Don't go away / say what you say / but say that you'll stay

“The thing they offer advertisers is that they can connect to groups of people. I can see why they wouldn’t want to throw away anyone’s information, but there’s a conflict with privacy,” said Alan Burlison, 46, a British software engineer who succeeded in deleting his account only after he complained in the British press, to the country’s Information Commissioner’s Office and to the TRUSTe organization, an online privacy network

Anyone not think that the site he's talking about is Facebook?

The New York Times today documents yet another privacy breech from Facebook: The inability to permanently leave.

And how do the Facebookers spin it? How do they always spin it: It's a feature designed to make things easier for users:

According to an e-mail message from Amy Sezak, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.”

Gee, thanks

"'Experiment' has not traditionally been part of the print publishing vocabulary"

Scott Karp has a good roundup of three newspaper sites using his new Publish2 linking system to offer their readers links to bloggers and other news sources outside their walls. He focuses on the speed with which these newsfolks implemented his system, but I'd rather look at something else.

I think the examples Karp gives are a great manifestation of the "smart filter" argument I've been making with colleagues lately: As the Internet becomes an ever-increasing cacophony of voices, readers are looking more frequently towards smart filters--sites that simplify the choices by offering a series of links that have been selected not by algorithm but by people. 

And who better to offer those choices than editors, the people who have been making choices as their career?

Just look at how the Knoxville News was able to integrate a nice collection of related links to bloggers writing about a similar topic:

But, the counter argument goes, these are links outside of the news organization--why would we want to send readers away? Because sometimes you've got to send them away to have them come back.

That's actually the crux of the smart filter argument: If people see you as a good source for links--be it internal or external--they'll come back regularly. And if they don't--if they see you only as a source for walled-in information--they'll only visit when they think you'll have something to offer a much larger conversation. And since the current state of online news is as much about eyeball equity as anything else, having people come back and look to you as an authority and a source of information--whever that information may reside--is a good thing.

User-generated innovation

One of the unusual characteristics of a caucus versus a traditional vote is that everyone who attended knows the outcome. Yet traditional media has rarely reported these outcomes, waiting instead for official
results.

That type of information embargo is impossible anymore, thanks to the ubiquity of user-generated content creators on the web.

Witness the information flow coming out of Maine today, with near-real time results being put up on a Google map:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&om=0&msa=0&msid=108855644820400443340.000445d3794716293aa9b

It'll be interesting to compare these informal results to the real deal one they're announced. If they're even close, it'll be a major ground-shift on how this stuff can be reported.

sometimes, local still truly does matter

In the shadow of Super Tuesday, it seems that the national media outlets have decided that coverage of the February 9th primaries aren't worth major attention. 

When The Bigs move away from a story is when you can truly see that local news does still matter--like the Omaha World Herald's coverage of today's caucuses which paints a picture of chaos and confusion that the national media isn't picking up on at all.

moving past free

"The Internet is a copy machine," explains Kevin Kelly in The Technium. And as such, Kelly suggests that it's simply not possible to try to fight the tide of facsimiles that wash over the web.

As a result, he argues, you've go to start offering things to go along with your content that can't be replicated, and thusly are "better than free." He lists eight good ideas to use as starting points and sums it up quite nicely:

Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.

mobile transformations

A new UN report says that mobile phones are transforming developing nations.

The take up of mobiles was allowing developing nations to "leapfrog" some generations of technology such as fixed line telephones and reap more immediate rewards, said the report.

The Times on the future of news

(via Romenesko)

So what's wrong with the newspaper industry? The New York Times offers their analysis today, including the sobering statistic that:

Newspaper executives and analysts say that it could take five to 10 years for the industry’s finances to stabilize and that many of the papers that survive will be smaller and will practice less ambitious journalism.

It's a good overview but misses some major factors--like bad acquisitions by newspaper's parent corporations or mismanagement (or straight-up corruption) by the same--and manages to gloss over the fact that the high-point in ad revenues they keep referencing (the year 2000) was also the height of the dot-com boom, when every IPO'd dot com was taking out lavish national ads touting their bubble-fueled companies. In fact, the dot-com boom was a statistical anomaly in advertising statistics.

PS. Not sure why there's been so much Times coverage this week. They must  be doing something right.