ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Here we go again. Nelson D. Schwartz, writing for the New York Times, reports that beginning in 2012 more than US$700 billion in collateralized loan obligations—sliced and diced subprime corporate debt; “junk bonds”—will start to come due. “The period from 2012 to 2014 represents payback time for a Who’s Who of private equity firms and the now highly leveraged companies they helped buy in the precrisis boom years,” writes Schwartz. The Goldman Sachs of the private equity firms, by all appearances, is Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts. If all of this doesn’t sound familiar, maybe this from Schwartz will help: “Optimists like Martin Fridson, a veteran high-yield strategist, note that investors seeking high yields snapped up speculative-grade bonds last year and early this year, and he suggests that continued demand will allow companies to refinance before their loans come due.” Oh, and if that’s not enough, the US federal government will have to borrow US$1.8 trillion in 2012—US$1.4 trillion in 2013 and 2014—to cover old bonds that will come due.

Dave Winer, who knows a thing or three about running a business has posted and absolutely essential guide to doing small business in this so-called economy. Forget about an MBA and forget about most of the thick business books (there are a few worth their ink; Michael Phillips’s Honest Business and The Seven Laws of Money come immediately to mind). Winer nails working on the web with his first guideline: “People come back to places that send them away. This means NO LOCK-IN. You don’t hold your customers by force, you hold them with the love they feel for you. ... If your investors say you need to force your users to use your stuff, fire your investors and keep the users. Money is fungible. People are not.”

ESRD

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake has a nifty healthcare reform cheat sheet (.pdf; 105KB). Highly recommended.

Early in the week single-payer healthcare advocate Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) flip-flopped and has agreed to vote for President Obama’s health insurance giveaway. Just last week Bernie Sanders (I-VT) promised to offer a public option amendment during reconciliation. At the end of this week Sanders flip-flopped, saying he would not offer the amendment. Such an amendment would have forced an up-or-down-vote on the public option, allowing the American citizenry to see for themselves just who supported the measure and just who didn’t.

Internet

Twitter @anywhere was the big news out of the South by Southwest Interactive festival this week. In Twitter chief executive Evan Williams’s keynote (which many walked out of out of boredom) he announced a new framework by which web publishers can integrate Twitter data into their websites by merely copying and pasting a few lines of javascript. Initial partners include Amazon, Bing, Huffington Post, MSNBC.com, the New York Times, Yahoo, and YouTube, among others. @anywhere will also employ hover cards that display Twitter actions when a user hovers over linked content. Eliot Van Buskirk, writing for Wired reports that @anywhere “aims to solve two vexing problems of the increasingly crowded, noisy network: Who should I follow? And what is that person’s Twitter handle?” My take on Twitter’s @anywhere is that it will quickly devolve into just another advertising platform. Here’s hoping it’s more than that.

Meanwhile, Anna Otieno at Iconoculture may have spotted an emerging trend: Social media suicide. Otieno writes that a subset of those individuals using social media networks are beginning to leave the networks, sometimes abruptly, citing “concerns they [the social media networks] worsen their offline lives.” Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and Seppukoo are free online services users can use to remove their profiles from the social media networks. Facebook notices by blocking both services and sending in the lawyers.

Media

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released its “State of the News Media 2010” report, weighing in at more than 700 pages. What stands out more than anything in the report is big trouble for news organizations who are planning paywalls: “... even among the most avid news consumers online, only about one in five at this point say they would be willing to pay, and this does not include less voracious news consumers.” What’s probably even worse news for online news organizations is the study’s revelation that users of online news are neither engaged nor loyal: “... 65% of online news consumers do not have a site that is so important to them that it stands out in their minds above all other sites they visit.”

Politico published an almost certainly fake memo about healthcare this week. In all likelihood the publication was hoaxed. It happens sometimes and it’s always best to admit the error, correct it, apologize, and move along. But that’s not what Politico did. Instead of correcting the error and apologizing, Politico White House editor Craig Gordon wrote that the memo had the “look, sound, and feel” of credibility. Politico removed the item only when “Democrats cried foul, claiming the memo was fabricated and saying they could find no one on the Democratic leadership or committee staffs who had authored the memo or read it.” The question Gordon fails to answer is why the Politico reporter who received the memo didn’t try to source it in that same “Democratic leadership or committee staffs.” Only after publication and Democrats crying foul did Politico “circle back to the multiple Republican sources that had sent along the memo and asked if they could authenticate its Democratic origins. They could not, so Politico pulled the item from the website.” A Politico reporter gets an apparently anonymous memo from Republican sources and doesn’t bother to question its authenticity? If that’s not bad enough, consider that Gordon notes two possibilities: one that Politico was hoaxed by “some dirty trickster hunched over a keyboard to fashion a memo so realistic-sounding in substance and tone that even seasoned health reporters could get fooled; the other that a draft leaked before Democrat leadership authorization. Dan Gillmor has a very complete analysis and sums up Politico’s actions concisely: “The standard Politico has applied here, is, of course, ‘truthiness:’ Because they want it to be true, it’s close enough.”

Privacy

People provide much more personal information on the internet than they would ever disclose to a stranger met on the street. Some are saying these bits of personally identifiable internet effluvia can be collected and collated by computers, creating a fairly complete identity snapshot. Steve Lohr reports on the phenomenon for the New York Times. Researchers Vitaly Shmatikov and Arvind Narayanan in 2008 demonstrated that customer data that had been stripped of all personally identifiable information released for Netflix’s contest to improve its recommendations could “‘de-anonymized’ by statistically analyzing an individual’s distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations.” Shmatikov and Narayanan went on to show “that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts and been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.” Even more alarming, notes Lohr, is the work of Alessandro Acquisiti and Ralph Gross who published a paper last year reporting “they could accurately predict the full, nine-digit Social Security numbers for 8.5 percent of the people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003—nearly five million individuals.”

US law enforcement agencies are using social media networks to actively surveil US citizens. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discovered as much through documents obtained from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Department of Justice Criminal Division under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. One document, for example, was an IRS training course describing how agents should investigate tax payers using social networking sites. Instructions prohibit agents from using deception or fake accounts to obtain information.

One of the highlights of the week’s South by Southwest Interactive festival was Danah Boyd’s opening address, “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity.” “No matter how many times a privileged straight white male technology executive pronounces the death of privacy, Privacy Is Not Dead,” said Boyd, noting that most of us don’t really understand privacy. Boyd sums up privacy really well and really succinctly: “Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows.”

Publishing

Floppy disks, CDs, and hard drives all degrade much faster than acid-free paper. That’s bad news for publishers, librarians, and archivists. As creators begin to donate their archives—in 2009, shortly before he died, John Updike sent 50 5.25-inch floppy disks to Harvard, according to Patricia Cohen writing in the New York Times. Cohen quotes Harvard curator Leslie Morris as saying, “‘We don’t really have any methodology as of yet’ to process born-digital material. ‘We just store the disks in our climate-controlled stacks, and we’re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines.’” Cohen reports that Emory University addressed the problem of obsolete technologies and data storage by recreating Salman Rushdie’s original computing environment. Visitors can login and “see the screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies were a favorite),” writes Cohen. “They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and edit a sentence or post an editorial comment.” Yeesh.

Kickstarter just may be capitalism 2.0 for the creative class. Artists, musicians, and authors fund projects by offering up their creative ideas and requesting funding. Kickstarter employs an all-or-nothing funding engine. If the creator attains pledges that meet or exceed her funding request, the money changes hands. If not, the project proposal expires. For creators and their audiences this is an enormous breakthrough. Creators can propose a project at no risk; if it doesn’t receive the required support, it simply dies. On the other hand, if audiences see a project they like, they’re compelled to spread the word about it. Stay tuned; I plan on proposing a Kickstarter project later this year.

Technology

Tim Bray explains why he left Sun/Oracle to go to work for Google. The short answer is Android. The longer, exquisitely articulated answer is, “The iPhone vision of the mobile internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it. I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.”

National Broadband Plan. Calling the long-awaited plan “cash for clunking carriers” in his headline, Fleishman sums up the plan as “a document that explains precisely how the FCC and the administration are going to provide money to the same companies that have failed to bring broadband to everyone already on the firms’ own dimes.” The incumbent carriers have already ceased bringing fiber connections to new markets, waiting with their corporate palms out.

The plan calls 100Mbps/50Mbps to be accessible by 100 million US homes by 2020 but is oddly silent on “anything on the wire-in-the-ground side that will get us to its laudable goals,” as Fleishman writes. And while the incumbent carriers will be the primary beneficiaries of the government’s largesse, the plan does not include universal access rules. As a result, the infamous ISDN redlining of the 1990s seems certain for fiber-to-the-home-based broadband. “No force in the United States requires incumbents, which have a monopoly over the telephone or cable wire which they own, resell access for any purpose at non-discriminatory wholesale prices,” writes Fleishman. Unfortunately, the plan doesn’t change that.

For an excellent Minnesota take on the situation, see Sharon Schmickle’s well-researched “Battle over broadband: Minnesota slipping in efforts to get more high-speed Internet access” at MinnPost.com.