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Grass-root of all evil

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As I plunge into my mid-40s there are times I think nothing can surprise me. And then I read a piece like today’s New York Times interview with FCC Chairman Michael Powell and, well, I’m amazed I’m so amazed.

Powell orchestrated the FCC’s new rules allowing greater concentration of media ownership in an era when big corporate media expansion, symbolized by the death-grip Clear Channel Communications holds over the nation’s airwaves, has people of all political stripes worried. Congress recently voted to override the FCC’s new rules. Powell is shocked.

What’s amazing is how he talks about his shock. Professing the airy, disinterested role of a policymaker sofar above the fray he can’t make out the ant-like little people swarming in the muck and mire of the political world, he describes the opposition to his regulations as follows: “Basically, people ran an outside political campaign against the commission,” he said. “I’ve never seen that in six years.” It seems Powell is “frustrated and surprised” that people who felt his big-media-friendly rules moved in the wrong direction actually organized some opposition to them. How dare they? What do they think this is — a democracy?

Stephen Labaton’s article continues:

  Asked about accusations by some that he had failed to build enough public support for the rules before adopting them, Mr. Powell replied: “I’ve heard that represented as my failure. I’ll take that as my responsibility. But there was a concerted grass-roots effort to attack the commission from the outside in.”

Here we have it: a “concerted grass-roots effort”! What a horrible thing! I think this is the first time in my life I have heard the term “grass-roots” used in a negative way. To most of us, “grass-roots” symbolizes healthy organizing of the citizenry beyond the corrupting influence of big business lobbying and entrenched interests. It is our democracy at its best. To Powell, somehow, it has become a term of opprobrium.

It couldn’t possibly be that his policy was so absurdly wrong for today’s United States that it managed to unite the liberals at Moveon.org and the NRA against it. Nah. It must be a grass-roots conspiracy! Like so many others in the Bush administration, Powell seems to feel that his ideology is beyond public accountability. With Bush’s poll numbers sinking week by week, these public servants may eventually learn just how wrong they are.

The micropayments debate

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For as long as the Web has been around people have talked about the possibility of a “micropayments” system to support small-time creators of content. Clay Shirky wrote a persuasive essay a couple of years ago laying out why such schemes have generally failed. More recently, Scott “Understanding Comics” McCloud put a new comic online and charged users 25 cents to read it using a new system called BitPass (I wrote in July about my experience with this, which was positive).

Shirky updated his critique in a new article, and now McCloud has fired back with this detailed and thoughtful defense of the BitPass approach.

Both of these guys are smart; I thought I agreed with Shirky while I was reading his analysis, but then McCloud won me over. I think he’s right to feel that it’s way too early to be certain that micropayments are a dead end; we have only begun to experiment. (Salon’s “DayPass” system of offering one-day access to premium content after users view a fancy ad could be thought of as an alternative micropayment approach.) Both pieces are worth your time if you’re at all interested in the subject.

Faux Windows patch

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There’s a grotesque new virus out there masquerading as a Microsoft Windows software patch. When I received it in my own email it took one look at it and laughed. But it’s easy to see where less careful (or jaded) eyes might be fooled. Here’s a screenshot. Here are the gory details. Be warned: Microsoft isn’t sending out operating system patches as attachments in email! Just as Ebay isn’t really asking you to update your account info. Caveat e-mail-ptor.

The road goes ever on

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My enthusiasm for Tolkien’s world took root at an early age when I fell in love with the map of Middle-Earth. So this bit of spoofery made me smile. Why, if only the Fellowship had had the aid of an online trip planner, they’d never have gotten trapped in Moria! (OK, before you LotR fanatics correct me, yes, I know Moria wasn’t on the original trip route, etc. etc. Just a joke.)

Music to our ears

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My recent post comparing the RIAA to Richard Scarry’s “Pie Rats” occasioned some vigorous debate in the comments, along with a couple of interesting emails: Jeremy Schlosberg, who did some writing for me years ago when I edited Salon’s technology coverage, wrote in to point me to his Fingertips site, which catalogues freely and legally available MP3s: “Something that tends to get overlooked whenever the MP3 situation is debated is the fact that there are actually an amazing number of free and legal MP3s available online for discriminating music fans, and it’s not all amateur crap either. Discussion tends to focus on the illegal stuff people trade or the legal stuff people are tentatively starting to buy, but there is a rich middle ground of free and legal music that’s worth knowing about as well.”

And Shuman Ghosemajumder emailed to tell me about his Open Music Model proposal. Many readers may already be familiar with Terry Fisher’s proposal for a royalty system for file sharing. These ideas and others like them floating around are evidence that the RIAA’s critics are not simply saying “to hell with the artists” or “to hell with business models.” We’re saying, online distribution — and redistribution — of music makes sense and is here to stay. So what can we do now?

There’s more good stuff on this over in Salon Technology: a point/counterpoint on the RIAA lawsuits, and some letters, and some more letters.

Jay Rosen’s CJR piece

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People who hung out in Table Talk in its early days remember the presence of Jay Rosen, who encouraged us to think about tightening the relationship between the journalism we were doing in Salon magazine and the discussions that were taking place on our boards. For various reasons we never really got there. Rosen moved on to other things too (he’s chairman of NYU’s Journalism Dept.). But he recently sent me a link to an article he wrote for Columbia Journalism Review that continues the discussion and is well worth reading.

Rosen is interested in how the online medium continues to break down the lines of authority in traditional journalism, using the two examples of the recent New York Times meltdown and Chris Allbritton’s reader-sponsored reporting from Iraq. The one thing I’d say is that these examples are at extreme ends of a spectrum, and though such outliers make the most dramatic contrast, they rarely point the way to the future. Only a handful of journalistic institutions have the Times’ reputation, and only a handful of bloggers (I believe) are ever going to be commissioned by their readers the way Allbritton was. What will be more interesting, I think, is to see how the rise of expert bloggers begins to eat away at the edges of trade journalism (as it already has), and local journalism, and other areas where the pros, today, often fall down on the job — or the institutional structures that should support professional journalism no longer bear weight.

If u cn rd ths msg u r jst lke vryne lse!

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Today’s hot meme in the blogosphere is this notion, now heavily Slashdotted, that readers can easily make sense of passages of verbiage in which the words’ letters have been scrambled as long as the first and last letters of each word are left intact. Try it — everyone else in blog-land has!

Waht tihs tlles us, of csuore, is taht cxonett is ideblrnciy intmorapt to our criepoehmnosn of txet.

(And that, as you can see from the above sentence, this approach is tougher to use as the length of words increases.)

This novelty occasioned a few thoughts:
(1) The human brain is much more forgiving than most software, at least today’s software. Fuzzy math may help. Google is getting good at suggesting what you really meant when you misspell a query.

(2) This is why we miss typos. I spent a significant portion of my college years proofreading newspaper paste-up boards, and still spend a lot of time editing on computer screen, and if you’ve ever done this sort of editing work properly, your eyes behave differently from the normal reader, and you notice tiny transpositions and goofs that a typical eye will simply pass over. (This is why Don’s Amazing Puzzle was not amazing to me. I caught it the first time I looked at it back when Dave Winer first presented it. Not because I’m a sharpie but because I’ve worked as a copy editor.) For anyone who reads this way, interpreting words scrambled in this fashion can actually be harder — because you’re trained to see what’s actually there, not what your eye thinks should be there.

(3) Reading slowly is a dying art. As our world pushes us inevitably towards more speedy skimming of information blasting at us through a dozen different protocols, we scan more than we read. That makes it easy for us to parse near-gibberish, and that capability is a wonderful thing. But reading slowly is a wonderful thing, too. It is an art we still need in a number of areas. Reading poetry requires the ability to read slowly. If you read a poem the way you read your e-mail, you might as well not bother. Oddly enough, working on computer code requires a similar ability: Both because the computer is far more unforgiving of typos, bad punctuation and garbled verbiage than the human eye, and also becaause in good code, like good poetry, every word counts, and you need to be able to notice the patterns the words establish.

(Catch the typo in that last sentence?)

Seybold post mortem

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Had a nice time talking at Seybold yesterday to a strangely sparse crowd (was it the bomb threat the day before? was it too late in the day? is Seybold dead? or was it just that the world is a lot less excited about RSS and blogs than we think?). Shared the podium with CNET’s John Roberts and Matt May. We agreed that RSS and blogs were highly unlikely to radically transform commercial publishing but that both were valuable, important tools.

I argued that it’s silly to talk about blogs “killing” print — that we keep getting stuck in a loop every time a new news distribution technology comes along, asking, will this “kill” its predecessor? Radio didn’t kill print, TV didn’t kill radio, the Net didn’t kill TV, and blogs won’t kill anything. Each new medium forces its predecessors to rethink what they do, and sometimes to revamp their business structures. Blogs are a fantastic way for individuals to enter the global conversation on the Net, to comment on the news and sometimes to break some news themselves. They don’t have to become Big Business to be important.

Steve Gillmor and Sam Ruby were there, and Christian Crumlish of RFB, and Steve Rhodes… and probably other bloggers who I didn’t recognize by face. It really should have just been a group discussion — when 25 people are in a hall designed for hundreds and three people are up on a stage it’s just not a very comfortable feeling.

The whole conference seemed that way — the Moscone West facility, which I’d never been in before even though it’s just down the street from Salon’s office, features vast lofty lobbies that make you feel small and insignificant, and if a conference isn’t positively bustling with energy there’s a pervading sense of forlornness. In a game effort to use some of the empty floorspace someone with a sense of humor had set up impromptu bocce courts on the industrial carpeting of the second-floor lobby. One guy was even playing, and seemed to know what he was doing.

Loaded questions

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The Online Journalism Review is running an interesting set of interviews with “online journalism pioneers” in whose number your humble blogger was included. Curiously, the first part of my response to one of the questions was omitted, so here it is for you:

OJR: Should information online be free, or should publishers try to squeeze out money from consumers?

SR: That’s a pretty loaded way of phrasing the question! With my bias from my experience here at Salon, I’d instead ask, “Is there any feasible model for supporting independent journalism online besides obtaining the support of a mega-corporation?”

The music industry’s pie rats strike back

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My kids are big Richard Scarry fans, and one of their favorite books is a little paperback titled “Pie Rats Ahoy!” (Yes, these successors to Captain Hook are tiny rats who steal a pie from the seafaring hero.)

I thought of that punning title as I read the latest batch of headlines from the file-swapping wars. The RIAA and its member labels have now taken the final step (one I predicted nearly four years ago, as I recalled here) of declaring all-out war on the music fans who are their own best customers — and who have in recent years taken to file trading en masse because of the music industry’s price gouging and its pathetic reluctance to adapt to new technology.

As the RIAA slaps lawsuits on 12-year-old girls, while industry executives admit to the Wall Street Journal that they are unable to keep their own kids from trading MP3s, one of the most ludicrous figures being tossed around is the amount that the industry has supposedly lost thanks to piracy. A conservative guess by an analyst in the New York Times placed this number at $750 million. Music industry lobbyists have put the number in the billions.

These numbers are reminiscent of the old software-industry complaints about software piracy: They assume that each illegal copy of a program or a music file represents the loss of a sale — that if the alternative of piracy were not available, most or all of the pirated stuff would have been bought fair and square at full price. (By this logic, every time Free Republic members rip off Salon Premium articles and post them on their site, Salon could claim that every single Freeper reading them represents a loss of a $35 subscription fee.)

This is self-serving nonsense. First of all, it treats the digital realm — in which each additional copy costs essentially nothing to make and does not limit the original’s availability to its owner — as if it were the physical realm, where copying carries costs and stealing involves depriving the original owner of his goods. Even more importantly, it ignores the essentially transitory nature of much or most file-sharing — which music lovers use to sample music, to see whether they like it, and frequently just to listen once or a handful of times. Each download does not and cannot represent a lost sale. But the record labels have an incentive to artificially overstate the size of the pie-slice that online piracy has cut out, and they have done so with all the scurrying zeal — and comical ineffectiveness — of Richard Scarry’s rats.

I get all my online music these days legally from the great Emusic service. But back in the days of Napster I used the software to listen to bands I’d heard about and see whether I liked them. I bought more CDs as a result. This year for the first time in my life I have consciously decided to cut my music purchases way back. I won’t support the pie rats!