Business
Maureen Johnson has published a simple manifesto: I am not a brand. It’s in response to being asked to speak — as an expert — at conferences and panels where all the speakers are hawking themselves. When I was writing full time I did a fair bit of this myself. And I hated it. I only did it when I had a book to sell. Truth be told, my appearances probably did more harm than good with regard to sales but I met some neat people and acquired more stories to tell. “I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work,” Johnson writes. “It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to commodify everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird.” But wait, it gets better: “We can, if we group together, fight off the weenuses and hosebags who want to turn the internet into a giant commercial.” And here’s Doc Searls from May 2010: “Reputation vs. Branding.”
ESRD
The University of Minnesota Board of Regents heard a report on the effects of Obama’s healthcare reform on UPlan, the University’s health insurance program. Beginning in 2014, an employee who pays more than 9.5 percent of salary for employer-sponsored health insurance will be entitled to switch to the exchange and the University would have to pay a US$3,000 fee to the government. If the employee’s share of the cost of employer-sponsored insurance exceeds eight percent of the employee’s total household income and that income is less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level (US$42,520/individual; US$88,000/family), a voucher would be issued by the University: About US$5,519 for an individual or US$11,177 for a family, which the employee could then take to the exchange. In 2018, a Cadillac tax of 40 percent will be imposed if the employer contribution to the insurance plus the employee cost of the insurance and any Flexible Savings Account exceeds US$10,200 for individuals or US$27,500 for a family. The tax is applied only to the excess. The University may be able to avoid the Cadillac tax by more aggressively promoting wellness and providing wellness awards for actually achieving goals, not just participating.
James Hipwell has begun writing a column about waiting to find a donor for his second kidney transplant for the Guardian. It’s really well done and sheds a lot of light on what transplant recipients as well as those waiting for an organ go through. There’s an ulterior motive for the series: To lobby for a change in the UK’s organ donation system to one of “presumed consent.” Under a presumed consent system, instead of organ donors having to go out of their way to opt-in to being a donor, the entire population would be automatic donors, having instead to opt-out. It’s needed worldwide, but the UK appears to be ahead of the rest of the world in this regard. The UK government commissioned a series of television ads for organ donation. The first one, created by AMV BBDO, is available on the Guardian‘s website.
Intellectual property
Victoria Espinel, the US intellectual property czar, has finally released her “Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement” (.pdf; 892KB). As expected, it’s mostly a plan to force other countries to comply with US intellectual property policies. As if that weren’t bad enough there are three areas where proposed US policy is completely of the rails: Secret treaties, pirate nation watchlists (entertainment cartel executives can nominate countries for inclusion), and evaluations of claims of piracy losses (the US Government Accountability Office has already dismissed these claims as total fabrications). The document’s section on secret treaties — like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) — is especially disturbing. The section starts out by acknowledging the need for transparency and outlines the Obama administration’s plan for it. But the very same section ends with a complete reversal: “… including consideration of the need for confidentiality in international trade negotiations to facilitate the negotiation process.” As Cory Doctorow notes, intellectual property treaties have traditionally been handled openly and transparently by the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization. The negotiations were made private by George W. Bush’s ACTA. Obama and his administration have eagerly embraced ACTA, going so far as to intervene in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the text of ACTA itself, claiming a threat to national security.
Law
In yet another example of the prime directive of American jurisprudence — maintaining or enhancing corporate profit — the US Supreme Court unanimously found broad interpretation of the “honest services” law to be unconstitutionally vague. The “honest services” law makes it illegal “to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” Both Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and Conrad Black were convicted of fraud under the “honest services” law. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing in the majority opinion, held the scope of the “honest services” law must be limited to bribes and kickbacks. Had Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas had their way, the “honest services” law would be completely eliminated.
Let me see if I have this straight. President Barack Obama crows, “We are poised to pass the toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression.” Big banks and hedge funds have to pay something on the order of US$20 billion to cover the costs of re-regulation that really isn’t. And we’re not stupid; we all know those costs will be passed along to us as consumers in one way or another. US federal government regulators will be able to liquidate failing financial companies but the financial industry will continue to be able to invest in their own funds and trade derivatives without transparency. This should tell you everything you need to know: Big bank stocks were up by the end of the week and as Edward Wyatt and David M. Herszenhorn report for the New York Times, With C-Span carrying the proceedings live, the last half-hour of the session featured sometimes confused lawmakers repeatedly asking about what happened to various proposed amendments. … many of the deals to complete the bill were cut outside the conference room, in private discussions between Democratic lawmakers and the Obama administration, with some of Washington’s most influential lobbyists trying to weigh in as best they could.” Worst of all, Congress left the specifics of the new law up to regulators in back rooms, out of the public eye.
Media
Politico, it turns out is just as clueless about publishing on the web as Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone. First Politico took it upon themselves to publish a .pdf of Michael Hastings’ profile of General Stanley McChrystal, “The Runaway General, for Rolling Stone. Then, in one of its pieces about the resulting dust-up about McChrystal’s quotes in the article, Politico published a piece by Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee containing this choker of truthiness: “And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.” Clint Hendler, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, reports that a day later the graf was removed from the article, without explanation. Hendler writes, “Politico managing editor Bill Nichols declined to discuss the deletion with me ….” The blogs and twitter feeds of media critics across the net burned brightly: “The better their sources, the less we know. Take it away, Greenwald!” (Andrew Sullivan); “Revealing little look at how journalism in DC works….” (Jay Rosen). In the wee hours of the next morning, Jay Rosen wrote an excellent analysis of Politico’s actions.
The Slow Media Manifesto might (or might not) be worth a read, depending upon your media diet. Slow media proponents advocate approaching media as we do food — choosing mindfully rather than just grabbing what’s closest at hand.
Privacy
Apple’s updated — and nonnegotiable — terms of service for using anything downloaded from the iTunes store, including iOS 4 on an iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad (the iPad will presumably be updated to iOS 4 at some point) allow the company to track your “precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device.” Apple can use this information in any way it sees fit, including selling it or giving it away. The company promises that the information is “collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you.” By installing the software, you’re agreeing to these terms. This is not, as some believe, just an update to the location-based services we’ve been using. This allows Apple to track you — or, more accurately your Apple device — in real-time, without additional consent on your part. This isn’t just Yelp asking if it can use your location, folks. This is Apple baking location-awareness into its products with no opt-out mechanism (in something that really should remain opt-in). UPDATE: Thanks to the fellow at UnSummit 4 who told me Apple really does have an opt-out mechanism, but it’s buried in legalese. Here’s what you need to know: Point Safari at oo.apple.com from the iOS4 to opt-out of Apple’s iAds.
Publishing
David Carr, in the New York Times Media Decoder, reports that Google is once again trotting out a one-click payment system for news called Newspass. In 2009, when the Newspaper Association of America requested proposals for paid content models, Google proposed a “monthly fee for access to a wide-ranging package of premium content.” This could put Google in a position relative to journalism analogous to Apple’s position relative to music — a 30 percent middleman.
Poor Jann Wenner. He didn’t understand the web in 1994 and he still doesn’t. Rolling Stone published a piece of journalism that got everyone — and I mean everyone — talking about it. Michael Hastings’ profile of General Stanley McChrystal, “The Runaway General,” shook everyone by, as Bob Collins so aptly wrote, “send[ing] the wrong signal to just about everybody who pays attention to signals.” But it was nowhere to be found on the web, so it didn’t exist. The issue wasn’t on the newsstands and the piece wouldn’t be published on the website for weeks. Politico published a .pdf of the story, but then took it down after Rolling Stone rightfully complained. By 10:00AM Tuesday, 22 June 2010, Rolling Stone had the Hastings article on its website. Hey Jann Wenner: 1992 called and wants its online publishing model back. But wait a minute. Rolling Stone‘s online operation has reportedly been profitable since 2004. Maybe Wenner knows something the rest of us don’t. After all, Rolling Stone published some of the best recent journalism has been theirs with Matt Taibbi’s devastating takedown of Goldman Sachs in April and Tim Dickinson’s astute deconstruction of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and Obama’s failure to clean up the Bush corruption.
Technology
Dan Gillmor is blogging about his experiences migrating from Mac OS X to Ubuntu on his Salon column. This is something Cory Doctorow promised but never delivered, so I’m glad to see Gillmor having at it. I’ve not reached the point Gillmor has with regard to the Mac OS X ecosystem and Apple’s ongoing epiphany about centralized command-and-control. But I too am seriously worried about Apple’s milking the Mac OS X ecosystem as it migrates its own customer base to the walled garden that is iOS. I’ve already been around that particular block with Apple with the migration from the Apple ][ series to the Mac. I’m not looking forward to another. For all these reasons and more I keep a current version of Ubuntu running on my MacBook Pro. As soon as there are GNOME (or even KDE) equivalents for BBEdit, OmniOutliner Professional, OmniGraffle Professional, and a handful of other pieces of software are available I’ll be making my transition.
User experience
Jakob Nielsen’s research reveals that web users still have a need for speed. The three response time limits remain the same today as Nielsen’s 1993 findings, which were based on 40-year-old human factors research. A tenth-of-a-second response time feels “instantaneous” to users; a one second response feels “seamless;” and responses up to 10 second will keep the user’s attention. In 1993 the culprit of slow response times was large images; in 2010 it’s fancy widgets and overly complex data processing on the server.
Faruk Ates has a great introduction to Modernizr in A List Apart. Modernizer, an open-source JavaScript library, takes the pain out of pushing the limits of HTML5 and CSS3 of the most standards-compliant browsers while still providing adequate user experiences for lesser browsers.
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The blotter: Week ending 27 June 2010 was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Sunday, 27 June 2010 at 9:10 PM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)