ARTS & FARCES internet

I’m at the Online deliberative democracy conference at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute today and tomorrow and I’ve just learned something incredible. Up here on the far edge that is Minnesota, each member of the state House of Representatives has an RSS feed. This is a first and is huge for the future of democracy.

Thanks to Saint Paul school board member Anne Carroll for providing her account information so we could get on the university’s wireless network. Imagine a conference on online deliberative democracy with no access. Two steps forward; one step back.

I was really proud—and really nervous—of Utne.com‘s coverage of both major party’s political conventions last summer. I sent credentialed interns to cover both conventions and I maintain they filed excellent stories.

One of the more intriguing stories was Jacob Wheeler’s “Mammoth Security Force, Aggressive Police Can’t Stop Protestors,” which detailed the disruption of the Republican National Convention by activists Jodie Evans and June Brashares.

This week June Brashares goes on trial in New York for allegedly injuring one of the security guards who forcibly removed her from Madison Square Garden. Brashares was charged with assault, attempted assault, disorderly conduct, and harassment. If convicted, she faces a year in jail.

Earlier this year I proposed to open my day job’s website redesign and restructuring process to public scrutiny, comment, and help. But The Media Center beat us to the punch with an interactive case study of Edweek.org‘s migration from an open content model to a paid content model.

Andrew Nachison, director of The Media center, has written an excellent introductory analysis to the interactive case study.

Utne.com made a similar migration to most content being placed behind a paywall in late 2002 and I’ve been struggling with the pros and cons ever since.

It will be fascinating to watch how this plays out and I’ll be paying close attention.

Where Utne.com employs a two-tiered content strategy—most magazine content is behind the paywall; everything else is freely available—Edweek.org plans to use a three-tiered strategy with the addition of some content requiring registration. Predictably, Edweek.org is struggling with what content to place in which bucket: “Should we put some of our high-traffic pages behind the subscription wall, or should they be free—to market our journalism and entice more people to subscribe?”

The Bush administration—through law enforcement—had made at least 200 and probably close to 600 requests to libraries for information on what citizens are reading since October 2001. So says a new American Library Association (ALA) study that found both formal and informal demands were made of librarians to disclose the reading habits of library patrons.

The ALA used anonymous responses to survey 1,500 public libraries and 4,000 academic libraries, finding 137 formal demands for information since October 2001.

Not surprisingly, according to Eric Lichtblau’s account in the New York Times, “the Bush administration says that while it is important for law enforcement officials to get information from libraries if needed in terrorism investigations, officials have yet to actually use their power under the Patriot Act to demand records from libraries or bookstores.”

One would think that the existence of a subpoena—if not the content of the subpoena—is a matter of public record, and it should be relatively easy to determine whether the Bush administration is telling the truth. That would be wrong: secrecy provisions of the Patriot Act make it a crime for a librarian to acknowledge even receiving a subpoena.

Nonetheless, abuses by the Bush administration are clear according to a source for Lichtblau’s article:

Microsoft has apparently taken the wraps off its “Avalanche” peer-to-peer file-sharing technology (seemingly a clone of BitTorrent) and, in a single sentence ultimately defines why the software giant sucks rocks and continues to take abuse for it:

A Microsoft spokesman, however, said there was to be no network naughtiness with Avalanche: ‘It includes strong security to ensure content providers are uniquely identifiable and to prevent unauthorized parties from offering content for download.’

To be sure, unauthorized parties—that’s you and me, bub—will be prevented from offering content. This is the asymmetric bandwidth business model of the cable and telco monopolies applied to publishing.

BitTorrent works by chunking large files and distributing those chunks across the network peers. As a BitTorrent client downloads the chunks it needs, it uploads the chunks it already has. Because the load is spread across the peers downloading the file, publishers don’t suffer the bandwidth penalties of releasing large media files. This is a Big Deal with things like Linux distributions (legal) and movies (illegal), but it’s going to be a Huge Deal for podcasts and indie music distribution, especially when paired with RSS.

Avalanche, according to the CNET article, works basically the same way as BitTorrent but magically “not all the chunks are needed to complete the file,” even though users end up “downloading more chunks than they need.” Nevertheless, Microsoft claims this is actually more efficient because “the load is spread more evenly.” Right. Embrace and extend 2.0. Now with even more hand-waving.