ARTS & FARCES internet

“These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it’s time to get paid for it.” That’s what Universal Music Group chairman and chief executive Doug Morris told Billboard regarding its decision to shake down Microsoft for a percentage of every Zune music player sold.

Universal refused to license its music to Microsoft unless the latter paid the former a “vig” on each music player sold in addition to standard license fees for downloads and subscriptions. Microsoft agreed to Universal’s terms last Thursday. “Published reports,” according to the Billboard account, indicate that Universal will receive more than US$1 for each US$250 device Microsoft sells. In remarkable beneficence, Universal says that half of its vig receipts will be shared with its artists.

Attitudes like this make clear why the music industry is failing.

“In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” That’s the crux of the advent of Web 3.0, also known as the semantic web, as defined by John Markoff for the New York Times. The semantic web, first envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee in 1999, is farther off than Markoff and the cheerleaders would like us to believe.

The idea that computers will be able to form intelligent—or even seemingly intelligent—connections between bits of data is a very difficult—“nontrivial” in geekspeak—problem. Even with some of computing’s best minds, including Danny Hillis,  on the case it’s doubtful that anything remotely resembling the truly semantic web will be accomplished in my lifetime.

Nonetheless, Markoff’s breathlessness is disturbing, and for a reason that he mostly glosses over. Nicholas Carr sums it up nicely:

“While it will be easy for you to mine meaning about vacations and other stuff, it will also be easy for others to mine meaning about you. In fact, Web 3.0 promises to give marketers, among others, an uncanny ability to identify, understand, and manipulate us—without our knowledge or awareness. If you’d like a preview, watch Dan Frankowski’s presentation You Are What You Say and Oren Etzioni’s presentation All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Google, and then connect the dots.”

It had to happen. Had to. A major—and very corporate—US news organization has thrown in the towel on its proprietary news gathering operations and has turned to the wisdom of the crowd to report the day’s news.

Gannett, publisher of USA Today and 90 other US dailies, has reorganized its newsroom departments into “seven desks with names like ‘data,’ ‘digital,’ and ‘community conversation,” reports Jeff Howe for Wired News:

“The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.”

The regoranization, coming on the heels of Gannett losing a full third of its share price in the last two years, has been tested in 11 of its US newspaper properties and will be rolled out in all Gannett publications by May. Howe covers the seven desks reorganization elsewhere.

This isn’t new. Startup national open-source journalism projects like NowPublic and NewAssignment are on the verge of taking flight. Similarly, on the local level, open-source journalism projects like the Twin Cities Daily Planet (see disclosure box, right) are already competing head-to-head with the corporate dailies.

It was only a matter of time before the corporate news organizations made this move. Whether it’s a positive move or not remains to be seen—inevitability does not equate to quality (or even being correct). Professional news organizations have the deep pockets required to do the reporting most of us seem to find important. Bootstrap open-source organizations just don’t have the financial chops to root out the really big, really important, really complicated stories. At least not yet. And that’s where Howe’s Wired story is the most disturbing: “Of all the pilot projects the company has conducted over the last few months, the most promising would seem to be the crowdsourcing of in-depth investigations into government malfeasance.” (Howe covers the crowdsourcing phenomenon in-depth on his excellent weblog of the same name.)

Hell, the Philadelphia Inquirer couldn’t afford Donald Barlett and James Steele—probably the best investigative journalism team in the business—and neither could Time magazine. Who knows how long ad-heavy Vanity Fair will be able to carry the duo. “Most of us got into this business because we were passionate about watchdog journalism and public service, and we’ve just watched those erode,” Gannett vice president for new media content tells Howe. “We’ve learned that no one wants to read a 400-column-inch investigative feature online. But when you make them a part of the process they get incredibly engaged.”

Yikes. Is Mentos and Diet Coke the really-way-new journalism? Too soon to be sure, but here’s hoping not.

The 2007 TED Prize winners were announced last night. They are war photojournalist James Nachtwey, biologist E.O. Wilson, and President Bill Clinton. Each winner receives US$100,000 to be spent however they like in support of their one world-changing wish. The winners’ world-changing wishes will be revealed at the annual TED conference.

The TED Prize links individuals who have demonstrated the ability to change the world with the resources of the TED community.

If you’re at all confused about the network neutrality issue—or why it’s so crucially important—Bill Moyers and his team have put together an excellent analysis.

The internet has changed everything and now the telecommunications and cable giants want to put the genie back in the bottle.

As Bruce Kushnick points out, we’ve already paid the telecommunications companies for a very-high-speed symmetrical fiber network that they have subsequently reneged on delivering. In exchange for being able to keep the profits on telephone services like call waiting and caller ID, the telephone companies agreed to build-out what amounts to 100Mbps connectivity for about US$40 per month; that’s more than 100 times current broadband speeds. 86 million US households should have been wired by now according to Kushnick’s research. It hasn’t happened, says Kushnick, because “none of the regulators stepped up to the plate and held the phone companies accountable.” That would be the individual state utility commissioners.

And now the telephone (and cable) companies want to double-dip by charging extra delivery of certain data packets on the network.