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Dear Bob,

I didn't join Go Daddy as a customer after your first Super Bowl commercial, or even after the second. A lot of other people did, and when I noticed you were the market leader, I figured I couldn't go wrong. I also thought it was cool that your image was anti-Silicon Valley: an ex-Marine in Scottsdale, a flag-waving NASCAR sponsor.

In the official online forum of the Obama transition team, tens of thousands of Americans petitioned for a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's support for torture. Was this democracy in action? Or would it only be if the President were to follow through on it? We examine this here.

The Launch

Six quotes set the stage:

With the country focused on the theatrics of the Presidential transition, Ben Smith of Politico reminded his readers of some of the mechanics of it-- particularly the transition away from using instant messaging ("Obama staff will say cu l8r to IM"):

Why do people still read blogs? There are, obviously, many well-written articles tucked into the blog format by professional journalists, as well as by unpaid savants like Nate Silver.

"The thing to do with good ideas," Oscar Wilde never said, "is to just wait until Google develops them, to save you the trouble of doing so yourself."

Some of my recent research led me to a book by Tom Rosenstiel, Strange Bedfellows: how television and the presidential candidates changed American politics 1992.

A year ago, I articulated the Protocol for Online Abuse Reporting (PONAR): a framework of icons, forms, and processes which could be deployed to help mitigate the effects of injurious speech online.

[Note: this was originally on the cover page of this series; it was split off to add new information.]

Newspapers have sections; magazines have departments; weblogs have neither. All of these publishing forms carry content of interest to readers, yet none use the same name to describe the essential nature of that content.

It's been a number of weeks since the last substantive post, so I wanted to provide an update on some of the planning I've been doing for a couple of conferences this spring.

First a quick review the elements of my grand unified theory of media:

The excellent HBO biopic John Adams inspired me to catch up on my period reading. This past weekend I bought a recent biography of perhaps the most famous of the founding fathers left out of the miniseries -- Thomas Paine, by Craig Nelson (2006).

The engineer looks at the law and asks, why is it so sloppy? Take the DMCA-CDA disparity, or the fact that anonynous political robocalls are legal in many states while anonymous political commercials are not. The software engineer wonders why this all can't be straightened out.

Rudolf Elmer, the key source in the Wikileaks/BJB story, has created a website Swiss Whistleblower. Some of the information he'd been posting at Wikileaks will now be posted to the new website.

I'll be presenting Thursday evening to the Berkman Blog Group. It's kind of an honor, since I really don't see myself as one. I associate with bloggers, I befriend them, I research their methods... and I hope they don't mind if they accept me as different.

This is a collection of pieces I've written recently on Wikileaks, the anonymous document dump website. There are interesting documents being made available on the site; I don't dispute that. I merely wanted to cover some of their foibles along the way.

It's about time someone mentioned the elephant in the room-- the locker room. A professional sports locker room has limited space. Does it have room for bloggers? Here's one media mogul who says no:

Yesterday I received an 750-word from the Wikileaks email address (@sunshinepress.org) in response to my critical article about the service. I'd love to reprint it, but the author had the temerity to preface it with the request "off the record." There are journalists who support the notion that a unilateral request of "off the record" need not be honore

Two updates in the jurisprudence of free speech online this week help shed light on one of our favorite pastimes, the search for truth. The lawsuit against Wikileaks (that "entity of unknown form" according to the district court) was dropped.

[A work in progress]

In the realm of Free Speech, there are the Absolutists and the Balancers. The abolutists read the First Amendment literally and without qualification: Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." As for the balancers, well, it's not universally clear that they have been represented by a cohesive philosophy.

Wikileaks is not out of the woods yet. The full hearing for the suit brought by Bank Julius Baer is scheduled on May 16, with motions, countermotions and briefs due at some intervals until htn (see the details from CNet's Declan McCullagh, who was the only reporter to pass it along.) [UPDATE 3/6/08: BJB has vacated the lawsuit.

I've recently spent many hours using the data on Wikileaks to produce some original analysis on the Bank Julius Baer story.

Now that a federal judge has cleared Wikileaks.org to have its domain restored, it perhaps might behoove the free information zealots to actually look into the substance of the story which instigated the takedown. Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss bank, has a Cayman Island subidiary apparently serving as a tax shelter for the rich: Perhaps top reporters are working on it?

Maybe it's a cruel conspiracy of the makers of WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, et al that make blog archives a disaster of design.

Back in 2005 I found myself looking through the Dean blog archives and noticed that they'd gone missing for a time (they're back now-- with some comments missing here and there-- I know because I have a 500MB copy of it.) In 2006, I poked around the early DailyKos/MyDD archives, and was frustrated with how difficult they were to navigate (compound by the fact that the early MyDD posts are onl

Obviously, the word that Harvard's FAS faculty has voted tonight on a measure to ensure open access to their published papers -- and passed it -- is fantastic news.

I've implemented OpenID on this site. My friend Kaliya Hamlin (Identity Woman) has been helping this effort for a number of years, and when she passed along the news that Yahoo had joined the effort, I decided to get with the program.

Four years ago, I picked the hometown favorite for the Democratic primaries, albeit very late in the game,  long after he was all but crowned as the presumptive nominee.

Communications law in the United States is a little peculiar at times. If I buy time on for an advertisement on television or radio to reach thousands of people over the public airwaves, I have to abide by one set of rules. If. If I use an auto-dialer to reach thousands of people in their homes over the telephone (“robocalls”), I abide by a different set of rules.

There's a limited market for the Facebook privacy beat, since most problems can be solved by young Zuckerberg flicking a particular switch. After all, one key aspect of a well-designed technical architecture (and Facebook has demonstrated that it is one) is the ability to reconfigure it without much difficulty. And sometimes it's as simple as cleaning up the user interface.

While re-designing the archives, I needed some icons to help illustrate the different story types.

As promised, I took the server crash of two weeks ago to be an oppurtunity. Previously, I had subconsciously stopped updating my "civ" Drupal extension modules as I was several revs behind. So this site was getting dull to read and navigate.

A bunch of merry pranksters have had some fun with the phrase anti-social networking over the last few years. ("You can use Nemester to: Find out the enemies of your enemies and conspire with them Denounce your enemies... Make new enemies... Help your enemies meet their demise..."; Introvertster is an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing you online.")

In September 2002, Clay Shirky sent an essay to his mailing list titled Broadcast Institutions, Community Values. He suggested how the former could employ the latter, and in doing so, explained the difference between the two.

This article takes a brief look at basic web findability guidelines, how they are addressed by federal guidelines in the United States, and how the FCC, an agency which most commonly deals with Internet issues, fails some basic tests of such guidelines.

Back in 1999, in the Web 1.3 era, I posted a survey of existing web annotation tools on the web, and was cited (twice!) in academic papers for that minor amount of scholarship.

On Sunday I discovered a potential privacy leak in the Site Meter traffic logs; I was able, with a fair degree of confidence, to determine the IP addresses used by ten anonymous commenters to a well-trafficked blog.

In recent months, there has been a heightened awareness about privacy risks online. Facebook's Beacon program, which had pulled in information from users' online purchases on from partner sites, was roundly criticized before the company backtracked.

Morning newspaper?
Don't drive and read on the road to work.
Passing by the woods on a snowy morning...
Can't we just leave those carbon suckers in the ground?

I have been hosting Civilities.net for close to four years. After tge first couple of months of finding my way through blog-like dribbles of posts, I posted a document Ethical and Stylistic Guidelines. I didn't know very much about the blogger vs.

Why do we read what we read?

If you're in the web publishing practice, you ought to know about this essential paradox: the disparity between the safe harbor exemptions governing copyright infringement (“DMCA”) and defamation/exposure (“CDA 230”).

This coming weekend I'm planning on attending the Reputation Economies conference at Yale, so I bought, and read, Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation.

TIME Magazine publishes an article regarding important legislation before the the United States Congress. The article is based on some flimsy research, and netizens immediately pounce on it. The article's author addresses his critics online, and the magazine publishes a correction, sort of. Online media critics, particularly at Wired magazine, are unsatisfied.

Last month, I sketched out how geotagging could be useful in major emergencies-- such as knowing, should your community be ravished by wildfires, when it is safe to move back (under the presumption that your neighbors have been geotagging their own photos). As such catastrophes don't happen every day, such an idea will take a while to get traction.

A couple of days ago, I wryly observed that supposed political revolution of blogging hadn't brought out any of the Presidential candidates to blog. Instead their blogs are all what the 2003 blogging know-it-alls scoffed at: a series of press releases.

One theory of weblogs is that they've settled into a niche of being “unplugged” alternatives to over-produced media. The same words used to describe the popular MTV series could be used to describe blogs: they promised an intimate, direct connection to the audience.

John Tehranian, a University of Utah law professor, recently published an article “Infringment Nation” where he claimed that a typical American might be violating copyright at an astonishing rate: 83 acts of infringement and a potential liability of $12.45 million a day.

Thanks to aggressive pitching, my TimesSelect series got out-- mostly from people I personally know. UMass-Amherst's Bill Densmore spoke to me about it for an upcoming podcast;  from Dan Gillmor: "prodigious work"; from Jonathan Dube: "very detailed analysis"; BusinessWeek Blogspotting's Stephen Baker passed it along as well.

In an ideal publication, every online article has a consistent URL format, which remain permanent, and every article allows threaded comments. In reality, few major newspapers follow these simple rules. This alone partly explains the popularity of weblog and CMS platforms like Drupal (used here), which support these. (Incidentally, Clark Hoyt announced yesterday that the Times will be supporting comments on every article.)

When Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, ran for Public Advocate of New York City in 2005, he campaigned on a novel civic idea: the city should create a service that enabled residents to report potholes using their cameraphones. He even set up the website for it.

The thrust of this series has been about online influence. Do we even have a good understanding of it? This short concluding piece will raise some new questions for further research.

I'm indebted to Philip Meyer, one of the pioneers of statistical journalism research. In his work on the Quality Project at the University of North Carolina, he has developed the Societal Influence Model. It's a very basic model; the data in his latest book, The Vanishing Newspaper, validates the connections. Societal influence (as opposed to commercial influence, which newspapers also sell) is associated with circulation and credibility. They tend to go up, and down, together. More circulation leads to more profitability, which leads to more spending on staff, which leads to more credibility.

When the New York Times announced TimesSelect in 2005, the merry cynics among the media bloggers asserted that it would lose any or all of the following (1) money, (2) Google referrals, (3), influence, (4) respect in the blogosphere.

Most of those predictions were based on the assumption that TimesSelect would be a permanent change; that's no different from any other prediction. It lasted only two years. Still, many commentators stuck by their original assessments, and few put forth data. This series aimed to extract the data. Here are the findings.

To truly understand the different shades of “conversation” that have been proffered by the blogosphere, let's look at two Op-Ed columnists.

In the previous section, we suggested that the Times, or any other newspaper, could well offer a premium service which allowed for perks like ad-free viewing and unmoderated discussion posts. Charging for content, on the other hand, has the effect of reducing the visibility to new audiences.

In the last part, I discussed how many of the reactions to TimesSelect were more driven by emotion than anything else. Just yesterday, Morgan Stanley announced that they were selling their 7.2% stake in the The New York Times Company. The reactions piled up ( “Another Grim Milestone,” “Getting out while the getting is bad,” and taking the cake: “Another Bullet in the Old Gray Lady's Ass”). More of the media bloggers have stronger backgrounds in reporting than in publishing, and thus don't naturally delve into the numbers.

In part 1, found that the number of blog references to the Top 7 Times columnists had likely dropped by 20% against their pundit peers. That's not a bad number considering, that new data from compete.com shows that Op-Ed readership a month ago (before TimesSelect ended) was 45% of what it is today.

The previous graph leads us to wonder whether we are viewing a power law.

A system exhibiting the power law is where power law is one where each node grows in proportion to its current size: thus, the rich get richer.  That is, if twice as many people blog about David Brooks than Bob Herbert, we'd expect Brooks's readership to grow twice as fast. And, in fact, that did happen. But it didn't happen across the board. The top 10 of 50 only had 56% of the mentions of the total list in the first period (ending 2003); this number had fallen to 47% by this year.

The following numbers list references to the writer's name in the blog posts. Certain columnists are commonly known by a nickname (Tom, Bill, Nick, Josh), and thus I queried both results and added them together. It is possible these include overlapping pages. In one case (George Will), I had to estimate the number of references to the columnist and not to the coincidental use of his name in a completely different context: from looking at the last 50 blog posts, 20% were constructions where “will” was used as a verb. (USA Today: "Boy George Will Be Picking Up Street Trash.")

Three weeks ago, Jeff Jarvis wrote on his blog: "TimesSelect cost the paper much more in the internet age: It took the Times columnists out of the conversation and reduced their influence in America and worldwide."

This sentiment was echoed by many and challenged by few. We'd like to look at the data, but first we must understand the terms.

This chart visually illustrates the number of mentions from blogs to columnists in the previously-defined "punditsphere" in each of the last four years up until September 17, 2007 (see the source data). Each year is illustrated by a different color:

Continuing our analysis, we want to get a better measure of the annual growth. The first column takes the blog popularity from the 12 months ending 9/17/2005, and compares it to the prior 12-month period. As noted before, we are using the odd cutoff date of 9/17 to roughly correspond to the TimesSelect period (see data). 

Two years ago, and ten years into its web era, the New York Times introduced TimesSelect as a value-added service for its 2 million subscribers; ultimately 227,000 subscribers paid a fifth of what either Sunday or Mon-Sat subscribers were paying. The values included access to 100 articles a month from the archives, as well as access to its popular columnists, no longer free to the casual Internet reader. The service was much derided by bloggers, who had felt that the attaching of a fee to previously free material was heresy, or bad for business, or both. The service ended last week after a two-year run.

What happened to the audience during the two years of TimesSelect?

Google reports that there were 4.8 million references to "New York Times" in the blogs over the two years. If we assume that these posts generally referenced  one of the 350,000 published articles over the two years (at least, to the same degree that a reference of "Frank Rich" referenced a particular column-- a BlogPulse trend graph tends to confirm a weekly spike for a weekly column), then we conclude that the averages references per article is 14. One can infer that the columns, at least to the opinionators in the blogosphere, are ten times as popular. Still, the 177,169 references only represented 3% of the blog buzz to the Times. Suppose we double this to account for the TimesSelect columnists in the Other sections, and then apply our 20% loss, we then conclude that the perceived audience drop for nytimes.com as a whole was 1-2%.

There are three common resources to measure "buzz" through historical mentions of names/phrases on blogs. This article compares the data available for each from common search terms.

Our interest is the influence of the New York Times columnists. Let us propose that they inhabit not just the blogosphere, but the punditsphere, comprising the top political columnists of the day. The blogosphere at large links to the much smaller punditsphere with much more concentration than the other way around. Combined, the pundits receive a fraction of the total references or links on any given day, but because the pundits individually get the most links, people pay them the most attention. It is within the punditsphere that the Times columnists compete especially for attention.

Pick any item that's been in the news. It's quite likely that a Huffington Post contributor has taken a stab at it-- and left it bleeding.

A couple of years ago, I offered a set of blogger archetypes. I came up with six based on the motivations of bloggers (singers, ringers, wingers, fingers, stringers, flingers). They didn't catch on very well, perhaps because there wasn't very much holding the set together beyond the rhyme. But I did want to distinguish those bloggers who didn't see themselves as playing any role in the news process and those that didn't take themselves to seriously (the “singers,” with a nod to Walt Whitman) from those that do.

Every cable network has a contract with cable carriers, not viewers, and thus it caught little attention outside the trade press that last October, Fox renewed its contract with Cablevision, the nation's fifth* largest cable system, tripling its carriage fee from 25 cents a month per subscriber to 75 cents.

In Unread Alerts, I suggest that anybody with a cell phone ought to know the contact points for their local news organizations. Finding the contact information is a different maze on each site.

Over the last year I'd learned through my work on compliance software about the Global Rules Information Database (now organized under the Object Management Group's Governance Risk & Compliance Roundtable).

After my investigation into Search Engine Obfuscation-- the case of the Times's pages on Allen Kraus dwarfing the search rankings on Google-- I emailed a number of the bloggers who'd written about it last week. The response was underwhelming. (Begging the Times to start a blog back in 2003, Dave Winer had explained: "In the weblog world we don't string together soundbites to create a 'story' -- we continually cover an area, and comment on developments over time." In theory, yes...)

This is a collection of pieces I wrote, culminating in an article for MediaShift, The Tangled State of Archived News Footage Online.

The New York Times, like other media publications, faces two major challenges today regarding the relationship with their readers. First, the newspaper needs to give its readers a reason to keep subscribing, as news can well be pulled from anywhere. Second, the readers need their newspaper to not magnify or manufacture reports of any alleged misdeeds.

Search Engine Orientation (SEOr) is SEO for Ordinary people.

Personalized Anchor Links are the heart of Search Engine Optimization, and as well, Search Engine Orientation.

Search Engine Land reports that ArsTechnica reports that the Computer & Communications Industry Association (an organization led by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and other software vendors) has created the Defend Fair Use initiatve. They'd like the big media companies to recognize fair use in their copyright statements. One can call it AstroTurfing (though no one will, since people side with the software companies over media companies), but they do raise a good point (even if the slogan "Stand up for your RIGHT to use the content YOU PAY FOR" is illustrated by a couple cuddling-- not standing up-- on the couch). It's such a good point, I think YouTube should take heed and listen!

That somebody in America can publish antisemitic literature to encourage hatred and bigotry is regrettable, but it is protected by the First Amendment. That said, YouTube is a private service, and their community guidelines prohibit hate speech.

Well, some user JewsWorldPower signed up three months ago, and this person does things like posting copyrighted video from the Colbert Report with antisemitic text in the description alongside. Surely Stephen Colbert has even less interest in being associated with antisemitism than he does in having his video pirated.

Here's a brief suggestion how video news archives could better market themselves in a YouTube world. Archive catalogs have, after all, content to license and sell, and a growing number of amateurs (not to mention the next generation of professionals) are seeking to use it.

It seems that Allen Kraus of New York City is a victim of search engine obfuscation.

There's two ways to show you've got a successful CMS platform.

One, your PR blogger can claim so before the next major version is released.
Two, when a customer has questions, somebody from the community is able to supply an answer.

Well, Micrsosoft SharePoint did achieve the first, thanks to the Scobleizer.

Dan Gillmor's Citizen Media blog, which normally just draws in the "citizen media gripes" in the comments like Seth, Delia, and myself (ok, I took a break for several weeks this summer), now has drawn a whole good deal more readers out of the woodwork. The impetus? In a post titled Another Gross Journalistic Failure, Dan offers a jeremiad against the mortage-morphing industry (previously known as the financial sector) and their apparent cheerleaders in the dead-tree business: