September 29, 2007

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Fee speech

September 29, 2007 in Journalism, problems | 11 comments

From the AT&T Legal Policy:

  AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. Termination or suspension by AT&T of Service also constitutes termination or suspension (as applicable) of your license to use any Software. AT&T may also terminate or suspend your Service if you provide false or inaccurate information that is required for the provision of Service or is necessary to allow AT&T to bill you for Service.

  [The boldface is mine. -- DS]

Verizon doesn’t even require cause:

  Without prejudice to any other rights that Verizon may have, Verizon reserves the right and sole discretion to change, limit, terminate, modify at any time, temporarily or permanently cease to provide the Service or any part thereof to any user or group of users, without prior notice and for any reason or no reason. In the event you or Verizon terminate this Agreement, you must immediately stop using the Service.

Word count: AT&T, 10,890 ; Verizon 10,147.

Should we have an openness index?

September 29, 2007 in Ideas | Comments closed

That’s the question over at Linux Journal.

Is journalism personal?

September 29, 2007 in Future, Journalism | Comments closed

My favorite recent Edhat is Gate B, posted August 31st. It begins,

  Those of you who are planning to attend Oprah’s Obama Bash might have heard that there won’t be valet parking in front of Oprah’s vacation home in Montecito. Instead, you will need to go eight miles away to Gate B of the Earl Warren Showgrounds and catch a shuttle bus to the big event. One might conclude from it’s second letter status that Gate B — like Plan B — is some sort of secret side entrance to The Showgrounds. But that simply is not true. Gate B is actually the main entrance. You get to it from Calle Real, the frontage road for THE 101 freeway.

  Note: Here in Santa Barbara as in the rest of Southern California, we refer to freeways with the definite participle “the” – it’s how we talk and if you are visiting our community for the first time and want to fit in, you should try it too.

Today’s is good too, though I can’t find the link to it. Here’s an excerpt:

  If you have a question about Santa Barbara, the person to ask is Brown Squared. On Wednesday he was the only Edhat subscriber who knew that the WWII picture was taken at the west end of the East Beach parking lot near the intersection of Cabrillo and Milpas. And, not only did he know where it was, he also knew what it was. Furthermore, when we asked him for more information — stuff he didn’t know about it or wasn’t 100% sure of — he found out and emailed us the answers faster than a Chocolate Lab eats cheese.

  He was certainly a lot more useful than the Gas Company. The same people who, one day long ago, put us on hold and left us there to die, were unable to tell us anything – even after 3 hours and 3 phone calls. Why you ask, should the Gas Company have been able to help? Well, after all it is their phallic-symbol shaped air vent that’s shown in the picture. And yes, for those of you who are paying attention, this is the second time in three weeks that the WWII was a phallic symbol. Maybe Ed has some issues.

  But, as we said, we don’t need no stinking gas company to give us the scoop. We have Brown Squared. Yesterday he told the dedicated staff of edhat.com that the vent is a breather for the utility “vault” underneath the sidewalk there. Apparently there is a very large gas pipe hiding underground, underneath the palm trees, along the waterfront.

So I had coffee on Thursday with Peter Sklar, the chief hat-wearer of Edhat. We talked about what news is, and about whether what we still call newspaper journalism should be strictly built around our old notions of news as “content” that gets authored by authorities and distributed by media. Peter’s an authority on a lot of stuff (he’s a technologist with an advanced math degree, for example); but that’s not what makes Edhat work. It’s something much more personal and engaging than that. There is nothing else quite like Edhat. It is not the product of pro formalities. It’s a labor of love to some degree, but the love flows back in asymmetrical abundance. And that’s the important part.

I was at a cocktail party last night, at the opening of the Santa Barbara Book & Author Festival, talking with Peter and his wife, when mayor Marty Blum came up and joined the conversation. It was clear she loves Edhat, as do many other people in town, most of whom don’t know who Peter is because he’s a shy guy and prefers to let the invisible Ed take the lead. I thought to myself, Why does Marty love Edhat? Is that just because the News-Press pounds Marty like tough meat every chance they get? Is it because Edhat provides a reliably positive (as well as delightfully ironic) source of interesting items about Santa Barbara? Both those might be true, but there’s a special relationship there, and not just for Marty.

The word “loyalty” doesn’t cover what goes on between readers and Edhat. It’s something more. I’d say the same goes for columnists with the Independent, the Daily Sound and various blogs, including (perhaps especially) Craig Smith’s. In a way this is no different than what Herb Caen had going at the San Francisco Chronicle for a thousand years, and that Barney Brantingham had for forty-six years at the News-Press and now enjoys at the Independent. (As does Starshine Roshell and other relocated members of the News-Press diaspora.) These are not just columnists, but writers who depend utterly on their readers.

So, one more question for Peter, the other panelists, and readers at the panel: Is this kind of highly personal engagement with readers the foundation we need for the future of newspapers (or whatever succeeds them)? To unpack that a bit, columnists have always been an essential but secondary ingredient in the newspaper recipe. Is it possible that they are now the primary ingredient?

Back in the 1960s, Tom Wolfe coined the term “New Journalism”, and applied it to engaged writers like himself, who waded deeply into a subject and in some cases became primary figures in the stories they wrote about. (The most extreme example was Hunter S. Thompson, who branded his new form gonzo.)

Could it be that New Journalism is finally arriving?

Answers

September 29, 2007 in Ideas, problems, VRM | 3 comments

[I just posted an answer to questions raised by Al and Max in the comment thread under the Go from hell post. But when I hit "submit", nothing happened. When I went back and hit "submit" again, WordPress told me I'd posted the comment already. I tried another browser. Still not there. So I copied it, expanded it, and posted it below.]

Al said,

  Also thinking about VRM as coming from the reciprocal of CRM, maybe thats the wrong approach. Maybe we should be looking for the reciprocal of advertising ? i.e. something more aggressive and direct in the same way that advertising rudely interrupts our attention, maybe we can rudely interrupt the producers attention.

That’s appealing at an emotional level, but I don’t think VRM can work if it’s a reciprocal either of advertising or of CRM as we know it today. But at least with CRM we have something that respects the ideal of relationships.We need to be able to relate to vendors. Being rude or aggressive isn’t a good place to start.

Max said,

  I agree with your spirit, but I’m struggling with the notion of “creating the tools to serve me versus them and on my terms.” I think I would like some of those tools! But I wonder if there’s a paradox. When those tools are created, and then achieve success with real scale and impact, don’t they assume high propensity to become what you’re arguing against in the first place — big companies trying to serve many, with a desire to grow bigger? Every big, evil company started as an ambition, an idea, then became a small business, then a mid-size business, then a big business. Regarding tools, what about the all-important individualist tool of voting with your wallet, or voting with your attention? Is there not an ongoing erosion of the monopolies that big companies once had on information, essentially empowering individuals to vote with their wallets and attention more effectively — at least for the subset of society which chooses to?

The tools I’m talking about here are not ones big companies can control. I’m talking about tools like the open source suite that started with Linux and Apache and now includes several hundred thousand hunks of code that approach (even if they do not technically achieve) the NEA ideal: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, Anybody can improve it.

There is no giant Apache company. Nor even a giant Linux company. There are large companies that take advantage of both Linux and Apache, however. IBM, Google and Amazon, for example. But they do not control those code bases.

Also, I am not arguing against “big companies trying to serve many, with a desire to grow bigger”. If they do that by serving customers respectfully and well, I don’t care. Instead I’m arguing against companies of any size continuing to relate to customers as “consumers” that can be herded into CRM-maintained silos like cattle, or assaulted with endless “messages” the vast majority of which are irrelevant, no matter how well “targeted” they are.

And yes, we do vote with our wallets, but we need to give companies more than a wallet to relate to. And we can’t depend just on sellers to give us that “more”. That’s what we have with loyalty programs, for example. They provide fancy and sometimes fun ways of relating to them (and to each other) inside their silos. Airlines are good at the former, and Amazon and Facebook are good at the latter. But we’re still just talking about silos here. The data we accumulate in those silos is too often theirs, not ours. My Netflix movie reviews cannot be shared with Yahoo’s. My shopping choices, presumably recorded by the grocery store in some database somewhere, are theirs, not mine. And, in the absence of a true relationship, the data we provide too often gets used in ways that are annoying for everybody. Loyalty cards, for example, inconvenience the buyers (one more card to carry in the wallet, one more fob for the keychain), slow down the check-out line, force the seller to provide dual pricing for countless SKUs — and then give the buyer a receipt with a discount on the back for stuff the buyer just bought.

Buyer-side tools would be independent of sellers, and would provide sellers with better clues for serving buyers than would ever come from any locked-down CRM system.

Book it

September 29, 2007 in Blogging, Future, Journalism, News, Past, problems | 1 comment

The Santa Barbara Book & Author Festival started last night with an award presentation to local author T. Coraghessan Boyle, and continues tomorrow with, among other things, a panel titled What’s Next for Newspapers. On the panel will be: Jeramy Gordon, editor and publisher of of the Santa Barbara Daily Sound; Matt Kettman, senior editor of The Independent; Jerry Roberts, author of Never Let Them See You Cry and former managing and executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Barbara News Press, respectively; Peter Sklar, publisher of Edhat; and Craig Smith, columnist, law professor and author of Craig Smith’s Blog. I’m the moderator.

A few questions running through my mind…

  Will all newspapers eventually be free?

  How can papers, which have a daily or weekly heartbeat, keep up with the hummingbird-heart pulse rate of Web-based journalism?

  Do you see the newspaper becoming Web publications with print versions, or (as they mostly are now) vice versa?

  Is there enough advertising for all of you?

  Will advertising survive as a business model? What will be the mix of advertising and other sources of revenue?

  How do you see the emerging ecosystem that includes bloggers and expert locals who are in good positions to participate in the larger journalistic process?

  What will be the complementary or competitive roles of radio and TV stations in the future local journalistic ecosystem? Bear in mind that analog TV will be a dead chicken in early 2009.

  Is it possible, really, to replace a once-great institution such as the News-Press?

  How do you see each of your roles playing out in the event of an emergency such as an earthquake, a wildfire, a tsunami?

  What do you see as Santa Barbara’s role in the journalistic world? Are we leaders? Followers? Both? Neither?

Be interesting to see how it goes. Hope to see some of ya’ll there.

Learning to drive

September 29, 2007 in Uncategorized | Comments closed

Somehow I made the Go from hell post below disappear tonight. Just got it back. My bad. Apologies.

Just discovered I made a whole ‘nuther post disappear, though. Completely. Damn.