ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Griff Wigley has launched Your Thick Skull, a series of online learning courses for grown ups who are not easily offended. I’ve known Wigley for years and he’s absolutely accurate when he characterizes himself as a “smart-ass coach.” First up is WordPress for Noobs, an eight-week course on the technical aspects of the WordPress content management system. Wigley’s stuff is almost always exemplary; check it out.

Catherine Rampell, writing for the New York Times’s Economix blog, reports that 41 percent of the third of displaced workers fortunate enough to have found work have had to switch occupations and most of those have had to take pay cuts, citing a report from Rutgers’s Heldrich Center for Workforce Development (.pdf; 336KB). What a great time to be laid off.

Censorship

The misnamed Media Shield bill—technically known as the even more Orwellian Free Flow of Information Act of 2009—making its way through both houses of the US Congress, aims to criminalize knowing and willing dissemination “in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States,” any classified information “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States.” As Geoffrey R. Stone, chairman of the board of the American Constitution Society and University of Chicago law professor, writes in a New York Times op-ed, “Although this proposed law may be constitutional as applied to government employees who unlawfully leak such material to people who are unauthorized to receive it, it would plainly violate the First Amendment to punish anyone who might publish or otherwise circulate the information after it has been leaked.” This is one of the best op-eds to appear in the Times in quite a while.

ESRD

What’s worse? China’s organ harvest or Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour suspending life sentences for two sisters if the younger one agrees to donate a kidney to the older one as a condition of their release. OK, bad question. One’s a tragic human rights issue; the other is an unethical and probably illegal act by a corrupt politician. Title 42 of the US Code makes it “unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation.” Michael Shapiro, chief of organ transplantation at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey and chair of the United Network for Organ Sharing‘s (UNOS) ethics committee, told the Washington Post, “If the sister belongs in prison, then she should be allowed to donate and return to prison, and if she doesn’t belong in prison, then she should have her sentence commuted whether or not she is a donor.” But wait, it gets worse. Barbour, in his commutation statement declared the older sister’s “medical condition [she’s a dialysis patient] creates a substantial cost to the state of Mississippi. ... [The younger sister’s] release is conditioned on her donating one of her kidneys to her sister, a procedure which should be scheduled with urgency.” The sisters were convicted of armed robbery, hit the victim in the head with a shotgun, netted US$11, and have been imprisoned for 16 years. NAACP President Benjamin Jealous told the Post, “This is a shining example of how governors should use their commutation powers.” OK, so that makes three bad actors.

Withings will ship a blood pressure monitor for Apple’s iPhone and iPad later this month. The latest in a series of healthcare “dongleware” for Apple’s iOS devices, the product consists of a traditional blood pressure cuff connected to a dock connector and an iOS app. The iOS app will be free in Apple’s App Store, but the dock connector and cuff will set you back a ridiculous US$130.

Mike Shelton, writing an op-ed for the Yuma Sun, asks the question I wish more people would ask and to which we’d all start demanding answers: “Why aren’t we able to repair and grow our own organs?” Shelton, an end-stage renal disease patient goes on to outline the work being done on organ regeneration.

Intellectual property

Waiting for Godot, Lord of the Flies, The Doors of Perception, Rear Window, Seven Samurai, and many more works published in 1954 should have entered the public domain on 1 January 2011. But because of yet another extension to US copyright law—passed in 1976 and becoming law in 1978—they didn’t. Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has the details of what we’re missing.

Internet

Cory Doctorow has written an excellent overview of the net neutrality “compromise” struck by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with itself. Doctorow uses the example of calling your local pizza joint only to be told by the phone company that the recipient of your call hasn’t paid for premium service. You’re given options to hold for 30 seconds or press “one” to immediately connect to Domino’s (who has paid for premium service). The unacceptable best we can hope for, according to these “compromises” is to be informed when our connections are being delayed. “The carriers, of course, hate this,” writes Doctorow. “They call it nanny-state regulation. In their view, telcoms companies should be free to retard the packets you request in perfect secrecy, as part of a larger strategy to blackmail websites and web services into paying bribes for the privilege of access to ‘their users’ (that is, you and me).” The entertainment cartel will gladly pay for premium service. As Doctorow notes, they can afford it, they understand it, and they’re used to it. In exchange, both the carriers and the entertainment cartel enjoy the knowledge that all this internet as a disruptor business is over.

Law

The US Department of Justice has subpoenaed Twitter for information on Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic politician who has worked with WikiLeaks, and at least four other individuals according to Kim Zetter, writing for Wired. It’s a safe bet that other internet services and publishers were similarly subpoenaed, but Twitter is the only company publicly acknowledging service. Zetter reports the information sought by the US government includes “full contact details (phone numbers and addresses), account payment method if any (credit card and bank account number), IP addresses used to access the account, connection records (‘records of session times and durations’) and data transfer information, such as the size of data file sent to someone else and the destination IP.” Zetter notes that this is likely boilerplate used for other internet service providers and publishers. Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon, reports that the same information is sought from “other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Julian Assange. It’ also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks’ Twitter account.” In an update, Greenwald pegs the situation nicely, “It’s worth recalling—and I hope journalists writing about this story remind themselves—that all of this extraordinary probing and ‘criminal’ investigating is stemming from WikiLeaks’ doing nothing more than publishing classified information showing what the US Government is doing: Something investigative journalists, by definition, do all the time.” Word is also beginning to circulate that Justice wants access to information on followers of the WikiLeaks Twitter account. First Amendment right to free assembly, anyone? Anyone?

Media

Magazine publishers rushed to the iPad like a nun to a rosary. But after the initial splash, the iPad turns out not to be the publishing epiphany many thought. Frederic Filloux runs the numbers on Monday Note: Wired had 100,000 downloads in June, but only 22,500 in October and November—a 78 percent drop. Non-tech titles fared a little better as Vanity Fair had 10,500 downloads in August, and 8,700 in November—a 17 percent drop. Filloux goes on to offer some valid clues to publishers thinking about implementing iPad versions of their titles. Matthew Ingram has a great analysis piece for GigaOm. His lede: “When the iPad first arrived on the scene, many newspaper and magazine publishers seemed to see it as a digital savior that would restore their fortunes and allow them to withstand the whole ‘information wants to be free’ aspect of the internet. After an initial flurry of interest, however, the enthusiasm of readers seems to be waning, according to some recent numbers which show that sales of many magazine apps have been slipping. Hopefully some publishers are starting to realize that simply having an iPad app doesn’t qualify as a digital content strategy.”

David Carr, writing for the New York Times, has a big-picture media outlook piece that I mostly agree with. Devices like the iPad have pretty much killed verticals—they just don’t know it yet, and neither does Apple. Everything has become just one big blob of (iTunes) media. As Carr’s 87-year-old father remarked when his iPad was set up, “Everything sort of looks the same.” As advertising sales really do start to compete with everyone, everywhere, the corporate media entities are looking for help wherever they can find it. Because they’re most comfortable with their own ilk, that’s where the big-media action is. As Carr notes, the shining exception is ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism site that is partnering and sharing content with “many print publications that have lost reporting muscle.” And then there’s the much-anticipated Times metered model where frequent users will be forced to subscribe. Carr realizes that the Times risks losing its status as the paper of record for, well, just about everyone when he points to News Corporation’s paywall foray with the Sunday Times and the Times of London: “The results were brutal—an 86 percent decline in traffic to the site.” Carr closes his piece by asking the question on everyone’s mind: “Will Google… continue to pretend it is not a media company?”

The Star Tribune, once one of the finest papers in the US, continues its slide into irrelevance by replacing long-time liberal columnist Nick Coleman with conservative Jason Lewis. That’d make a matched set with whacko conservative Katherine Kersten. 

Politics

Jay Rosen sums up the Arizona political assassination attempt best with a Wittgenstein quote: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Minnesota Public Radio’s Bob Collins did a stellar job of live-blogging the events after the assassination attempt without falling into the trap of speculation. Not surprisingly, James Fallows, writing for the Atlantic has the most cogent analysis.

Publishing

Leif Utne has written an obituary for the late, lamented Worldchanging.com from the inside. Utne left Utne Reader shortly after I did to become publisher of the website. Tasked with bootstrapping growth for the publication through various revenue streams, Utne’s success was modest, but just not enough. “In the end, I believe Worldchanging’s demise was due in large part to the organization’s inability to craft a business model that could surmount several challenges endemic to the current ad-driven media ecosystem,” writes Utne. I had really high hopes for Worldchanging—it had received a big boost from TED but couldn’t leverage it in time.

Meanwhile Borders, the bricks-and-mortar bookstore chain, has told publishers it would delay payments. Mary Davis, Borders’ spokeswoman, told Julie Bosman, writing for the New York Times, that “the company was not in a liquidity crisis and that its stores were well-stocked.” As ebooks continue to become more appealing to readers, bricks-and-mortar bookstores become even more irrelevant. And, as Bosman notes, Borders has been especially slow on the ebook uptake. If Borders does go bankrupt it will be a serious problem for publishers who stand to lose many millions of dollars. Bosman reports that Ingram Book Company—the largest book wholesaler in the US—is still shipping books to Borders and cites a Wall Street Journal report indicating that National Book Network—a smaller US book wholesaler—has stopped shipping to Borders.

User experience

One of the most overlooked aspects of user experience is the content maintenance and governance piece of content strategy. Seth Earley has written a pretty good overview of the importance of content maintenance and governance for ASIS&T. Earley uses a metaphor of building and moving into a new home.

Brain Traffic’s Meghan Casey has a great piece on the importance of the governance bit of content strategy. It hits so hard at the heart of anyone who’s ever done content strategy work that it’ll take your breath away. In short, “... it’s pretty hard to say no when you don’t have anything formal or documented to back it up,” writes Casey. “Get some governance—and get more control.”