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.  I reported it to the blogger, whom I'd met once, and we discussed this over several days of emails as I worked on an article (which turned out to be 2,100 words).  Only on Wednesday night did we figure out what led directly to the problem: by paying, you can see the full IP address– but anyone else can as well. On Thursday the blogger reported this problem to Site Meter. I followed up with a support request at 4pm PST (Site Meter is in LA, apparently) asking general questions about who to talk to at the company regarding privacy issues. [I sent an email in at 9am EST on Friday.]

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. That this conception has been endangered in many high-profile political campaign blogs in the United States has not received due attention.

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.

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.

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…)

It seems that Allen Kraus of New York City is a victim of search engine obfuscation. A Google search on his name, at least up until today, according to the public editor of the Times, brings up an article in the New York Times website (PageRank 8/10) which casts Mr. Kraus in some poor light, the result the end of his employment with the city in 1991 and how it related to a scandal which it didn't relate to.

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.

Last week I wrote about the recently resurfaced 1994 Dick Cheney video clip, and compared it to a video from the same year of George W. Bush in a Texas debate (see “Tales of the Tapes”). For the newsworthiness of these videos, both took a rather long path towards widespread viewing. In that long path, the provenance of both video clips had been regularly obscured along the way. The uploader of the Cheney video had deliberately blacked out C-SPAN's logo. Only after hundreds of thousands of views did he belatedly acknowledge in the description on YouTube that a C-SPAN3 broadcast on August 9^th was the source of the video. That's not unheard-of behavior for an anonymous Internet provocateur (though his previous 35 uploaded clips had not touched the C-SPAN logo). What is strange is that the professional media and advocacy organizations which showed the video in the subsequent week had, with the exception of one, continued the error of having the original network's logo blacked out.

It's closing in on ten years since my last pitiful appearance in the Times, and an opportunity arose to try again. The front page of the Times website teased Friedman: Blogosphere, so I figured he was contributing some more suck-ups to the bloggers with the usual grab-bag of metaphors. In that sense, Friedman didn't disappoint with "The Whole World is Watching." And there he was, conflating business transparency (a very good thing) with the end-of-personal-privacy (a bad thing, which I've been digging into over the last week).

Machines and humans see the Internet differently. At the machine level, two systems which are communicating are able to do so reciprocally. One system can send a message to the other with the expectation that it can get a response. At the human level, however, this does not hold: one person can send a person a message without any return address. This basic asymmetry has been at the heart of most of the abuse on Internet.

I was busy on a follow-up of my Talking Points Meme research, and then the bloggers code of conduct story hit me like a Dice-K gyroball. Granted, the gyroball is a media creation, just like the bloggers code of conduct, but the ball was in the air and I had to find my bat. I did some deep thinking and deep linking, and churned out 3,000 words on the larger picture about comment management responsibility.

I caught wind before the weekend of Governor Deval Patrick’s bid to freshen up his image by unveiling a new website.

Dan Kennedy asks why he didn’t do it on Mass.gov?

I suppose it’s simply easier for him to post the information there. And the discussion on Blue Mass Group basically confirms this. But let’s look at the details:

When life gives you apples…

Sunday’s Times amplified the story of one Melanie Tucker, whose suit against Apple Computer, Inc. last year must now be updated to reflect that the defendent has shed the "Computer" appellation from its corporate name. Apple is now quite solidly in the media business, and it is for this Ms. Tucker complains in her suit. To wit: the Apple iPod can play music from only one electronic music store, Apple’s itTunes (as well as, it should be noted, music files from the owner’s collection). And music from Apple iTunes can only be played on an Apple iPod and not any other device. What is fairly convenient for the Apple, Inc., and to millions of users, is apparently some gross inconvenience to a few. To Tucker, this is "crippleware" a product tie-in which violates United States and California antitrust laws.

Now that I was committing money to buy a Google AdWord for Alaa, my cause was his. I realized I ought to spend a little more time to learn about him.

The thought crossed my mind that he might have different politics than I, and that somebody might pick on me later for this. Whatever were his thoughts on Israel, I wondered. I searched his website, and found some topical entries– but couldn’t find any actually written by him, only by the folks he was drawing in. I figured if I ought to draw the line somewhere: I couldn’t support anybody who advocated aggression against U.S. or Israeli interests. Anything else he had to say– well, it was up to him, I was defending his right to say it.

Alaa had won an award last November by Reporters Without Borders for his Manalaa.net Drupal site, an aggregator Egyptian blogs. He was participating in ongoing protests for an independent judiciary, when he was arrested along ten others; Now a mighty wind had blown across the the plains of the blogosphere to raise support for one of their own. The wind also carried seeds of activism: as a protest measure, bloggers were invited to link to the new Free Alaa website, but using the link text Egypt. Doing so, on a massive scale, was supposed to effect a googlebombing.

Since Ronald Reagan, U.S. Presidents have added "signing statements" onto laws to indicate how (or whether) they expect to enforce them. Two weeks ago in the Boston Globe, Charlie Savage reported on the 750 signing statements of the current President Bush, which have come at a pace several times that of his father and President Clinton. This story has caught on, but perhaps not as quckly as one might think, for a couple of reasons. First is that it has been just one of many troubles battering the current Administration. Second, and what interests me, is that the phenomenon has yet to win a pet name. The common name for the effective veto as described by Article I, Section 7 has been popularly known as the "pocket veto." This I’d like to call the "sock-it veto."

It was eleven months ago that I published the New Gatekeepers series. I’m still learning. Just last Friday, Elisa Cooper of Berkeley, CA, posted a comment informing me about the concept of rankism, and its supporting website, Breaking Ranks. The concept Rankism has been coined by Robert Fuller, a past Professor of Physics at Columbia and President of Oberlin College. He had come to realize that all of our old scourges of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry had a common root– an -ism called rankism— but it was not until he left academia that the idea coalesced. He told Publishers Weekly: "Lacking the protection of title and status in the years after Oberlin, I experienced what it’s like to be taken for a nobody."

[This post is a response to a thread on the ONA discussion list. It got too long to email.]

When talking about the best use of technology for uses like computer-mediated communications, a skeptical philopsophy is invariably voiced along the lines of "technology can't solve all problems; humans can." This is sensible, but the statement is problematic due to a different understandings of what exactly "technology" means in this sense.

I’ve been promising this story since Monday, but I must disappoint for now as I’m still waiting to hear on a couple of key source that I only contacted late in the week. If I haven’t contacted you, and you think you need to improve upon the historical, shoot me a message, or post yourself. If you want to scoop me, be my guest, but here’s what you have to reach for: you’re going to need to come up with the particular faults of RSS, and also illustrate a model of how it could be completely re-imagined. And you also might want to deliver something on the order of 5,000 words, which is where I’m at right now. It was longer, but I’ve cut out many parts where I was just quoting directly five-year old quotes– as in years ago, not the age of the quoted person. I’d like [As for this little game? Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek floated such an idea this past Monday. I was skeptical then, but under the circumstances, I accept.] Whatever you got, tag it rss+quest.

The New York Times begins the year by giving an update on such a modest proposal: Officials at U.N. Seek Fast Action on Rights Panel. Paraphrasing the article, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan explains thus: some countries participate “not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others” with the consequence being that “a credibility deficit has developed, which casts a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.” The position of the United States, according to Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Kristen Silverberg, is “to improve the membership criteria so that countries like Zimbabwe and Sudan were not eligible.”

In thinking about how to write up a Civilities-style proposal, I started mining the old Brill’s Content magazine– which for a few years at the turn of the millenium was a handy gloss of the information age. Its hundred-and-fifty pages,were news about the news, reviews of the news, and just about everything would look for in a magazine if one weren’t lookinf for advertisements. It had a running gag which took the trouble to actually rate how many of the predictions made by the Sunday pundits came true. For kicks, the magazine also compared them to a prognosticator on loan from a local zoo, Chippy the Chimp. (In his debut in the August 1999 issue, Chippy went 3 for 6 , “good enough to beat George Will and John McLaughlin”).

I’m returning from my summer break away from writing. As I hinted three months ago, I’d be on a bit of a break for a while– work had gotten pretty intense, and I was in the process of moving across town (which caused two outages of over a day last month: one by my poor planning, one by Verizon’s mistake in fixing my phone line), and then setting up the new place. And I wanted to get some normal sleep.

Let me correct those mis-impressions which I’ve just made for myself:

I wasn’t there then, but it’s possible that the perception leads reality. Wherever one looks on the Internet, there is activism, though the physical evidence, and quantifiable acheivements, are harder to discern (Zinn did not admit to much web-surfing, let along blog-reading, other than reading his email).

As I’ve explained, blogs are different things to different people. Rebecca Blood one of those people who is more respected than most, and here’s her recent definition: “The weblog is at once a scrapbook, news filter, chapbook, newsletter, and community.”

I went to the last hurrah party for the “Young Professionals for Kerry” last week at M.J. O’Connor’s. A few people objected, not wanting to have to leave the “unified” group and have to choose between the three tribes listed below. We assured them that a little competition is good in the off years. So here’s what to do, if you’re young and want to keep the patriot fires burning in Boston:

Here’s the list of convention bloggers. I’m not on that list, since I take exception to calling this website a blog. Nonetheless, if I do come up with some idle thoughts that are blogworthy, Jon Lebkowsky and Aldon Hynes have asked me to contribue to Greater Democracy. With 15,000 journalists in town, it’s going to be a challenge with any unique slants. I expect to contribute one or two articles here. And about 200 pictures.

• From the Roots — for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSSC)– help the Democrats capture 51 seats in the Senate
• John Kerry Volunteer Center — one more month to raise money for Kerry for President.

I’ll be doing the American Lung Association Asthma walk on the Charles River in two weeks, and I’ve joined team Sánchez. For a couple of simple reasons. One, my Dad has suffered from an asthma-like condition. The more direct reason is that Rep. Jeff Sánchez asked people to join his team at the recent Democratic Town Committee meeting. So I joined up, and I pledged to raise an additional hundred dollars. Sánchez’s district covers part of Brookline– not my part exactly, but just down the street, one of the places that I’m looking to buy a condo. Or just as well, Sanchez’s district may yet change thanks to a court-ordered redestricting of Boston’s legislative districts.

Since then, the GOP has blossomed into the party of no accountability. After all, accountability would be tantamount to admitting error, and admitting error would invite investigations, and that would just get in the way of the important things a government does, like wage war and cut taxes. As Dick Cheney said, in a Saturday night prepared release defending Rumsfeld: “People ought to get off his case and let him do his job.” Move on, indeed. The talking points from Republican Senators today (outside of McCain and Warner) were on that message: let’s not dwell on the past; let’s focus on the present, and the future. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have an incumbent President who campaigns on the same theme, to forget the past.

This perhaps drew winces in every living room in America. But it did inspire me to consider how a structured forum for questions & answers can offset some of the better-known deficiencies of press conferences. I wrote it up in a proposal called the Question Scoreboard. This page is a sampling board for questions for the President and the 2004 campaign.

Essentially, my access logs fill up with lines like “SEARCH /x90x02xb1…” (for 32,000 characters), and my Apache configuration has proved very stubborn in filtering them out automatically. So it’s a bit annoying. Plus I don’t like 32KB getting sent to my server unsolicited, in much the way that spam is.

I’ve made my best effort to make them multi-browser compatible, with the help of QuirksMode, a website by PeterPaul Koch of Amsterdam. In every (web-browser) generation there comes along a website which clearly and plainly illustrates the different ways that each browser implements web standards (javascript, DOM, CSS). QuirksMode is it today, and for the foreseeable future. Koch’s illustrations are simple and elegant.

Picking a candidate is hardly done rationally (as I had feebly done earlier in trying to deduce, according to the Civilities Themes, who would be the best candidate). More often it’s about rationalizing your choice once you’ve made it. Now obviously, Kerry is the best choice for me, for the Network/Access reason alone. After all, I know people in Massachusetts politics, and I’m more closely linked to Kerry than the rest of the candidates. Besieds, it looks like he’s going to be the nominee.

I hereby apologize to Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean: I passed on the mistaken observation that he had improperly benefitted by steering Dean campaign ads to his agency. Fortunately for me, I only told this to Same, of my lawyers on the C-line (where all of my lawyers hang out), who never takes me seriously.

As a penance, I’ll promote Trippi’s new blog, Change For America, where he convincingly explains that the financial arrangement with the Dean campaign wasn’t a conflict of interest. Trippi in fact has picked up where he left off, which was Dean’s Blog For America, with just a small change. Trippi’s makeover came as he was heralded at Monday’s Digital Democracy Teach-In in San Diego at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Wired News reported that he told the sesion:

Why register with a party? So that you can vote in the primary, of course. Even though the Democratic primary may appear locked up by Senator Kerry, the Massachusetts delegates to the national convention are assigned in proportion to the vote totals they get in the primary. In addition, registering with a party in your residence is used to determine the voting power for your locality in the state party convention. Here, for example, is from the bylaws of the Massachusetts State Democratic Committee on the selection of selecting state committee members:

I still haven’t found any blogs on politics that are must-read on a daily basis. I thought that the Columbia Journalism Review’s CampaignDesk would be one, but then I read Managing Editor Steve Lovelady remark to Jack Shafer in a recent Slate dialoge: “To date, the version that I have been to skeptical readers who ask me how Campaigndesk.org is ‘different from any number of blogs?’ is this: ‘Read my lips: IT’S EDITED!'”

The social software and use of the Internet attracted the media, the media attracted attention, and Howard Dean rode the polls up. He peaked too early, and he was stung too many attacks; he criticized the “Washington establishment” of Democrats while soliciting endorsements from them. (In 1992, it was seemed ok for Jerry Brown, or even Ross Perot, to criticize the Washington Democrats for rolling over in the Reagan/Bush years. Now, when liberals think of this group, we like to think of them as the last people defending our nation from indulging into a dangerous cocktail of laissez-faire attitude and crony capitalism, and the preventing the extension of the state of paranoia). Dean just wasn’t the best candidate. The only question left was, how did he spend $40M?

The DeanSpace team– the ones driving the technology for the campaign– have been asking whether anything went wrong. (I followed DeanSpace only in the last several weeks, so I have a marginal association at best). Mark Ratcliffe provides a summary of answers in his Meta-Analysis of the Dean Campaign. A few commentators, such as the pseudonymous Spengler of the Asia Times, have made an ill-informed comparison of DeanSpace developers to a “dotcom startup”, and compare the “crash” to the Internet bubble. (It was roundly criticized by letters to the editor). The only thing I can add is some insight that the “social software” used by the Dean campaign wasn’t always social, and sometimes it was anti-social.

1. The software has to continue to be developed, especially along the lines of fostering truly effective deliberation. The emphasis on blogs will be subsumed into more comprehensive community systems. I call it constructive media. Whatever the technique is, it has to be more thorough-sounding than just “Internet-based”.
2. We’d have to start using the software for local, smaller efforts, and prove that they are effective complements to committee-meeting politics.
3. We need candidates who really believe in this stuff and practice it, and make their way from the beginning of their political career using it.

Does Howard Dean remain the patron saint of the movement? Not to me, really. It is ultimately ironic that the politician most associated with the Internet, Al Gore, did not inspire this movement after losing the most contested election in the modern age. So maybe it would be prudent to evolve the software to DemSpace for now, that would certainly please the Democratic nominee. It also might call to attention that there’s no comparable “GopSpace”.

Timothy Noah, in this Thursday’s Chatterbox column for Slate, alerted readers to the Ron Suskind’s initial release of The Bush Files, an online archive of the source documents for his bestselling book, The Price of Loyalty. (This is the book about the Bush White House from Paul O’Neill’s point of view, sourced in part on 19,000 documents which had been released to the O’Neill, while he was still Treasury Secretary).

If Super Bowl commericals have passed their peak and jumped the proverbial shark, maybe they’ve lost their effect completely. And if we’re lucky, political campaign commercials as well.

An inspiring trend is the spontaneous guerilla marketing efforts forged by simply forwarding on emails. Now that the whole world over has gotten tired of forwarding along the chain emails which never really brough good luck, here’s one that may just do that: a link to Dishonest Dubya, an interactive animation which allows everybody to hear the President in his own words.

David Brooks devotes today's New York Times column to two points: 1, that we should take at face value the conclusions by David Kay, Richard Kerr, and senate Intelligence Committee, that there was no political pressure to slant the intelligence analysts*; and 2, that the very problem with the CIA is that it should be more politicized, and less "scientific". Just the sort of hack piece you'd expect from a guy who also writes a column for the Atlantic Monthly, edits the Weekly Standard, and is a regular campaign panelist on All Things Considered and The Newshour.

But what does it mean? Are these people relying on hard data, or are they just picking generalizations from thin air?

David Brooks, on Wednesday’s All Things Considered with E.J. Dionne, remarked:

“Only 42 percent of people voted for him because they agreed with him on the issues. 46 percent said they voted for him because he’s ‘electable’. What they’re doing when they’re saying when he’s electable is that one group is saying that he has certain qualities that appear to appeal to other groups of people. That’s pretty suspect to go about voting, because people tend to be wrong.”
“Multi-State Primaries Await Democrats”

I heard on MPR’s MarketPlace this Thursday that the USA Network has been promoting the new “Traffic” series by re-introducing into circulation 50,000 dollar bills with a promotional sticker on them. (see the summary, hear the report). The reporter, Jeff Tyler, informed us that this was fully vetted by the company’s lawyers, so I suppose it follows that this was legal. I suppose that the removeable stickers are not permanently defacing the bills.

They’re vulgar, increasing in frequency, and containing shameless displays that shouldn’t be shown to impressionable young children. No, I’m not talking about the variations on profane words which Congress wishes to ban on broadcast television. I’m talking about celebrities making impromptu speeches on televised award shows.

You’d think, with financial fraud costing society about $35 billion last year (that’s over $100 per person), the credit institutions would do more to fix this. While they talk mightily about the fantastic biometric technologies on the horizon, they keep a lot of people employed handling all of this identity fraud and pitching “Identify Theft Solutions”. But they don’t have to. Here’s a breathtakingly simple solution: start having the major credit card companies, as well as the major credit bureaus, register people’s email and SMS addresses.