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Never one for understatement, BuzzFeed is promoting the launch with a London event and an animated flyer that shows Queen Elizabeth II riding a tweaked-out corgi dog against a Doctor Who style background:

This is BuzzFeed’s first international expansion and comes after it received nearly $20 million in new funding early this year. According to editorial director, Scott Lamb, the UK site will start by offering “great pop culture content” that represents BuzzFeed’s roots. He explained the strategic goal this way:

“Social is global. We already had a solid audience in the UK, a place that embraces Twitter and Facebook in a huge way, so it made sense for it to be BuzzFeed’s first foray into international waters.” A report from the Next Web says the UK content will come from a four-person team based in London. Meanwhile, a BuzzFeed spokesperson told us that the largest proportion of BuzzFeed’s overall traffic was coming from the UK early Monday morning.

BuzzFeed’s expansion comes at a time when UK and US press outlets are increasingly entering each other’s markets; Britain’s the Daily Mail and the Guardian, for instance, are making a concerted effort for American readers.

BuzzFeed also appears to have brought its trademark native advertising across the pond in the form of “stories” like “15 Kinds of People You Will See at Ultra,” a photo-feature produced by an energy drink maker. BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has long argued that this form of advertising, which can be distributed across social media, is more effective than traditional internet display advertising.

As it dips its toe into Britain, BuzzFeed is also expanding aggressively at home with more long-form content and plans for a business vertical.

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Once he finds a suitable topic, Feilding Cage, a New York-based developer and journalist for The Guardian, can easily spend three weeks generating the source information and designing a visualization for what’s become known as data journalism. The results bring understanding and reader engagement to topics that are otherwise discussed with a lot of words or static numbers. Readers can and do play around with the information, share it widely and discuss it for long periods after it appears online.

The Guardian’s interactive guide to gay rights in the United States

Along with The Guardian, a few other news organizations have been putting an emphasis on data-driven reporting and visualizations, apps and even games in the past few years, such as the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica (Check out the Data Journalism Handbook for more information on this sort of work.)

Data journalism and visualization stand out for the verification and occasional gray-area explanations that journalists provide. Cage, for example, accompanied his interactive visualization of gay rights in the United States with a blog post explaining his methodology and disclosing his assumptions.

Screenshot from the Zoomdata’s big data analytics iPad app

It would be neat to find a happy medium for enterprises that want original insights that every employee can see and use and act on but doesn’t take three weeks to generate. That’s especially true because the return on investment for work like Cage’s is hard to identify, although it’s possible the content could indirectly generate revenue by driving users to content they have to pay for.

Bridging the gap might be a matter of finding the perfect data scientist for the company. Or it might be a matter of time before the kind of work Cage does is automated. A computer already can write an earnings story, although it might be a few years before computers put wordsmiths out of business.

Maybe it just doesn’t make sense to cross data journalism visualizations with big data analytics apps. But I, for one, would like to play with such a tool.

Entrepreneurs from companies that work with and make visualizations from big data, such as Quid, will speak at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference on March 20-21 in New York.

Disclosure: The Guardian is an investor in Giga Omni Media, which publishes GigaOM.

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Manning, who has been in U.S. custody for more than two years, is the government source who allegedly provided WikiLeaks with the “Collateral Murder” video of a U.S. military attack on civilians in Iraq, as well as tens of thousands of classified government cables, which the organization released in a massive document dump in late 2010. A number of newspapers and other mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times and The Guardian, also printed some of the cables and wrote stories on them as part of a partnership arrangement with WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks is a media entity in every way that matters

As Glenn Greenwald points out in a post at The Guardian, the military prosecutor in Manning’s trial has provided one of the best justifications for seeing WikiLeaks as a media entity, and therefore deserving of the same protections as a newspaper. In court on Thursday, Captain Angel Overgaard was asked whether Manning would be on trial if he had delivered the same classified information to the New York Times, and the prosecutor said simply: “Yes ma’am.” In other words, for the purposes of the government, WikiLeaks and the NYT are interchangeable. As Greenwald describes it:

“[The government's claim against Manning] applies to virtually every leak of classified information to any media organization, thus transforming standard whistle-blowing into the equivalent of treason.”

The conventional wisdom for some time has been that WikiLeaks was simply an intermediary — like the brown envelope that leaked documents come in, or the parking garage that Watergate mole Deep Throat used — and that newspapers and other media have performed the actual journalistic work by filtering through the cables, verifying facts, etc. During a discussion about the media and WikiLeaks in 2010, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said of founder Julian Assange: “I don’t regard him as a kindred spirit — he’s not the kind of journalist I am.”

Last summer, however, in an email interview with me after I wrote a blog post arguing that WikiLeaks should be thought of as a media entity, Keller admitted that both Assange and the organization deserve the support of all journalists — for the simple reason that an attack on WikiLeaks is effectively an attack on free speech and the free press as a whole (although Keller still didn’t want to call Assange a journalist). As the former NYT editor put it:

“I would regard an attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks’ publication of these documents as an attack on all of us, and I believe the mainstream media should come to his defense. You don’t have to embrace Julian Assange as a kindred spirit to believe that what he did in publishing those cables falls under the protection of the First Amendment.”

The media could be the next target

The risk isn’t just that the government will apply the same tactics or rationale to other leakers that it has to Bradley Manning, even if they leak documents to the New York Times — the real risk is that seeing the NYT and other outlets as equivalent to WikiLeaks will encourage the government to try and prosecute them as well, just as the State Department is trying to pursue Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for what it believes to be their acts of espionage.

This is more than just idle speculation: the blog post Bill Keller was responding to when he emailed me was about a discussion that took place in Congress, in which several legislators asked legal experts who were giving testimony to the House judiciary subcommittee whether there was a legal rationale for prosecuting media outlets like the New York Times under the Espionage Act for publishing classified information the way WikiLeaks did.

This may be far-fetched, but identifying the New York Times and WikiLeaks as equivalent is a clear step in that direction. If Manning providing documents to the former counts as treason, because this is defined as “aiding and abetting the enemy,” then how is a someone providing data to the New York Times any different? Or for that matter, a senior member of the national security establishment giving documents to Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward, as Greenwald notes in his piece?

The justification for supporting WikiLeaks’ rights as a journalistic entity seems clear: as Benjamin Franklin said, “We must hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Carolina Georgatou and Charlie Rose and jphilipg

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And Poke… Well, it is languishing at the 34th spot on the top free apps list, way behind Instagram, Messenger and the official Facebook apps. It is yet another example of why just because you can copy something it doesn’t mean it will become successful, even if you are Facebook who is doing the copying. It is not clear what kind of usage the app is getting, but I am pretty sure Facebook will announce any day some metrics that don’t quite measure anything.

This quick decline in downloads raises some questions about Facebook’s ability to be kingmaker. It may have helped Zynga when social games and Facebook’s platform were brand new phenomena. Remember how their frictionless sharing was going to change everything, especially for media companies? Well, it didn’t change a lick. Washington Post’s Facebook socialreader is now on the open web.  Guardian is no longer interested in wasting its resources on the Facebook reader. Frictionless sharing might have made some video sharing services hot for a day, but the reality has been much harsher for them.

Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman writes:

In April, The Washington Post’s Social Reader had 12 million monthly active users. Now, it has about 600,000 according to AppData, a decline of 95 percent. The Guardian had nearly 6 million monthly active users of its Facebook app in April. Now it has about 2.5 million, a decline of about 75 percent. Most Facebook users didn’t want this, for all the reasons we’ve discussed before — thoughtless sharing means little to your friends, can lead to faulty assumptions about why you read something and have a chilling effect on what you choose to read.

Invent something

Actually, last week when everyone was getting excited and proclaiming the end of Snapchat, I was wondering to myself: How is that Facebook, which has some of the smartest folks in the room, can’t really invent any new single online behavior that would keep people addicted to Facebook?

Why does it have to look at others to come up with new user behaviors and new features? For instance, checkins came from Foursquare, while the short status updates were a direct response to Twitter. Facebook Answers were nothing but a variation on Quora’s offering. Poke is yet another example.

Sooner or later, Facebook and its think tank has to confront the harsh reality — if it needs to stay relevant and stay ahead of the curve, it needs to invent and reinvent. Doing otherwise could be fatal.

Updated: I have updated the post to reflect the change from SnapChat to Snapchat.

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The impetus for this idea (which would levy a fee of two British pounds (about $3.20 US) on every internet account to create a government investment fund), is abundantly obvious: print-advertising revenue, which most general-interest papers rely on for the bulk of their income, has fallen off a rather large cliff over the past several years, and the rate of decline seems to be accelerating rather than slowing. Paywalls may be picking up some of the slack for a few providers, but they are not enough to fill the gap completely — and so companies are cutting back, and in the case of U.S. papers even shutting down print.

Journalism and newspapers are no longer synonymous

Editors like Leigh — and columnists like Roy Greenslade of the Guardian, who wholeheartedly supports the idea of an internet tax to subsidize print papers — are understandably concerned about the effect that this unprecedented industry decline is likely to have on journalism, which they argue serves a crucial public purpose and therefore can’t be left to the whims of the marketplace. Others in the U.S., including New York Times media writer David Carr, have raised similar concerns about the effect on cities such as New Orleans when their newspaper shrinks in size or stops printing, and can (theoretically at least) no longer hold politicians and other evil-doers to account in the way they always have. As Leigh puts it:

“When the day comes that the newspapers are forced to stop printing altogether, it will be a disaster for democracy. The lean pickings from web advertising on a free newspaper site will only pay for a fraction of the high-quality investigative journalism that commercial newspapers generate.”

There are a whole series of problems with the internet-tax idea, many of which journalist Allan Donald has summarized in a smart and funny post (which, as Chris Dixon points out, imitates a popular geek response to early spam-fighting ideas). Among his points are that such a plan “tries to support a fundamentally broken business model” and “users of the web will not put up with it.” As Paul Carr notes at Pando Daily, the idea of compensating or financing newspapers based on their readership and market share could also worsen some of the existing problems with digital media, since all it would do is encourage papers to boost their traffic by whatever means possible.

But one of the biggest flaws with the tax idea, as Charlie Beckett at the LSE points out, is that it is based on the principle that journalism — of the kind that is deserving of government funding — is synonymous with newspapers. Even if that was the case in the distant past, it clearly isn’t any more: such a plan would leave out a growing number of alternative providers, from non-profit entities like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism to smaller web-only media outlets (some would argue that the Guardian is also a non-profit, but not by design). And these kinds of alternative services and startups, many of whom are trying to reinvent journalism for a digital age, are arguably more deserving of funding than the large newspapers who already have giant market share.

Taxing internet users would do little to “save” journalism

The reality is that the internet-tax plan would do very little to help subsidize journalism that is in the public interest. Instead, it would be used to subsidize a failing business model, one that continues to be based primarily around a dying medium called print. How would that benefit society as a whole? I think Carr is right when he says the industry needs to be more creative in finding a range of small ideas and solutions to their problems, not depending on a massive publicly-funded bailout.

Some of the proponents of the internet-tax idea argue that it makes sense for Britain to take such measures, since a similar structure — namely, a government-imposed TV tax — is used to subsidize the BBC. But whether you believe that a tax on the purchase of a specific consumer product is the appropriate way to do such a thing (which I would argue it is not), creating a single government media outlet for public-service purposes is a very different thing from setting up a fund that would be used to prop up an entire industry.

American newspaper owners like Advance Publications — which has shut down a print paper in Michigan and cut back on printing in a number of other cities — have been criticized for their failure to negotiate the transition from print to digital well, and there is no question that their handling of the move and their digital replacements leaves a lot to be desired. But at least they, and other struggling newspaper chains such as the Journal Register Co. (which recently filed for bankruptcy for the second time) are trying to find a way towards a new model, not asking for governments to subsidize the existing one.

Saving — or rather, enhancing and expanding — journalism is a noble and worthwhile goal, and finding innovative solutions for doing so is a commendable idea. But taxing internet users to prop up a largely print-based newspaper industry is not the same thing. Not even close.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/iQoncept and Flickr user Zarko Drincic

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Take Britain’s royal family, who contacted the editors of the UK’s newspapers after TMZ published a series of photographs of the man third in line to the throne cavorting, naked, with young women in Las Vegas. Don’t print those photos, they asked: it’d be an invasion of Harry’s privacy.

Whether or not you believe that royals deserve such privacy, or whether there was public interest in exposing his exposure, the reality was that on a practical level it seemed like a ludicrous request. The images had already been seen by millions online, through social networks and on the web — in Britain as well as around the world.

And yet, incredibly, the request worked … at least for a while.

It took an entire day for Rupert Murdoch’s arch-tabloid Sun to break the silence, and by the time it did, it was forced to admit the absurdity of its position.

“Heir it is!” punned the headline. “Pics of naked Harry you’ve already seen on the internet.”

Just think about that for a second. What an astonishing admission of its own irrelevance for a newspaper to make.

And yet we’re seeing this sort of situation come up again and again in different ways as the world of secrets rubs up against the era of democratized distribution and radical transparency.

Streisand versus the super-injunction

Most of the time the friction is when one group — one with a secret of some sort to protect — misunderstands the unruly way information can behave online: The Streisand Effect famously describes the way that the attempt to keep something quiet, actually ends up amplifying it for the internet.

There are countless examples of this — some of them very important, others less so. In 2009, The Guardian was not only barred by the British courts from publishing a story about the Dutch firm Trafigura dumping toxic waste in Africa, it was banned from writing about the injunction. But things fall apart: the details of the super-injunction hit the web, and Trafigura’s attempt to hide its activities was not just over — it was bigger news than ever. It’s the cover-up, after all, that kills you.

Trafigura was a prime example of what the media, and groups like the royal family, still need to understand: that the internet’s great magic trick is to make mass distribution possible, while simultaneously making control impossible.

It’s a pattern that is being repeated over and over.

Forget what you think of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange: the organization’s publication of secret State Department memos changed the game for the way information moves. The U.S. government knew that publication was coming, but it also knew that it was almost impossible to prevent once it had hit the public sphere.

Just look at Gawker’s audacious dump of 950 pages of documents detailing Mitt Romney’s financial affairs. Many will wring their hands over the ethics of such a move. Should it be public? Should it be private? Was it right for Gawker’s boss Nick Denton (another trouble-making Brit) to publish?

Right now those arguments don’t matter: the fact is that data is out there and it can’t go back. Whether it’s right or wrong, the barriers have been broken down.

What happened with Prince Harry and the British press was not quite the Streisand Effect, because the photos weren’t a secret, even in litigious, furtive Britain. But it is a form of radical transparency — and not just in the way it exposed Harry’s backside to the planet.

Harry and his henchmen should realize that we are now way beyond Stewart Brand’s famous dictum that “information wants to be free”. We now live in a world where information struggles to be anything else: if it can be digitized, it can be distributed… and if it can be distributed, then nobody — not even the Queen of England — can control it.

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The answer: scientific research.

More specifically, large amounts of scientific work is funded by government agencies — yet the results end up hidden behind paywalls. Money from the public purse is used to pay academics to undertake investigation and write up the results, before academic journals take over copyright and sell access to the work for profit. Citizens are effectively being asked to pay twice for any information: first to fund the research, then to access it.

Over the last few years, a growing movement has been pointing out this illogical situation and campaigning for what’s known as “open access”: unfettered availability to research that’s funded by the public purse. And on Monday that movement appears to have won a significant victory, with the British government announcing that it would make open access a condition of any public funding in future.

Science minister David Willetts said in an announcement that the new system would be implemented by 2014, meaning that any research that uses public money could no longer be locked away.

“Removing paywalls that surround taxpayer funded research will have real economic and social benefits. It will allow academics and businesses to develop and commercialise their research more easily and herald a new era of academic discovery. This development will provide exciting new opportunities and keep the UK at the forefront of global research to drive innovation and growth.”

This may be one of the most significant victories for the open movement so far — and advocates will certainly be hoping that other governments, including the U.S., follow suit sooner rather than later.

It’s all part of a sea change happening in science towards openness, a move that’s taking place in large part because of the internet.

Just as the net has disrupted other industries, so it’s starting to make science more collaborative, more accessible and more democratic. My colleague Mathew Ingram has documented much of this conversation, and I’ve written about it before too, talking to startups like ResearchGate, which is trying to turn the stuffy world of research upside down by helping scientists collaborate.

And last year I covered the story of open science, talking about the work of Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge who has been one of the lightning rods for openness.

There are many interpretations of what open science means, with different motivations across different disciplines. Some are driven by the backlash against corporate-funded science, with its profit-driven research agenda. Others are internet radicals who take the “information wants to be free” slogan literally. Others want to make important discoveries more likely to happen. But for all their differences, the ambition remains roughly the same: to try and revolutionise the way research is performed by unlocking it and making it more public.

Gowers later led a boycott against the publisher Elsevier which drew in some 12,000 academics, who all objected to the company’s approach.

So, after all that, a victory — if a relatively small one.

Before anyone gets too excited, however, it’s also worth noting that this change is not without pain. As The Guardian notes, this process itself doesn’t come free — and may eat into already-strapped science budgets.

Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

Scientist photograph copyright Shutterstock / damicoangie

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There’s been a lot written recently about Twitter and the choices it seems to be making about the future of the network, although the exact nature of those choices remains shrouded in mystery. Some say Twitter made the wrong choice when it decided to focus on advertising as a business model, rather than expanding its status as an open platform for others to build on, while others argue that doing this was the only possible move the company could make if it wanted to build a business. In many ways, this dilemma is the same one that confronts many media companies (which isn’t surprising, since we have argued that Twitter effectively is one) — namely, how much should you be a platform, and how much should you be a destination?

As entrepeneur Dalton Caldwell has noted, at some point during the past two years Twitter made a deliberate decision to de-emphasize its nature as a platform with a wide-open API that allowed developers to add functionality to the service. It’s fascinating to look now at a post that now-CEO Dick Costolo wrote on the Twitter blog in 2010, in which he describes what appears to be a very different future from the one Twitter has pursued — one in which a new feature called “Annotations” would allow the network to function as a real-time information utility, which other services could build into their offerings:

We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform.

Twitter chose advertising over being a platform

Although Twitter has implemented some added functions that allow it to offer things like the new “expanded tweets” feature it is currently rolling out, Annotations as it was originally described never really came to be. Instead, the company chose to focus all of its efforts on becoming an advertising platform, with features such as “Promoted Tweets” and “Promoted Trends,” and partnerships with large brands and media players like Coca-Cola and MTV. And the more it has focused on advertising, the more it has confronted the kinds of challenges that media companies of all kinds are confronting.

It’s not just advertising as a business model that is the central challenge for Twitter, however, as it is for other traditional media players like the New York Times. It’s the inherent tension between the two potential futures that Caldwell mentions in his post: the one in which Twitter is an open platform with a robust API that allows other players of all kinds to build on top of the network — turning it into a sort of real-time news and information distribution utility or plumbing provider — and the one where the company becomes a media player in its own right, controlling the access to that information as tightly as possible, and monetizing the attention around that information via advertising.

The New York Times has experimented with open APIs, which give outside developers access to its data for use in third-party services or features, and so have a number of other newspapers and media companies such as USA Today and National Public Radio. But the traditional media player that has taken this idea the furthest is The Guardian newspaper in Britain (see disclosure below) — which launched an “open platform” project in 2010, offering all of its data to outside developers through an API. Doing this has been a core part of Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger’s concept of “open journalism.”

Can a media company survive as an open platform?

In a nutshell, the Guardian‘s open platform project offers developers and third-party services full access to the newspaper’s stories and other data, and they can pay for that access in one of two ways: they can either pay a licensing fee for the data, or they can allow the Guardian to insert advertising into the stream of content that they get. This is very similar to the vision of Twitter’s future that entrepreneur Nova Spivack detailed after Twitter gave its warning, one which would involve the service either charging users and services directly for access to the “firehose” of data from the network, or monetizing it by inserting ads into the feed.

Twitter may not create content itself, but the recent moves it has made — whether it’s the launch of “curation” services based on its acquisition of Summify, or the creation of new editorial services built around experiences like the recent NASCAR race, or the focus on new features like “expanded tweets” — are driven by the same impulse as anything the New York Times or any other media company does: that is, a desire to commandeer (and/or seduce) the attention of users and direct them to the company’s platform, whether that’s a printed newspaper or a website like Twitter.com. And the fundamental purpose of doing this is to monetize that attention by selling it to advertisers.

Is it possible for a media entity to simultaneously be an open platform and a destination? The Guardian has had some success with its open platform, but how much isn’t really known, and it certainly isn’t enough to stop the massive financial losses the paper is undergoing — which isn’t going to fill a company like Twitter with confidence, especially when it is trying to justify an almost $10-billion valuation. And so the network’s future looks more and more like that of a traditional media entity, chasing the same eyeballs that everyone from Facebook to Google are also pursuing.

Disclosure: 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.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and jphilipg

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The Guardian’s (see disclosure below) story lays out in detail the creation of the text messaging standard. It describes the creation of GSM as a reaction to the complicated and varied analog phone standards in use across Europe. It took ten years from idea to the time the first GSM call was made, and the effort involved 13 countries. As part of creating the GSM standard for networks, the carriers wove in a way to share messages across operators as well. From the article:

The idea for SMS emerged during the GSM project. It was based around a really neat trick – to transport messages on the signalling paths needed to organise telephony during periods when those control channels were quiet. This was a fantastic idea because it meant that there was no extra cost involved in transporting the messages. The only restriction was that they had to be short – no more than 160 seven-bit characters. So SMS was built into the GSM system from the beginning.

And while texting seems like a great example of carrier innovation, it was actually a result of this multi-governmental body demanding that operators find a way to interoperate. So carriers didn’t act alone according to this article. And the usage came about far later than the availability of SMS texting services thanks to young people, who were finally able to afford mobile phones but wanted to avoid high prices on calls. So in truth, texting, a service so innovative that its use is still on the rise today, achieved success (and incredible margins for operators) in spite of the carriers.

And now, as carriers see their high-margin texting revenue coming under attack form over the top messaging services such iMessage, WhatsApp and others, the question most people who follow the industry asked was, “What will carriers do to trip up the competition?” Carriers have been known to block everything from Wi-Fi on handsets to Skype in order to protect their margins, and so it seemed logical they might go after OTT services again.

But carriers are changing. Now instead of a direct block, they are co-opting their competition and may in fact be doing so in ways that will help both consumers and OTT providers, even it it does mean carriers may not get as much as they want. It seems finally the industry might be wising up to the idea that expanding the whole pie might be beneficial even if the carriers have to share the revenue.

Examples of this change in heart include WhatsApp considering a deal with Telefonica to providing messaging services. Or plans from Orange and T-Mobile to include unlimited music streaming services on the phone as part of a data plan. Areas where operators can add value (and thus get paid more) are focused in enterprise settings as opposed to consumer areas for the most part, although mobile security and tie-ins with wireline broadband and home network automation plans might also be something consumers shell out for. Check out the chart above from Chetan Sharma, which lays out areas where carriers might find ways to add value on top of their data plans.

But for carriers to make this leap from the antagonistic “get off my pipes” worldview to becoming one layer among several in a mobile ecosystem, they will have to stop clutching at this myth that they are a bastion of innovation. Instead, they should accept that while they may be innovative as anything when it comes to transmitting packets, no one transmits packets for the sake of transmitting packets. In the pre-IP world they could hang onto the idea that only they could deliver voice, but in a post-IP world they have to realize that while only they can deliver data, data isn’t exactly the service. It’s just another delivery mechanism.

And people don’t buy delivery mechanisms. They buy services.

Disclosure: 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.

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