Slate’s got a new piece up about it now.

Allowing these guidelines to take effect would be like giving the government a no-knock warrant to investigate hundreds of thousands of blogs and hundreds of millions of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter users for … saying nice things about goods and services. [FTC spokesman Richard] Cleland tells Ad Age that a restaurant employee who gave his eatery a good review on Yelp would have to disclose. Given the billions of opinionated postings on the Web, there would be no end to FTC’s work.

Because of a pesky thing called the First Amendment, the guidelines don’t apply to news organizations, which receive thousands of free books, CDs, and DVDs each day from media companies hoping for reviews. But if the guidelines don’t apply to established media like the New York Review of Books, which also happens to publish reviews on the Web, why should they apply to Joe Blow’s blog? Regulating bloggers via the FTC while exempting establishment reporters looks like a back-door means of licensing journalists and policing speech.

This is a federal power grab of epic proportions, folks.

One more reason we need to pass the Federalism Amendment.

Well guess what, Google’s here to help!

1. Go to Google Maps.
2. Click on “get directions” (under the Search Maps box)
3. Type “New York” in the first box (the “from” box)
4. Type “London” in the second box (the “to” box) and hit “get directions”
5. Scroll down to step #21

:-)

Technorati Tags: Google maps

It’s said that if you put a million monkeys at a million typewriters, eventually you will get the works of William Shakespeare. When you put together a million humans, a million camcorders, and a million computers, what you get is YouTube.

The subhead gets another:

TV advertising is broken, putting $67 billion up for grabs. Which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup.

Uh huh.

Also worth the click is the glimpse into the post Google-acquisition ride of Chad Hurley, one of the site’s founders. There’s something so kinda sweet & touching about these overnight Internet zillionnaire stories, isn’t there? Another coupla dorm room geeks all grown up and rich. *sniff*

Technorati Tags: youtube

What could be more fun?

I also noticed that instead of just a driver on the truck, there was a second fellow whose job it was to distribute the packages. Kind of like Santa navigates and his right hand man negotiates the chimney.

That’s the first time I’ve ever seen UPS do it that way.

Is it a coincidence that deliveries of my Internet orders seem to be happening faster this year than last? Do you suppose UPS has tweaked its processes so it can better meet holidaytime demand? Do you suppose online retailers are doing the same? Do you suppose the Internet shopping infrastructure is blossoming into a thing of glorious & unprecedented consumerist beauty?

Dunno, but I can tell you I LOVE shopping online. I’ll go out and shop in person for a few things this year. But Internet shopping is heavenly. You can compare prices with the click of a mouse, find neat things without having to schlep around the space time continuum AND you get lots of visits from shipping carriers. What could be more fun?

This is going to be the best Christmas EVER.

:-)

Technorati Tags: Christmas shopping

Twelve pencil sharpeners sharpening????

I ordered one. Paid for one. Some warehouse picker sent a case instead. So now I have these eleven extra electric pencil sharpeners.

I emailed the company and they don’t want them back:

Thank you for letting us know. However, since it was our error and you were not billed anything extra, you may keep the additional pencil sharpeners you received.

Anybody need a pencil sharpener????

Meanwhile my cat inspected the situation and decided she was singularly unimpressed:

Technorati Tags: pencil sharpener, Friday catblogging

Technorati Tags: books, publishing

Rats, and I’ve been working so hard on my one-finger midi version of Freebird . . .

Technorati Tags: book promotion, website

For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending. Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.

So what are newspapers to do?

Gal Beckerman, at CJR Daily, ends a summary of the piece with this little zinger:

If the only way to make newspapers profitable is to turn “fine journalism” into junk, than maybe we should start thinking about whether or not news is too precious a commodity to be subjected to the same economic rules by which one sells widgets or hamburgers.

That would be “free market” rules, right? Bring on state-subsidized newspapers!

Meanwhile Jeff Jarvis excerpts from this companion piece in a post titled “Who Saved the Treees?” — and notes that it ends hopefully. This is about change, after all. And change is only a threat if you aren’t willing to change with it.

I was thinking last night about how Google has made a fortune organizing content for people without regard to its quality while newspapers husband their content jealously — in essence, they place a higher value on the content than on peoples’ access to it. “This is so good, you have to pay to see it.” “If you want to read this, you have to register and maintain an account with us.”

It’s a completely different mindset. No wonder the newspaper industry is in flames.

Technorati Tags: media, newspaper industry

Imagine if a trip to the corner newsstand required handing over your name, address, age, and income to the cashier before you could pick up the daily newspaper.

That’s close to the experience of many online readers, who must complete registration forms with various kinds of personal data before seeing their virtual newspaper…

I currently have a page of college-lined paper crammed with combinations of user names and passwords. Some of these are for accounts with companies who handle my money or credit card information. I can understand that.

But it’s to the point where I absolutely refuse to add more combos to this list. It’s insane.

If that means I don’t read some article online, so be it.

I’m not alone in my sentiments, of course. Here’s an argument by Adrian Holovaty that online newspaper registration is not only irritating, but self-defeating.

Everyone I’ve talked to (techies and non-techies alike) sees this type of registration as an extremely annoying barrier with no redeeming value. There’s no personal tie to a typical news-site registration account, no incentive to give accurate information or even care about who has access to your account . . .

(No, saying “Registered users get more highly-targeted ads!” isn’t enough. Neither is saying “The benefit of registration is that you get the content.” That’s nothing short of arrogant — and readers can and will get their regurgitated AP stories elsewhere.)

And here’s a post by Simon Willison that offers a link to a site called BugMeNot which provides user name/password combinations you can use to access newspaper sites.

Well, okay, that way you don’t have to go through the rigamorole of filling out the form. But you still can’t just read the article.

The worst offender by far, btw, is a certain online paper that doesn’t ask you to register when you first click on their article.

They wait until you’ve read 2/3 of it.

What are they thinking?

“Hey, let’s not just inconvenience our online audience — let’s try to infuriate them! Maybe we can make a killing selling ads for tranquilizers!”

You will never see a link to that site on this blog, I’ll tell you that.

Technorati Tags: newspaper registration

The article is online here (subscription required).

Anderson responds here.

I find Anderson’s refutations of the column plausible. It will be interesting to see if Gomes takes up the subject again.

My dog in the fight, of course, is the fate of writers who have the chops to please a sizeable readership, but for whatever reason fail to hit a bestseller list. Solid midlisters have done okay, income-wise, in the past. Will that be true in the future?

Hopefully, someday, someone will tackle that issue without succumbing to the “end of the good ol’ days” hand-wringing that has characterized the attempts so far.

Technorati Tags: writing, long tail