supreme Court, in 2005, refused to reconsider the decision. The upshot, however, is that today we still don’t know for sure how long a sample can be before it infringes copyright. Twitter declined to comment on whether it believes Vine videos are covered by copyright law’s “fair use” exception, but a source familiar with the company told me that the decision to make the videos six seconds long was not a coincidence.

Chilling our new visual culture

The trouble with Prince’s request to take down the Vine videos is not so much the disappearance of the videos themselves — but instead that Vine and other forms of visual expression could meet the same fate as early hip-hop. When the Beastie Boys released their sample-stuffed 1989 masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique, the law was still in a gray area and no one was suing hip-hop artists. That’s no longer the case. As copyright scholars have explained, the threat of lawsuits and the astronomic cost of clearing samples means, today, no one could make an album like Paul’s Boutique in the first place. And that’s the danger posed by Prince. Right now, we’re enjoying a rich new age of images — everything from Vine videos to BuzzFeed cat GIFs that are shared, recast and then shared again. If lawyers began to throw copyright grenades into this mix, these splendid strains of creativity could be quickly snuffed out. Does this mean that all Vine videos should be fair use? It’s hard to say. People are already using the platform to produce clever and original works of art — the sort of thing copyright law is meant to reward. Likewise, big companies who use Vine for marketing have a case for using intellectual property law to protect their brands. It seems inevitable that these issues will get resolved sooner than later. The biggest task for now, though, is to find a way to do so without resorting to the harsher tools of copyright law, including the $150,000 damage demands that are a common feature of cease and desist letters. Congress is right now reviewing the Copyright Act. The process presents a perfect way to protect and foster this emerging age of visual culture — rather than try to smother it like hip-hop. But let’s give the last word to the rappers (click on the Vine vid below) : (Image by R. Gino Santa Maria via Shutterstock)

Twitter is framing the partnerships as a way for marketers to reinforce brand messages by reaching consumers on television and small screens at the same time. For consumers, this is likely to mean seeing more video content within their Twitter feeds and more hashtags on the shows they watch. In its news release, Twitter framed it this way:

We think these types of two-screen sponsorships are a win-win-win. Users receive spectacular, timely content that rounds out their TV experience or reminds them to tune in. Powered by Promoted Tweets, broadcasters reach new audiences and open up new business lines. Brand advertisers get, for the first time, an integrated cross-platform tool for reaching the social conversation wherever it happens.

The company is branding the deals as “Twitter Amplify” or, as one executive said on stage, simply “Twitter Amp.” Other partners, which join earlier participants like ESPN and the NFL, include A&E, Time Inc and Warner Music.

The announcement is part of Twitter’s effort to strut its stuff before Madison Avenue and to show that it is now part of “the New York City community.” The company is engaged in a major push to raise revenue as it prepares for an IPO widely expected to take place later this year.

The feature, known as “two-factor” authentication, is already used by companies like Google and Apple and works by sending a pin code via text message to a user’s cell phone. Twitter has details and a tutorial video here.

The decision to add an extra security feature comes after hackers have repeatedly gained control of high profile Twitter feeds. The most prominent example occurred last month when hackers used the Associated Press’s account to say bombs had injured President Obama. The fake tweet roiled financial markets and led to calls for Twitter to improve its security features.

Attackers have also targeted CBS, the BBC and the Onion. The latter offered a candid account of how the hackers phished employees accounts and induced some of them, including a person with control over social media passwords to share log-in information.

Two factor authentication would likely have prevented those attacks because the attackers would have had to enter a password sent to the employee’s cell phone.

The perception, then, is that Twitter is useful for what the ad types call “top of the funnel” marketing — building brand awareness and so on — but that it has yet to deliver paying customers in the way that GoogleAdwords can. Today, though, it appears Twitter has responded with a new ad product that will make it easier for brands to assess what they get for their marketing bucks.

The product, called a “Lead Generation Card,” lets marketers post expanded tweets that invite users to sign up for stuff right inside Twitter. The company showed what this might look in a blog post describing the product:

According to a spokesman, the idea reduces friction in the marketing process because Twitter already has users’ email addresses and other contact information — meaning that it takes just one click for a user to connect with the brand.

The move comes as Twitter continues to expand its ad products, including its self-serve platform, ahead of a rumored IPO later this year.

While buying Tumblr isn’t necessarily a bad deal for the two companies, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, there’s another photo site out there that might have been an even better deal: Pinterest.

In many ways, Pinterest is also building a mobile-friendly photo site just like Tumblr, but Pinterest is also in the midst of constructing the underpinnings for a potentially much more lucrative native revenue experience. Pinterest is oriented around commerce and consumers craving particular items. That’s good for business.

No, buying Pinterest wouldn’t help Yahoo discover its inner tween. It’s a well-known fact that Pinterest is populated mainly by adult women — not exactly the demographic Yahoo needs to attract. And no, considering Pinterest’s valuation as of its last funding round, such an acquisition probably wouldn’t have come cheap. Acquiring the company would require a much bigger departure from Yahoo’s current mass-market advertising into the world of e-commerce and affliate links. It could be a harder sell to the company’s investors, and a bigger transition for everyone.

But if Yahoo is looking to shell out the big bucks for a site with viral growth, visuals to compete with Facebook, and a devoted community of users, Pinterest might have been the better choice. According to a Pew report in December, out of all online adults (which is basically anyone with an internet connection), just six percent of those people visited Tumblr on a regular basis, compared with 13 percent on Instagram (which isn’t exactly for sale), and 15 percent on Pinterest — only Twitter comes in at 16 percent ahead of the others and behind behemoth Facebook at 67 percent.

Less than a year out of beta, Pinterest is a dominant force on the web; a place where women of all ages collect photos of things that inspire them or things that they want to remember or create. For many, it’s a digital wish-list. And because of that, Pinterest sends huge amounts of traffic to online retailers. To be the intermediary between the people and the stores is a good place to be — you’re a crucial link that drives the sales, without any of the hassle of shipping or orders or user acquisitions that come with e-commerce.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann at the company’s new offices in San Francisco.

Pinterest has no business model in place right now — the site is free to join and for brands to integrate with — but that’s just right now, and it likely won’t last. The company just announced yesterday that it is starting to connect photos of items back to the brands who sell them, and it’s not hard to image how this could play out.

Tumblr does have a business model right now based on ads, and it just started rolling them out on mobile users in April. But the company has been reportedly burning through cash and not yet making a lot of revenue, hoping to bring in $100 million this year. But people are usually pretty unhappy about a free product suddenly peppering them with ads — especially if those ads are dropped into a feed that users have created (just ask anyone how they feel about Facebook ads.) CEO David Karp said at our paidContent event just last month that he wants advertising on the site to be native and unobstrusive.

“We focused on higher up in the funnel, the type of advertising that creates intent,” Karp told us in April. “It gives room for the most creative advertisers to create their best work. I think we’ve started to prove it, and see really good examples of it.”

But that’s a hard nut to crack.

Suddenly, the possible Pinterest model of taking a cut on sales and traffic resulting from users creating digital shopping lists looks a lot less disruptive to the core experience, and potentially more lucrative, than trying to solve mobile display ads for the Tumblr feed. Making money off traffic and sales wouldn’t disrupt Pinterest’s core product, and would generally fit in with the company’s existing user experience, just as promoted tweets are fitting with Twitter’s on both desktop and mobile (a profitable venture so far estimated to bring Twitter $528 million in ad revenue this year.)

So no, buying Pinterest wouldn’t make Yahoo all that hip. But buying the site that has potential to become a strong force in modern, social retail? Seems like a good bet — especially since teens might leave you once Mom joins and you become mainstream.

It’s important to note that Twitter  is a platform, not a news service, and also that regardless, no one outlet can control the internet anyway: That’s the beauty and curse of the beast. So when news breaks it’s about two things: accuracy and distribution.  Right now we’re stuck with a drunk leaf blower in a flour factory. I’ll be the first to champion these tools as platforms for change, opportunity and knowledge sharing, but it has become clear we – and especially the reeling news media – are in need of a system that helps Twitter et al sort through the haze of breaking news and get the facts straight, faster. The current model and tools are not clearing things up – they are adding to the mess.

A centralized, collaborative evidence table

Sifting through the mountains of analysis on the bombings alone, I couldn’t help but think of the customized Twitter Nascar hashtag page that was put together in 2011, and how it tied in nicely with the New Yorker digital “evidence table” it describes for Reddit users. So one first step I propose is a one-stop place or system in times of important news or mass emergency. Literally just a single agreed upon place to gather the facts, or a system of checks and balances free from speculation. Like a central hub for help to be channeled and extra information provided – a bit like an active Storify stream.

This feels like a simple fix to a complicated problem at the source. Clearly there are huge questions about who administers it, but one thing is clear: It must be solitary and held to a strict code that is pre-agreed upon, possibly among a cross-collaboration of the major newspapers. For instance, each might host the same page so traffic stays where the trust is with the user.  There is no speculation: Simple fact dissemination and information being released – only after  it is verified – so that the news-consuming public has a go-to source that is consistent.

The ability to deal with errors

Imagine if Twitter or Facebook could lower the relevancy of an incorrect tweet or post in real-time so that bad information was less likely to be seen. Reddit and pals is a more difficult kettle of fish because of their very nature.  We will need to help them help themselves by providing clear information in order for them to do what they do best – engage with it.

The Atlantic wrote recently about the need to undo things on Twitter because it is currently a one-way system that, while capable of self-correcting over time, is pretty flawed when it comes to doing so in the moment. And so we need a system that enables users to revoke or modify what has been said so that it is instantly identifiable. Internet fundamentalists find this idea uncomfortable but many I suspect would cherish the ability to be alerted to incorrect information so the continued dissemination of knowingly false info can be minimized.  A technical nightmare sure, but something to work towards.

A need for innovation and cooperation

Right now big data is not being used or harnessed by news organization beyond visualization or longer-form pieces but I imagine a time (and not too far in the future either) when we see news outlets using Twitter and company in a much smarter fashion than simply looking at volume spikes and “first-grabs.”  So for instance, outlets might soon use data to predict, locate and activate “sleeper-unit” journalists (and trained citizen journalists) who are armed with Facetime technology – or simply volunteer individuals streaming through a phone that a news outlet is able to instantly locate via GPS. It’s interesting to note that Twitter has just appointed its first Data Editor who is charged with “explain[ing] how this phenomenon works.”

We have two options when it comes to “fixing” truly crucial news and real-time mass events: 1) Assume that what we’re doing now works but will need a few tweaks, or;  2) Realize that our current system is no longer tenable and so needs a complete overhaul. Any honest appraisal will quickly come to the brutal truth that the current system is failing, and so needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. In the short term, we will need to move toward something like a system of “Flash tweets:” site-wide notifications, that simultaneously tweet, post, alert, offer a donation system, etc to news sites when major events transpire. I’d like to see a system like this fleshed out by the social juggernauts as they further flex their news muscles.

Paul Armstrong is founder of  Digital Orange Consulting. Contact him via paularmstrong.net, or on Twitter @paul__armstrong or @TheMediaIsDying.

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Photo courtesy Edward Meyer.

We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

This idea has come up before, but I was reminded of it when I read a Nieman Journalism Lab post about some research being done by Lee Humphreys, looking at the way that communication — and particularly personal communication, through letters and diaries and other pre-digital tools of expression. Although this doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we use ultra-modern services like Twitter or Facebook, there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Media has always been personal and social

As Humphreys describes it, her research shows that if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style “mass media” isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually returning to one.

“Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.”

For example, Humphreys says that the idea of diaries or journals as private things — which their owners hide underneath a mattress or keep in a secret place under lock and key — is a fairly new one. As recently as the late 19th century, it was common for people to read each other’s journals as a way of catching up with what they had been doing, and in many cases this was done with the author of the journal taking part in the discussion. In that sense, journals were a mix of private and public, in much the same way that social media is.

Although the Nieman Lab post doesn’t mention it, there was also the idea of a “commonplace book,” which was a kind of paper version of a blog, a place where people would keep snatches of text or ideas that they came across, and then share that with others. Famous writers such as John Milton and Ralph Waldo Emerson kept commonplace books, and the phenomenon is seen by many as a prelude to what would become the “remix culture” of today.

The era of mass media is over

The idea that mass media was a kind of historical accident has been raised by others as well, including Tom Standage of The Economist — both in his upcoming book, called “Writing on the Wall,” and in a series of pieces in the magazine about the nature of digital media. The latter described how the interconnected qualities of social media and “networked journalism” mirrored the way that media used to function before newspapers were invented, when the local tavern or coffee house was the center of the information ecosystem. The title of his book, Standage says, also refers to:

“The ominous implications of the rebirth of social media for mass-media companies that arose in the industrial era, predicated on the high cost of delivering information to large audiences. The conclusion of the book is that the mass-media era was a historical anomaly… indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis.’”

If this is in fact what we are experiencing — that is, the unbundling or dismantling of a mass-media infrastructure that was constructed to serve the needs of readers (and advertisers) at a specific time in history — then what can we expect? Among other things, probably further downsizing and layoffs and bankruptcies of media companies whose size and cost structure and print focus no longer corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.

And on the positive side, we are also likely to see the growth of new entities that take advantage of the networked, social and smaller-scale nature of the media ecosystem — startups like Circa, for example, or algorithmic players like Prismatic, along with larger entities like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In a very real sense, it is both the best of times and the worst of times.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Feng Yu and Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

There’s no question that some of the reaction to the company’s job posting has strained the bounds of credulity: media gadfly and failed media entrepreneur Michael Wolff, for example, wrote about how the person who became Twitter’s head of news and journalism would have a job “more important than Jeff Zucker’s at CNN,” one that would be like “running a network news division in the 1970s or 80s, the biggest job that there has ever been in news.”

“Given the choice between being the executive editor of the New York Times or being the first Twitter news chief, you’d be well advised to think twice.”

Twitter says it isn’t a media operation

Wolff’s description is more than a little hyperbolic — but at the same time, not entirely untrue. Emily Bell, head of the Tow Center at Columbia University and former head of digital operations at The Guardian, described Twitter recently as “the most significant invention for journalism since the telephone,” and her opinion is shared by many in the media and outside it. For all its flaws, the service that started as a simple messaging app with a weird name has become a critical piece of the real-time information and journalistic infrastructure.

In his interview with PBS MediaShift, Luckie — who got his start doing social media for the Washington Post and was hired by Twitter last year to be part of their growing media-outreach team — downplayed the company’s media ambitions, saying the service wants to be a partner for media companies, and has no intentions of hiring reporters or editors, creating content or doing any of the other things that traditional media entities typically do.

“Twitter doesn’t have ambitions to be a news operation. Because Twitter is so central to what a lot of newsrooms are doing, naturally there’s a lot of hype around this position. No, Twitter has no editorial team. We’re not out there curating news, or saying, “here’s the source that you have to go to.” We’re not writing stories. We’re simply providing a platform for other people to do so.”

But I think Luckie’s response — while perhaps being technically true — misses the much larger point about what we mean when we say “digital-media entity,” and the increasingly powerful role that Twitter and other tools and services are playing in that ecosystem. In a nutshell, much of the power that used to reside with the creators of content has been moving to those who have platforms to disseminate it.

Where does the power lie in media?

The reality is that hiring journalists and creating content, as valuable as those things are (and I would like to stipulate that they are hugely valuable, before any traditional media fans get out the tar and feathers) is only part of what constitutes a media entity in the digital age. The other factor that is almost as valuable — and perhaps even more so, depending on your perspective — is the ability to aggregate, filter, distribute and monetize that content.

For a long time, traditional media entities like newspapers and TV networks owned both of these aspects of the media ecosystem, but that is no longer the case. Now, the most powerful platforms for distributing — and potentially monetizing — journalism and other kinds of content are not made of paper or TV tubes or coaxial cable, and they are not owned by family-run media conglomerates. They are companies like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.

It’s true that Twitter in particular has focused on selling itself as a partner for media companies, rather than a competitor, which is one of the reasons why CEO Dick Costolo has tried hard to resist any attempt to paint the service as a media entity. Instead — as with Luckie’s interview — the company would much rather describe how it works hand-in-hand with media outlets, the benefits that accrue from having a strong Twitter presence, etc.

Twitter is a partner, but also a competitor

At the same time, however, blog pioneer and digital-media entrepreneur Dave Winer has a point when he repeatedly warns media companies that Twitter is not their friend: in a very real sense, as I’ve tried to argue before, Twitter has built a powerful media company without having to create any of its own content — and every TV network “crawl” that features tweets, and every newspaper story that mentions a reporter’s Twitter handle subtly reinforces that position.

Even the use of Twitter Cards or “expanded tweets” is what I’ve described as a double-edged sword for media companies: it promotes their content, but it also shows an excerpt that might be enough to satisfy many readers — in exactly the same way that Google does with Google News, something that many media companies have criticized and even required payment for.

I am in full agreement with Emily Bell and others who say Twitter is one of the best tools for journalism and media that we have ever seen, and there is no question that it has changed the media environment for the better in a whole range of ways. But let’s not kid ourselves about whether it is a media company or not — it obviously is, in almost all of the ways that really matter, and other media players need to be as clear-eyed about that as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Flickr users Socialsidekick

Tunigo works on Spotify’s platform and also has iOS and Android apps. Tunigo lets users browse Spotify playlists, discover new music and read music reviews.

Tunigo’s app will remain on Spotify and its employees will work from Spotify’s New York and Stockholm offices.

“The acquisition fits into our overall strategy around music discovery, basically helping our users make sense of over 20 million tracks,” a Spotify spokesman told me.

Twitter recently launched its own #Music app, which focuses on music discovery and was built by We Are Hunted, the company that Twitter acquired last year.