ARTS & FARCES internet

Internet

Jon Udell’s “Seven ways to think like the web” is a stunning exploration into making the best possible use of the distributed hypermedia system that is the web. Udell’s outline for working online is remarkable in its clarity: Be the authoritative source for your own data; pass by reference not by value; know the difference between structured and unstructured data; create and adopt disciplined naming conventions; push your data to the widest appropriate scope; participate in pub/sub networks as both a publisher and a subscriber; and reuse components and services.

One of the ways Google appears to be combating the content farms is by releasing the Personal Blocklist extension for its Chrome browser. Personal Blocklist adds a link beneath search results that lets the user block specified websites from those search results. More than anything, Google’s Personal Blocklist indicates the search engine hasn’t a clue about how to deal with content farms and is therefore punting, letting users fend for themselves.

Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor—an once upon a time the lawyer for Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation—is intent on rebuilding an internet that neither governments nor corporations can control. Jim Dwyer, writing for the New York Times, profiles Moglen and his dream of a truly decentralized internet. Moglen’s scheme starts with tiny servers called Freedom Boxes: “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip, You plug it into the wall and forget about it.” The tiny servers would run open source software with a focus on privacy and security. Moglen’s point is that current networks are too centralized and therefore vulnerable to control. “It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Moglen told Dwyer.

Media

All the poor Huffington Post bloggers carping about not getting cut in on Arianna’s big pay day would do well to avoid reading Nate Silver’s excellent analysis for the New York Times of just how valuable those blog posts are to Huffington Post‘s bottom line. Silver’s answer: Not much. “... the average pageview was worth a little more than six-tenths of a cent….”  resulting in the average blog post being worth about US$13 in advertising revenue writes Silver. I’m not sure I agree with the metric Silver used in his analysis—the number of comments each article received as related to pageviews—but it’s at least a start. Silver also asserts that the Huffington Post isn’t really a publishing company, but rather a technology company.

David Carr, writing for the New York Times, frets that there’s a media bubble on the horizon and observes that most of the value in the multi-billion dollar valuations and multi-hundred-million dollar acquisitions piling up “was created by people working free.” Carr writes, “... as advertising, the mother’s milk of all media, flows toward social and amateur media, low-cost and no-cost content is becoming the norm. For those of us who make a living typing, it’s all very scary, of course. It’s less about the diminution of authority and expertise, although there is that, and more about the growing perception that content is a commodity, and one that can be had for the price of zero.” Carr goes on to quote Anthony De Rosa, a Reuters product manager, as saying, “We are being played for suckers to feed the beast, to create content that ends up creating value for others.”

Politics

The Obama administration has announced a new policy on “internet freedom” intended to make it harder for governments to repress online dissent. That’d be governments foreign to the US, where the government and corporate oligarchies are trying harder than ever to stifle dissent. In a speech announcing the policy, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “The United States continues to help people in oppressive internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.” Mark Landler and Brian Knowlton, writing for the New York Times, report the US federal government will finance firewall circumvention services, email security, and data wiping. Landler and Knowlton also cite the cables made public by WikiLeaks as an exception to the US State Department’s free flow of information campaign. Clinton referred to the WikiLeaks disclosures as “an act of theft.” The same day that Clinton announced the Obama administration’s new policy, the administration’s other hand was in court trying to secretly pry Twitter account information open. Secret access to the Twitter accounts resulted from a secret grand jury convened to investigate possible grounds for a criminal case against WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange. Bruce Sterling, writing for Wired, has deconstructed the issue nicely. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society published an email exchange between its fellows on the issue.

Privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has received a document dump in response to its two-year-old Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) “Going Dark” program. The program originated as a response to the FBI’s problems implementing wiretaps on new communications technologies. According to the EFF, the documents reveal “a fully-formed and well-coordinated plan to expand existing surveillance laws and develop new ones.” Last year, Charlie Savage, writing for the New York Times, linked the “Going Dark” program to expansion plans for existing surveillance laws including the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). Charlie Savage, writing for the New York Times, covers a US House Judiciary Committee hearing where the FBI’s “Going Dark” program was unveiled. The FBI very much wants the 1994 CALEA provisions—which apply only to phone company networks being built specifically to support wiretaps—extended to apply to all internet-based communications. Representative John Conyers Jr. (D-Michigan) articulated the opposition to the expansion: “Requiring back doors in all communications systems by law runs counter to how the internet works and may make it impossible for some companies to offer their services.”

Publishing

Apple this week began allowing publishers to sell subscriptions on the company’s iOS devices. Apple will extract a 30 percent fee on sales through its App Store and will retain ownership of subscriber information. Apple will share subscriber information with publishers with customer agreement. The arrangement extends far beyond the publishing industry as companies like Amazon and Netflix would also be subject to the Apple arrangement. Subscription sales that took place outside of Apple’s App Store would, of course, not be subject to Apple’s arrangement, although Jeremy W. Peters and Miguel Helft, writing for the New York Times, report “Apple said it would not allow discounting outside the App Store. A company must offer the same deals to customers buying through Apple as it does through its own website.” Additionally, Apple will no longer allow publishers to place links in apps redirecting readers to an external website for subscription purchases. In a statement, Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said, “Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing.” Thomas Catan and Nathan Koppel, writing for the Wall Street Journal, cite unnamed sources as saying that US federal antitrust regulators have expressed interest in Apple’s subscription program for its iOS platform.

A day after Apple began allowing publishers to sell subscriptions within the iOS environment, Google announced a competing digital content payment service called Google One Pass. Based on the Google Checkout online payment system, Google One Pass allows publishers to retain 90 percent of the subscription price (Google takes a 10 percent cut, compared to Apple’s 30 percent take) and Google shares the customer’s name, ZIP code, and email address unless the customer specifically opts-out. Like Apple’s system, Google’s One Pass prevents a publisher from interacting directly with its customers. Publishers selling subscriptions within Android apps would have to pay Google’s 30 percent take, but unlike Apple, Google allows publishers to direct users to an external website for subscription transactions. From what I can tell—and I haven’t spent an inordinate amount of time looking at Google One Pass—it appears to be a trussed up paywall. Or rather, a trussed up tollbooth for publishers’ paywalls. In short, it’s a knock-off of Steven Brill’s and Gordon Crovitz’s Press+.

Borders, the bookstore chain, filed for bankruptcy this week. There were lots of reasons, but the hardest to swallow is the bookseller’s total failure to come to terms with digital publishing and online retailing. According to Julie Bosman and Michael J. de la Merced, writing for the New York Times, “Borders owed US$272 million to its 30 largest unsecured creditors—including US$41.1 million to the Penguin Group USA.” Borders reportedly stopped paying publishers in December 2010.

User experience

User experience professionals who work in organizations fantasize about a situation where everyone in the organization already knows and buys into the importance of user experience design. Sadly, that’s almost never the case and, as Stephanie Arnold writes in “The adventures of usability girl: Building UX from the ground up,” we spend our time educating, selling, practicing, and as “a soldier in the UX revolution.” Arnold offers good tips for those working in the UX trenches.

It’s no secret that I despise search engine optimization (SEO) and that I believe the “secret” is compelling content that people want to read and to which others find value in linking. Claire Cain Miller, writing for the New York Times, attempts to expose the practice for a mainstream audience and does a pretty good job. And then comes David Segal’s account in the Times of how J.C. Penney gamed Google during the holiday selling season using SEO techniques that Google acknowledged were over the line. Buried in the last page of Segal’s piece is the revelation, “Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J.C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent US$2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads—the kind you see next to organic results. Is it possible that Google was willing to contenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers?” That’s precisely the kinds of antitrust questions the European Union is asking Google.

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox finds that giving money on charity websites is seven percent harder than spending money on ecommerce sites. Donating physical goods was even harder, although volunteering was found to be quite good.

Brandon Schauer, writing for Adaptive Path, offers a pretty good overview of the user experience impacts of Apple’s new subscription model. Products become services that must improve over time; publishers had better spend plenty of time making a compelling trial or demo; and loyalty is going to become a more important metric than circulation.