The future of the Internet is coming on

I don't know if anyone remembers this, but there used to be days... the days of BitNet... when using the Internet meant a command-line interface on a mainframe terminals.

Then there were the bulletin boards and their menu-driven interfaces. Anybody out there remember menus?

Between the bulletin boards and the World Wide Web, there was a transitional stage -- America OnLine. You had to dial up and log in, as if it was a bulletin board. But once inside, there was a graphical user interface -- in other words, you could point and click. There was online content -- newspapers, magazines. There was shopping. There were discussion forums, and there was email.

It was more complex, and more involved, and more engrossing than the alternatives.

At first, AOL was a "closed garden." Only members could get in. And they could only send emails to one another. Then the email system opened up, and AOL emails could go elsewhere on the Internet. Then the rest of it opened up, and AOL became just another Internet portal.

The World Wide Web was different from AOL -- AOL had buttons, and the WWW had links, but in many ways it was very similar.

Both were graphical user interfaces. And people could go shop, communicate, research, and get entertained.

At each stage of its evolution, the Internet has become more engrossing, a richer experience, with more choices. Also, at each stage, nobody expected it to change. Back when there were bulletin boards, people expected the bulletin boards to last forever -- except they would be slightly better bulletin boards.

Today, many people expect the current version of the Internet to last forever, except maybe with faster connections, more videos, and slicker websites.

It's not going to. Our websites are about to disappear as quickly as the old bulletin boards did. Well, they'll be stored in online archives somewhere.

But really, when's the last time you checked out a Compuserve forum?

The next version of the Internet will look a lot like Second Life. It won't be Second Life -- Second Life is a walled garden, has interface and scalability problems, and is difficult to use.

But it will, in many ways, be like Second Life. You will be able to walk down virtual streets that are ever-more-accurate representations of physical reality -- or down imaginary streets that have no counterpart in the physical world.

Your online representation -- currently just your email address or instant messaging handle, LinkedIn profile, MySpace page or personal website -- will be augmented by an ever-more-realistic three-dimensional avatar.

The entire planet -- and our space satellites -- will have virtual equivalents. In addition, there will entirely new virtual-only worlds.

Second Life is a poor imitation. Slow, cumbersome, and cartoonish. But for anyone looking to get a jump on the next iteration of the Internet, it's great place to learn how to do it.

Tempted to cheat on my chosen career

I believe that, on average, the sharper your focus, the further you will get in life -- whether in your career, your business, your hobbies, or anything else you're after.

Unfortunately, picking a career is no easier than picking a mate -- no matter how attractive your spouse, there will always be other people who are prettier, sexier, nicer, or just plain different.

You can't get away from it.

Some people deal by becoming promiscuous. They work on a hundred different projects, each going off in a separate direction. By playing the field, they get to enjoy variety -- but it's much harder to enjoy any success.

And, even as people in perfectly happy marriages can be tempted, so people with perfectly wonderful careers can sometimes be seen sighing over the green grass on the other side of the fence.

In my case, this past week, I've been tempted by the thought of a career as an urban fantasy novelist.

Sure, I love being a business journalist. And I absolutely love running my own company. But I have a secret desire to write novels about witches and demons.

I know, from a practical sense, that I've never written anything longer than a hundred pages -- and that was a struggle. I prefer, short, tight deadlines -- the tighter, the better.

I also don't like working alone. I prefer to be part of a large team of people. No, I prefer to be the head of a large team of people.

I also like making money. There are only a handful of novelists out there who make real money. Writing -- like music and acting -- is a career for people who don't mind spending most of their time waiting tables, or living off their significant other.

Finally, I like making a difference. What difference could I possibly make writing frothy, escapist books about witches and demons?

I'm like the guy in the bar complaining that his wife doesn't understand him -- when he knows that the opposite is true, that, in fact, she understands him all too well. And that the woman he just met is a soulmate -- despite not having any in common with her at all.

I'm the guy in the bar. And urban fantasy is that woman in the bar. She's fresh and dewy -- she's Samantha in Bewitched. She's fun and doesn't take life seriously. She drinks sweet fruity cocktails. And she compliments me on how creative I am.

Meanwhile, my old career has been with me for 15 years. Made me reasonably happy most of the time. Is likely to continue making me reasonably happy for the rest of my life. And we've produced some good stuff together.

Of course I'm not going to throw that away.

But it's nice to flirt and to fantasize once in a while.

In my fantasy, I live in a house in the middle of fields and woods. In fact, it's my actual house in Massachusetts, where I hardly spend any time at all -- it's in the middle of nowhere and I start going crazy with boredom within a week.

In my fantasy, I write on an Apple laptop -- maybe a pink one, like Reese Witherspoon had in "Legally Blonde." In real life, of course, I would rather shoot myself than get a pink laptop. A Mac, maybe, but definitely not pink.

And I write light, fun fantasy about urban witches.

I've got one idea about a former executive secretary who slows learns that she can sense an object's history just by touching it. At first, she uses her powers to help her boss, but then quits her corporate job to raise foster kids and fight evil.

And another idea about a woman whose parents immigrated to the US -- from another dimension. And she's got secret magical power and uses them to maintain peace in the city where she lives -- even as others of her kind use their powers for evil.

But now that I'm thinking about the serious implications of doing this, there are ways to set it up like a business, with teams of contributors...

Okay, gotta go... I smell the potential of money to be made.

In Shanghai,

Maria

How to kill your journalism career: The story of J.

We cover a lot of countries here at Trombly Ltd. Some of these countries speak other languages. So we're always looking for reporters with go od language skills.

J. was perfect. Young, ambitious, had the languages we needed -- plus, with journalism experience.

She wrote ten articles for us. Sure, her work needed work. She needed to improve her reporting, story organization, and grammar and style. But she was well on her way to becoming a solid international business journalism. Plus, we were getting in assignments on the movie industry -- just up her alley.

On Wednesday, I took her to a meeting with a local media executive who liked her background and was interested in helping us put her on TV.

On Thursday, I offered her a part-time assignment editing gig for one of our publications, on top of the other work she was doing, and started up the process for getting her a key to the office and a pass to the building, and a new set of business card with her name on them. Later on, if everything went right, we would have gotten her accredited, and she'd become an international correspondent.

And by "international correspondent" I mean someone who works for the top tier of publications. These are the publications that pay enough so that you can travel, buy a house, have children anywhere in the world.

This is a small group of publications, mostly based in the US and Europe, with a few in Asia, and they're shrinking. Moreover, the budget these publications allocate to international reporting isn't getting any bigger, either.

It's a hard market to break into. You have to have the experience they need. You have to demonstrate ability and connections. And you have to be able to gain their trust. After all, it's hard for an editor to manage a reporter who's based on the other side of the planet.

If the reporter is still one desk over, you can easily see whether he's on the job, how many phone calls he makes. When he goes out on assignment and brings back into, you know whether he did a good job covering the event because you've been working in this area for a long time, and may have, perhaps, covered it yourself in the past. Sure, frauds still slip through -- like the New York Times' Jason Blair -- but then your readers will usually let you know.

With foreign reporters, you don't know the beats that they're covering. You don't know the topics that they're covering. And your readers usually can't act as a fail-safe fact-checking mechanism because they don't have first-hand experience of what the reporter is covering, either.

As a result, publications typically send trusted, senior writers to overseas assignments. These guys are expensive -- but they know what they're doing, and they don't need constant supervision.

These are hard-to-get, high-profile, glamorous assignments. You don't just walk into them. You spend years working your way up.

There are short cuts, however, and our bureau is one of them.

We hire young, inexperienced writers. We train them, and we supervise them. We help them find people to talk to. We help them figure out which questions to ask. We help them organize their stories and improve their English grammar. We help them decide which stories ideas are interesting -- and which ones are the same old, same old.

Finally, J. had learned enough about our databases and processes to work on her own. Her task was to find someone to comment about a particular news development. She had a number of people she could try to reach -- and she only needed one quote for this particular story, a 250-word brief.

She had everything she needed to make the calls.

But instead of calling, she pulled a quote from an old article from another publication, translated it into English, and put it into the story. More than that, she didn't just plagiarize the quote -- she added in the story that the source talked to her, personally.

We caught the problem immediately -- before the story even went out for copy editing.

There was no reason to do this. It would have only taken a few minutes to actually call the source and get the quote. Maybe a little longer if the first guy wasn't available. Maybe a couple of hours if she had to call several different companies.

Why did she do this? Not just "accidentally" copying something and "forgetting" to attribute it properly -- that happens, we catch it, issue warnings, help the writer avoid such mistakes in the future. (If they keep making these "mistakes," though, they're out.)

This was an out-and-out lie.

I would guess that the lie saved her, most likely, 30 minutes of reporting time.

And, most likely, it killed her career.

I may have given her a second chance, but my business manager and Shanghai bureau manager forcefully overruled me. The risk to the company's reputation was too great - and the risks of setting a precedent too severe -- to allow her to remain in the office at any capacity.

We also pulled her previous ten articles and re-checked the sourcing of all stories. For two stories, we opened her company email account and checked for email confirmations of the quotes.

Then we notified all the clients whose stories she worked on -- all US-based business publications -- and explained what happened.

It is possible that J.'s career will recover from this. There are other news organizations in China, and she might also be able to report for smaller news organizations overseas, especially ones who require her language skills.

She's very lucky that her fraudulent story wasn't printed. If it had been, we would have had to run her name along with the correction -- and any future editor who Googled her would have known what she did.

In Shanghai,

- Maria

A busy May

Sorry about not posting last month -- it was a busy, busy May. The company continues to grow -- and new people have to be trained, new clients dealt with.

I was on local TV -- the International Channel Shanghai -- and taped the first episode of a new ITV-Asia program, Emerging China, for which I'm the host.

There were business deals with new partners. More details to come later, but it looks like I'll be running a second company soon in a different, but slightly related, line of business.

And I'm getting ready for my annual pilgrimage back to the US to meet with clients and see the old folks. We're flying out July 15 -- the e-tickets are already in hand.

Then, last night, I went out to an evening with some business friends (following up on an earlier meeting that night with another business groups - my Friday nights are packed!) -- and the discussion quickly turned to non-business issues. I needed to get back to my computer near 9 p.m. -- 11 p.m. at the latest. Those deadlines came and went.

I haven't just hung out and talked like that -- just talked with a bunch of cool guys -- for ages.

Not since the last webloggers meeting, in fact, which was a couple of months ago. And that in itself is sad -- my main non-business social outlet is a webloggers group.

Back when I had a marriage, my marriage counselor told me that I needed to learn how to get in touch with my feelings, learn to relax, embrace the softer side of life.

That didn't get too far.

Maybe it's time to rethink this. And get a hobby. Based on my high appetite for risk, I'm considering something like race car driving, or sky diving. But I might start out with rock climbing or downhill skiing.

In Shanghai,

Maria

How to invest your money and beat the stock market

When people find out that I'm a business journalist, they invariably ask me for stock tips.

After all, I'm probably sitting on tons of juicy corporate insider dope that my editors won't print so as not to offend advertisers, right?

First of all, not true. Any inside dope I've got, has been printed. I've been lucky with editors all my life -- in 15 years as a journalist, I've never had a story pulled due to advertiser influence. It's true. I've had stories pulled because they sucked, but that's a different matter.

Secondly, I'm not allowed to give stock tips. There are regulations out there about insider trading. If I do find something out, I either have to tell everybody, or nobody at all.

Finally, if even the employees at Enron didn't know that their company was going down the tubes, how would a journalist who spends a few minutes on the phone with an exec and some analysts know anything at all? Those employees pretty much lived at that company. They knew what was going on. They heard all the gossip. But they still lost their shirts.

But, despite all this, I still know the secret of how to beat the stock market. It's the only strategy that works.

We journalists don't write about it much because it conflicts with the news cycle.

Here's the problem: there's only one good way to invest your money. Everybody knows what it is. But you can't run the same story every day. You need to say something different, something interesting, something new. So we write about what various sectors are doing, how the economy is shaping up, give advice on what company to put your money in. Most of this advice is no more useful than the latest Britney Spears gossip.

But people want it, so we write it.

Take, for example, this month's cover story in Fortune: "What Warren Thinks..." It's not online yet, or I'd give a link to it.

Here's Buffett's advice on investing:

...they should just stay with index funds. Any low-cost index fund. And they should buy it over time... It's a positive-sum game, long term. And the only way an investor can get killed is by high fees or by trying to outsmart the market.

Then, if you turn the page, the very next article is titled "Where to Put Your Money Now" -- advice to investors on how to outsmart the market.

Journalists are not evil. But sometimes it does look that way, doesn't it?

So here's the best strategy. Only one guaranteed to beat the stock market:

1. Index Funds

Index funds sound boring. Basically, they're a fund that includes every company of a certain type. Your best bet is the biggest fund that there is. You want to bet on the whole US economy, not just on one company. Or on the whole world. Over time, the whole world is getting more efficient, more productive, and richer. Index funds reflect this. And the best thing with index funds is that you're not paying multi-million-dollar salaries for fund managers who do no better than monkeys throwing darts. Sure, by chance, some managers do well some of the time. But they're no more likely to do well the following year than anyone else. In fact, the more clever the story behind some manager's strategy -- whether it's a mutual fund, hedge fund, or some crazy new plan -- the more likely it is to lose you money.

Stick with index funds. Go for the cheapest ones. If you don't like saying "cheap" because it sounds... well ... cheap, then say "no load index fund." Now you're no longer cheap, you're a savvy investor.

2. Invest Over Time

If you want to sound fancy, you can call it "dollar cost averaging." For example, you might want to take $100 out of each paycheck and invest it in your index fund.

The key here is not to look at the news. Don't put in more when the market is hot. Don't put in less when it's down. Just set up the investment strategy and then don't look at it again... oh, for the next thirty years.

At the end of the thirty years, you'll find that you've beaten the market. Why? Because when the market is down, that $100 bought you more stock. When the market was up, that $100 bought you less stock. In other words, you were automatically investing more during the best times to invest - when the stocks were less expensive.

If you try to do this deliberately, chances are you will fail. People have a hard time guessing what the market will do, and even the best fund managers get caught up by investment fads and bubbles -- and by panic, as well.

By not looking at your investment, you take the emotions out of the equation.

There is one big drawback to the "index fund-invest over time" strategy. You have nothing to talk about with your buddies. Some guy will say, "I bet everything on big oil and war profiteers, and now I'm up $10 million!" and what have you got? "I'm in index funds." That sounds so lame. (Now you see the problem that journalists have.)

If you're desperate to play the market, then take some of your entertainment budget and play with it. Think of it as going to Las Vegas -- you'll lose everything, but you'll have fun doing it and you'll have some stories to tell. Except to your spouse. He or she won't want to hear these stories.

Then, when you tell your friends that you lost your shirt betting on pork bellies you will have literally lost just the price of your shirt.

Still in Shanghai,

Maria

Nostalgic for My Shanghai

I'm going to be heading off to the U.S. on July 15 -- and coming back in the fall -- but I'm already nostalgic for the Shanghai of today.

I was down in the French Concession area this afternoon, one of the nicest parts of Shanghai.

After having a quick bite at Abbey Road with journalist friend Bill Marcus -- of Marketplace fame -- I walked up Dongping Lu to buy some bread on the way home.

I walked into Paul's, a new French bakery chain in town. I love their Xintiandi location -- small, but drowning in a sea of real crusty French breads. Not the typical Wonder white-bread-style bread you get here in Shanghai. During nice weather, you can sit outside, sidewalk-cafe style.

The location on Dongping Lu is a full-scale sit-down restaurant. So although I walked in for a loaf of crusty whole wheat bread, I immediately saw that they had one croissant amande left in the bakery display.

I first had one of these when visiting a friend in Paris. They're sweet, filled with almond paste and sprinkled with sliced almonds and a light dusting of powdered sugar.

As I rode the taxi home, I was overcome with a wave of nostalgia. Shanghai will never again be the way it is today. The beautiful weather, the cafes popping up all over town. The laid-back lifestyle.

Bill says that the longer people stay in China, the less they work. Finally, they're just coasting along, moving around from one wifi-equipped cafe to another, blogging and twittering, pretending that they're doing something, until finally they're living on no money at all.

You can do that in Shanghai.

Bill is not an example of this -- he actually seems to be working pretty hard.

But I do know guys -- and gals -- who come to Shanghai with sky-high hopes and business plans then somehow get off the career track. Or never get on it in the first place.

Pretty soon, they're doing a little teaching or copyediting or corporate copywriting for a few hours a week. Just enough to pay rent on their part of a bachelor pad, and to buy a few beers and coffees during the week.

Next thing you know, they're in their mid-40s with potbellies, still coasting along on the coolness of being expats.

One mid-40s guy I know copyedits a couple of hours per week. The rest of the time, he told me, he spends dating. His dates are all hot young Chinese girls. He himself looks like the Big Lebowski, from the film of the same title. Well, a little dumpier.

Another guy -- in his late 40s -- somehow married and reproduced without leaving the Shanghai slacker mode. He teaches English some of the time. The rest of the time he spends working on his business plan. With each iteration the business plan becomes more grandiose, all-encompassing, and impossible to actually execute. If you want to hear about his idea, he'll make you sign a non-disclosure agreement. Don't be surprised if his idea seems familiar to you -- I've seen it on House.

Then there's a group of guys married to rich women. All in their mid-40s. Most pot-bellied. (To be fair, so am I.) Some seriously balding. (Not me. I've got tons of hair. Long. Blonde. Lustrous.) They tell people that they're running online businesses. These are one-man operations, involving an occasional consulting gig. Maybe some search engine optimization. Or web design. Their wives do the heavy lifting, bringing-home-the-bacon wise, leaving the hubbies to the cafes and beer gardens. Have wifi, will drink.

If you think you recognize yourself in this description by the way -- it's not you. It's somebody else. It's that other guy -- you know, that guy you hate.

I love these guys. They always have time to hang out. They're cool and laid back. They'll sit around and argue politics and solve all the world's problems over a couple of slices of pizza and some beer. They never have to rush off for an appointment, and never seem to have any deadlines to meet.

I'll miss them when I leave.

Once I move my family back to the States, I'll be back in Shanghai only on business. I'll probably pack my days here full of staff meetings, and interviews, and bureaucratic get-togethers with government officials. There will be stacks of papers to sign, new hires to interview and train, budgets to go through, cashflows to plan. I won't have as much time to just hang out in cafes, enjoy the free wireless, and blog about life in Shanghai.

It's too bad -- it's a beautiful life. Someone should make a movie about it.

Still in Shanghai,

Maria

Journalism vs. PR

Just came back from a nice lunch at KABB, in Shanghai's people-watching mecca Xintiandi. Hose Mitamura (author of China s Environment 2008, available from Amazon) and I discussed the differences between journalism and PR.

As my staff constantly reminds me, I tend to believe passionately in whatever I heard most recently. In my case, this is Law and Order -- I was watching reruns of the show the night before.

(I'm not going to say how, except to mention that I was shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find that there were illegally uploaded TV shows available through surfthechannel.com. Don't people know there is intellectual property violation going on? The horror!)

Anyway, on Law and Order -- and in every show that depicts an American-style legal system -- every legal case has two sides. There's the prosecutor, who tries to make the accused look as bad and guilty as possible, within the constraints of the law. And there's the defense attorney, who tries to make the accused look all harmless and innocent. There's a judge there, to keep things moving along, and the jury makes the final decision.

That's the media landscape in a nutshell as well.

The journalists try to print as much of the scandal and wrong-doing that they can dig up. Sure, they present ordinary facts as well -- so do prosecutors. But we all know what we're there for -- the blood and gore.

The PR guys try to make their clients seem sweet and wholesome. They also present some actual facts, but these are shaded in such a way as to tell the most flattering story about their client.

Sure, a good defense attorney will advise a client not to commit the crime in the first place, or, if the crimes are ongoing, to stop as quickly as possible. But once the crime is done, the defense lawyer is supposed to go all out to get the client off -- whether or not the client deserves to be punished.

So, a PR agency will usually advise clients to clean up their acts. But, barring that, the PR folks will do all they can to keep the bad acts from being publicized -- or, if they're already out, to put the best possible spin on them.

In this analogy, the jury is the reading public and the judges are the libel courts.

I don't mind working with PR people. They perform a useful public function. They get me in touch with company executives. They hook me up with customers, and send me background information and research reports. They suggest story ideas.

I regularly read PR blogs. One of my favorites is the China Law Blog. Yes, it's a PR vehicle for the law firm that sponsors it, Harris & Moure. But there's excellent information in the blog as well. PR Newswire is also a great source of information, sources, and story ideas, and they have a Chinese version through a partnership with Xinhua. Their Profnet service is by far the best way to find sources. I occasionally browse through their database of experts, but, more often, I post queries about articles I'm working on. Especially for tech-related stories, this is a great way to immediately get interviews with high-ranking executives at major companies, since their PR agents subscribe to these queries.

So I love PR guys. I used to be married to one. In fact, my ex still works in PR.

Would I want to be a PR guy? Be forced to say nice things about people? Never. Shoot me first.

Fortunately, PR work and journalism require such different personality skills, such different characters, such different approaches to morality, that there doesn't really have to be a conflict on a personal level. I can't do their jobs -- they can't do my job. And we wouldn't want to.

It's the old "Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean" thing.

I believe that the greater good is that which benefits society as a whole. This means, exposing corruption and injustice whenever it happens. If a few innocent people get hurt in the process -- well, that's just too bad for them.

Other people believe in the rights of the individual. Better that a hundred guilty people go free than an innocent guy go to jail. This is also a noble sentiment. In fact, if I was a lawyer, I might be torn about deciding whether I wanted to be a defense attorney or a prosecutor.

One of the things that appeals to be most about journalism -- and about prosecutors -- is that we are heroes. The mafia lawyers and the corporate attorneys -- they make the big money, but they don't get much respect from the public.

With PR, it's the same way. Sure, they have better haircuts. And better clothes. And better food at their parties. Their drinks are more expensive, and their cars are newer and flashier. But who really respects them?

The worst that can be said of good journalists is that in our zeal, we sometimes step over the line.

That brings me to the final parallel between PR and law. In the legal profession, the worst that can happen is for money to cross the line between the defense and prosecution. Whether it's the defense attorney paying off the prosecutor, or the prosecutor paying off the defense, if there's an exchange of cash there's corruption going on and the minute it comes to light the careers of everyone involved are over, and the respective organizations will suffer major PR blows.

On the media side, any exchange of money or favors between PR folks and journalists -- regardless of the direction that the money flows -- is a scandal. The bigger the money, of course, the bigger the scandal. If someone buys me lunch to pick my brain, no problem. If we're discussing possible stories over dinner, however, them I'm picking up at least half the tab.

I've worked for many media organizations. I've never seen a case in which they paid money to sources, or in which they accepted payments for PR people in return for editorial coverage. There was one case, of a very small-circulation local business magazine, that preferred to quote advertisers in stories and write flattering pieces about them.

In the competitive American media climate, it is hard for publications like that to become successful -- after all, who wants to pay for articles that are composed exclusively of advertising blather? Especially if there's an alternative publication that gives you the straight scoop, the solid dope, the inside dirt. Which one of us wouldn't take the dirt over the puff piece any time?

Since, over time, the average media climate tends to become more competitive, not less, I would guess that the demarcation line between PR and journalism will become increasingly clear in every region.

And this means that people who are just getting into the media field should be clear from the start about which side of the line they want to be on.

There's nothing wrong with being either a journalist or a PR guy. But the folks who try to cross the lines are vilified by both sides, and by the reading public.

When the public gets upset at either PR people or journalists it's when they confuse the functions that the two groups serve. At various times, the PR guys are the bad ones because they're trying to make evil corporations look good. At other times, the journalists are the bad guys because they're only looking for bad news.

In some emerging markets, where the media and PR functions are conflated together, the end results can be extremely messy. But I believe that over time, as the two functions are separated due to market pressures -- as well as increasing professionalism on both sides -- this situation will be resolved as well.

It pays to be clean.

In Shanghai,

Maria