ARTS & FARCES internet

That the Bush administration is one of the most secretive in history is not news. But the breadth and depth of that secrecy is news. According to Scott Shane’s report in this morning’s New York Times, “a record 15.6 million documents were classified last year, nearly double the number in 2001, according to the federal Information Security Oversight Office.”

Bush’s federal minions are classifying documents to the tune of an astounding 7,500 per hour.

The Times presents this information visually in a series of graphic images.

The price we pay for Bush’s secrecy is considerable. “The increasing secrecy—and it’s rising cost to taxpayers, estimated by the office at $7.2 billion last year—is drawing protests from a growing array of politicians and activists, including Republican members of Congress, leaders of the independent commission that studied the Sept. 11 attacks and even the top federal official who oversees classification,” according to the Times account.

All of this secrecy flies in the face of the common-sense notion articulated by former Republican governor of New Jersey and chair of the Sept. 11 commission, Thomas H. Kean: “We’re better off with openness. The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public.” Things have clearly gotten out of control when scientific papers, portions of a Supreme Court decision, and the CIA’s budgets from the 1950s and 1960s are being suppressed. Perhaps no one knows more about the overclassification issue than J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office. “I’ve seen information that was classified that I’ve also seen published in third-grade textbooks,” Leonard told Times reporter Shane.

Greg Reinacker released a new version of NewsGator today. It’s a free update. Except it’s not. Not at all. It appears to be a forced transition to a subscription service. Unfortunately, the NewsGator marketing material is neither honest nor transparent about this:

“This is a free upgrade for all existing customers. More details are here. If you’re not yet a subscriber, create an account and enter your existing 2.0 license key - you’ll get a free business account. If you’re already a business plan subscriber, go to your My Account section and enter your existing license key for a free service extension.”

What’s not said is that the “free business account” requires you to provide a credit card which will be billed when your “free” service expires in a maxium of two years.

I’m not interested in a subscription service for RSS and that’s not what I bought when I purchased the product license. To rub salt in the wound,  features found in the previous version of the product will be turned off on Halloween.

Goodbye NewsGator; hello Attensa.

Update—30 June 2005 08:15 CDT: NewsGator’s credit card requirement for updates is a bug and has been fixed (see Greg Reinacker’s comment below). The way Reinacker handled this—responding directly to user criticism quickly, honestly, and transparently—is to be commended in the attention economy where options are plentiful. Too bad more companies and their executives don’t take a similar approach; they’re going to have to in order to thrive. As for me, I intend to give NewsGator at least one more close look. I really prefer getting my RSS fix in my email environment.

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?”