Conservative lion Richard Viguerie doesn’t like Fox excluding Ron Paul from their New Hampshire debate, and he isn’t shy about saying it. (Nor is he shy about promoting his book.) He makes – and reveals – some interesting points about media bias. It’s welcome to see any media outlet criticized for any reason. There was a time when there wasn’t even a practical way to get the word out.
I was sick of social networking before it was cool. (I may still have an account on Ryze, for heaven’s sake.) But I am growing intrigued with the concept once again. Perhaps I’m having my own little Social Networking 2.0! (OK. That’s all the self-reference I’ll do in 2008 – I guarantee it.*)
I’m interested in the brouhaha that Plaxo has created by creating a process in which they screen-scrape Facebook members’ email addresses. Facebook presents them as images to make harvesting difficult, but apparently Plaxo is using OCR to gather them, contrary to Facebook’s Terms of Service. Best of all, Plaxo is using journalists and bloggers to test it. Robert Scoble has gotten zapped by Facebook for using the Plaxo scraper.
There are wonderful competitive issues, PR issues, and privacy issues here, all balled together in an ugly mass.
I think Michael Arrington has it right:
Beyond the automated script issue, Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses – user privacy. Robert Scoble may be perfectly fine with having my contact information be easily downloaded from Facebook, but I may not be. Ultimately it should be me that decides, not him. And if Plaxo wants to push the envelope on user privacy issues, again, perhaps they should at least have given Facebook a heads up. And be prepared to take the consequences themselves instead of passing them off to their users.
*not a guarantee
A Bear Stearns report examines at the economics of the Wall Street Journal knocking down its paid-subscription wall:
WSJ.com revenue is currently pegged at $78 million annually, based on an estimated 989,000 subscribers paying $79/year. Including non-subscriber traffic, the company claims 122.4 million monthly page views. Based on an estimated CPM of $6 and a few other assumptions about sell-through rate and ad impressions per page, Wang arrives at the 12x conclusion.
Still, as Joseph Weisenthal notes, “$78 million in revenue only accounts for an estimated 4 percent of Dow Jones revenue, so from a strictly financial stance, it doesn’t much matter either way to News Corp.,” the Journal‘s new owner.
Where I work, we’re very wary of static economic analyses: why should a huge change (e.g., raising tax rates) have no impact on behavior (e.g., hours worked)? Yes, certainly, lowering the cost of getting Journal content to $0 will undoubtedly bring a surge in readership–maybe 12X, maybe more, maybe less. That’s not the interesting question.
The big question for media watchers should be, how will the Journal react?
(This is in response to a thoughtful post by Adam, who beat me to the punch, and to a controversial recent article (“Long Live Closed-Source Software!“) by the free-thinking Jaron Lanier that Adam discusses.)
No one needs to say “Long live open-source software,” because it is what it is and isn’t going anywhere. Think of it as the ground beneath our feet.
As Lanier explains, closed source is the font of nearly all paradigmatic innovation–the great revolutionary leaps. Open source contributes iterative innovation, such as the best kernel scheduler for variable workloads–this is a problem it is possible to work out slowly, with small changes over a period of years. It is also a problem that doesn’t matter at all to most users–good enough is good enough, though better is, of course, better.
Where the two forms of development come together most interestingly is the use of open source as a stepping stone for closed-source radical innovation. Asus, for example, didn’t have to step forward and create its own OS from the ground up for its EeePC. Even though the thing sports an interface unlike those in most Linux distributions, the underlying guts are the same. Would something like the EeePC even be possible without open source? Could a manufacturer afford to undertake the great expense, and gamble, of working out an OS for itself? Free software lets businesses take chances on projects that would otherwise be too expensive to devise and products that would otherwise be too expensive to market.
I found Jaron Lanier’s provocatively titled Discover magazine essay “Long Live Closed-Source Software!” quite interesting, and I’m surprised others here (especially Tim) haven’t commented on it yet. Taking a look at the development of open source software over the past 25 years, Lanier concludes that:
Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it. Before you write me that angry e-mail, please know I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.
The problem, Lanier argues, is that…
The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.
Popular Mechanics speculates that Apple is on the verge of announcing a breakthrough laptop-tablet device that’ll change computing as we know it (hyperbole deliberate):
So any Apple tablet would have to be, first and foremost, a laptop—not an über-iPhone. … I’m also requesting that the MacBook Plus fall in the ultralight realm—a sorely neglected category for Apple. It could, and should, be 2.5 pounds or less. To achieve that, the tablet should offload heavy components such as the optical drive, making do with, say, a 32 GB solid-state drive rather than a hard-disk drive…. That would let it run a full Leopard OS while delivering long battery life—hopefully using a lightweightbattery. Plus, it could probably be passively cooled, meaning no noisy, bulky fans or hot spots on the lap.
Two thoughts on why an Apple tablet would be a big deal:
All copyrighted works originate as ideas, born when authors choose how to express themselves. The slightest exercise of discretion will suffice; just about anything more original than an alphabetical listing of names can qualify for copyright protection. Once having crossed that low hurdle, it remains only for an author to fix her expression in a tangible medium for more than a transitory duration. She must, in other words, record her authorship. After thereby fixing her work—in words, music, pictures, computer code, architecture, or almost any expressive medium—she enjoys the rights afforded by the federal Copyright Act. Copyright thus inheres both in doodles and multi-million dollar movies, in works ranging in creativity from formulaic news blurbs to unprecedented paintings.
Those, copyright’s fundamental features, mark it as a distinct legal entity. Though laypeople often confuse copyrights with patents, trademarks, and other intangible goods, each of those related types of IP corresponds to a unique combination of subject matter and supporting law. [The figure below] illustrates how copyright relates to, and differs from, its nearest legal next-of-kin.
Movie critic Richard Roeper of “Ebert & Roeper at the Movies” has a new video commentary up with some sensible thinking about the issue of regulating in-flight entertainment.
As I mentioned in this previous post, legislation has been proposed in the House of Representatives that would regulate “violent entertainment” shown on airline flights. Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) and several co-sponsors argue that a “Family Friendly Flights Act” is needed to protect kids from such fare while they are flying.
Roeper argues that “sometimes the content in these movies is a little too violent” and that the studios “should probably be a little more judicious in their editing.” But Roeper is generally against regulation and doesn’t think we need separate seating areas for kids on flights. He points out that adding another distinct seating section to airplane is just going to slow down boarding times. “It would be better if the studios themselves do a little bit better job cut[ting] the violent content so that kids don’t need to see people getting shot and car crashes and all that stuff, but let’s not get Congress involved.”
I agree. As I pointed out in an editorial for the City Journal a few months ago, it would be a mistake to empower federal regulators to become “Long-Range Censors” since many better alternatives to regulation exist.
You can hardly tell that I’m a carousing womanizer in today’s Cato Daily Podcast, titled “Once More Into a Breach.”
Vie Secrecy News, the NSA is expanding its electricity generation capability.
The Proposed Action includes the construction of generator facilities, two electrical substations, a boiler plant and chiller plant, as well as ancillary facilities and parking. The proposed utility upgrades would allow for 100 percent self-contained redundancy, should off site power sources fail.
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