ARTS & FARCES internet

Greg Reinacker released a new version of NewsGator today. It’s a free update. Except it’s not. Not at all. It appears to be a forced transition to a subscription service. Unfortunately, the NewsGator marketing material is neither honest nor transparent about this:

“This is a free upgrade for all existing customers. More details are here. If you’re not yet a subscriber, create an account and enter your existing 2.0 license key - you’ll get a free business account. If you’re already a business plan subscriber, go to your My Account section and enter your existing license key for a free service extension.”

What’s not said is that the “free business account” requires you to provide a credit card which will be billed when your “free” service expires in a maxium of two years.

I’m not interested in a subscription service for RSS and that’s not what I bought when I purchased the product license. To rub salt in the wound,  features found in the previous version of the product will be turned off on Halloween.

Goodbye NewsGator; hello Attensa.

Update—30 June 2005 08:15 CDT: NewsGator’s credit card requirement for updates is a bug and has been fixed (see Greg Reinacker’s comment below). The way Reinacker handled this—responding directly to user criticism quickly, honestly, and transparently—is to be commended in the attention economy where options are plentiful. Too bad more companies and their executives don’t take a similar approach; they’re going to have to in order to thrive. As for me, I intend to give NewsGator at least one more close look. I really prefer getting my RSS fix in my email environment.

I’m at the Online deliberative democracy conference at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute today and tomorrow and I’ve just learned something incredible. Up here on the far edge that is Minnesota, each member of the state House of Representatives has an RSS feed. This is a first and is huge for the future of democracy.

Thanks to Saint Paul school board member Anne Carroll for providing her account information so we could get on the university’s wireless network. Imagine a conference on online deliberative democracy with no access. Two steps forward; one step back.

I was really proud—and really nervous—of Utne.com‘s coverage of both major party’s political conventions last summer. I sent credentialed interns to cover both conventions and I maintain they filed excellent stories.

One of the more intriguing stories was Jacob Wheeler’s “Mammoth Security Force, Aggressive Police Can’t Stop Protestors,” which detailed the disruption of the Republican National Convention by activists Jodie Evans and June Brashares.

This week June Brashares goes on trial in New York for allegedly injuring one of the security guards who forcibly removed her from Madison Square Garden. Brashares was charged with assault, attempted assault, disorderly conduct, and harassment. If convicted, she faces a year in jail.

Earlier this year I proposed to open my day job’s website redesign and restructuring process to public scrutiny, comment, and help. But The Media Center beat us to the punch with an interactive case study of Edweek.org‘s migration from an open content model to a paid content model.

Andrew Nachison, director of The Media center, has written an excellent introductory analysis to the interactive case study.

Utne.com made a similar migration to most content being placed behind a paywall in late 2002 and I’ve been struggling with the pros and cons ever since.

It will be fascinating to watch how this plays out and I’ll be paying close attention.

Where Utne.com employs a two-tiered content strategy—most magazine content is behind the paywall; everything else is freely available—Edweek.org plans to use a three-tiered strategy with the addition of some content requiring registration. Predictably, Edweek.org is struggling with what content to place in which bucket: “Should we put some of our high-traffic pages behind the subscription wall, or should they be free—to market our journalism and entice more people to subscribe?”

The Bush administration—through law enforcement—had made at least 200 and probably close to 600 requests to libraries for information on what citizens are reading since October 2001. So says a new American Library Association (ALA) study that found both formal and informal demands were made of librarians to disclose the reading habits of library patrons.

The ALA used anonymous responses to survey 1,500 public libraries and 4,000 academic libraries, finding 137 formal demands for information since October 2001.

Not surprisingly, according to Eric Lichtblau’s account in the New York Times, “the Bush administration says that while it is important for law enforcement officials to get information from libraries if needed in terrorism investigations, officials have yet to actually use their power under the Patriot Act to demand records from libraries or bookstores.”

One would think that the existence of a subpoena—if not the content of the subpoena—is a matter of public record, and it should be relatively easy to determine whether the Bush administration is telling the truth. That would be wrong: secrecy provisions of the Patriot Act make it a crime for a librarian to acknowledge even receiving a subpoena.

Nonetheless, abuses by the Bush administration are clear according to a source for Lichtblau’s article: