This was 1993—the dawn of the commercial internet—and the only interaction I had with my readers was through email and speaking engagements. I wanted to know more about what they were interested in because I suspected it was the same folks buying each work.

Having written for a lot of magazines I was always curious about why the business side—especially the circulation director—was paranoiacally protective of and disturbingly enamored with “The List” (of subscribers). It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Here was a list of hundreds of thousands of people who were willing to pay for what you produced. In addition to name, address, phone, and the like, it had a good bit of demographic information about each individual, as well.

My publisher for that book, skunk that he was, was not stupid. He understood the value of “The List” as well as I did. Probably better. He argued that readers should send their cards to him, not me. I was having none of that, and it took us several days to negotiate an arrangement: The publisher would receive the cards from the readers, have an employee enter the data in a database, and send me the files. It was pitched as saving me the trouble of data entry. I stupidly, stupidly took the deal. Stupid because the skunk publisher never sent the complete database.

That’s the frame of reference for what Time, Inc. is currently going through with Apple. Time, Inc. wants to sell iPad subscriptions to its publications through Apple’s iTunes Store. Not being stupid, it’s not about to let Apple control it’s list. But Apple, not being stupid either, won’t have it any other way.

Peter Kafka, writing for All Things Digital, reports this conflict comes “much to Time, Inc.‘s surprise.” Oh, sure it does. Kafka writes that Time, Inc. had to resort to selling single copies of its Sports Illustrated app through the iTunes Store last month because Apple rejected Time, Inc.‘s subscription app at the last minute.

Kafka reveals the revered importance of “The List” for publications: “Subscriptions, whether they’re for ink-and-paper magazines or their digital editions, are a big deal for Time, Inc. and every other magazine publisher. They value them in part because they provide recurring revenue, but primarily because they provide a treasure trove of data.” Publishers can also grow value in their publications by bundling the two editions, discounting—or giving away—one or the other edition. But doing that requires control of “The List.”

Time, Inc. executives told Kafka they “had been communicating with Apple throughout the spring as they developed their subscription plans, and had been told that Apple approved.” Kafka reports that Time, Inc. can’t get a clear answer from Apple on how the project went off the rails and opines that “Steve Jobs loves the idea of digital magazines and wants to control the market for himself.”

Apple is clearly telling Time, Inc. (and other publishers) to go pound sand down a rat hole with it’s official statement: “We have two platforms that we support for apps of all types, including magazines: HTML5 provides an open platform for developers to create and distribute whatever they want, and the App Store which is a curated platform offering customers the largest offering of apps for any mobile device with over 225,000 apps and 5 billion downloads.”

Except how, then, do you square that Apple rejected Time Inc.‘s app, yet approved apps from Amazon and the Wall Street Journal, both of which bill customers directly.

If you’re a publisher, my advice is the same as it’s always been: Avoid Apple’s “curation” at all costs. Do not be distracted by the shiny iPad object. HTML5 and CSS3 provide almost as rich a publishing environment with no walled gardens (hint: CSS3’s media queries).

Previously, Medicare paid a predetermined fee for dialysis services, but some drugs—like Epogen—were reimbursed separately. That system gave dialysis providers a financial incentive to overuse Epogen which increased the patients’ risk of heart attacks and strokes. Because Epogen is now part of the “bundle,” it will likely be underused and patients’ quality of life will suffer. While Medicare has set up adequate standards for quality of care—including maintaining patients’ hemoglobin levels between 10-12—it remains to be seen how these standards will be enforced. When my hemoglobin falls below 11.3, I’m wiped out; when it’s below 10, I’m virtually immobile and barely conscious.

Cheryl Clark, writing for HealthLeaders Media, cites CMS as saying, “the law requires CMS to reduce the payment rates to a dialysis facility by up to two percent if that facility fails to meet or exceed the established performance scores with regard to performance standards established for each quality measure.”

Epogen is incredibly expensive because Amgen has had a US monopoly on erythropoietin since 1989. Amgen’s original patent expired in 2004, but because of the broken intellectual property laws in the US, Amgen received a total of seven patents on the same work, some of which won’t expire until 2015.

A 2,000-unit vial of the drug currently costs US$49.99 from a veterinarian supply house; my current dosage is 18,000 units each dialysis run or about US$900 per week, retail. Dialysis providers pay Amgen’s Wholesaler Acquisition Price (WAP). According to the third amended complaint in US v. DaVita, Inc. (.pdf; 156KB), Amgen’s WAP was “calculated based on a 20% reduction from the Average Wholesale Price (AWP). ... The total possible discounts totaled 14.5% off the listed WAP, which itself was heavily discounted off the AWP.”

Under the current Medicare reimbursement plan, dialysis providers were able to make a profit on the spread between the Epogen they purchased at less than wholesale and the Medicare reimbursement rate. Forbes reported in April 2007 that “Medicare also reimburses at 6% above the average sales price of the drug. A Morgan Stanley report estimated that dialysis chains made 25% of their profits on the Epogen spread. Last year 21% of DaVita’s revenue came from reimbursements for Epogen.”

Because of the Epogen expense, dialysis providers may begin to administer it by separate injection (less is needed when the drug is injected directly); something the providers rejected when the drug was reimbursed separately. Some oral drugs—most notably Amgen’s Sensipar and Genzyme’s Renvela—won’t be included in the bundle until 1 January 2014. These drugs, while crucial to the health of dialysis patients, aren’t typically taken during the dialysis treatment.

The Medicare dialysis payment rule sets a base “bundled” payment rate of US$229.63 per treatment.

Medicare’s Quality Incentive Program (QIP), which takes effect 1 January 2012, ties a dialysis provider’s payment to how well it meets Medicare’s performance standards. “For the first time in any of our payment systems, the quality of care facilities furnish to patients will be reflected in their payment rates,” said Donald Berwick, Medicare’s newly-appointed administrator, in a statement. Quality measures included in the QIP include urea reduction ratios (a measure of dialysis adequacy) and the previously mentioned anemia levels. The QIP also mandates that dialysis providers’ facility performance scores be made publicly available.

ESRD

Renal Business Today reports a Rhode Island Hospital researcher has found that hemodialysis patients are at “increased risk of carrying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in their nose.” The study appears in the June 2010 issue of the University of Chicago’s Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology (not yet available online). MRSA in the nose increases the risk of developing an invasive MRSA infection. In the US general population, about one percent of people carry nasal MRSA. The Rhode Island Hospital study found that 15% of outpatient hemodialysis patients carry nasal MRSA.

Internet

Facebook announced it will be using OAuth, an open source protocol that enables secure API authorization. That’s the big news. The little news is that Facebook is repositioning itself as an organizer of the web around relationships between people. As users click the “like” button for various websites for example, Facebook will aggregate that data, mapping it to individual recommendations. Facebook has a mistaken mind map of the internet and the web, as clearly exemplified in Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote: “Open Graph puts people at the center of the web. It means that the web can become a set of personally and semantically meaningful connections between people and things. ... We’re going to connect all of these graphs together to form the Open Graph. And when we connect all of our graphs together, the web is going to get a whole lot better.” Thanks but we don’t need—or want—Facebook intermediation for making our semantic connections. Nor do we need—or want—Facebook’s crappy widgets cluttering up our websites. Facebook’s “map of the graph” is not the web. I’ve been told I’m wrong about this by people I respect, but I can’t help it: Facebook 2010 = AOL 1991.

Dave Winer asked (and answered) a seemingly innocuous question: “What comes after location?” The answer is what Winer calls “vector-awareness.” It’s really simple in concept: Don’t give me information just about where I am; give me information about where I’m going. Winer expanded on the concept the next day. This is a Really Big Deal, folks.

Media

Dave Winer offers the best advice I’ve seen to the media industry: “On the way down, with the ground rushing up to meet you, you’re going to have to learn how to fly. Or else suffer the consequences.”

Ex-Wall Street Journal staffer Heidi N. Moore has been burning Twitter at both ends to plead the case that the US national corporate business press did a good job covering the 2008 financial crash. The unfortunate fact, as Dean Starkman’s “Power Problem” ($$) for the Columbia Journalism Review unmistakably points out, is that the corporate business press fell flat on its collective and individual faces in covering the financial institutions that caused the crash. Unfortunately, Starkman’s 6,400-word source article is trapped behind a paywall. Here’s the gist: Starkman and two associates spent months surveying the corporate business publications between 2000 and mid-2007. Starkman selected 737 stories that he “deemed relevant for one reason or another.” Starkman’s conclusion was that the corporate business press was just as surprised by the crash as everyone else, encapsulated in the subhead of his CJR cover story: “The business press did everything but take on the institutions that brought down the financial system.” Starkman does an incredible job of unpacking Moore’s delusions in a follow-up blog post, “Mangling ‘Power Problem.’”

Dan Gillmor has been asking corporate media producers about their relationships with Apple and whether or not Apple could reject their journalism for quite some time. While Gillmor hasn’t been able to coax a response out of any of the usual suspects, the Washington Post‘s Rob Pegoraro got a definitive answer from his own publication: “So, can Apple remove news organizations’ apps for their content? Washington Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti wrote that “this is our understanding”; National Public Radio’s Danielle Deabler agreed but said NPR saw no evidence that Apple wanted to do such a thing. Publicists for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and USA Today declined to comment or did not reply to e-mails.”

Publishing

Ken Auletta’s New Yorker column, “Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?” deconstructs the battle between Amazon, Apple, and Google to control the ebook market. Sales of books between 2002-08 grew by 1.6% and margins were shrinking. Book publishers were playing it safe, avoiding unknown authors. The one glimmer of hope was Apple’s iPad—it and it alone would bring profitablity to the booming ebook market. Auletta notes that ebook sales increased 179% in 2009, even though they account for only 3%-5% of the book market. Amazon had set the ebook price point at US$10—in an attempt to grow the market and Kindle sales—and Apple would change that. Apple agreed to the publishers’ desire for an agency model where the publishers would be the sellers and Apple would be an agent, taking a 30% fee for all of its sales.

Technology

Nobody ever wants to work for Steve Jobs more than once, but Bruce Tognazzini has a stellar piece on the product development strategy of Steve Jobs. The article, “Mac & the iPad, History Repeats Itself,” is couched in a comparison between the early days of the Macintosh and the early days of the iPad. Both began as closed ecosystems. The first Mac connected to nothing and didn’t even have arrow keys—Jobs’s way of ensuring that the existing crappy software couldn’t be ported to the graphical user interface. Eighteen months later Tog was responsible for adding those arrow keys. “I didn’t do it because I thought Steve’s original decision was wrong,” writes Tognazzini. “On the contrary, I believed then and I believe now that decision was critically important. Without it, the new machine with its rodentiometer* and unproven interface would have been overrun with great hordes of horrific software, likely preventing the new interface from taking hold.” What Tog misses, as Dan Gillmor points out is that “the first Mac didn’t require software developers to get Apple’s permission to write apps.” Oh, Tog worked for Jobs more than once; he spent 14 years at Apple, founding the company’s Human Interface Group.

The first glimmer of hope for the open iPad arrives with SproutCore Touch, a framework for building incredible, touch-enabled interfaces in HTML5. Take a look at the documentation demo.

The back-end is all done and I’ve had about as much as I can stand of MySQL, PHP, and ExpressionEngine. The site is now running ExpressionEngine 2.1.0, and either this has to be the most excruciating upgrade ever or I’m getting older and crankier. Let me just say, dumping and importing databases is within my comfort zone; dropping and importing tables within that database is pushing it; modifying the actual database is way over the line.

This update experience is precisely why I ceased doing IT consulting work eight years ago. The various disciplines within user experience design are all much more within my comfort zone, and I’m finding that things I know are starting to get pushed out by new things I’m learning.

I had hoped to have the front-end finished by now as well, but no such luck. Someday soon.

Whoa, the new image picker in the editor sure is snazzy.

Anyway, there’s almost certain to be some breakage; please let me know by using that Feedback link in the upper right corner (it won’t be there for very much longer).

Dan Gillmor writes, “but from what I can see this is going to be a seriously big deal if it works as advertised.” The problem is, these things have never worked as advertised. Nonetheless, Gillmor writes he’s “going to start working on an app for the journalism marketplace, a project I’ve wanted to do but couldn’t get going with because of the cost.” Godspeed, Dan, but I’ve seen this movie before. Anyone remember the name of Danny Goodman’s personal information manager HyperCard stack? Gillmor notes that App Inventor is built on Scratch, a programming language for kids developed at MIT. Apple, predictably, rejected Scratch for iOS.

Steve Lohr, writing for the New York Times, reports that App Inventor “has been under development for a year” led by Hal Abelson (one of my heroes) and has been tested with “sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students, and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.”

The fruits of the initial users can at best be seen as minimally useful applets. A program that sends a text message every 15 minutes informing a list of friends of the sender’s current location. A program that auto-replies to text messages. And a program that’s the software equivalent of the “help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” gizmo.

Censorship

Centre County (PA) Judge Thomas King Kistler ordered the Centre Daily Times and the Daily Collegian (Penn State’s student newspaper) to delete news stories about two defendants from their websites. The defendants’ lawyer “was concerned the media’s First Amendment rights to free speech were trumping his clients’ rights to have cleared records,” according to Genaro C. Armas writing for the Associated Press. The judge for the other three cases, Centre County Judge Bradley Lunsford reversed his original order to expunge the stories. Neither US federal nor Pennsylvania state law require newspapers to change archives that are factually correct. Sara Ganim, writing for the Centre Daily Times, reports that Kistler later met with fellow judges, district attorney, and the defense attorney and rescinded his expungement order.

ESRD

Apropos of nothing, but it fits as well here as any of the other categories. Jeremy Messersmith is one of the best under-the-radar songwriters to come down the pike in quite a while. He was on Minnesota Public Radio this week; here’s a video clip of him singing “Organ Donor.”

Internet

Last month Twitter reduced the number of API calls allowed for third-party applications from 350 to 175 per hour. This week Twitter third-party vendors reported that the the number of allowed API calls was reduced to 75 per hour. What that means is that Twitter is throttling its servers—if you follow a lot of people on twitter, or only a few really prolific ones—you can’t keep up with the stream. As Ryan Singel aptly writes for Wired, “... take this as another reason why communication services work better as open protocols—like email—not as proprietary platforms like Twitter and Facebook.”

Media

One of the stupidest newspaper headlines ever run is indicative of how truly far the Star Tribune has fallen: “15 homicides aside, serious crime drops on North Side.” To think that I can remember when the Star Tribune was one of the best papers in the US is simply stunning.

Politics

If you live in the Twin Cities, check out MetroWatchdog, a joint project of the Fourth (Saint Paul) and Fifth (Minneapolis) Congressional District Green Parties. Instead of focusing on electoral campaigns and the attendant personalities, MetroWatchdog focuses solely on grassroots democracy: issues and local government.

Publishing

Ann Handley accurately describes the 14 stages of writing a book. Really.

User experience

Jeffrey Zeldman explains his view of why there won’t ever be an InDesign for HTML and CSS. “HTML is a language with roots in library science,” writes Zeldman. “It doesn’t know or care what content looks like. (Even HTML5 doesn’t care what content looks like.) Neither a tool like Photoshop, which is all about pixels, nor a tool like Illustrator, which is all about vectors, can generate semantic HTML, because the visual and the semantic are two different things.” Zeldman goes on to rail that the machines can’t do what humans can: “Moreover, authoring good HTML and CSS is an art, just as authoring good poetry or designing beautiful comps in Photoshop is an art. Expecting Photoshop to write the kind of markup and CSS you and I write at our best is like challenging TextMate to convert semantic HTML into a visually appropriate and aesthetically pleasing layout. Certain kinds of human creativity and expertise cannot be reproduced by machines.” Be sure to read the comments.

I’m finding UX Myths to be more and more useful as time goes on. Written by two information architects in Budapest, the site provides links to extensive supporting evidence of its positions. And Zoltan Gocza and Zoltan Kollin aren’t afraid to refute long-held user experience axioms.

Eric Meyer has written an endorsement of vendor-specific CSS prefixes for A List Apart. Here’s his nut graf: “We ought to praise vendors for using prefixes, and indeed encourage them to continue. Beyond that, I hold that prefixes should become a central part of the CSS standardization process. I do this not for the love of repetition, but out of a desire to see CSS evolve consistently. I believe that prefixes can actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS.”

When user experience experts hand-off their deliverables to the client, sometimes the transition is uncomfortable. How does the client conduct a successful implementation? Adaptive Path’s Chiara Fox has published a useful flow chart clearly outlining where strategy and design tasks end and where implementation starts, including various roles.

I’m tough on my bags, but I don’t mind paying for quality and expect them to last. I have Tumi and Tenba bags that are 20 years old and still in excellent condition. They’re terribly scuffed and dirty, but all the parts still work. That’s what I expect. Tumi has even sent redesigned replacement parts for two of our bags (wheelie pop-up handles) because they were seeing unusually high rates of failure. That was years ago. So far, only one of the bags needed the new part.

I need a backpack because I want both hands free and I want the weight of my bag distributed as I tend to walk fairly long distances—the enormous University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus (I still can’t believe how much physical space it takes up) is distributed between two campuses about seven miles apart, and the College of Design occupies buildings on both campuses.

Today I bought a Briggs & Riley 17-inch clamshell. It’s as well constructed as any of my Tumi bags and even more thoughtfully designed. I couldn’t decide between the 17-inch clamshell and the Glide. I liked the straps on the Glide better, but I liked the interior design and water-resistant zippers of the clamshell. And the middle section of the Glide didn’t go all the way to the bottom (it’s taken up by a cable compartment at the bottom). And there was a US$50 price difference. The owner of Luggage World (highly recommended; don’t let their website fool you—they have a lot more in stock than they show) offered to give me US$30 off on the clamshell and I bit. He said if I didn’t like it, I could run it over a few times with my car and he’d still take it back with a full refund. And Briggs & Riley comes with a no-questions forever repair warranty, even if the airlines mangle the bag.

I haven’t had it out in the field yet, but so far I like it. Because it’s a clamshell, making my way through airport security will be a breeze (the laptop can stay in the bag; the bag opens like a clam to pass through x-ray). And it holds just as much as the Booq and is a full inch less deep, at 6.5 inches. Most of the other bags I looked at were at least twice as deep. You might think a deeper bag is better (hey, look at all the shit I can put in here), but it’s significantly worse. Just because you can put all that crap in there probably means you will. And then you’re looking at hoisting and carrying 50 pounds of all that crap around. A smaller depth bag forces you to pack thoughtfully.

Business

In the financial reform bill that isn’t, Senate Republicans threatened to block the legislation unless the proposed tax on big banks and hedge funds was removed. Democrats spinelessly obliged. The compromise? Taking about US$11 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to pay for it. So, instead of the banks paying the cost of re-regulation, the US taxpayers will be footing the bill.

As if you had any doubt, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has published a report by Kathy Ruffing and James R. Horney that clearly shows that George W. Bush’s policies are entirely responsible for the deficits the American citizenry will face over the next decade. “Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years,” write Ruffing and Horney. Included is a neat takedown of the Heritage Foundation’s most recent propaganda. Highly recommended.

Censorship

Instead of complying with Chinese censorship, last March Google began redirecting searches originating in China to servers in Hong Kong. The Chinese have responded by ordering Google to stop the redirection or lose its ability to conduct business in the country. Google blinked and has stopped redirecting its Chinese search traffic. Dan Gillmor, writing for Salon, reports that Google’s Chinese users can “still get the mostly uncensored Hong Kong results, but now they have to do so via hyperlinks rather than automatically.” Sooner or later Google will have to decide to either cease operations in China or continue to make concessions. “Will its fiduciary duty to shareholders outweigh moral concerns,” Gillmor writes. “Right, silly question.” Silly because American law dictates that the sole responsibility of a corporation is to return profit to its shareholders.

ESRD

Laura Sanders, writing for Wired, cites three independent papers in the 2 July issue of Cell Stem Cell reporting that a routine blood draw can produce stem cells that can form any human tissue type. All three approaches reprogram immune cells into induced pluripotent stem cells.

A New Jersey Superior Court Judge has ruled that a 42-year-old Jamaican home health aide cannot refuse dialysis. The woman’s doctors told the judge she “was overridden with fear of the dialysis machine, partially because, in her view, machines that duplicate bodily functions overly intrude into God’s domain.” The woman was also not convinced she’d most likely die without dialysis. A devout Christian, the woman believed “God would cure her kidneys and prevent her from dying.” When I first started dialysis I remember receiving print material about my treatment options. One of the options outlined was to simply opt-out of all treatment—it was even condoned by the Catholic Church. So, Art Buchwald can refuse dialysis and go off to die (many months later) at home, but a New Jersey judge eliminates an individual’s right to self-determination with a ruling that a woman with less means cannot.

Intellectual property

The US Supreme Court did little to fix the broken American patent system in its decision this week regarding business methods. Bilski and Warsaw applied for a patent on a system that institutions could use to hedge their energy purchasing. The application was denied because the process didn’t meet what’s known as the “machine-or-transformation” test. The process was neither tied to a specific machine nor transformed anything. One glimmer of light was Justice John Paul Stevens writing in a concurring opinion: “The court is quite wrong, in my view, to suggest that any series of steps that is not itself an abstract idea or law of nature may constitute a ‘process.’” Stevens goes on to call for the court to find “business methods are not patentable.”

Internet

NeighborGoods has launched. What a great web application. Enter your zipcode, share your stuff with your neighbors, and borrow their stuff.

Law

Media

Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon, reports on a new study from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (.pdf; 288KB) finding “evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials. The students’ study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by the four largest corporate newspapers in the US over the past 100 years. Not surprisingly, waterboarding was almost invariably referred to as torture until the US began using it openly and insisting it wasn’t torture. From that point on, waterboarding is almost never referred to as torture.

Publishing

Jeffrey Zeldman has written the definitive resource guide to publishing ebooks. It succinctly covers everything from BookGlutton’s HTML to ePub Converter and Adobe’s documentation for exporting ePub from InDesign (.pdf; 674KB) to using O’Reilly’s Bookworm and other services and applications to test ePub files before distribution. Now, if only Zeldman would publish ebook versions of the titles he publishes.

Kit Eaton, writing for Fast Company, wonders if AOL’s content farm is journalism or content spam. AOL’s new strategy is to make all of its content fit within 17 “super networks” making it easier to sell advertising against. David Eun, president of AOL’s media and studios division, plans to possibly double his editorial staff from the current 500 editors and 40,000 freelancers. Each piece of content will be “valued” based on the number of click-throughs, time spent on the page, and advertising revenue generated. Eaton quotes Jeff Levick, AOL’s president of global advertising, as verbalizing everything you need to know that this isn’t journalism: “We have insights into our audience, and can produce content they want, which leads to engagement, which leads to what advertisers want.”

Sustainability

In 2008 Berkeley launched a program whereby homeowners could retrofit their homes with solar panels and other energy saving technologies using loans from the city which are repaid over 20 years through special property taxes. Berkeley’s Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program was so wildly successful that it was adopted by 22 states. Relatively few people have participated in the PACE programs (950 in Sonoma County, CA; 600 in Boulder County, CO) because they’re generally not very well publicized. The US Energy Department has designs to change that using US$150 million in stimulus money to help communities set up and administer PACE programs. All of that is threatened to come to a screeching halt with threats from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the US government-chartered agencies that resell most home mortgages, announcing they might not accept loans for homes that are tied to the PACE program. Fannie and Freddie are requiring the assessments to be paid off before they’ll approve loans. Todd Woody, writing for the New York Times, reports a county commissioner worries “that treating the energy liens as loans could set a precedent that would undermine local governments’ ability to pay for municipal improvements through tax assessments.”

User experience

Yahoo! released its digital style guide this week, written and edited by a team led by Chris Barr, CNET’s founding editor-in-chief. Do we need yet another style guide? Yeah, in this case we really do. The print edition won’t be available until next week, but the online edition is really useful and well done. So, on a daily basis I refer to Chicago, Wired Style, University of Minnesota, and now Yahoo!

Volume 2, Issue 1 of the Journal of Information Architecture is available. I haven’t quite made up my mind about this publication yet—it’s certainly not the definitive IA journal—but it’s worth a look.

Oh, my. Proportional leading comes to the web. Stuff & Nonsense takes a close look at the MSNBC redesign of its article pages and delivers the goods. More CSS3 media query goodness.

Chris Turner is giving up on content strategy because “the business world doesn’t deserve content strategy.” Well, it’s true, the business world has never deserved content strategy (neither has higher education) but some of us have been doing it much longer than the latest buzzword. The challenges and rewards have been the same for as long as I can remember in my professional career (long before the web); there’s always been content and it’s always needed managing. But Turner’s core point—“When a business doesn’t want to make friends with content strategy, it’s likely to throw rocks at it until it dies or runs away—is as true now as it’s ever been. That’s why we end up with the typical business website that is unusable, unnavigable, and content-clueless.

Time magazine and Politico both stole the Rolling Stone article and published a .pdf of the complete article on their websites. As Carr writes, “It was a clear violation of copyright and professional practice, and it amounted to taking money out of a competitor’s pocket.” Carr reports that both Politico and Time rationalized their theft by saying that they were responding to a “frenzy involving a significant national issue.”

Rolling Stone may have been clueless in not publishing the article on its website as soon as it was available, but let’s be clear: It was Rolling Stone‘s sole choice to publish the article or not.

Carr quotes Jim VandHei, co-founder and executive editor of Politico as saying, “Our reporters got the article from sources with no restrictions. It was being circulated and widely discussed among insiders, and our team felt readers should see what insiders were reading and reacting to.” VandHei is clearly clueless about stealing the intellectual property of others, but you can bet your ass he’d whine endlessly if it was a Poltico article that had been stolen.

A Time spokeswoman was just as clueless in an email to Carr: “Time.com posted a .pdf of the story to help separate rumor from fact at the moment this story of immense national interest was hitting fever pitch and the actual piece was not available. ... It was a mistake; if we had it do over again [sic], we would only post a headline and an abstract.” Like every blogger on the planet.

In fact, at the same time the corporate media elite—the Associated Press, Advance Publications, Belo, Gannett, McClatchy, New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest of the usual suspects (including Time)—were lined up submitting briefs of their own to uphold the “hot news doctrine.”  Google and Twitter had filed briefs asking for it to be reversed in the flyonthewall.com case. Hot news was established in the 1918 International News Services v. Associated Press case where one wire service rewrote the other wire service’s news for its clients in other markets. Currently, the corporate media wants to use the hot news decision to restrict the efforts of aggregators and others. As Jeff Jarvis writes in his BuzzMachine blog:

“Hot news limitations should be repellant to journalists, even desperate ones, because every journalist builds on the facts revealed by others. It should further be repugnant to them as it constitutes a form of court-supervised prior restraint. Hot news restrictions would be suicidal to news organizations—even though they foolishly think it would protect them—because it would restrict everyone’s ability to spread the news via links and send journalists audience. Hot news should worry every citizen because the free flow of information is vital to a democracy.”

Jarvis is absolutely right about this. But he’s just as absolutely wrong when he goes on to infer that Propublica and Time were right to steal Rolling Stone‘s property solely because Rolling Stone didn’t properly exploit it. Propublica and Time would have been on solid ground had they elected to write their own stories based on the facts uncovered by Rolling Stone, but they were absolutely wrong to steal it in toto.

With that brief adventure off the tracks and into the deep weeds, the rest of what Jarvis writes in his hot news pieces is dead on.

Meanwhile, Matt Tiabbi writes an excellent—and well-deserved—takedown of Lara Logan for Rolling Stone. Logan, CBS News chief foreign correspondent, attempted to takedown Michael Hastings on CNN’s Reliable Sources, but failed pretty miserably. Taibbi’s entire article is spot-on, as usual, but here’s the nut: “Here’s CBS’s chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that’s killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag.” And this: “If there’s a lower form of life on the planet earth than a ‘reputable’ journalist protecting his territory, I haven’t seen it.”

Business

Maureen Johnson has published a simple manifesto: I am not a brand. It’s in response to being asked to speak—as an expert—at conferences and panels where all the speakers are hawking themselves. When I was writing full time I did a fair bit of this myself. And I hated it. I only did it when I had a book to sell. Truth be told, my appearances probably did more harm than good with regard to sales but I met some neat people and acquired more stories to tell. “I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work,” Johnson writes. “It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to commodify everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird.” But wait, it gets better: “We can, if we group together, fight off the weenuses and hosebags who want to turn the internet into a giant commercial.” And here’s Doc Searls from May 2010: “Reputation vs. Branding.”

ESRD

The University of Minnesota Board of Regents heard a report on the effects of Obama’s healthcare reform on UPlan, the University’s health insurance program. Beginning in 2014, an employee who pays more than 9.5 percent of salary for employer-sponsored health insurance will be entitled to switch to the exchange and the University would have to pay a US$3,000 fee to the government. If the employee’s share of the cost of employer-sponsored insurance exceeds eight percent of the employee’s total household income and that income is less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level (US$42,520/individual; US$88,000/family), a voucher would be issued by the University: About US$5,519 for an individual or US$11,177 for a family, which the employee could then take to the exchange. In 2018, a Cadillac tax of 40 percent will be imposed if the employer contribution to the insurance plus the employee cost of the insurance and any Flexible Savings Account exceeds US$10,200 for individuals or US$27,500 for a family. The tax is applied only to the excess. The University may be able to avoid the Cadillac tax by more aggressively promoting wellness and providing wellness awards for actually achieving goals, not just participating.

James Hipwell has begun writing a column about waiting to find a donor for his second kidney transplant for the Guardian. It’s really well done and sheds a lot of light on what transplant recipients as well as those waiting for an organ go through. There’s an ulterior motive for the series: To lobby for a change in the UK’s organ donation system to one of “presumed consent.” Under a presumed consent system, instead of organ donors having to go out of their way to opt-in to being a donor, the entire population would be automatic donors, having instead to opt-out. It’s needed worldwide, but the UK appears to be ahead of the rest of the world in this regard. The UK government commissioned a series of television ads for organ donation. The first one, created by AMV BBDO, is available on the Guardian‘s website.

Intellectual property

Victoria Espinel, the US intellectual property czar, has finally released her “Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement” (.pdf; 892KB). As expected, it’s mostly a plan to force other countries to comply with US intellectual property policies. As if that weren’t bad enough there are three areas where proposed US policy is completely of the rails: secret treaties, pirate nation watchlists (entertainment cartel executives can nominate countries for inclusion), and evaluations of claims of piracy losses (the US Government Accountability Office has already dismissed these claims as total fabrications). The document’s section on secret treaties—like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)—is especially disturbing. The section starts out by acknowledging the need for transparency and outlines the Obama administration’s plan for it. But the very same section ends with a complete reversal: “... including consideration of the need for confidentiality in international trade negotiations to facilitate the negotiation process.” As Cory Doctorow notes, intellectual property treaties have traditionally been handled openly and transparently by the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization. The negotiations were made private by George W. Bush’s ACTA. Obama and his administration have eagerly embraced ACTA, going so far as to intervene in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the text of ACTA itself, claiming a threat to national security.

Law

In yet another example of the prime directive of American jurisprudence—maintaining or enhancing corporate profit—the US Supreme Court unanimously found broad interpretation of the “honest services” law to be unconstitutionally vague. The “honest services” law makes it illegal “to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” Both Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and Conrad Black were convicted of fraud under the “honest services” law. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing in the majority opinion, held the scope of the “honest services” law must be limited to bribes and kickbacks. Had Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas had their way, the “honest services” law would be completely eliminated.

Let me see if I have this straight. President Barack Obama crows, “We are poised to pass the toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression.” Big banks and hedge funds have to pay something on the order of US$20 billion to cover the costs of re-regulation that really isn’t. And we’re not stupid; we all know those costs will be passed along to us as consumers in one way or another. US federal government regulators will be able to liquidate failing financial companies but the financial industry will continue to be able to invest in their own funds and trade derivatives without transparency. This should tell you everything you need to know: Big bank stocks were up by the end of the week and as Edward Wyatt and David M. Herszenhorn report for the New York Times, With C-Span carrying the proceedings live, the last half-hour of the session featured sometimes confused lawmakers repeatedly asking about what happened to various proposed amendments. ... many of the deals to complete the bill were cut outside the conference room, in private discussions between Democratic lawmakers and the Obama administration, with some of Washington’s most influential lobbyists trying to weigh in as best they could.” Worst of all, Congress left the specifics of the new law up to regulators in back rooms, out of the public eye.

Media

Politico, it turns out is just as clueless about publishing on the web as Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone. First Politico took it upon themselves to publish a .pdf of Michael Hastings’ profile of General Stanley McChrystal, “The Runaway General, for Rolling Stone. Then, in one of its pieces about the resulting dust-up about McChrystal’s quotes in the article, Politico published a piece by Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee containing this choker of truthiness: “And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.” Clint Hendler, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, reports that a day later the graf was removed from the article, without explanation. Hendler writes, “Politico managing editor Bill Nichols declined to discuss the deletion with me ....” The blogs and twitter feeds of media critics across the net burned brightly: “The better their sources, the less we know. Take it away, Greenwald!” (Andrew Sullivan); “Revealing little look at how journalism in DC works….” (Jay Rosen). In the wee hours of the next morning, Jay Rosen wrote an excellent analysis of Politico’s actions.

The Slow Media Manifesto might (or might not) be worth a read, depending upon your media diet. Slow media proponents advocate approaching media as we do food—choosing mindfully rather than just grabbing what’s closest at hand.

Privacy

Apple’s updated—and nonnegotiable—terms of service for using anything downloaded from the iTunes store, including iOS 4 on an iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad (the iPad will presumably be updated to iOS 4 at some point) allow the company to track your “precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device.” Apple can use this information in any way it sees fit, including selling it or giving it away. The company promises that the information is “collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you.” By installing the software, you’re agreeing to these terms. This is not, as some believe, just an update to the location-based services we’ve been using. This allows Apple to track you—or, more accurately your Apple device—in real-time, without additional consent on your part. This isn’t just Yelp asking if it can use your location, folks. This is Apple baking location-awareness into its products with no opt-out mechanism (in something that really should remain opt-in). UPDATE: Thanks to the fellow at UnSummit 4 who told me Apple really does have an opt-out mechanism, but it’s buried in legalese. Here’s what you need to know: point Safari at oo.apple.com from the iOS4 to opt-out of Apple’s iAds.

Publishing

David Carr, in the New York Times Media Decoder, reports that Google is once again trotting out a one-click payment system for news called Newspass. In 2009, when the Newspaper Association of America requested proposals for paid content models, Google proposed a “monthly fee for access to a wide-ranging package of premium content.” This could put Google in a position relative to journalism analogous to Apple’s position relative to music—a 30 percent middleman.

Poor Jann Wenner. He didn’t understand the web in 1994 and he still doesn’t. Rolling Stone published a piece of journalism that got everyone—and I mean everyone—talking about it. Michael Hastings’ profile of General Stanley McChrystal, “The Runaway General,” shook everyone by, as Bob Collins so aptly wrote, “send[ing] the wrong signal to just about everybody who pays attention to signals.” But it was nowhere to be found on the web, so it didn’t exist. The issue wasn’t on the newsstands and the piece wouldn’t be published on the website for weeks. Politico published a .pdf of the story, but then took it down after Rolling Stone rightfully complained. By 10:00AM Tuesday, 22 June 2010, Rolling Stone had the Hastings article on its website. Hey Jann Wenner: 1992 called and wants its online publishing model back. But wait a minute. Rolling Stone‘s online operation has reportedly been profitable since 2004. Maybe Wenner knows something the rest of us don’t. After all, Rolling Stone published some of the best recent journalism has been theirs with Matt Taibbi’s devastating takedown of Goldman Sachs in April and Tim Dickinson’s astute deconstruction of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and Obama’s failure to clean up the Bush corruption.

Technology

Dan Gillmor is blogging about his experiences migrating from Mac OS X to Ubuntu on his Salon column. This is something Cory Doctorow promised but never delivered, so I’m glad to see Gillmor having at it. I’ve not reached the point Gillmor has with regard to the Mac OS X ecosystem and Apple’s ongoing epiphany about centralized command-and-control. But I too am seriously worried about Apple’s milking the Mac OS X ecosystem as it migrates its own customer base to the walled garden that is iOS. I’ve already been around that particular block with Apple with the migration from the Apple ][ series to the Mac. I’m not looking forward to another. For all these reasons and more I keep a current version of Ubuntu running on my MacBook Pro. As soon as there are GNOME (or even KDE) equivalents for BBEdit, OmniOutliner Professional, OmniGraffle Professional, and a handful of other pieces of software are available I’ll be making my transition.

User experience

Jakob Nielsen’s research reveals that web users still have a need for speed. The three response time limits remain the same today as Nielsen’s 1993 findings, which were based on 40-year-old human factors research. A tenth-of-a-second response time feels “instantaneous” to users; a one second response feels “seamless;” and responses up to 10 second will keep the user’s attention. In 1993 the culprit of slow response times was large images; in 2010 it’s fancy widgets and overly complex data processing on the server.

Faruk Ates has a great introduction to Modernizr in A List Apart. Modernizer, an open-source JavaScript library, takes the pain out of pushing the limits of HTML5 and CSS3 of the most standards-compliant browsers while still providing adequate user experiences for lesser browsers.

What, you don’t believe that? Here’s three very recent examples.

Victoria Espinel, the US intellectual property czar, has finally released her “Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement” (.pdf; 892KB). It’s an entertainment cartel wet dream, complete with secret treaties, pirate nation watchlists (entertainment cartel executives can nominate countries for inclusion), and evaluations of claims of piracy losses (the US Government Accountability Office has already dismissed these claims as total fabrications).

The document’s section on secret treaties—like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)—is especially disturbing. The section starts out by acknowledging the need for transparency and outlines the Obama administration’s plan for it. But the very same section ends with a complete reversal: “... including consideration of the need for confidentiality in international trade negotiations to facilitate the negotiation process.”

As Cory Doctorow notes, intellectual property treaties have traditionally been handled openly and transparently by the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization. The negotiations were made private by George W. Bush’s ACTA. Obama and his administration have eagerly embraced ACTA, going so far as to intervene in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the text of ACTA itself, claiming a threat to national security.

BP, like Exxon before it, will likely be able to write off its expenses—including the US$20 billion escrow fund—from its taxes. Meanwhile, recipients of BP’s largesse will be most likely be liable for income taxes on those funds. After Hurricane Katrina, some Gulf coast residents received federal money to rebuild their homes after claiming a casualty loss for the damage on their 2005 tax returns. The IRS ruled that anyone who received the money and took the deduction would be liable for the money as taxable income on their 2007 tax returns. Only in 2008, after tremendous resistance from Gulf coast residents, did the US Congress reverse the IRS ruling. Kenneth Feinberg, Obama’s appointee to oversee the BP escrow fund, has said “it hasn’t been determined if the payouts will be considered taxable income.”

Finally, consider the recent movement by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on network neutrality—the concept that all traffic on the internet should be handled neutrally. After campaigning as a staunch advocate of network neutrality (not to mention transparency), Obama’s FCC is apparently deciding the issue behind closed doors, in meetings limited to the incumbent telecommunication and cable giants. The incumbents were scared to death that the FCC would reclassify them as telecommunications carriers, subject to common carrier regulations, and lobbied in direct proportion to their fear. As a result, they’re in the room—behind the closed doors—and we’re not. As Tim Karr notes on Save the Internet, “Given that the corporations at the table all profit from gaining control over information, the outcome won’t be pretty.”

The expected outcome is nothing less than total regulatory capture.

For its part, the US Congress has also scheduled its own net neutrality closed-door meetings. They’ll almost certainly fall in line with the FCC’s. After all, AT&T isn’t the single biggest political donor between 1989-2010 for nothing. It’s US$44,939,004 greased a lot of congressional wheels, and those well-greased Congresscritters are just itching to rewrite the Communications Act of 1934 and its spawn, the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Here’s Karr’s nut graf:

“This is what a failed democracy looks like: After years of avid public support for net neutrality—involving millions of people from across the political spectrum—the federal regulator quietly huddles with industry lobbyists to eliminate basic protections and serve Wall Street’s bottom line.”

Corporations were granted fictional personhood in 1886 when the US Supreme Court, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, found that corporations were subject to the due process and equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. With that decision, corporations were solidly identified with private property instead of the public grants and interests that had been their overarching governance previously. That single decision also significantly weakened the public claims on corporate charters, and is seen by most corporate governance experts as an endorsement of the corporation being a “natural entity” with natural rights, rather than a created fiction chartered by the state for a specific purpose in the public interest, subject to state control.

The US Supreme Court reaffirmed corporate personhood in January 2010 when it ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (.pdf; 2.6MB) that the US government may not limit the spending of corporations in political elections.

The sole purpose of a modern corporation—since corporations were granted the rights (but not the responsibilities) of personhood—is to maximize returns to shareholders. This precedent was firmly established by the 1919 decision of the Michigan Supreme Court in the case of Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. which found that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end.”

As Ralph Estes eloquently pointed out in Tyranny of the Bottom Line: Why Corporations Make Good People Do Bad Things, stockholders do not fund large corporations. What we commonly call “investments” are much more accurately termed “speculations” because the only time a corporation gets money “invested” in stock is when the corporation issues new stock. And that happens very rarely indeed. Federal Reserve data compiled in the 2000 census indicates that only about one percent of money “invested” in the stock market actually reaches corporations. The stock market is analogous to the used car market. When you buy stock, the money goes to the prior owner of the stock, not the corporation in which you are said to be “investing.”

The stock market is not an abstraction, it’s a fiction. The idea that shareholders create wealth is a myth, plain and simple. Shareholders do not create, they extract. When stock is purchased the common myth says that capital is being added to the economy. What’s really happening is that shareholders are buying the privileged entitlement to extract wealth. No one points this out more articulately than Marjorie Kelly in The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, where she draws comparisons between shareholders and feudal aristocrats: “The most fundamental right of an aristocracy,” she writes, “is a right to income detached from productivity—in other words, to be free from labor.”

In real markets, participants work to keep what they earn; in the stock market, a solitary privileged group called shareholders keeps—through an entitlement—what others earn.

In the early 2000s there was a movement in which I was active for a time—the Code for Corporate Responsibility—to begin to address these and other relevant issues related to corporations and corporate governance. Those efforts seem to have died after proposed legislation in several states—including Minnesota—failed. Has the US’s bastardized version of capitalism finally and forever jumped the shark?

I’m doing this for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is migration to a new version of Expression Engine, the content management software on which Hasten down the wire runs.

But mostly this is happening because the spam problem has become untenable. There’s no real Askimet for this version of Expression Engine, and the Ellis Lab folks don’t seem to be too interested in the problem. It’s become a real problem and I just don’t have the cycles to deal with it.

While I’ve become quite frustrated with the direction Ellis Lab is taking, I readily acknowledge it’s their decision to make and I know where the door is. I’ve got my hand on the doorknob, but I just don’t have to cycles to make the jump to Drupal just yet.

With regard to comments, as John Gruber eloquently stated, “you write on your site; I write on mine.” Trackbacks are still turned on; use them.

Colorado has cut benefits for current workers and on retirees. The cuts to retirees is facing a legal challenge. Colorado argues that a 1961 US Supreme Court ruling held that pension cuts for current workers is allowed when “actuarially necessary.” It hopes to stretch that ruling to cover retirees as well.

IBM lowered its pension benefits at the precise time most of its older workers were scheduled to see a bump in retirement benefits. The workers brought legal action, but a federal appellate court in 2006 found that IBM was within its rights (.pdf; 119KB) to cut the pension benefits. The IBM plan, the court noted, was “almost, but not quite, a defined-contribution plan.” Pensions are, by definition, not defined-contribution plans, but rather defined-benefit plans. The IBM employees also made the mistake of bringing the legal action on the basis of age discrimination under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) when everyone knew, as the court affirmed, “all the terms of IBM’s plan are age neutral. Every covered employee receives the same 5% pay credit and the same interest credit per annum.”

Minnesota isn’t waiting for the outcome of the Colorado case. As of 1 January 2011, post-retirement adjustments are lowered from 2.5 percent to 2.0 percent, there’s a six-month waiting period for initial post-retirement adjustments, the interest rate on future refunds is lowered from 6 percent to 4 percent, interest on suspended benefits (for those who return to the workforce) is eliminated, and the vesting period is increased from three to five years.

The question—that hopefully the Colorado retiree case will resolve—is if membership in a state pension fund is a contractual relationship. “An employer is free to move from one legal plan to another legal plan, provided that it does not diminish vested interests” or benefits already earned, wrote the court in the IBM case. In the case of my employer, the University of Minnesota, employee contributions to MSRS are mandatory.

Business

In a shocker, the University of Minnesota didn’t even place in the Star Tribune‘s list of 2010’s top 100 workplaces. Even John’s Auto Parts, Inc. was a better place to work. Here’s a sliver of a clue as to why: Faced with lowered funding from the state, a governor’s illegal unallocation, and severe budget cuts the unit in which I’m employed—the College of Design—elected to heap all the cuts on a handful of employees. Instead of an equitable across-the-board cut (like the one instituted at the University of Wisconsin), the College of Design cut the salaries of the external relations staff by 10% for fiscal year 2010. The college’s top leadership—dean, associate deans, assistant dean, and chief of staff—also took 10% cuts and salaries were restored earlier this month, but still.

Internet

Here comes the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opening an inquiry on network neutrality and already the incumbent telcos and cable companies are whining like children in the back seat after 200 miles on the back roads. Their whining was harmonized by the Republican commissioners: Robert McDowell said in his statement (.pdf; 79KB) that by opening the inquiry the FCC had “lost the moral high ground,” and that net governance should be left to the nongovernmental technical groups (populated mostly with, you guessed it, the incumbent telcos and cable companies). “For decades now, the international consensus has been for governments to keep their hands off the internet and to leave internet governance decisions to time-tested nongovernmental technical groups. Once that precedent is broken, it will become harder to make the case against more nefarious states that are meddling with the Internet in even more extensive ways than are contemplated here.” Democrat Michael Copps when right for the BP jugular (.pdf; 82KB) in his statement: “I, for one, am worried about relying only on the goodwill of a few powerful companies to achieve this country’s broadband hopes and dreams. We see what price can be paid when critical industries operate with unfettered control and without reasonable and meaningful oversight. Look no further than the banking industry’s role in precipitating the recent financial meltdown or turn on your TV and watch what is taking place right now in the Gulf of Mexico.” Buckle up; this one’s going to be interesting.

John Naughton, writing in The Observer, delineates everything you need to know about the internet. Nine enormous ideas are packed into this eminently readable article. Naughton observes that the while the internet as deeply infiltrated our lives, we’re oddly unreflective about it. Writing that much of corporate media’s coverage of the internet is negative, Naugton sets out to elucidate how we should be thinking about the net in compliance with George Miller’s magical number seven, plus or minus two. If you don’t read anything else this week, read Naughton’s piece. Highest recommendation.

Politics

US President Obama addressed the nation from the White House Oval Office on Tuesday, almost two months after the Deepwater Horizon exploded, caught fire, and and sank into the Gulf of Mexico. The same day his administration radically increased its estimate of the amount of oil spewing from the well into the gulf: 60,000 barrels. (Never mind that on day one of the disaster, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) worst-case estimated 64,000-100,000 barrels a day.) Obama said he will not accept inaction or settle for the challenge being too big and too difficult to meet. Almost two months after the disaster occurred.

Publishing

Steven Johnson deftly rebuts Nick Carr’s most recent argument that “the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our screen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.” Carr’s concern, notes Johnson, “is what happens to high-level thinking when the culture migrates from the page to the screen.” Using the Amazon Kindle’s new “popular highlights” feature as an example, Johnson asserts that we’re still reading, but now it’s a socially mediated activity. The crowd determines which passages in books are important and that information is shared across the user base. Recent studies showing heavy multitaskers are 10 percent to 20 percent less efficient are, Johnson writes, “meaningless as a cultural indicator without measuring what we gain from multitasking.” Highly recommended. Also see Johnson’s additional comments on his blog.

Sustainability

Business Insider has been publishing some really well done infographics lately. “15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America,” from April, posits “the gap between the top one percent and everyone else hasn’t been this bad since the Roaring Twenties;” “half of America has 2.5% of the wealth;” “real average earnings have not increased in 50 years;” “Republican tax cuts have significantly increased the gap;” “highest-income households have seen sharp drops in tax rates;” and “America’s income spread is nearly twice the OECD average.” A more recent project, “Here’s How Much 1 Million Barrels of Oil Really Is,” is just as disturbing. It’s reckoned that at least 1.33 billion barrels of oil have spewed from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Business Insider created visualizations of Cutler Cleveland’s list of equivalent energy costs: “Supply your house with power until the year 83286;” “power all US auto traffic for 3.9 hours;” “power total world energy use for eight minutes;” “power the country of Ghana for 20 days;” “supply one year of energy for 130,968 Chinese;” or “supply one year of energy for 22,890 Americans.”

As the remains of the Deepwater Horizon well continue to spew up to 110,000 barrels of oil in to the Gulf of Mexico each day, BP chief executive Tony Hayward has gone yachting. Earlier in the week, Hayward had a rough time during his US congressional testimony where he either refused or was unable to provide details about the events leading up to the explosion, sinking, and gushing of the company’s Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig. BP’s latest best guess—after a string of wrong ones—is that it will be able to stop the oil spew in August with two relief wells intersecting with the damaged one.

The most visible addition to Winer’s output are little plus signs, signifying a link to contextual information—something Winer calls sub-text. Click on the plus sign and contextual—or, more likely at this early date, conversational—content is revealed. Winer refers to this as an “internet-age footnote” and says it’s related to Nick Carr’s misguided article about it being time to get hypertext links out of our way.

Carr says hypertext links are a distraction. “Sometimes, they’re big distractions—we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read,” Carr writes. Uh, that’s what browser tabs are for, Nick. Carr goes on to state (without citation), “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.” Without a citation, statements like that are of little use. From the abstract of “Reading Strategies and Hypertext Comprehension” from the November 2005 issue of Discourse Processes: “The literature on assessing the cognitive processes involved in hypertext comprehension during the past 15 years has yielded contradictory results.” (In a prior life, in the pre-web world, I wrote three books on hypermedia; I tend to follow this area with some interest).

Winer’s sub-text poses a problem for anyone who uses a piece of his prior art—RSS. While he’s added a new element,