ARTS & FARCES internet

Transparent business processes—what a concept. Today, Anil Dash reveals that he’s moving to San Francisco and was mostly responsible for the recent licensing dustup surrounding Six Apart’s roll-out of Movable Type 3.0.

To use the requisite automotive analogy, if Six Apart were a shiny new car, I feel like I was the person who put the first dent in it, and then a couple thousand people stood around pointing and saying “It’s totalled!”

Two things stand out about this incident. First, that Dash got the support he needed from his management and second, that the whole process was transparent, albeit after the fact. The only thing that could have made this better is if the transparency had come before, rather than after, the licensing announcement.

Good for Dash and good for Six Apart. They’re learning and there’s a lot in this for all of us to study.

The Medicare drug bill would never have passed without the support of AARP. Progressives of all stripes—as well as most AARP members—were shocked, shocked I tell you, when the country’s largest senior-citizen lobbyist threw its collective weight behind the Republican-sponsored legislation. It didn’t take a rocket scientist (or an insurance actuary) to sort through the spin and figure out that the bill was a giant step toward fulfilling the Republican wet-dream of privatized Medicare and that millions of citizens would lose employer- and state-run benefits.

I mean, dating back to my Grandma’s membership days, AARP if not a progressive force, at least always leaned in the right direction on healthcare issues.

My wife and I let our membership in the organization lapse, thinking the reason behind AARP’s startling move was pure greed: AARP, after all, started as an insurance business in 1958 (which explains the organization’s initial opposition to Medicare), and still turns a tidy profit—about 24% of operating revenue in 2002—selling health insurance. Turns out we were wrong. The turning of AARP was a long time coming, according to Barbara Dreyfuss’s “The Seduction: The shocking story of how AARP backed the Medicare bill,” published earlier this month in The American Prospect.

“To those few who were really watching closely, however, AARP’s actions were not a surprise at all, and the group’s conversion was anything but sudden. The story of the Republicans’ seduction of AARP unfolded over nearly a decade, as GOP leaders cajoled, seduced, and occasionally threatened the group’s leaders into changing their ways and accepting the reality of Republican congressional control. Today, with bad policy already law, the stakes are incredibly high, as regulations to implement the law loom, along with bills to repeal some of its worst aspects. And they will grow higher still if President Bush is re-elected and Republicans can continue toward their ultimate goals. As the battle to preserve Medicare unfolds, Democrats who were surprised by the bill’s passage last November should understand a key part of the story, which has not been told, of how it happened.”

According to Dreyfuss, former House speaker Newt Gringrich spent the last decade shepherding the AARP into the Republican camp by socially engineering his friend Bill Novelli, who became AARP’s executive director in June 2001. Novelli, quickly realizing which side of his bread was buttered, centralized AARP’s policy making activities in the hands of a coterie of corporate aides-de-camp, limiting input from local leaders who were, generally, much more progressive than the national organization.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)‘s Peter Hart opines that a member of the Saudi royal family, Al-Walid bin Talal, owns a sizable stake in Eurodisney, one of the more financially troubled of the Disney properties, and that’s why Disney is refusing to let its Miramax subsidiary distribute Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

“This particular member of the Saudi royal family [Al-Walid bin Talal] has been a big supporter of Disney. I think he’s the fifth richest man in the world according to Forbes last year. US$300 million he has invested in the so far failed Eurodisney project,” Hart said in a Democracy Now! interview.

The FAIR website carries additional information along these lines in its “Activism Update: Eisner’s Fantasyland Excuse for Censorship.”

“It’s not unprecedented for Disney to respond favorably to a political request from its Saudi business partner; when Disney’s EPCOT Center planned to describe Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in an exhibit on Israeli culture, Al-Walid says that he had personally asked Eisner to intervene in the decision. That same week, Disney announced that the pavilion would not refer to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (BBC, 9/14/99).”

Christopher Allen has been thinking a lot about privacy lately, especially in relation to social networking software. Allen understands the concepts of privacy related to networked environments at a very deep level, noting that even when he was developing products that used encryption technologies, he spoke precisely about confidentiality and authentication, but not privacy. “Promising privacy was too much.”

While at this year’s Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Berkeley, Allen’s thoughts about privacy congealed, and the result is his most excellent “Four Kinds of Privacy.”

According to Allen, when we speak about privacy we’re actually speaking about four distinct forms that, while related, are not the same (although they do intersect) :

1. Defensive privacy is information about me that I don’t want revealed because it makes me feel vulnerable in some way.
2. Human-rights privacy is what most Europeans mean when they talk about privacy-the levels to which governments, rather than individuals, can abuse personal information.
3. Personal privacy is somewhat peculiar to the United States and is embodied in what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis recognized in 1890 as “the right to be left alone.”
4. Contextual privacy is related to an “inappropriate level of intimacy,” according to Allen, or what Danah Boyd has identified as the “ickiness factor.”

Take the time to read Allen’s essay; it doesn’t take long to read, but it’ll keep you busy for a good long while.

According Karen Holt’s “And Now, For A Little Bloggery” in Folio, the time may be right for magablogs—magazine weblogs—as both a brand enhancer and a source of revenue.

“For now, magazine blogs tend to work as brand enhancements, not as moneymakers. ‘It is another way for us to get our name out there in a different venue, the blogosphere, and try to become part of that conversation,’ says Amy Bernstein, senior editor at Business 2.0, which launched its first blog, B2day, in January. ‘It runs on a completely different heartbeat from a monthly magazine, and it gives us an opportunity to respond to events on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute level.’ B2day is open to postings from any member of the magazine’s editorial staff.”

Although some magazine weblogs are beginning to show signs of revenue life:

“At The American Prospect, a blog called Tapped, by Matthew Yglesias and Nick Confessore, reaches a whole network of computer users who might never otherwise visit the magazine’s site, says executive editor Michael Tomasky. Now the magazine is experimenting with political advertising on the blog. ‘We decided that the time was right with election season upon us,’ says Tomasky. Yglesias, who also runs his own blog independent of Tapped, says he took ads for the first time in March and brought in about $1,000 in revenue.”

Holt goes on to write that direct sponsorship is culturally incompatible with the weblog community. She bases this on a 2003 survey by Blog Search Engine that found “only 13 percent of the sites take advertising and half of the 610 bloggers surveyed said blogs and ads don’t mix.”

Magazines—both mainstream and alternative—should be exploring stand-alone micro-publication niches that complement their core print publications. Non-invasive direct sponsorships of these online nanopublications will be enormously successful for everyone involved. Time’s a-wastin’ and it’s only a question of who’s going to be first and who’s going to get the business model right.