Category: News

We’re going to pay a price for our using corporations to enforce rules that the government can’t without violating the constitution. A legal precedent has already been established for using corporations as extraconstitutional cops.
The government can’t test you randomly for drugs or search you without cause, but they’ve gotten your employer to do it for them.
The goverment can’t suppress Internet porn and gambling, but they can make your credit card company to do it for them.
Corporations are also scratching one another’s backs. That’s the thinking behind the RIAA trying to force Verizon to rat you out. Don’t think that Verizon’s lack of enthusiasm for this role has anything to do with scruples.

As much as I loathe local TV news, multi-station braodcasters replacing local newscasts with corporation-produced broadcasts is even more loathesome.
This is logical outcome of Congress’s and the FCC’s mad dash to concentration in the media business, as surely as are robot radio stations . What’s staggering is that Michael Powell could present this as anything other than bad for America. The only reasons for concentration are increasing ad rates by lowering competition and lowering costs by ceasing whatever minimal production is going on locally.
The real tragedy is that we have to fight for the protection of such unwholesome fare as the local newscast or ABC’s overrated Nightline.
[Thanks, Mediageek, for this depressing link!]

The current system of using the name of the corporation that you buy internet access from as your email address doesn’t work. Over 200,000 people in New England have had to change their addresses from [email protected] to [email protected] to [email protected] in the last year. And if an existing Comcast customer already has [email protected], they’re going to have to change their user name as well.
As David Weinberg says, “This is the clearest example I’ve seen of the confluence of the marketing and cattle farmer’s sense of ‘branding.'”
This system makes some sense when you’re talking about the address where you do your employer’s business. But there is no excuse any longer for yoking your digital identity to that of your access provider. Get your own domain. This will also make it easier to change access providers without notifying everyone in your address book.
At least that’ll work until more access companies limit our access to POP and SMTP.

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s new email ethics pledge are designed to improve the ethics of selling mailing lists to advertisers. It says nothing about the ethics of acquiring names, removing names, or determining to whom to sell your name. In other words, it protects email marketers, but does nothing to protect consumers.

Back during the bubble, the only must-read email newsletter was the Industry Standard’s Media Grok. I was sorry when closed with the Standard and was glad to see it revived as Media Unspun. Media Grok did the best job of synthesizing the trades and the dailies and showing who really understood the implications of what they were reporting.
Now, sadly, Cyberjournalist interviews founder Jimmy Guterman about Media Unspun’s death and the challenges of making a living publishing on the Net.

Joho the Blog points us to Peter Kaminski’s brilliant analysis of the Cometa WiFi announcement:

To me it looks even simpler than that, a couple guys trying to make a small deal look big. Why else would they call Intel Capital “Intel”, and IBM Global Services “IBM”? Why are there no quotes from ATT, Intel and IBM in the release? Why don’t they post the size of the deal, instead of the scope of their goals? Why is their entire physical contact info “866-266-3823”? Why is Steve Harris, VP Corporate Affairs, listed as the sole press contact on the copy of the release on att.com? Etc.

Dead on. Clearly the reporters who reported this press release didn’t understand it.
I think this is a potentially exciting announcement, but clearly there are big issues with WiFi networks that remain to be resolved and this new joint venture announcement has failed to resolve them.

They finally cracked the digital Doomsday Book. In less than fifteen years, the discs had become unreadable on any existing equipment. New media, especially proprietary formats, are far from a permanent record of anything.
“By contrast, the original Domesday Book, an inventory of England compiled in 1086 by Norman monks, is in fine condition in the Public Record Office in Kew, London.” (Thanks to WebWord)

Henry Luce’s baby (Time Inc.) now belongs to Steve Case’s baby. Time is not exactly the same company the creator of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated bequeathed to his heirs. But until this moment, I don’t think I appreciated how far it had fallen from relevance.
Time Inc’s journalism is now something AOL can give away to sell subscriptions — the journalistic equivalent of all those CD’s you get in the mail.
If this is such a hot deal, why hasn’t Conde Nast, Hearst, or Primedia jumped at it?
I mentioned Henry Luce earlier mainly so I could relate this anecdote:
Dorothy Parker and Clare Booth Luce — arguably two of America’s great twentieth century literary women — come to a door at the same time. Luce steps aside, saying, “Age before beauty”. Dorothy Parker walks through the door, saying, “…and pearls before swine.”

I don’t understand the numerous interested and enthusiastic links to the LA Times’ story on mechanisms that permit libraries to lend ebooks to patrons.
The LAT calls it “Another Boost for E-Books”, which is fair. But it’s another step in the incremental destruction of libraries.
I just finished reading Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold and was shaken by his portrait of the library community’s embrace of microfilm and digitization — and their destruction of their collections of paper newspapers, magazines and books. Baker had already been pretty hard on librarians, when he took them on for moving from card catalogs to computerized catalogs.
One of Baker’s core ideas is that we’re moving away from a world in which libraries could acquire (or create) information in print and make it available free to patrons until it fell apart from use.
We moving into a world where access to information is metered and where libraries pass the cost on to us. In that world, taxpayers (who don’t want to pay for anything, anyway) are going to resist “subsidizing” the information needs of their fellow citizens. This was the reasoning behind closing the PubScience database (at the insistence of the private database industry).
When libraries start buying ebooks with licenses for a limited number of uses, it’s another step toward becoming retail channels and rent-collection agencies for copyright holders.

Time Inc. is thinking about making its magazines exclusively available on AOL. This is potentially a big play for synergy, and a sharp contrast to, say, the bickering between AOL and Roadrunner over the “broadband” access market.
According to the WSJ, Time thinks it’s too expensive to operate its web sites, is concerned that they’re cannibalizing print sales, and feels that there’s not enough advertising to compensate for those disadvantages.
It must be difficult for Time Inc. to sell advertising on their Web sites. With the (possible) exception of Fortune, their readers are undifferentiated Jane and Joe Twelve-Packs who live vicariously through the lives of celebrities.
They also know no one’s going to pay for access to the Entertainment Weekly web site.
Even granting this grim alternative scenario, it’s difficult to make the math work.
Doing a deal with AOL means making Time’s “content” available to only a third of US Internet users — a small enough audience to cut into their advertising reach but too big not to be source of cannibalization. And it isn’t exactly going to improve their chances of getting on Ralph Lauren’s (or even P&G’s) next media plan.
Sure, it would be nice (for AOL) to have control exclusive access to People, Entertainment Weekly, and In Style; but what are they really willing to pay Time for that exclusivity? Do they simply propose to relieve them from the cost of operating their Web sites? Will they compensate them for the cost of supporting AOL’s proprietary Rainman format? Does this mean break-even is the best Time can hope for online?
If the way you make this deal a win-win is to assume that Time Inc’s Web sites will always lose money and it might, theoretically, boost AOL customer loyalty by a few percentage points, then each company must value this deal pretty poorly.