ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

The New York Times’ “Mapping America” by Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter, and Alan McLean culls data from the US Census Bureau’s 2005-09 American Community Survey to deliver tremendously usable interactive infographics on race and ethnicity, income, housing, and education. Highly recommended—one of the best series of infographics in years.

Stephen Martin, writing for TechCrunch notes that periods that Richard Florida identifies as The Great Reset aren’t really events, but rather processes representing “a shift in values, economic tastes and preferences, business structures, and industries. ... a fundamental change in our culture as a whole.” Martin sees these times as first refocusing people as businesses come back to their core competencies. As the culture transits a period of turmoil, new opportunities present themselves. One of the most important opportunities according to Martin is something he calls the “democratization of opportunity.” Background and baggage no longer matter; all that matters is results.

Censorship

When Amazon dropped WikiLeaks from its servers, it painted its actions as driven by a moral concern for protecting innocent lives. And that WikiLeaks didn’t own the content it published. That turns out to be not so much the case as are lucrative government information hosting contracts. That’s the discovery by Dave Winer, citing promotional email from Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Today we have nearly 20 government agencies leveraging AWS, and the US federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments,” writes Kay Kinton, Amazon’s senior public relations manager for AWS, in the email to Winer. “AWS customers include Treasury.gov, the Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives, the openEI.org project at DoE’s National Renewable Energy Lab, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA.” Winer follows the money as he writes, “It makes perfect sense that the US government is a big customer of Amazon’s web services. It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that business. There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary.”

ESRD

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued its final rule for the Qualitative Incentive Program (.pdf; 164KB). The Quality Incentive Program establishes performance standards for dialysis facilities and provides payment adjustments based on how well individual facilities meet the standards. Facilities that fail to meet the standards are subject to a payment reduction of up to two percent. The performance standards are based on anemia management and dialysis adequacy. Dialysis facilities will be required to publish their Total Performance Score and their score on each individual measure. Additional quality measures may be added in the future and CMS will publish the scores on its website.

Internet

Except for Dropbox—one of the best new software programs of the decade—I’m not a fan of cloud computing. Michael Hiltzik, writing for the Los Angeles Times, explains why: “... What if the company decides to stop maintaining the server or goes out of business?” Hiltzik uses Yahoo!‘s Delicious web browsing bookmark sharing service as an example. The dangers of cloud computing are especially onerous in the area of social media. As Dan Gillmor tells Hiltzik, “You might keep a copy of your data, but only the company has access to the web of relationships.” In exchange for being able to store your data online, so it’s accessible from anywhere with a net connection, you give up some measure of control of that data.

What happens when an infinite amount of information is available to anyone with an internet connection? That’s the core question Om Malik posed to Ev Williams in a distillation of a wide-ranging interview. Apparently not overly enamored of social media, Williams addresses Malik’s question about machine intelligence by saying, “People are obsessed with social but it’s not really ‘social.’ It’s making better decisions because of decisions of other people. It’s algorithms based on other people to help direct your attention another way.”

Media

Publishers grasped at the coming mobile tablet devices like Apple’s iPad like a last ditch attempt to salvage a failed business model. Only now are they starting to become aware that these mobile devices (and the ones that come after) are part of the internet and nobody—and I mean nobody—is going to get their information from a single source any more. And nobody wants an app for every one of their information sources. The web isn’t dead—not even dying—but the branded channel is. This is the area explored by Bradford Cross in his “Why the iPad is Destroying the Future of Journalism.” Cross says this is RSS all over again, and the only innovation is taking place in the presentation layer. (I disagree with him about RSS; it’s still my primary information source, although Twitter is catching up a lot faster than I thought it would.) Cross trots out the numbers showing that users find news by search (not me) with 35-40 percent of the 123 million US online news users coming to news sites via a search engine. Social media is the lagging second leading referrer to news sites, which isn’t really surprising until you think about it. What users want more than anything is relevance. Unfortunately, hyperrelevance comes at a cost to serendipity. Old media, instead of doubling-down on paywalls, should be figuring out how to tap into this social media element, according to Cross. “The dominant models of search and social for discovery seem to point to the need for syndication above the need for subscription to branded channels,” writes Cross. “The syndication model in turn requires additional focus on relevance. This, together with the new needs for social and design, again points to the need for media companies to refocus their efforts on their core competency; journalism.”

Publishing

Dan Gillmor turned down a New York publishing deal for Mediactive because the publisher refused to allow a Creative Commons license. Gillmor published his second book himself and Jane Park wrote a brief profile for Creative Commons. Within three days of Mediactive‘s publication, 1,500 visitors to the Mediactive website had downloaded the book. Sales are smaller, naturally, but Gillmor hasn’t even ramped up his marketing effort yet. “Almost a decade after Creative Commons was founded, and despite ample evidence that licensing copyrighted works this way doesn’t harm sales, book publishers remain mostly clueless about this option, or hostile to it,” writes Gillmor in the book’s epilogue.

Glenn Fleishman covers Google’s eBookstore for The Economist noting that the search giant employs digital rights management (DRM) to keep its ebook customers in its own proprietary walled garden. Supporting both .pdf and .epub formats, Google adds DRM to these nominally open file formats, preventing some publications from working on some devices.

User experience

Relly Annett-Baker’s “A Contentmas Epiphany” asks—and answers—the perennial content strategy question: “Why would you start designing the container if you haven’t worked out what you need to put inside?” It’s long, but really useful.

Jolie O’Dell, writing for Mashable, offers up 10 predictions for where the web is headed in 2011. Unlike many of these kinds of packages, O’Dell’s exhibits real thought and insight. Except for the “WYSIWYG tools get better and grow” bit. I’ve been waiting for a usable visual HTML, CSS, and Javascript tool since 1993. It’s not going to happen in 2011.