Just a preface: when I use the term “Investigative Reporting”, I’m talking about trying to discover something people don’t want you to know. This doesn’t include the run-of-the-mill “be sure to do your background work” kind of stuff.
I’m having a love/hate relationship just at the moment with investigative reporting. I love it because it’s stimulating, but I hate it because it eats at my time like crazy. I don’t have much time to spare lately, and unfortunately some people who’ve been arbitrarily secretive have backed me into investigative mode. So I’m resenting it, even if it is fun.
In the Metaverse, however, having to do a little poking around is inevitable if you want to get to the bottom of the really interesting stuff. This post is, for the most part, just a way of reminding myself of a few things. I’m in the middle of investigating something pretty nebulous right now that’s going to take me quite some time to work out.
Here’s a quick tip-sheet of things to do when investigating something that people aren’t being up-front about for whatever reason:
Interview everybody. – Everybody. Your best friend when investigating an executive is the building’s janitor. Your best friend when investigating a merchant is an ex-employee. Don’t even think of skipping someone because they “don’t matter”. Geniuses are often clerks.
Leave nothing un-Googled. – Do searches for every single thing associated with your subject, even if you think you already know everything about it. Did a company come up? Check out what people have been saying about them lately. Know just a first name? Search it anyhow. Most of the time it comes up with nothing, but about one in fifty times it comes up with a stunning home-run.
When two things relate, search for them together. – Know a person’s pseudonym and a company name but don’t know the person’s real name? You’d be shocked how often it’s just served right up by a search engine when you put pseudonym and company together in a search.
Dig where Google can’t see. – You’re going to have to repeat steps 2 and 3 elsewhere I’m afraid if you really want to know anything. In fact, you’ll have to do it in several other places. Hit the searches inside virtual worlds, inside other Web 2.0 apps, mapping applications, and any other private directories that could possibly apply.
Remember Networking basics. – You’re going to be beating the bushes, which means asking a lot of questions. That means asking favors. If you’ve done your networking right before this point, you’ll have helped out so many people and introduced so many friends to each other that asking favors won’t be a big deal. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be prepared to make it worth someone’s while if they help you out. Trade for credit, information, or some other kind of favor. Try to avoid cash – the information gained through cash purchase is usually worthless.
Confidentiality is sacred. – Not much is sacred in this world, but if you want to learn anything you’d better learn to keep your mouth shut sometimes even under penalty of torture. If a source asks me to preserve their anonymity, then that’s it. It’s a solid black-and-white issue. It’s understood that a betrayal of confidence is an injury.
Interviews are either dancing or combat. – I can’t believe how many people, reporters even, don’t get this. When you’re trying to accomplish something with a conversation, it’s either a dance or a fight. If you’re friends, it’s a dance. You flow together in the moment, exploring emotion and expression while getting to where you need to be. Relax, go with the flow, and you’ll get the information you need even if they aren’t real sure you should have it. If you’re strangers or opponents, prepare your best word-fu. They have what you need, and you must extract it. Make no move without knowing what effect it will have. Use feints, fakes and dodges before you open with a few jabs. Keep a power-strike ready when they’re open for the kill. Use the hail-Mary only if you’re about to lose. Remember: if they walk away without spilling their guts, you’re the one left dead on the matt.
Become an expert in everything the subject likes. – I was once researching someone who had a sail-boating hobby. I didn’t know their name. I studied up on boating, what the names of the most popular clubs were, their histories, the history of sailboats in (the country of origin)… eventually a cryptic offhand comment was made that I realized was actually a boat’s name. I discovered where the boat was docked in real-life, got a membership list of the yacht club, cross-referenced it with the company profiles that were associated at the time, and I had my name. It’s not always that easy but hey, learning is its own reward.
When truly stumped, consult. – I can’t count the number of times asking the advice of my peers has helped in the past. Ask your friends for advice on how to proceed. You never know. Also, do hit http://www.journalismnet.com/ for all of the cool links there.
Timelines, Timelines, Timelines! – Get all of the events down on a timeline. Dates and times are pretty much always critical. I’ve yet to see an occasion where it didn’t matter when something happened.
Ok, that’s all off the top of my head. Let me sit on this overnight, and go through my list and see what I’m missing in the current investigation.
Everybody is quite excited about Newt Gingrich visiting Second Life. I don’t know or care about him, so I’ve been spending a lot of time shrugging and looking for more interesting things.
Today someone emailed me the following under the subject heading “Read this and THINK”. I offer it to you unabridged, unedited, and uncommented. Do read it, but please, not without thinking as well.
Gingrich Speech in New Hampshire . Apparently it is causing a firestorm.
NEWT GINGRICH : The third thing I want to talk about very briefly is the genuine danger of terrorism, in particular terrorists using weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass murder, nuclear and biological weapons. And I want to suggest to you that right now we should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren’t for the scale of threat.
Let me give you two examples. When the British this summer arrested people who were planning to blow up ten airliners in one day, they arrested a couple who were going to use their six month old baby in order to hide the bomb as baby milk.
Now, if I come to you tonight and say that there are people on the planet who hate you, and they are 15-25 year old males who are willing to die as long as they get to kill you, I’ve simply described the warrior culture which has been true historically for 6 or 7 thousand years.
But, if I come to you and say that there is a couple that hates you so much that they will kill their six month old baby in order to kill you, I am describing a level of ferocity, and a level of savagery beyond anything we have tried to deal with.
And, what is truly frightening about the British experience is they are arresting British citizens, born in Britain , speaking English, who went to British schools, live in British housing, and have good jobs.
This is a serious long term war, and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country, that will lead us to learn how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear or biological weapons.
And, my prediction to you is that either before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.
This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.
And, I further think that we should propose a Geneva convention for fighting terrorism which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous.
This is a sober topic, but I think it is a topic we need a national dialogue about, and we need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until actually we lose a city which could literally happen within the next decade if we are unfortunate.
This is a very sober description of the Islamic terrorist threat we are faced with . We are NOW at war with a culture that wants, not to take over our land, but to KILL us.
If this has meaning to you, please pass it on to those on your list
At the Metanomics meet yesterday someone mentioned how all of these worlds springing up lately weren’t interfacing. They saw that as a problem. The Metaverse is coming, but it’s coming fractured.
I’m starting to realize that it’s a good thing.
Web 2.0 applications don’t all communicate with each other, and while there is some demand for some interactivity between them, it’s hardly a make-or-break to the viability of any application. MySpace doesn’t need a Facebook interface. They exist parallel to each other just fine.
Take this concept to the Metaverse. There would be world clusters, small collections of worlds in groups of a few hundred to a few thousand scattered around the Internet. They’d interface with each other in a wide variety of ways, sometimes enabling people to walk their avatar from one world cluster to the next, sometimes allowing inventory transfer, and sometimes even allowing virtual currency exchanges.
They wouldn’t always allow it these exchanges, however, and the reasons for that wouldn’t be technical by any means.
Take There.com and Second Life for example. Imagine you could exchange Therebux for Linden Dollars. A brisk trade in currency exchange would definitely spring up for one simple reason: Therebux are available at a discount if bought in bulk. People would buy large amounts of Therebux with USD at a discount, then switch the money to Linden Dollars at the standard rate, and then back to USD. They’ve just made a profit. Repeat until one or both economies are dead.
That’s only the beginning. Imagine someone says that you can no longer buy currency at a discount in There because they don’t do it in Second Life. Is that fair to There residents? Imagine they make it possible to walk your avatar from There to Second Life, but since There doesn’t have the same Identity Verification process that Linden Lab is shoving down everybody’s throat, we just can’t have mature content in Second Life at all now. Is that fair to them?
What could work is if there was an avatar import process from There to Second Life, but the user established separate accounts in both. That could work (some legal issues involving intellectual property aside) and people would still maintain a sense of identity while having travelled from one world cluster to another.
note: I'm referring to There as a world cluster as Virtual Laguna Beach and the Hills are separate yet connected, as will be the wider open-source Second Life grid.
People might not see this as a fluid movement from one world to the next, and it might not match with their personal vision of the Metaverse, but the barriers will always be as necessary as a nation’s borders are. For reasons of trade, culture, and harmony, a fractured Metaverse will be a happy Metaverse.
This latest from Bernhard Drax is the best demonstration of where media is going. It’s not enough to see it. It’s not enough to hear it. You must experience the reality for yourself.
I tripped across this IMVU-type service via Alice‘s DEL.ICIO.US links. It’s called mEgo, and it’s a fancy-dancy avatar you can put wherever.
An avatar you can’t walk around, interact with, or otherwise do anything with… sounds like… a picture.
IMVU is doing great, and mEgo looks nice and flashy and will undoubtedly do even better as you can implant all sorts of crazy extra personal details in it. I kind of think the whole thing is stupid, but that’s exactly why I went ahead and made one. Eric Rice gave some advice once that really had an impact on me: if you don’t get a Web 2.0 application, use it. Use the hell out of it. Become a fanatical guru in that application.
At first I didn’t get it. Why the hell would I do that?
This was around the time everybody was going on about Twitter as the Next Big Thing, and I was looking at it and thinking “god this is stupid. Why waste my time?” So I took his advice. Now I can’t imagine NOT having Twitter.
I was also thinking of this advice back when I was trying out vSide. Don’t get me wrong, I never thought vSide was lame. It was the option of having that stupid little photo of your av with the distracting animation on your blog. Guys, the animated gif went out with the dinosaurs and we’re all happy about it!
Still, in the spirit of trying new things, I put the little avatar with the rotating ads on my blog. It’s driven me crazy ever since. I’ve pulled it off.
So I’m going to take this mEgo thingamajig and stick it on my “About” page. I’m going to fill it out over time, and sooner or later I’m going to figure out what the hell the attraction is.
Of course, now that I think about it, I’m not sure I could define what the attraction is behind Twitter. I’m screwed, aren’t I?
