I don't know if anybody is still reading Mediasavvy. Since I launched Coastsider in May 2004, I haven't been posting much here. However, if you're still interested in what I have to say, there is a place where you can see it. I joined Jupiter Research as an analyst covering media in July 2005, and I'm now blogging there. I've added a feed from my Jupiter blog to the nav bar on Mediasavvy.

I will continue to post at Mediasavvy from time to time, when I have something to say that is more personal and wouldn't be appropriate to post on Jupiter's site.

I just made interesting sale.

Back in September, I covered a murder in Coastsider. I was first on the scene and got some great photos of the crime scene and Sheriffs at the site.

The story itself is lurid and heartbreaking. The central character, Charles Loo, is a resident of Singapore. Last week, I got a call from the Straits Times in Singapore. They wanted to buy photos that I had posted on Coastsider for use in the paper.

I'm not certain there's anyone left who still questions whether bloggers can be journalists. At the same time, most pros still use demeaning term "citizen journalism".

I don't know what "citizen journalism" means, but I don't think it'll be too long before we can just erase the word "citizen" as a meaningless qualifier. After all, professional journalists become so objective that they're not citizens any more?

As my strategy for Coastsider develops, two things become clear: the focus of the site must be ruthlessly local, and I would love to have a general news feed.

The local focus is key. I'm simply not running stories that don't directly impact my local community. That not only gives the site its character, it makes a lot of decisions about what to include and what not to include a lot easier.

But I also know that it would improve Coastsider's role as a daily habit for my readers if I had news headlines on the site. The problem is that no general news feed that I would want to run (NY Times, BBC, NPR, Washington Post, Yahoo, Google, etc.) can be featured on a commercial site.

I sort of get that rationale, and I expect it to change as we become more comfortable with syndication. But I'm not sure what to do in the meantime.

It seems to me that it would be possible for sites like mine to pool their resources and link to interesting state, national, international, business, and technology stories. These links could be aggregated and filtered and delivered to participants. The closest thing to this now is the most-linked list on Technorati, but it's a little raw and also not available for syndication.

This would be a great open-source project. It's well-defined, doable, and would be a great resource for the community.

My friend Dustin sent me a note I wanted to share:

I saw these quotes in different media sources and thought you might
appreciate the way they illuminate Hollywood's understanding of technology:

"This is an interesting way to start my career at Disney," Mr. Ovitz said he
replied, adding that "My mind was spinning like a Univac trying to figure
out" what to do.

-- Ovitz's Testimony on Disney Tenure Portrays a Thwarted Deal Maker, The Wall Street Journal, 10/27/2004

"In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for
Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had
missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had
5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty
impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power."

-- In '52, huge computer called Univac changed election night, USA Today, 10/27/2004

The finalist list for the Online Journalism Awards confirms my suspicion that Online News Association's idea of a small site (fewer than half a million unique visitors a month) is way too high.

Belo, the Orange County Register, Congressional Quarterly, Ventura County Star, PBS, WBUR, and the Fresno Bee are all nominees in the small site category.

Coastsider serves a community of 30,000 souls. I will never have the resources to compete the smallest of the organizations. I'm stunned that the Online Journalism Association so strongly favors corporate journalism, whether for profit or not. They're completely missing the revolution.

I was listening to a story about yet another stolen election in some faraway country on NPR and I wondered if political corruption in nominal democracies is having an effect on voting in the United States.

All markets are international. Including the market for voting equipment. If you were selling voting equipment to a typical third world government, would absolute security and reliable audit trails be considered a feature or a bug? Could you justify selling an unhackable version in your home market and a hackable version overseas? Would you want to maintain twice as many SKU's, one set hackable and one not?

I've looked around a little bit and I can't find any information on the size or potential size of the global market for voting equipment. But I'm beginning to wonder if the potential of selling voting equipment in undemocratic countries is affecting the quality of the equipment manufacturers are willing to sell us here.

I don't know of anyone who has written about this. Perhaps someone should.

I love Yahoo. I think they're good people and they have a terrific product that they're making better every day. But Google is beating them at their own game.

Yahoo owns Overture, which arguably invented keyword advertising, the online ad segment with all the momentum right now. I am buying ads for a small regional site at five cents each on Google, with no monthly minimum. Yahoo will sell me those same keyword clicks for ten cents and a monthly minimum of $20.

Yahoo owns the number-two webmail service (after Microsoft's Hotmail) and it's very good. Until recently, Yahoo mail offered its users 2 megabytes of storage for free. Google announces (and still has in beta) a webmail service that offers 1,000 megabytes of storage for free. Yahoo responds by raising their limit to 100 megabytes, more than enough to keep their existing customers, but only 10% of what Google is offering.

Yahoo and Google are both great companies and I'm happy with my relationship with each of them.

But keeping your costs low is key to success on the Web, and I think Google has figured out something about keeping their costs low that even Yahoo (whom I've always thought of as cheapskates) can't seem to approach.

Should we be worried about Yahoo?

When I built Coastsider, my goal was to make the design, and the underlying markup, as simple as possible. I wanted to do the layout with CSS only -- no tables.

Tables brought back too many memories for me of the original News.com site, which was a twisted mass of nested tables designed to over-determine how the site looked on the reader's computer.

Right before releasing Coastsider, I decided I was unable to assure the site would look right without a basic three-column table layout. I held my nose and added the table. But at least I wasn't nesting my table.s

Today, I came across an intractable problem that forced me to nest a second table inside my layout. I'm sure the problem is that I don't know CSS well enough to fix this without nested tables. But I'm out of ideas and out of time. Nested tables beat the alternative, which looks awful.

News sites have been wringing their hands about whether blogging is journalism and whether newspapers should let their reporters blog.

They're missing the most important point about blogging. Suddenly, millions of their readers now have better-managed web sites that are better integrated with the Web than any online news Web site.

I'm not saying that the Tribune Company should rush out and buy WordPress for their newspapers. But the blogosphere has evolved into a sophisticated network that online publishers should emulate and build upon. I've been discussing the elements of this network in this series:

• RSS feeds put your headlines on readers' desktops, especially the most influential 1% of Web users -- the people who can drive traffic to your site. Don't worry that you can't control it or measure it. Trust people to find you.
• Comments let your reader participate directly in the reporting process, amplifying, correcting, and just blowing off steam. Letters to the editor and separate bulletin boards now seem absurd.
• Archives should no longer be in a separate database. Your Web site should be your archives, which should be free and open to anyone who wants to read or link to your news. Why shouldn't readers be able to search your archives using Google? Think before you answer that question.
• Trackback points to people who point to you, creating context for every news story you publish, and giving back traffic to people who are pointing their readers to you.
• Your community should be the focus of your site. And you should be integrating your site with bloggers and other sites in your community.

I've been pretty tough on newspapers' Web sites for the last week or so. But newspapers actually do a pretty good job compared to the typical television broadcaster. A little later, I plan to write about why publishers are so much better equipped than broadcasters for the Web.

For now, let me say that Fox News just redesigned their site, and the result is godawful.

Supposedly, it's designed to be "high bandwidth", but all I know is that it performs like a pig on my DSL line. And by "pig," I don't mean Babe. I mean a big, fat sack of lard.

To be fair, Fox News Channel isn't exactly the most elegant stop on the TV dial, either.

But...oh, the humanity!

With its pseudowindows swimming in a blue background; its pop-up menus that don't work on a Mac; its jumble of news with ads with promos that make it impossible to tell who paid whom for what; the "Fox Connect" window where the ad cannot be separated from the content; its obviously ghost-written "blogs"; a creepy above-the-fold file photo illustration of the Supreme Court looming like an evil presence; its spammy text ads for viagra, diets, and offers to "crush old age"; and its bright-yellow bigger-than-Fox's-logo terror Alert Status, the Fox News Web site looks like a porn site without the tits.

Every blog is part of multiple communities. MediaSavvy is part of the online publishing, news, telecom, and Web theory communities. You can tell by looking at the list of blogs (the blogroll) on my nav bar. I link to those guys and many of them link back to me.

Now, imagine a newspaper Web site with a blogroll. Jonathan Dube says newspapers should give community members blogs on their site, but he doesn't say that newspapers should promote local weblogs that they don't host.

The typical newspaper web site's home page is a roach motel: readers can enter, but they can't get out, unless they click on an ad. Some news stories may provide a few relevant links in a news story, but it feels like noblesse oblige.

I could make a compelling argument that newspaper publishers should support local bloggers for the karma alone, but why bother? I know most publishers are less interested in karma than in cash. And most publishers would make more money if they shared the wealth of their traffic with local bloggers.

On the Web, karma translates into reputation really quickly. And reputation is the old-fashioned word for the Holy Grail of nineties marketing -- branding.

A newspaper may be a dominant media brand in its community, with boxes on every street corner and a wad of newsprint plunked on a third of the doorsteps every morning. But what is its share of its community's Web diet? I don't know what things are like in your home market, but here in the Bay Area, the big three newspaper publishers are competing with a host of free dailies the do a better job of covering individual communities than they do. By associating yourself with a constellation of neighborhood and community bloggers, most online newspapers could serve their community better.

And why on Earth would any publisher want to host blogs? Why put up with the liability, support headaches, creeping editorial responsibility, and general managerial overhead? That's so ten years ago! That's why God gave us Tim Berners-Lee. Anybody can create a Web site. And the (minimal) hassle of setting up a blog filters out the folks who'd never maintain a site in the first place.

If newspapers are going to survive, they're going to have to get local in a hurry. Why is the A section of most newspapers national and international news and the B section local news? That's backwards. And local news is even more important on the Web. People are going to the local daily for local news. And they should be going there for other links to the community.

On the Web, focus matters. And newspapers should be focusing their site on local news. When I built Coastsider, I worked hard to link to lots of local sites. This was as much about necessity as strategic vision. But I also know that this is going to come back to me in reputation, audience, and revenue. Every newspaper in the US should be aware that this kind of online community building is already taking place in their home markets. They either can surf this wave or be swamped by it. There is no other option.

On the Web, more even than real life, your reputation is your fortune. It's the source of your network and the your network is the source of your customer base. Branding on the Web isn't about advertising. It's about reputation. It is your karma. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon have translated good karma into big money and there's no reason why newspapers can't do the same.

Be a good neighbor: Think locally. Act locally.

Until newspapers embrace trackback, they're not really part of the Web.

Weblogs aren't powerful because a handful of A-list bloggers are influencing their loyal dittoheads. Weblogs are powerful because they're part of a web of their own where millions of individual bloggers are pointing to stories -- amplifying, clarifying, or debunking them. The size and complexity of this web-within-the-Web is staggering.

The power of all these links is multiplied by the power of trackback, which links a story back to any story that links to it, as long as both stories are on sites that support the trackback protocol. Trackback is the most original and important innovation that blogs brought to the Web, and is the last one that newspapers are likely to adopt. When you read a story, you know who's pointing to it and what they're saying about it. Trackback creates the kind of context and metadata for each story that you can't buy at any price.

Trackback also provides accountability that comments cannot. You can't get a trackback link unless you have a site that supports trackback and you're willing to disclose your identity (or at least one of them).

Trackback is so good and so well accepted that it's a requirement for weblog software. It should be a required feature for content management in general. Trackback solves the problems of the one-way nature of Web links and is especially useful for news stories.

Trackback is powerful, and it can be merciless. When SixApart announced its licensing terms for Movable Type 3.0, its users condemned the license on their sites, and linked to the announcement. Hundreds of trackback links to these negative stories festooned the announcement and created a network of dialog and feedback. SixApart had the nerve (or the good sense) not to interfere with the process, and eventually things calmed down a little. They banked some karma by leaving those trackbacks in place -- karma that will stand them in good stead as they turn Movable Type into a for-pay product.

If they're going to succeed on the Web, Online newspaper publishers are going to have to let go of the paralyzing fear that somebody, somewhere is going to make a little money from pointing people to their content.

Weblogs have revolutionized web publishing. The act of blogging itself isn't all that revolutionary. But blog software developers have put powerful weapons in the hands of ordinary citizens. The Pentagon calls this asymmetrical warfare.

One unnoticed aspect of the revolution is that anybody can have searchable archives on their site. As soon as a story is published, it has a permanent URL and it keeps that URL even after it is moved off the home page. Users can follow offsite links to the story, or search the archives to find it on the site. In other words, the site is the archive.

Newspapers make a false distinction between their site and their archive. After a couple of weeks, they remove stories not only from their home page, but from their Web site. The original URL is broken, and readers who followed a link to the story are invited to search the paper's archives for it and pay money to get a look at it.

Newspapers don't even understand what URL's are for. Many of them actively oppose "deep linking" to stories, or tacitly support the link-to-my-homepage-or-don't-link-to-my-site element by their silence. After all, who even thought we needed a term for "deep linking"? It should be called linking.

They don't understand that links from interested outsiders add even more value to their news by creating dense and useful meta-information that they couldn't buy even if they wanted to.

Bloggers add value to old news with commentary, context, community, links, inbound traffic, and Google cred. With online advertising (especially search-related advertising) growing explosively, the value of having stories permanently accessible on your site far outweighs the trivial incremental revenue that comes from selling your archives.

Every year, newspapers hold conferences about online news and they invite the people who run Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and other geeky community sites to speak to them. They listen raptly to tales of how to build community online. And then they go back to their home markets and continue to dump their news on the Web.

I know of no US newspaper that lets its users attach comments to news stories -- something nearly every does. If you want to comment on a news story, you're going to have to put a pointer to it somewhere (on your blog, on a community site, on a static page) and put your comments somewhere else. No one can reply. No one can provide their opinion. No one can provide their insight from direct experience of the story.

Nobody who reads the story on the original site will be able to find your comment, because newspapers don't support trackback (more on that later). And people who read your comments won't be able to read the original story after it is moved to archives, usually about two weeks.

Free content management software is so competitive that it's hard to find a package that doesn't offer a pretty good facility for adding comments to individual posts, and most are moving in the direction of (optional) user registration. What that means is that there are literally millions of web sites run by regular human beings that welcome comments from readers.

Newspapers demand registration and acceptance of advertising email as a condition for reading their news, but none use those registrations to create a community.

It's hard to find a better example of how newspapers still treat the Web like a broadsheet.

Note: Jonathan Dube's piece "101 ways to improve your news site" addresses some of the issues that I've raised in this series. But he doesn't address trackback.

It looks like I have to add a category for full CMS's with a sufficient layer of abstraction to build sites other than a blog, wiki, or Slashdot clone. The three that have been mentioned in comments are:

EZPublish is a PHP/MySQL CMS that looks like it does all the right things, and you can get it as an abstract framework, or preconfigured for more structured sites. However, the one (undisputed) review that I have been able to find says that EZPublish is crufty and slow.

Bricolage is aparently the open-source evolution of Salon's CMS, using Perl and MySQL. Personally, I'm leery of Perl, which I don't know, and PostgreSQL, which I don't use and can't pronounce. But it looks like a mature and exciting alternative[too-short eWeek review].

Typo3 is abstract and uses PHP and MySQL. However, I'm having a really hard time understanding it by reading the site, which is badly organized and poorly documented. The site itself says it takes weeks to learn how to use Typo3.

If you're looking for a CMS with a greater level of abstraction, you're going to need to spend more time on your decision. I'd probably install both Bricolage and Typo3 and get to know them both.

Perhaps newspapers will never understand the Web.

We're approaching the ten-year anniversary of newspapers on the Web -- Mercury Center (my site) and SFGate launched at the end of 1994. Our vision of the Web has changed a couple of times in the last decade, but newspapers vision of their online edition remain unchanged.

Right now, we're in the middle of a bottom-up revolution in how the Web is created and how people use it. OK, all real revolutions are bottom-up. That's how you know it's in a revolution.

Right now, Technorati is indexing 2.5 million blogs. Most of those are inactive, and most of the rest suck. But there is a huge, unmanageable number of sites remaining that are changing the way that people use the web. And the tools they use to create their sites and reach their audiences are steadily improving.

The title of this piece is deliberately provocative. I don't expect newspapers to mimic blogs. But I don't understand why they haven't learned some broader lessons about how our use of the Web has changed in the ten years since we first went online.

Newspapers are treating RSS as a threat to their core business. They are desperately afraid of "aggregators" grabbing their headlines and treating them as wire services.

Why are they afraid of aggregators? I understand the rationale, but it doesn't really make any sense. They want you to visit their home page, which they view as the gateway to the rest of their site, every day, whether they have any news for you or not.

Publishers don't understand that the home page is no longer the gateway to their site. Every well-designed page has enough navigation and headlines to draw you into the site.

Publishers don't trust their newsrooms to deliver headlines that will bring you to their site because you have to read the story.

Publishers are anxious because they can no longer get you to pay to have them deliver a package on your doorstep that you feel compelled to read because you paid for it and because you'd feel guilty to toss it out unread.

Publishers want you to read their sites because it's a habit and not because they're producing must-read journalism.

I spend too much time thinking about cheap content management. Between new sites and new licenses for software I'm already using, I've got a couple of reasons. But I think I may just be compulsively fascinated with the idea that my ideal CMS is just around the corner...and that it's free.

My criteria are simple. A CMS needs to be able to create sites more complex than a simple blog. It needs to be easy to install and use. The software must be mature and apparently bug-free in daily operation. It should have a large community of users and developers. And it should cost less than $200 for a commercial license.

There seem to be four principal differentiating factors among these CMS's:

• Platform: Perl, php, or Python/Zope. If this matters to you, you already know.
• Page generation: Static or dynamic. This is somewhat platform-related. For example any php site is going to be dynamic.
• License: Commercial, or Open Source. I'm not a zealot about this. I love the idea of Open Source, but I'm currently using commercial packages for my sites.
• Type of site: Weblog, news site, or Wiki. What you choose depends on what you're publishing. How chronological do you want to be? Do you want a lot of modules packaged with your software? Do you want your site to look like Slashdot, or do you have an original design in mind?

So, here are what I think are the top ten free and cheap content management systems, in alphabetical order. If you're thinking about creating a site, this would be a good list of candidates to start with. Examining each would also help you work out your ideas about the ideal CMS for your application. I've included a couple of basic blog packages that might not meet my personal criteria, but which I know people are using creatively.

Blogger is free and you don't have to install any software. If you don't know why you're blogging yet, this might be a really good place to start. It's owned by Google, which is a plus or minus, depending on your point of view.

Drupal is a full-blown site management system (php and MySQL) that has gotten a lot of recommendations since Movable Type changed their license. It's open source and based on php and MySQL. It's part of a geek triumvirate with Plone and Slash and I'm wondering if I really need three packages in this category. Other php-based CMS's in this category are Nucleus and phpNuke.

Expression Engine is the newest CMS from Rick Ellis, who created pMachine, which I use to run Coastsider. It's based on php and MySQL and seems very powerful and flexible. It will cost you money to run, either for personal or profession use, but it's inexpensive and the license is flexible.

Movable Type is what I use to run MediaSavvy. I love MovableType. It's based on Perl, but I love it anyway. It has a huge user and developer community. Movable Type pages are not dynamic and have to be rebuilt every time you make a change. This is reasonably fast, but can be a real pain if you get a lot of spam comments. They have the best templates in the industry and an inordinate market share among A-list bloggers.

Plone is based on Python and uses the Zope platform. It feels sort of like Drupal and Slash, and they're all designed to help geeks reproduce Slashdot in whatever realm they're geeky about.

Slash is a perl-based system for Slashdot-like sites. You need to have root access to the server it runs on, so it isn't going to work for most users. A similar package with the same limitations is Scoop. I seriously considered using Scoop, but it was missing a lot of the things most modern CMS's should offer, such as real templates and CSS support. I don't know about Slash.

Some Wiki or other, there are dozens, I can't tell them apart, and they all make my head hurt. But wikis are undeniably cool, ideal for some applications, becoming a lot more sophisticated, and are beginning to look like an overnight success ten years in the making.

WordPress is another contender who's profile has been boosted by Movable Type's licensing misstep. It's php and MySQL, and its open-source. And it has the momentum of a killer asteroid. It's biggest limitation is that it can only handle one blog, so you need multiple installations for complex sites. However, at least one thoughtful fellow chose it for his complex site.

That's about ten, depending on how you count. I'd be interested in more nominations if they're serious contenders for top ten and genuinely different from the ones I've listed here.

I love Movable Type. Movable Type changed my life. Movable Type is a better piece of software for me than anything I could have designed for myself. I would pay money for Movable Type. I'd like to see Ben and Mena Trott get rich from Movable Type. And I've been looking forward to the release of version 3.0, while they've been focused on other projects.

But their new licensing scheme is confusing. I think Inluminent hit the nail on the head: they need an unlimited personal license for a reasonable flat fee for personal use (say, $100 for unlimited users and weblogs) and either a flat fee or user/weblog licensing scheme for commercial users. Personal users shouldn't be subjected to tiered licenses.

I don't think anyone who is a serious enough blogger to need a lot of users or weblogs from Movable Type would object to paying $100 for such a wonderful tool.

But right now, I'm not sure what I'm going to do next.

I'm tempted to move to Expression Engine for its simpler license, dynamic php publishing, and the free "switcher" license they just offered me. I'm using their pMachine software for Coastsider and am considering migrating that site to Expression Engine.

But MT is making me consider whether I want to use commercial software at all.

I have been so happy with the GPL software I've been using lately that I'm tempted to move all my personal publishing to GPL as a gesture of support. WordPress seems to be the GPL solution of choice, with a large community and lots of momentum. It also uses php, which is quickly becoming my platform of choice. But it doesn't have the author and weblog management flexibility of either commercial option.

MT 2.x does what I need right now. Until I need the features MT 3.x or Expression Engine, or WordPress matures, I think I'll sit tight.

Gerry McGovern says we should treat content management as a process, not a project. One example of this kind of thinking is making sure that the things we build are maintainable once they are built and that a procedure for maintaining them is in place.

Gerry's talking mostly about content management on intranets, but this is clearly applicable to online publishing.

I remember a meeting in the early days of the Web when our project manager told the team, "When the server upgrade is finished, things are going to be a lot better." To this our webmaster replied, "Don't you see? We're never going to be 'finished'". I've told this story over and over because it points out the difference between two schools of thought in IT generally and the Web in particular. I wouldn't call our webmaster a pessimist, although the project manager probably perceived him that way.

I've always readily admitted that it's a lot more fun to build Web sites than it is to maintain them. If you're not careful, this kind of thinking can lead to the creation of lots of cool features that don't work all that well and eventually break. Gerry says that this point of view also leads to the idea that everything will be fixed in the next redesign. But, if you don't change your way of thinking, you'll find yourself in the same fix when you're done.

Gerry says we should be building a small number of important features (e.g. search, directories) that exceed our users expectations and can be maintained in that state over the long run.

I really like Rafat Ali's new Digital Media Jobs Blog. It's an incredibly simple idea with a real revenue potential.

He's simply blogging digital media jobs, from the usual online classified sources. Finding these jobs in the usual haystacks is nontrivial and the number and quality of his listings is high. This site demonstrates how versatile the blog format can be and that we have only begun to explore its possibilities.

After spending too much time an energy dealing with posting spam, I finally installed MT-Blacklist. I've been concerned that it wasn't going to be effective, but it was becoming clear that the vast majority of the spam in my comments was coming from just a couple of scumbags and that a blacklist was probably the right approach.

Comment spam has become such a nuisance that every time I open my mailbox I could feel the tension and anger rising.

While I don't have enough experience to say how well it works, it did manage the few test messages I threw at it. It is really well-designed and easy to install and set up. It also allows me to avoid inconveniencing my users by requiring registrations for comments or closing comments after a certain period of time. Finally, it avoids the more radical and time-consuming solution of switching my site from Movable Type.

Yesterday, I wrote that I received an obvious spam comment, apparently from Edmunds.com. Today, I was able to analyze my log files, and the results are explosive.

At the date and time that message 364 was spammed, that message was accessed by a Java program from IP address 66.161.49.254. According to the following IP Address lookup, this address belongs to Automotive.com, a competitor to Edmunds.

Automotive.com also spammed my site on 3/10. Finally, I was spammed via email, apparently by one of their affiliates using a forged return address, eight times in November and December of 2003.

Edmunds general counsel posted a prompt reply to my posting yesterday evening, denying they had anything to do with it. Now that we know who is responsible, I encourage him to take it up with Automotive.com.

Update: Edmunds didn't spam me. Automotive.com spammed me, using Edmunds name, and I have the log files to prove it. Also see the comment on this message from Edmunds general counsel.

My web site has recently been plagued recently by spammers trying to scam links to sites offering viagra and baldness cures.

Today, I find that someone calling himself Mark Riley has posted a completely irrelevant and gratuitous comment on my site with a link back to edmunds.com. Here is the comment. You decide if it's anything other than comment spam.

Edmunds.com is a legitimate site and one that I use and like. Are they now using spam to promote themselves? I can see no other explanation for this message. No one other than Edmunds could possibly benefit from it. I'm awaiting Edmunds' reply.

I'm spending time every day deleting spam from MediaSavvy. The worst part is having to rebuild the entire site every time I delete a single spam. Perhaps I need to switch to a dynamic CMS like Expression Engine, so that I don't have to do this.

Meanwhile, my email spam filter managed to move a couple of important messages into my spam folder. I don't blame SpamSieve, which I love. I blame the spammers for making this whole process necessary.

Finally, I get a dozen spam faxes for every fax I want. This has been going on ever since I used my fax to send a message to efax.com. You can't tell me they didn't sell my number to the spammers.

Detecting spam has become an entire industry.

Technology is insufficient and the law is insufficient. You need both to solve this mess. What really galls me is that the direct marketing industry has fought every step to help solve the problem and given us a law that is completely inadequate to the task. Apparently, they can't tell the difference between what they do and what the spammers are doing. If they can't, how are we supposed to?

[This note was rewritten. The original post was eaten by a Safari bug exacerbated by the way Movable Type posts messages.]

Steve Outing asks why so many Web sites put their (fixed-width) content flush-left in the browser window, and not in the center.

I'm not a designer, but I know why I do it. When you have centered pages and go from one site to another, the location of the top left of the page in the browser window is going to move every time you go from one site to another.

I find news.com's centered presentation very disorienting when I move there from pretty much any other site.

Eliminating fixed-width layouts is also better because they give designers the illusion of more control of presentation than they really have. Fixed width for navigation and advertising columns is more justifiable, but content should be set free and more control over presentation should be ceded to the user.

I never thought I'd program a Web page.

I've done a little programming, but on the Web I have been happy to either create static pages or to use a content management system. My Web programming has been limited to using includes to modularize my pages and tossing CMS macros onto my pages.

But since I've started building Coastsider [password required for the next week or so], I've started using PHP. I started using it against my will, just to get some of the "templates" that came with my classified software to look like the rest of the site. Then, I started using it to create forms for my users.

Yesterday, I created a page that interfaced to the Terraserver's satellite photo database, including panning and zooming. It's empowering to be able to build software into your web pages. It's barrier-shattering to be able to mix code with HTML to do simple tasks and to interface to your content management system. The architecture of PHP encourages experimentation.

No more than a small number of individual Web site publishers will ever do much coding. On the other hand, I now think that increasingly powerful content management systems will encourage programming, rather than make it unnecessary.

I spent some time today cleaning up my stylesheets on a big site I'm working on. I was stunned by how messy they were. I was able to reduce the size of my main stylesheet by 20%. Not only that, but this top-down review showed me a lot of structural problems that had accumulated over the months: styles that didn't cascade properly, orphaned styles, redundant specifications, and even a couple of missing styles.

The result is that I've managed to resolve a few formating quirks that were due to stylesheet problems, improve the consistency of my site, and improve its performance.

I've once again been exploring employment web sites and it's stunning how little they've changed since I put together Free Agent for the Mercury News back in 1996. Looking for jobs on the Web is a miserable experience. And it doesn't have to be.

• Some sites still don't work with all browsers.
• There an astonishing amount of sheer garbage in these sites, such as Work at Home "opportunities", mainly because the sites are unwilling to police their advertisers. The newspaper-owned CareerBuilder is the worst offender here.
• It's too difficult to sort through large volumes of results.
• The search tools are inconsistent and underpowered. For example, not all sites allow you to use boolean operators. There are severe limits on the number of criteria that you can set. It's difficult to edit predefined searches.
• Some sites make it impossible to launch listings in tabs.
• All sites are job-centric and don't allow ongoing meaningful searches based on, for example, companies.
• Most sites do not have meaningful metadata about jobs in their databases.
• Everyone does everything differently, and because all listings are paid, you have to search every site.
• Employers' web sites are even worse. Ebay's site is browser-dependent and you can't capture a unique URL for any listing. Most sites unbelievably difficult structured resume builders that simply do not work.

I think it is easier just to read the print classifieds. The tragedy is that this is a solvable problem, or there is a solution that would work for a large number of users.

Why not encourage employers to post their ads in XML format with clearly defined declarations of things like company, location, salary, title, responsibilities, qualifications, posting date, requisition number, and so on? All employers need is the knowledge that someone would read their listings and a few modest tools to create the pages.

If these pages were created, they could be crawled and indexed by anyone who chose to do so. Search tools could be provided by portals and search engines, who would compete on the quality of their search and management tools and not on the size of their listings databases. Listings could be delivered by RSS to interested applicants.

Meanwhile, applicants would start getting tools that would let them look for a particular, well-defined job in a large, but strictly-defined set of companies. Over time, they could refine their searches with tools like Bayesian filters, looking for more jobs like the ones they want and eliminating whole classes of listings.

Finally, anyone who could establish this kind of standard could create a standard XML format for resumes that would allow job seekers to enter their resume into a single form (or have it parsed) and output it in a format that any employer would be able to read.

The incentive for most large employers to do this is huge. They only need someone to set and promote the standard. There would be a market for providing tools for this to employers large and small.

Who can do this? Yahoo can, but their fortunes are tied to HotJobs. Similarly Monster and CareerBuilder have no reason to mess up their revenues stream or those of their corporate parents. The remaining obvious candidates are Microsoft and Google. It seems like a perfect fit with Google's current strategy.

The latest edition of Adam Engst's outstanding Mac newsletter Tidbits reviews how their various efforts to increase revenue have been progressing. (Adam: thank you for sharing your results with us.)

The bottom line is that Google's Adsense probably makes more sense for sites without a loyal audience, sponsorships are still their biggest revenue source, and ancillary products (ebooks) are their best new revenue source.

That sounds about right. I had high hopes for Google-style targeted ads, but they don't appear to the be panacea for sites that their increasing share of Internet advertising implies. They demand a huge volume of readers who are looking for something. This doesn't describe the audience of most online publishers.

As Adam points out, most the AdSense advertisers were offering products (Mac systems) that Tidbits was already recommending readers buy from their primary sponsor.

There is still no substitute for a strong relationship with you sponsors.

I heard an interesting example of politically correct editing on Morning Edition today.

In a story about how an LA synagogue used a federal law that exempts religious groups from most land-use regulations, reporter Alex Cohen referred to one opponent of the synagogue "who happens to be Jewish". That mildly annoying "happens to be" is a clumsy PC synonym for "is", intended to connote...well, I'm not exactly certain what it's intended to connote. After all, the guy's Jewish and it's relevant to the story.

What's interesting is that KQED ran the same story ten minutes later as part of the "California Report". In that, virtually identical, version Cohen says that the neighborhood opponent "is Jewish". I wonder what editorial process that led to this difference, and what the Morning Edition stylebook says about this usage.

Martin Geddes says that network providers should be regulated as common carriers. He's right, of course. There really is no other solution.

Common carriers can't discriminate against either users or applications. This idea is older than telecom, going back to the regulation of railroads. In return for this loss of control, the carriers give up liability for how the network is used.

We've moved away from this idea because the telcos have always wanted to "add value" to their networks and they've managed to "persuade" the regulators that this will increase competition. Furthermore, Big Brother would like nothing better than for the networks to be its partners in controlling how we communicate. After all, the networks are private companies and are not bound by the first or fourth amendments.

What surprises me is that Martin says no one else is saying this. He may be right. I've only hesitated to say it before because I don't understand the subtleties of common carrier status. But it seems like the only reasonable solution to me. Why aren't more people talking about this?

The economy is less ragged, there's more confidence in IT, Internet advertising is booming, the media are talking about a new Internet bubble, and webloggers are creating an atmosphere of innovation in Internet publishing. Here's a quick braindump of what I think will happen next year.

Demand from high-volume bloggers will lead to the development of simpler, standards-based open-source content management software. This will increase pressure on existing CMS vendors and integrator to justify their cost and complexity. Most will not survive this challenge.

More and more CIO's will report to CFO's. IT will look more like a cost center and not a strategic resource. ROI and hard cost/benefit analysis will be necessary to justify any IT spending.

The IT recovery will be unevenly distributed. Large vendors will reap the benefits, but there will be pressure on their margins as their solutions are commodified. Small vendors will scurry for defensible niches or merger partners.

Internet advertising will be white-hot, but most of the revenues will go to a handful of sites. This will give Time Warner the opportunity to spin off AOL. They should seize it.

Computer companies will fail in the consumer electronics market, because they don't have any understanding of what consumers want, have been turned into followers by Wintel market dynamics , and don't have the right distribution channels. Apple is the only company that could do it, but loss of focus, low margins and short product lifecycles may make it unattractive even to them.

RSS will be used to syndicate new kinds of information and RSS readers will begin to appear in mobile devices.

This will be the year of digital rights management. A lot more hardware, software, and media will be introduced with DRM, but unattractive terms and compatibility issues will lead to stagnation in networked media.

Client-side and server-side spam filters will be ubiquitous and really good. Collateral damage will include most legitimate email marketing programs.

Most commercial wifi hotspots will go away (except in hotels and airports), but merchants will begin to provide free hotspots as a customer service.

More online content will go behind subscription barriers. However, this will be the beginning of a death spiral for those sites. Eventually (after their current management is fired), they will be reborn as stripped-down, highly-automated free sites.

Broadband access providers will begin to exercise their muscle by metering bandwidth and by imposing more limits on what protocols their customers can use, what information they have access to, and what information they can publish on the net.

It has been a long time since I was involved in creating a site from scratch, and only then as part of a large team.

I'm in the process of building a site for a community that I'm interested in and it has been an education. Most of the lessons have been positive. You're going to be hearing a lot more about this on MediaSavvy. Especially once I'm ready to go public with my project.

Generally, the quality of the tools that are available to site builders is extraordinarily high. And a lot of great ones are free and open-source. And a lot of the others are cheap. Not to mention the fact that even the more-expensive tools take advantage of open-source platforms: Linux, Apache, mysql, and PHP.

You don't have to be an ubergeek to put it all together, either. Everything is polished and has a enough customization options that you can avoid coding if you want. And boy, do I!

I also learned that I can do nearly everything I want with CSS, but that I still need tables if I want to be confident that the site will display as intended in the average user's browser. A tip of the hat to Microsoft for keeping Netscape's annoying table tags in circulation.

The big challenges right now have nothing to do with code. I need policies for posting, editing, advertising, as well as some idea of what my workflow will be.

What's amazing to me is that although I knew deep down that open-source software was revolutionizing the publishing business, I had no idea how fundamentally disruptive this is becoming. And it goes beyond production. This software makes it possible to destroy the tacit understandings (and explicit labor contracts) that underpin publishing as we know it.

In the near future, you'd better have a damn good reason for printing something on paper, and you should forget about letting your print product drive your online strategy.

It's amazing how much energy is left in the idea of digital editions of print publications. I'm not talking about shovelware Web sites, but about digital replicas of the print product, distributed electronically and read on the subscriber's computer. The basic formula for these products is PDF+DRM.

This idea has been around forever. Longer, I think, than the consumer Web. It gets a lot of its energy from the perception among publishers that because it duplicates their print product with some digital advantages (e.g. searching) that it can be sold. Yet, aside from licensing fees, the incremental cost is about the same as a Web site -- zero. Of course, there are real disadvantages as well. Magazines and, especially, newspapers are not formatted for reading on a computer.

The latest avatars of digital editions, Zinio and Newsstand, are generating a lot of interest.

PBS's Newshour ran a story on digital editions of newspapers [Real Audio], with some remarkable statistics: about 160 US newspapers, and 225 newspapers worldwide are now offered in electronic editions, and the Washington Post's digital edition has 800 subscribers. However, the number of actual editions being delivered today may be an order of magnitude smaller than this.

The Newshour described the audience as expatriates and others who couldn't get home delivery. In other words: the Web audience.

But if it's true, as Zinio claims, that 83 percent of digital magazine readers click on links in editorial content and 60 percent on links in ads -- why not just give away the magazine and make money on the ads, just like you're doing on the Web?

This maybe already happening. I know of at least one person who is getting a Zinio edition of a normally paid computer magazine for free.

I've been giving a lot of thought to bundling lately.

Generally, I think bundling is a pretty stupid idea. Bundles don't exist to solve problems for consumers. They exist to solve problems for producers, either subsidizing products that can't be sold unbundled (cable packages), to maintain manufacturing volume (magazine subscriptions), disguise the real cost of a product (Tivo, cell phones), lock out competitors (Internet Explorer), or to create the illusion of value where none exists (local telephone services beyond dialtone and call waiting).

Because bundles seldom solve problems for customers, they generally fail. Even when they continue to survive in the market, it's not clear that if the components were sold individually, the net present value to the producer would not have been greater.

I can only think of a few situations where bundles make economic sense. One is where individual components of the bundle could not be sold economically, but that there is enough value in the bundle to satisfy customers. Norton Utilities is an example of this kind of bundling. So is Microsoft Office. Back in the seventies, this could be said of cable programming, but now cable programming could be unbundled if cable companies weren't monopolies.

A second example is volume sales. Magazine subscriptions are a good example. Publishers cut out distribution middlemen and increase readership. Readers are given an almost impossible-to-resist bargain as a result.

A third is where you need to create a bundle to solve a chicken & egg problem or, in rare cases, to create a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Apple Computer is a good example where the combination of hardware and software is genuinely synergistic. The early cell phone industry might be another example where bundling hardware and services might have made sense, but technology has passed this model a long time ago.

The fourth economically successful kind of bundling is the forced buy. Generally, you have to be a monopolist to force customers to buy a product that they don't want to get something that they do, or give away a product to force a paid competitor out of business. "B" movies and a lot of pre-antitrust IBM software were subsidized in this fashion. Microsoft used this technique (as well as an excellent product) to make Internet Explorer the standard Web browser. Generally, these bullying tactics can be successful, but are bad for end users and markets, and are often illegal.

Outside of monopoly markets, I don't believe it's possible to create a successful bundle that doesn't create real value for the end user by either reducing price or creating something genuinely new.

If you can't do that, you should be asking what your real motivation for bundling is.

Greg Tingle of Media Man Australia recently asked me, "Do you think that white lists are the answer to spam?".

I've already said that challenge-response email systems aren't a good solution. White lists in general don't work, because they assume the only people you want to hear from are the people you already know.

White lists are a bad approach, but fortunately they're not the only tool. I've become convinced that we need multiple solutions to spam; criminal law, civil law, blacklists, voluntary industry standards, Bayesian filters, filtering and tagging by the ISP, local filtering by the user, and other approaches. Used in the context of these other approaches, even white lists can be used to ensure against false positives. That way, if your best friend figures out a way to make money smuggling Viagra out of Nigeria, you won't miss out.

One single solution isn't going to work. The idea that there is a single solution allows everyone to say, "The solution is over there, not here."

The latest Online Publishers' Association paid content report has some interesting information about non-subscription payments under $5. [They call them micropayments, I'd call them minipayments and reserve "micropayments" for any payment too small to be economically handled by credit card.]

According to the OPA, payments under $5 are 8% of non-subscription payments, which are 11.5% of the $1.5 billion/yr paid content market. That works out to less than $15 million/yr. Clearly, a large part of that market is owned by the WSJ and NYT, leaving probably less than $10 million to be shared by newspaper archive operations and a few other sites such as Hoover's and Consumer Reports.

It gets even worse. According to Peter Krasilovsky at Borrell Associates, database vendors keep about half the revenue from newspaper archives.

Both Clay Shirky and Andrew Odlyzko make a persuasive case that micropayments are an economic dead end. I won't try to summarize either of these essays. Read them for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Consumers are currently spending less than $40 million on (non-business) news and information on the Net, including both subscriptions and minipayments. By comparison, online advertising adds up to more than $6 billion/year.

Even assuming a nearly frictionless and profitable micropayment mechanism, and optimal pricing by publishers, how much larger could the Internet market for news and information be? Can you describe a scenario where it would add up to a billion dollars?

I can't.

I'm approaching my second anniversary of hosting my sites (including MediaSavvy and Parr.org) at Dreamhost. I bounced from host to host for seven unhappy years until I landed at Dreamhost. They had the right combination of products and services. I can recommend them without reservation.

They're a small company, but their uptime has been excellent.

Dreamhost's control panel works really well and does everything I need to manage my account.

They supply all the software support I need (Perl, PHP, cgi, MySQL, and more). I've been able to install and use all kinds of CMS and other software on my Dreamhost account without any problems.

Their customer service and tech support have been outstanding.

They're prices are great. They have surprised me a couple of times by increasing and improving the services I get for what I pay. Their packaging is simple and I don't feel like I have to buy any more service than I need to do what I want to do.

Disclaimer and invitation: If you use the link above or the one on my navigation bar to sign up, I get credit against my Dreamhost bill.

The Online Publishers Association has released a demographic study that compares online content buyers to the Internet users as a whole.

Most of the data show that the demographic differences between content buyers and everyone else are meaningless. They're the tiniest bit younger, a little more heavily represented among people with incomes over $100,000 (like buyers of everything else), and their households are smaller (probably because they're younger).

The real difference is behavioral. Internet content buyers spend about twice as much time on the Net and view more than twice as many pages. And they're a little more likely to have broadband service (about 60% versus 50% for all Internet users).

The most interesting fact is that they spent less on conventional ecommerce ($235/quarter vs. $315/quarter) than the average online buyer.

This data confirms my thesis that demographics are meaningless to Internet marketers. Internet content buyers look like everyone else on the Net. We should be looking at behavior.

I've been looking for a content management system for a new community project I'm working on.

My requirements were simple. It had to be easy to set up and maintain. It had to be template-driven and the templates had to be editable by someone more proficient at HTML than Perl, PHP, or Python. It had to use either a weblog or Slashdot-style structure, but be flexible enough to accommodate changes in the structure and menus. I had to be able to use it on a virtual host where I didn't have access to the http server. The software also needed to support registration and posting by users, without a lot of intervention from the administrator. It needed to be a finished product with good documentation and an active community of users. Finally, I had to be able to find the software, install it, create a prototype, and set up my site without using a lot of time.

Movable Type would have been ideal. It's what I use for MediaSavvy and my family sites, but it doesn't support user registration and posting.

I spent a lot of time examining open source CMS's, but none seemed to be both broadly-supported and really simple. But it's really hard to tell sometimes. There is still not enough information available on open source CMS's.

I looked at wikis, but that was a frustrating experience. I never found one that was both easy to install and able to support more than minimal design improvements.

I looked at Scoop, which I liked a lot. I went so far as to get an account on a Scoop host, create a prototype site, and modify the templates to use CSS. But it didn't work with my virtual host and required too much Perl to make the modifications I needed. It became clear I would need to hire a Perl wizard to maintain my site.

Postnuke looked great and has the best installer of any package I've used. But its formatting wasn't flexible enough. That's too bad, because it's a great piece of software in many ways.

I installed pMachine this morning, and I think it's what I'm looking for. It's not open source, but at $45 for a noncommercial license it's hard to beat. It's as impressive as Movable Type in its power and ease of use. Plus, it has much better support for multiple authors.

David Isenberg notes that price discrimination in networks is probably inevitable, but that it needs to take place at the ends, not in the middle:

One of Mile O'Dell's aphorisms that has stood the test of time is, "Today's optimization is tomorrow's bottleneck."

...

We need to accept that price discrimination happens, and focus on where it happens, for what and to whom. According to the End-to-End Principle, if you have a choice to put a function at the edge of the network or in the middle, you should put it at the edge. Price discrimination in the middle of the network is a risk to new app discovery and to free speech. We should keep the network stupid -- and put the "for what" and "to whom" of price discrimination at the edge.

I had never heard the O'Dell quote before. It's brilliant.

I certainly agree that price discrimination puts the brakes on innovation in networking applications. But I'm not sure how it can be moved to the edges the network, or if that is the right solution to the problem.

There is a huge opportunity that the cellco's are ignoring. All kinds of devices should be connected to the Net, but aren't.

Why doesn't my digital camera have an "email this picture" option? Why can't my iPod be updated with news or email or RSS feeds? Why does Tivo require a physical connection to a telephone landline? Why is data access so much more expensive than voice access?

The cellco's are tightly controlling what devices can connect to their networks and are stifling innovation in the process. Right now, they make money on the hardware and selling hardware is a big part of their distribution model.

If they opened up their networks to well-behaved devices that could be traced to a known account holder, they would greatly increase the amount of innovation on applications and devices that used mobile networks. Furthermore, if any one of the big cellco's did this, they would have a significant competitive advantage. And, finally, if they don't do it soon, WiFi could preempt most data-based applications of cellular networks.

No single company can innovate a fast as a market, especially a networked market. Cellco's could achieve Internet-style growth rates in users and traffic if they opened up their networks to all kinds of devices, protocols, and applications. Is it too late for Congress or the FCC to make this a licensing requirement?

The Sony Ericsson T616 has tons of features, including dozens of shortcuts. I've read the manual a couple of times, and I'm not sure I'm ever going to master all of them. It's critical to read the manual if you're going to get the most out of this phone. Fortunately, the manual is pretty well written and organized.

Synchronization with iCal and Address Book is seamless and painless. The address book and calendar on the T616 are very good. I'm still confused about one thing. There are two places numbers can be stored--either on the phone's built-in memory or in the SIM card. It's still not clear to me how these two phone books work together. Also, the process of setting up speed-dial numbers is unnecessarily cumbersome.

Email works well, and you don't need to use a proprietary account to do it. I was able to set up my POP account, and send and receive email without a problem--including emailing pictures I took with the phone. I'm still struggling with how to use email with this device. Fortunately, the T616 allows you to set up and choose from multiple email accounts. I can see that I'm going to start racking up some significant data bills with this device.

The ergonomics of the phone are good. Despite its square shape, it has curves in the right places, making it comfortable in my hand and easy to grip when I'm using it. The limited number of keys are well laid-out, and it's (usually) easy to figure out what to do next. My only other complaint is that the functions of the special-function keys, clustered around the joystick, are sometimes difficult to figure out. Also, the keys (and the clickable joystick) are a little smaller than I would like, resulting in a great deal of pressure on your fingertips. After a lot of use, the tips of my fingers can be a little sore.

The menus are ugly and hard to read. Nearly every other part of the phone acknowledges that upper and lower case is more readable than uppercase, but the menus are upper-case only.

The camera is fun and doesn't appear to add a lot of overhead to the phone, but its resolution is pretty low. But it's better than nothing when you need to send a picture. If mobile networks were more open, we could have "email this picture" function into cameras as well as cameras built into cell phones.

I still haven't set up voice control or explored AT&T's mMode walled WAP garden. I'm excited about one, and couldn't be less interested in the other.

Douglas Rushkoff says it's not content that matters on mobile phones, it's communication.

He's right. That means that the cellco's are doubly stupid. Not only could they have virtually unlimited content on their systems if they opened up their networks, they've completely missed the point that content doesn't sell phones.

As the wireless industry begins on its long, misguided descent into the world of content creation, it must come to terms with the fact that the main reason people want content is to have an excuse - or a way - to interact with someone else.

Ideally, this means giving people the tools to create their own content that they can send to friends. Still cameras is a great start. Some form of live digital video would be fun, too. ("We're at the Grand Canyon, mom, look!" or "Here's the new baby!")

But elaborately produced content - like prepackaged video shorts, inscrutable weather maps, and football game TV replays - are not only inappropriate for a two-inch screen, they are inappropriate as social currency.

Why are they trying to reinvent themselves when they can sell the single most valuable thing of all...human contact? Why are they trying to create the elaborate content superstructures when they should be enhancing how their hardware and their networks enable communication? Why are they nickel-and-diming us for text messaging when they should be looking for the next killer communications app?

The next killer app on mobile phones will be hosted by the first cellco to open up their network to developers.

My new phone has given me a first-hand experience with how telephone companies would like to see the Internet work. It's a chilling vision, and one that publishers, regardless of size, should be fighting.

Right now, telcos are working behind the scenes to control your access to the Internet. They have already turned wired broadband into a duopoly. They have already turned as-yet-undeployed fiber broadband into a monopoly.

As the telcos tighten their grip on the Internet, you can expect to see Internet access look more like the mobile network.

Complicated and confusing pricing: Right now, you can get unlimited Internet access at a specified speed for a flat monthly rate from the telcos and cable companies. That's because they're still competing with dial-up, which is a wide-open free market with plenty of real competition. Even so, duopoly pricing has suppressed broadband adoption in the US. If the telcos ran the Internet and could structure access pricing, you could expect to have "plans" that would offer multiple tiers of service, allowing you to "choose the plan the met your needs". The result, because your needs are less predictable than you think, is that virtually everyone would pay more for the same amount of service. The unpredictability of our monthly bills would suppress usage almost instantly. This would be a hidden tax on the free Internet.

Discrimination among traffic. Despite the fact that it's all bits, AT&T bills separately for voice and "data". There are two separate plans and the prices are wildly different. AT&T's cheapest data plan is 8 MB for $19.95/mo + $.006/kb after that. Their most expensive is $.03/kb with no plan at all. I'm not sure how fast AT&T's network is, but let's assume its 14.4 kb/s. At maximum throughput, this works out to be about 10 minutes of data use (8,000 kb / 14.4 kb/sec / 60 sec/min = 9.26 min) for $19.95/mo. It gets worse if their network is faster. AT&T wouldn't get very far selling voice plans that provided 10 minutes a month for $20. Why are they charging more for "data"? Because they can.

Charging for messaging: In addition to the hourly charge for voice, and per-bit charge for data, there a per-message charge for text messaging. Imagine having to pay for each email or instant message you send.

Walled gardens and discrimination among destinations: The cellco's invented the term "walled garden" to describe a subset of the Internet that they control, which their subscribers would be forced into, and which content and commerce companies would be forced to pay for access. You could expect it to be more difficult (or impossible, depending on your provider and your plan) to get to content providers who are not paying to reach you. This hidden tax on Internet access would result in more fees for content, more advertising, and higher prices from Internet merchants.

Dedicated hardware: Why can't you buy any cell phone and hook it up to your cellco's network? Why do you have to pay a fee to add an approved phone that you bought from another user? The cellco's are selling access to you to the handset providers. There is no free market for mobile hardware. The other result of this is that there is no free standard for data access on cell phones. Imagine an access provider that didn't support anything other than the latest version of Windows, which included lots of goodies like digital rights management, copy prevention, telco control of which applications and protocols you can run, and advertising.

Limited protocols: Why can't you use MP3 rin, display HTML pages, access POP and IMAP email, or use AOL instant messaging on your cell phone? Why are the access companies already limiting access to email servers or bouncing mail from people who operate their own email servers?

This is the direction in which the Internet is moving. This is the vision of the telcos and the current management of the FCC. Its bad for users, small hardware and software companies, publishers, merchants, and anyone who uses the network to work, communicate, or gather information.

And the irony is that it's probably not that much more profitable in the long run for the telcos than providing us with open, unlimited access to bits via whatever devices and protocols we choose.

I've ranted here a few times that I don't want HTML in my email. Today I did something about it. Virtually all of the HTML mail I get is spam. I was sick and tired of my mail client parsing the HTML and going to the Net and every time I clicked on one of those messages. And spammers could use those accesses to track whether I read their message.

I set my email client (CTM's PowerMail) to flag a