As a "physical" winter storm approaches: how "hardened" is my digital life?

With a (back-to-back) winter storm approaching, and the possibility of power outages, conceivably prolonged, one wonders how well various electronics would fare.

An article by Catherine Roseberry at About.com states that the acceptable range for laptop use is about 50 degrees F to 95 degrees F. Most well insulated homes will not go below 50 F for a long time (at least on upper floors) unless it is extremely cold outside during the outage. In the summer, during a heat wave, indoor temperature could go up quickly; the basement will be the coolest place. The link is here.

Note the tip about not leaving the laptop in direct sunlight or in a hot car when traveling. Remember, even if it is only 60 degrees in March outside, in a locked closed car it will warm up quickly.

She also recommends laptop stands to dissipate internal heat. I’ve never heard this before.

If you go to stay with someone during an outage or go to a hotel, remember to pack everything: laptop battery charger, Blackberry connector, and Blackberry charger. Use a subscription wireless service (Verizon, etc) rather than a free service for maximum security.

A quick search of Dell’s website (link) found a server with recommended operating temperature the same (50 F to 95 F) and a permissible storage temperature that surprised me: -40 F to +149 F (like maybe it could have to be stored on another planet some day).

All this suggests that most electronics can stand long time temperature changes (moisture is another matter), but should be recooled or rewarmed very gradually before reuse. Some offices allow air conditioning or heat to be turned off on weekends, which means that on Monday mornings computer might be brought up in more extreme temperatures, which is not good.

Since many of us have invested in compact disc collections over the years (since the late 1980s) proper storage and care becomes an issue. We’re gradually finding out that they don’t necessarily last forever. The foam padding and program notes could sometimes cause damage over long periods of time. In some CD’s, the aluminum oxide coating may tend to oxidize. One site (link) says that they should be stored at temperature 50 to 68 F with 40-50 % RH, but in many homes temperature and humidity gets higher in the summer. People with very large collections of classical music could consider taking care of their old vinyl; wear is less of an issue with albums that as a practical matter aren’t played often. If stored upright in original sleeves, temperature is probably not as big an issue with analog media.

More and more classical music is being offered as MP3 albums to be downloaded “legally” sometimes at lower prices than CD’s. One advantage for this method is that the files could be backed up offsite (Mozy, Carbonite, Webroot, etc), offering protection from physical destruction, either by natural disaster or theft.

Texas nurse prosecuted for "offline" reputation damage

Here’s a disturbing story about reputation defense – even “off line”. A nurse in Texas faces state prosecution for malicious damaging of doctor’s reputation for writing a letter about him to state regulators. The official felony charge is “misuse of official information”.

It would appear that state whistleblower laws would have protected her from a civil suit.

The New York Times story from Feb. 6 is by Kevin Sack, is titled “Nurse to stand trial for reporting doctor”, with link here.

The “obvious” question is what could have happened had the disclosure appeared in a public blog.

Is there something "wrong" with the idea "you can make it on your own"?

“No man is an island,” John Donne wrote. Yet, the heart of individualism seems to consist of autonomous independence. Modern society gives you the impression you can do everything for yourself and not need others until you want to. It even provides the legal structures.

If you don’t want to have everything you own destroyed by circumstances beyond your control, you get picky about where you live. The safest place would be a modern, secure high rise building in a major city. Generally single family homes are much more vulnerable. But you’d have to stay away from earthquake zones (and wonder about areas where major earthquakes occur every 500 years or so, like New Madrid, or even some areas of the East Coast, even). You’d stay away from coastal areas prone to hurricanes, or from Midwestern river basins, which can flood much more than we realized before. In California, you’d watch for mudslide prone areas, wildfire exposure, and irrigation canal flooding.

Indeed, there are some hazards that we’ve never experienced, like the Yellowstone or Mono Lake supervolcanoes (dwarfing Mt. St. Helens), or a huge East Coast tsunami from a collapse of the Cumbra Vieja volcano and landslide on the other side of the pond.

Of course, there is terrorism – starting with New York and Washington, but probably expanding to softer targets, and more subtle hazards we haven’t thought about much, like EMP or electromagnetic pulse attacks. There exist plenty of unwelcome paths toward “the purification”.

The Internet has offered a lot of us the chance at self-promotion, and with all the cyber dangers, privately run security is much more robust than anyone could have imagined fifteen years ago. That point, at least, supports the libertarian approach to all this.

In fact, there are new tools to protect “what you have” – buy it all digitally (by recordings legally as MP3 files rather than on CD’s) and back it up off site with Mozy, Webroot or Carbonite.

When we get into the “moral” questions, we wonder if “independence” is a phantom. You depend on people who do things you don’t see and wouldn’t want to do – and sometimes political moralists see this as exploitative.

So then the “natural family” arugments come at you: belonging to a family unit and giving it loyalty becomes a moral duty. That’s why parents disrupt even talented kids and make them join in things they don’t want to do. When I was a boy, I simply wanted to avoid competitive scenarios that I was not good at, and pick and follow my goals – and people would come back and say that when I expressed myself or drew attention I was getting back at them, stepping on their toes, or kibitzing, As an adult, do you really have a right to commit yourself to love only when you choose to? It becomes a profound moral question about our humanity. Christianity, especially, deals with the idea that people need to accept interdependence with some moral flexibility; other religions often deal with this need by imposing strict rules on how the family must work.

Still, if we wound up with a world like in the movies “The Road” or “The Book of Eli” or even “Legion”, I don’t think I would have anything to offer. Don’t let it happen.

Snow! How to watch the power outages (from a laptop, with wireless)

I grew up in Arlington VA, and I do recall some memorable nor’easters, including Inauguration day in 1961, the Blizzard of 66, the March 1993 Blizzard (for about two hours, the most violent I have ever seen here), the 1996 blizzards (January 6-8, and a similar storm Feb. 6 went about 50 miles further south and pounded southern Md and Tidewater VA), the Dec 2009 blizzard, and not snowpocalypse today. Is this “The Day After Tomorrow”?

The Weather channel predicts a wintry mix until 2 AM, with heavy accumulations not starting until then, whereas Doug Hill at WJLA says that will stay further south, and the real heavy accumulations and thunderstorms with snow will start around 10 PM. So far, it’s about 4 inches. Not that much. But other areas have about 8 already. Hardest hit will be the Blue Ridge, and then Annapolis East, across the Delmarva to Deleware and extreme southern New Jersey. Rehoboth Beach could wind up with the full three feet accumulations jackpot.

The greatest danger is long power outages, if they overwhelm the system after unexpected freezing rain or heavy wet snow sticking to trees and power lines. That’s not good in the winter. They say laptop computers are OK down to 50 deg. F. But right here, by my observation, the snow is already turning finer and drier. Hopefully we’ve dodged the worst. We got a break in the middle of the day when the streets were too warm for the snow to stick for a few hours.

You can follow the Dominion Power outgages on this map. The power outages in northern VA have increased markedly since 7 PM, and there were some around Charlottesville. There is a large outage around Great Falls, VA according to the map (one of the worst areas for overgrown trees). Virginia may be spared somewhat because a lot of the weakest trees were "sacrificed" in 2003 to Hurricane Isabel, which caused enormous disuption with only 40 mph winds sustained for 12 hours. Dominion Power whined that Isabel tore through the region like a "giant washing machine."

My experience was that both Dallas and Minneapolis had much more stable power grids (than the DC area) when I lived there. It makes sense -- fewer trees. I know a little bit about the utilities in Dallas because of a job interview one time with the utilites (and a visit to a nuclear power plan in Glen Rose).

Are these bigger storms the result of climate change? Maybe. I’ve never heard of an El Nino that increased snow. But the biggest snows here result when high pressure to the north dams cold air against up the mountains, and drives the low pressure systems to the south and east, often resulting in even heavier show in Richmond and even down to Williamsburg. With Appalachian cold air damming, low pressure systems tend to “jump” to the Atlantic (potentially tapping on the Gulf Stream for energy) rather than go up the Ohio valley (as they tend to do earlier in the winter). This kind of pattern is more common in late winter, in February and early March, which is why in many years the biggest snows come late here. February, not January, is usually the worst month hear and typically has the annual low.

I spent six years in Minneapolis, 1997-2003, and the biggest snows were in late February 2001 (when Watertown SD got 32 inches), and March 2002. Typically a “Southern” storm like this happens there once a year, around the first day of spring. But most of their snows were small and dry clippers, and caused little trouble. It’s ironic to have bigger snows here, in a milder climate.


Update: 9:30 PM (while Smallville plays "Absolute Justice", a fantasy of Chairman Mao). The Bing weather channel map shows that the freezing rain reached almost to Alexandria around 8:30 PM and then got pushed back south by a "cold front". There appears to be strong avection and lift and thunderstorm activity along I-64 SE of Charlottesville, which may explain the outages there. The "cold front" will keep pushing south toward Richmond.

The wind is picking up, about 20 mph, almost due east. The wind is helping blow some snow off the tree limbs and lines. That may be good. Hopefully the snow will become drier and fluffier pretty soon is the "cold front" is passing.

Bing shows a lot of freezing rain in the valleys of the Ridge and Valley Province in W Va, just east of the Eastern Continental Divide. That sounds like big trouble for power companies there. This time, it's colder in the East and warmer in the mountains, if that make any sense, with cold air damming.

Update: Feb. 7

Arlington County VA YouTube video on snow removal (6 min)

Are the days of a "multiple life" on the Web over? Social media changed everything!

Can you lead a double life on the Web?

Well, of course, many people live in multiplicity, with different profiles on Facebook or Myspace, and in Second Life and other VR experiences.

But in my case, the notion took on a narrower meaning. Back in the early 1990s, because of personal history that I have documented elsewhere, I became interested in research and writing about the issues surrounding Bill Clinton’s proposal to lift the ban on gays in the military, which would lead to the notorious “don’t ask don’t tell” policy being codified into law in 1993. I was working for a life insurance company that specialized, in part, in selling to military officers. I felt that I had a potential conflict of interest and ethical dilemma.

The potential problem would be partially resolved by a corporate merger and my transferring to another division of the new company and moving from northern Virginia to Minneapolis in 1997, leading to some of the best years of my life. I wrote and self-published the book in 1997, eventually buttressed it with a print-on-demand arrangement in 2000, but in the mean time put the book text, with a lot of running footnotes and extra supplementary material, on the Web (the site was hppub.com then; it is now doaskdotell.com, along with all the blogs). I found that the political issue was the kernel of something much bigger, that “DADT” a paradigm for our social and professional behavior in many areas of life. I became concerned with “connecting the dots”, and the material expanded so much that after 9/11 I actually attracted a few tips that were shared with law enforcement.

One of the points that came up with the company is that I did not have direct reports and that I did not make any decisions about customers or stakeholders. Therefore, I could say in public pretty much what I wanted without causing a conflict, as long as I didn’t betray any actual confidences. I was an “individual contributor” in the workplace. I began to perceive my worklife as a double one: my salaried job as part of it, and my web stuff as separate and as “mine”.

That view made sense in the late 1990s, perhaps, as people developed their own flat sites and discovered that search engines would give them “fame”. But with the development of social networking sites in 2004 and later, the perception started to change. Employers realized they could use what people wrote online (or what others wrote about them) as “background check” information (however unreliably). Employers could fear that clients could easily check up on their professional consultants. (Hence the new industry of online reputation defense and repair.) Furthermore, social media facilitated the process of selling, so many jobs required that people use their online presence for the benefit of their employers, not to propagate their own views on things.

In the past two or three years, job counselors have been talking more about setting up an integrated web presence to facilitate one’s career, with Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and blogs, but about professional topics only, please. The days of the double life are over. I guess, however, that I can claim that my professional identity is “connecting the dots”. Too bad, my early life would have kept me out of the CIA.

FTC holds roundtable on digital privacy; concern over the "one-way-mirror" world

The Federal Trade Commission held a roundtable last week (Jan. 28) on privacy in the digital age, sponsored by the University of California law school. The San Francisco Chronicle has an important story by James Temple, “All eyes on online privacy,” link here.

A lot of this has to do with potentiality (a concept that at one time high school teachers graded us on!) Cell phones, car GPS, wireless laptops, all kinds of devices would allow someone with “bad education” and stalking intentions to track someone, and companies are increasingly sophisticated in their ability to monitor and analyze the browsing habits of Internet visitors.

There is controversy as to whether younger adults really are willing to share more information online than were members of their parents’ generations.

Pam Dixon, of the World Privacy Forum, has urged adoption of a measure requiring that Internet marketing companies delete user information within 24 hours. The WPC presented a report “The One-Way-Mirror Society: Privacy Implications of the New Digital Signage Networks”, link here.

It’s important, however, to remember that the “free entry” model that enables not only social media as we have gotten used to since 2005 but also older forms of self-publishing around since the late 1990s, depends ultimately on effective advertising, and a willingness of consumers to have items of greatest potential interest shown to them. (These days, I seem to get a lot of ads from Netflix. I suppose that’s because of behavioral advertising.)

A "Modest" (and dangerous) "thought experiment": the return of the Natural Family?

Here’s another “modest” thought experiment. Suppose we change the constitution so that only heads of households with dependents vote. The “patriarch” (or maybe matriarch) would get as many votes counted as there are people in his family, as long as everyone else was dependent. Okay, single adults might be allowed to have their votes count as one until age 30; then they would have to have dependents. Elderly parents or disabled adults would count as dependents. There would be no public safety net; families would take care of their own completely.

Perhaps the thought experiment goes further. You don’t have your own Internet site unless you have dependents (that is “responsibility”). You can’t even have a mortgage. And so on. Perhaps these are the "rules of engagement" on Pandora, or other planets 30 or 40 light years away with advanced civilziations. Authoritarian and communitarian social systems are probably pretty common throughout the universe. Oh, yeah, these systems invite feudalism, slavery, all kinds of macro abuses -- but they are "stable" -- families take care of their own.

There is a certain component of our culture that would like to see things work that way, in practice and beyond the realms of sophistry. The logical endpoint of the “natural family manifesto” that I reviewed in the books blog (Sept. 18, 2009) (book by Allan Carlson and Paul Mero).

The “natural family” movement regards the family as the granularity of society, not the individual. Within the family, individuals are supposed to function only for the mutual benefit of the family, according almost to the Marxist motto about abilities and needs. But all this originates with the “natural” complementarity of men and women that used to be much more evident and essential than it seems today. In earlier eras, men really did have to “protect” women and children from external physical threats (at least much more than in Western society today), and men took considerable risk in doing so (as in military service). Women bore their own risk in childbearing, which is one reason why being “protected” was so essential. Today, we know that gender equality and interchangeability is evident (and viewed as socially and politically essential), because technology and higher standards of living have made this possible.

However, the “family” also accomplished a more subtle purpose: mediating and directing the emotional commitments among its members. As in Rosie O’Donnell’s recent HBO film (my TV blog Jan. 31), a family consists of people, not always blood related or based on opposite-sex marriage, where “love goes all the way”. It’s the parents who have both the power and responsibility to socialize their children into experiencing this kind of love, which extends into adulthood and which is supposed to make their children’s commitments to their own marriages possible (but the idea that it accounts for transmitting heterosexual complementarity is very questionable, to say the least, given increasing evidence of the immutability of sexual orientation). Yup, parents have the power to nudge their kids into learning to love the people who need to be loved -- to make emotional attachments based on complementarity rather than narcissistic reflection. Within the family, the love is supposed to mean that the family members put the welfare of others in the family, based on need, above fulfilling their own individual purposes (the “it’s not about you” stuff from Rick Warren), without the sense of personal “sacrifice.” To some couples, the meaning of their marriages is enhanced by the belief that they are socializing their children to meet the family’s ends. Parents often expect older children to be able to take care of younger siblings, or even to be able to raise siblings’s children after family tragedies. Family responsibility is partly communitarian, and doesn’t always wait for “chosen” behaviors (sexual intercourse producing babies). Parents also expect that their children will personally take care of them in old age, and that unmarried adult children will be the first to step up to do so.

Proponents of this view of the family often view single and childless people as shirking moral duties to their families, living off of the unseen sacrifices of others, and as undermining the motivation and stability of marriage as a whole. This view of family values maintains that adults who don't have family responsibility (by choice, or later by having it assigned to them) should keep a low public profile, and they also tend to believe that if everyone follows this ruleset, marriage will be more exciting for most people who then make marital commitments. The idea that everybody "plays the game" and that there are no kibitzers helps make this outlook work; it seems to provide a sense of "local equality" because "nobody gets out of things", such as sharing risks. That’s not a worldview that gets expressed in the major media today very often, as a much more individualistic view of morality, based on “personal autonomy” or “individual sovereignty” has evolved since the mid 1960s. Psychologists make something of this when they characterize as abnormal the “schizoid personality” which likes to stay in its own inner world (sometimes imbued with a lot of fantasy) and avoid emotional interactions with others (other than those who are carefully “selected” in a “creative” sense) particularly in the extended family setting. But this characterization seems as much based on the interpersonal needs of the more socialized family members as on the duties of the supposedly “abnormal” excessively introverted or secretive persons who have withdrawn into their own worlds. However, the childless (especially when they are also male homosexuals) are sometimes viewed as expressing hostility to others for demanding

Population demographics will make the “natural family” concept more critical. Medicine is extending lives of elderly parents and sometimes non-elderly disabled family members, but the capacity to do so may be challenged not only by lifestyle habits but also by the willingness of other family members (especially the childless) to “sacrifice”. Medical practice now may be creating a half generation of dependents, creating a social issue with a moral context previously not imagined; this can only otherwise be countered by medical practice that can prevent or counteract disability altogether.

In a modern individualistic society, most discussion about “morality” concern responsibility for chosen actions, particularly bringing children into the world (especially accidentally, as with teen pregnancy). But the “moral climate” that I grew up in during the 1950s was much broader, and emphasized becoming socialized to step up and share common duties, particularly according to gender, and especially when entailing the risk of sacrifice. Today, we see a new kind of debate about the “empty cradle”, that the responsibility for childrearing and caregiving can’t be seen entirely in terms of individual choices; some of it may be a duty that all must share. The “moral” side of this problem is just barely beyond the horizon of the establishment media. Paradoxically, it could help buttress the case for gay marriage.

Most of BitTorrent use seems related to copyright infringement (Princeton study)

Jacqui Cheng has an interesting report on Ars Technica Jan. 29 about Bit Torrent. Specifically, “Bit Torrent consensus: About 99% of files copyright infringing,” link here.

Nearly half of the files studied by a Princeton student, Sauhard Sahi were “non pornographic” movies and TV shows. That’s a bit surprisingly, maybe, because most networks offer most episodes of their primetime shows available for “free” Internet “anytime” viewing – you just have to sit through the commercials, too (just like you would on TV).

The article also points out that a record industry fear has not born out: P2P users can share DRM-free MP3 files easier than ever, but these have become a small part of BitTorrent sharing, which often mislabels its files.

There’s another report on the Princeton study on the “Freedom to Tinker” website by Ed Felten, here.

Today's debate on "don't ask don't tell" and the 60s debate on draft deferments: an odd moral connection: why repealing DADT redeems me

While some momentum seem to grow to repeal the “don’t ask don’t tell” and allow gays to serve (somewhat, at least) openly in the US military, it’s well to review another moral debate from four decades ago, the Vietnam era draft with all the controversy about deferments.

In fact, from the late 1940s until the mid 1960s, married men were sometimes deferred, and sometimes only married men with children were deferred. In early 1963 the term “Kennedy fathers” was coined to characterize married men in genuine relationships to their children, who then had III-A deferments. The fatherhood and marriage deferments got wiped out by Johnson in 1965 as Vietnam escalated. However, student deferments remained, and changed the character of the debate. (Male) math and science majors with good grades in college and graduate school were the “safest” from conscription. The rationale was that we needed “brainpower” to defend ourselves in the Cold War. Suddenly, society had a new quasi-hero, the nerd. Deferments would finally be replaced by a lottery in 1969, and Nixon would end the draft in 1973. Congress and the president, however, have always had the authority to restore it (and there have been some minor changes, such as in 1980 when the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan). Selective service still operates today, and men in certain age ranges are still required to register.

In fact, right after 9/11, there was talk from some people, such has Democratic Senator Carl Levin (MI) , New York Representative Rangel, and DADT author Charles Moskos, that we should restore the draft. At the same time, Moskos was starting to argue the DADT should be repealed, and in general proponents of conscription or even mandatory national service have favored ending “don’t ask don’t tell.”

It’s well to mention here that in 1981 the Supreme Court had valided the constitutional permissibility of the male-only draft, in Rokster v. Goldberg (text). In the modern world of individualism, it seems strange that the state could require men to offer themselves as potential sacrifice for the good of all. And that only men had to do this. But remember, not only was the “complementarity” of the sexes regarded with more “reverence” in earlier times, women had taken their own share of the common risk merely by undergoing childbirth. At one time, men outlived women.

Of course, some nations with conscription, namely Israel, require women to serve, and if a draft were ever reinstated in the U.S., it would probably incorporate women, too.

Once in the Army, men with college educations fared better and were less likely to wind up in combat, at least during the Vietnam years. Men who enlisted for three years or more were given some choice of MOS, and I was told by a recruiter in 1967 that “95%” of draftees got infantry. There was a slogan, “choice, not chance, in today’s Army.”

My own story becomes relevant and prescient. My expulsion from William and Mary in November 1961 for admitting homosexuality (covered here Nov. 28, 2006) was, according to the cultural and “moral” standards of that era, a cause for great shame, or perhaps an extension of shame from teenage years for not being “competitive” enough as a male. One part of my plan to redeem myself was military service. I “volunteered” for the draft physical in 1964, 1966, and 1967, and was rated 4-F, 1-Y, and finally 1-A. By 1966, the draft paperwork had stopped “asking” about “homosexual tendencies”, and by the mid 1960s there was, in effect, an unofficial “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. After finishing graduate school, I “volunteered” for the draft and then went in 2 weeks early as a two-year enlistee (at age 24). I had an RA number, “RA1937256” (I still remember it from all the BCT formations – it’s long term memory). I guess I fell into the lucky 5%. In the MOS session, the master sergeant in charge said, “hey, you missed a college grad”. I wound up with the MOS of “01E20” which was Mathematician. But I was a dud at the start of Basic, and after a few days in the infirmary with the flu, I got recycled through Special Training (Tent City at Fort Jackson). My PCPT went from 190 to 357 before I graduated from Basic in 14 weeks. (I even remember the PCPT: low crawl, horizontal ladder, run dodge and jump, and mile run).

What strikes me about all this is that our society, in fighting Communism in the Cold War, thought nothing of estimating the “value” of one young man’s life compared to someone else’s. Supposedly we had won World War II in order to put down this kind of thinking, that one person could be officially regarded as more “worthy” than another, and compel another’s “sacrifice.” In my case, the whole draft deferment system seemed almost anti-Darwinian. Someone less fit for service could let someone else put himself in the line of sacrifice. In more authoritarian thinking setups, this could be seen as a moral outrage. In the "McCarthyism"-infected world of my coming of age (which still strikes me as having endured some lingering fascism), physical cowardice was seen as one of the worst moral deficits: if you didn't step up when called for the common good, someone else would take the hit in your place.

All of this background helps explain why I would view a repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” as a personal vindication.

Does it take money to distribute effective political speech?

George F. Will, in a column “Campaign finance: A ‘reform’ wisely rejected” on p A25 of The Washington Post Thursday Jan. 28, adds some more fuel to the debate on the value of money in influencing policy debate. His link his here.

He writes that “the court now held that dissemination of political speech requires money”, leading first to the conclusion that campaign contributions are a form of speech. But the developments of the past fifteen years or so (Internet speech, whether or not part of “social media”) have shown that policy debate can be affected by individuals with little money or competitive track record, raising questions about the “stakes” of speakers not taking as much risk or responsibility as others. The Court’s decision, as noted yesterday, would seem to protect the newbies too.

Will also notice that the overturned law would have sometimes prohibited political instructions from employers to associates. Again, “political loyalty” is an issue that I have encountered in my own career.

Will points out that voters should have access to knowledge of corporate and union contributions, and such knowledge would help mediate their votes.

Did the Supreme Court, while upholding corporate speech and campaign contributions, "exonerate" web self-publishing?

Remember how it was a big deal at one time to “get published”? To some extent, in some narrow areas, as in the academic world, it still is. But generally magazine articles and books were not published and released “into the wild” without a lot of supervision and due diligence. Vanity publishing (or subsidy publishing), before the 1990s at least, was very expensive. There used to be a company called “Exposition Press” and the owner, a Mr. Uhlan, wrote a book in the 1970s called “The Rogue of Publishers’ Row.”

Desktop publishing and more efficient press designs began to drive costs down in the 1990s, and self-publishers could indeed order modest runs at book manufacturers for low cost. But web publishing, as a way to be found and recognized, started to get recognized around 1998 as search engines took off.

At first, self-publishing on the web tended to consist of flat sites, and sites with mostly simple html text and hard coded hyperlinks tended to do well because they loaded faster, particularly for users with dialup connections. Despite the multiplicity of businesses offering search engine placement, in practice “amateur” content on static files placed higher in search engine results than “professional” corporate content generate with sophisticated dynamic algorithms pulling content off databases.

Self-publishing could work socially, because if the content was original and interesting and about pertinent topics, it would attract “friends” that I wanted. This could take place in areas like screenwriting, political activism, gay rights, libertarianism, and so on.

Self-publishing, because of the almost “free entry” and elimination of most due diligence, could also pose unbounded and unpredictable downstream risks, even for those connected to the speaker (especially in connection with the workplace, sometimes the family, sometimes with special problems like with the military [“don’t ask don’t tell”].

Social networking sites, however hesitatingly, tried to turn the paradigm around. Facebook, particularly, was originally based on the idea that you should know your friends, and there should exists some common connection, like a campus. Even as it became “global” and allowed the now controversial “everyone” concept, it still encourages the idea that some “published” material be circulated only among known “friends” – although it isn’t reasonable to say you “know” 1000 people that well (no double meaning here).

Making a personal website available to “everyone” and accessible to all search engines and robots is the logical equivalent of self-publishing a book or periodical. The author does not know who accesses his or her literature immediately.

But in practice, the risk of release inappropriate or damaging material in digital form even in a known list is still quite great. Digital records can be transferred to anyone and can never be “recalled.” Most of the time, defamation law will consider an item as “published” if it is shown to one other party who understands it. There are Victorian novels concerning defamation in handwritten letters.

The “self-publication” event, releasing material into the wild and to search engines, may be considered “gratuitous” in some circumstances (creating risk) if what the speaker has to “gain” is not clear.

Yet, there is still a good First Amendment-related question about the value of political speech for its own sake. If a large corporation or labor union can (according to the Supreme Court ruling last week) spend its own money on “published” materials that support a political candidate favorable to it, then as a corollary it seems to follow that an individual can stake out a political position on the open web with no other motive than to create a public stir and gain the sense of personal leverage with respect to a particular issue. There may need be no other purpose, and the recently touted “implicit content” issue might go away.

There’s another angle to the Facebook model: that is, the “right to publish” (or "the privilege of being listened to") could depend on how “popular” you are. But that notion would not be good for public policy or healthy debate.

More writs filed to identity bloggers or webmasters who "skank" others "anonymously"

MSN is reporting more lawsuits against bloggers for online “slagging”, in this story from NineMsn, “Floodgates open for cyber-bullying writs”, link here.

All of this follows on the heels of a case involving a model who was able to get a court order disclosing the identity of an anonymous blogger who was defaming her, as discussed on this blog on Aug. 19, 2009.

Attorney John Dozier, Jr., who made a comment on a posting her Aug. 28 about Section 230 (with respect to his recent book), reports several other major similar cases, including at least two where people put up “fake websites” to cause people to appear to be defamed when found on search engines.

A model railroad is one big thought experiment!

Today, I visited the WGH model railroad show at the Dulles Conference Center near the Dulles Airport (link for show).

The best exhibit was a complicated layout by National Capital Trackers on O Gauge, with a curious feature. It seemed to comprise two layouts, appearing to join in parallel tracks in one stretch, but with no topological crossover. Using the language of Clive Barker’s 1991 novel “Imajica”, the two “dominions” remain “unreconciled.” There lots of interesting things in the layouts, such as a steel mill and a carnival with roller coaster. There were about ten other model railroads, including a Standard, an an N-gauge layout with a long coal train and a simulation of “mountaintop removal”, and an Acela model of Wilmington, DE (in the Blue Hen State). Most of them seemed to invoke worlds that existed more or less in the 1950s.

In a screenplay that I submitted to Project Greenlight in 2004 (“Baltimore Is Missing”), the protagonist wakes up after a bizarre “abduction” (of sorts), to find that he lives as a toy figure in a model railroad “dominion” owned by an old nemesis. (It would be especially horrible if the dominion were a model of Wilmington or, as in in screenplay in one scene, Grand Rapids MI). It does sound a bit like “Outer Limits” or “Twilight Zone.” He has a “wife”, and he is charged with the idea of rebuilding a new world by joining with people in other “dominions.” Now this could tie into (Jan. 2010) Discover 's recent treatise on multiverses: maybe when you tweak the physical constants in pairs, you get other universes compatible with life. For example, you could have a “weakless” universe (without the “weak force”) without elements heavier than iron – which might mean no nuclear weapons, and maybe world peace. It might be a “simpler” universe in some other ways, and smaller. Maybe Heaven lies in a “weakless” Universe. Maybe some of Clive Barker’s dominions have other physical constants, although some of the characters have learned to move back and forth between the “reconciled” dominions. (When will “Imajica” be a movie? It sounds like a great project for Lionsgate to me. And there is a great little train in the Third Dominion -- a great idea for a model railroad, as would be a railroad on a terraformed Mars.)

Ii got my one model train at the age of 3, in 1946, at Christmas. That is my first memory. I remember building little layouts with it, with one track to my grandparents, another to my aunt and uncle, before I started to realize that life was much more than blood relations – such a politically and socially controversial point today. We used to build toy cities in Ohio on the concrete sidewalk to the privy behind grandma’s house – recreation that my mother once thought was “baby play.” But now, model railroad layouts strike me as Thought Experiments: kingdoms, of limited horizons, where people can start over as characters in someone else’s world.

A few years ago Dulles had another model railroad show that simulated 60 miles of track to scale. Pennsylvania has a couple of large layouts, including Choo-Choo Barn in Starsburg, and Roadside America up on I-78.

As for the Dulles Exposition, it could have been better managed. The parking situation at the Dulles Expo Center is atrocious, as I wound up in a dirt lot changed to mud by the melted snow from before Christmas, and some cars were getting stuck in the mud. The directions were wrong: you turn right when you reach Willard, not left. The whole facility needs much more management and infrastructure, and probably a for-pay commercial parking garage. I was almost struck by the overhang of an oversized truck trailer (huge momentum) passing me as I walked out. Narrow miss! Remember Oprah’s recent show on cell phone and text free driving.

New York Times to meter visitors and charge for content in 2011

The New York Times will start charging Internet visitors to view content on its website starting in January 2011, according to a report Jan. 20, 2010.

Visitors will have to register, and will have a certain free allotment per month, and then be charged on a metering system. Print subscribers (even only to the Sunday version) will be able to view the online content free.

It’s not known if other newspapers will follow suit. Wall Street Journal requires a paid subscription for some online articles. So do a few others like Newsday , the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and the Albuquerque Journal. Financial articles reporting on specific companies (as linked from Yahoo!) and “professional journals” in medicine and other fields typically require paid subscription now.

This could make it more difficult for bloggers to gather information from multiple sources if many newspapers do this. Furthermore visitors, if they clicked on links in blogs, could sometimes find that their viewing of content counted toward a monthly limit or led to a request for a credit card payment. On my own blogs, I have sometimes warned visitors if I know that specific linked content requires paid subscription.

Many newspapers charge for archived articles, but some have backed away from the practice in recent years.

The Los Angeles Times blog has a story about this here.

The basic news wire story is here. It was reported in print Thursday in the Washington Times.

The Times own story ("The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site") from Richard Perez-Pena from Jan. 20 is here.

As to the use of a print sunscription to pay for unlimited access, I do have one issue: it is a bit of a security problem, for someone who lives alone, with newspapers likely to be visible at a residence when someone is not home. I wish the newspapers would consider that. Consider unlimited use online subscriptions, too.

RIAA wants ISP's to take on more downstream responsibility to prevent copyright infringement; FCC may agree: more than a net neutrality issue

The RIAA is still challenging the limitations on downstream liability in our legal system and claiming that ISP’s should be required to limit the transfer of infringing downloads, including those through P2P networks. EFF has a link to a Computer World story by Grant Gross, “RIAA tells FCC: ISP’s need to be copyright cops,” link here.

ISP’s even say that this is a “network neutrality” issue, but it is more a downstream liability exposure problem.

The FCC, in a Notice on Proposed Rulemaking from Oct. 22, 2009 (comment date Jan 14 2010), here had proposed that broadband providers “ be allowed to engage in "reasonable network management," including preventing the "lawful transfer of content," RIAA has also suggested that ISP’s follow a practice prescribed by law in France, to kick out subscribers after three violations.

Visitors: I can't be responsible for how you feel about yourselves, but I do empathize with what you're saying; please understand "subjunction"!

Occasionally I receive comments about a few of my blog postings or other essays, indicating or hinting (sometimes with irony or sarcasm) that the reader feels that he has been made to feel less well about himself because of the posting.

In many postings, I review lines of thinking and personal value systems of people that I had to deal with in the past. I try to restate their postulates and the conclusions or logical consequences of their “moral” belief systems. Sometimes readers believe that merely reviewing or restating their beliefs gives these belief systems credibility and “helps the enemy”; some people will take a post "personally" even though the speaker did not know them when writing the post. I maintain that it is important to understand how other people think, and how this relates to how people thought a few decades ago.

In writing, we often state hypotheses or assertions, as if they could be tested or questioned. But many times readers do not understand that these are hypothetical thought systems, and are taken as “fact”, relative to the world of the essay or blog posting author. Other (inflected) foreign languages (like French, especially) are better at dealing with this problem because they have more explicit conjugations for the “subjunctive mood,” than does (“analytic” and “simplified”) English, which places so much importance on overall context (as related to the "implicit content" problem). I’ve had another brutal lesson before (July 27, 2007 here), when readers did not understand that “fiction” by me was just that.

Given the nature of these postings, then , I don’t take personal responsibility for how a particular visitor “feels about himself.” There is no way that I could.

In a related area, however, I can empathize with the reader’s feelings. There are some “dark energy” areas in my own life where I sometimes believe others have not respected me and have felt free to suggest that I should allow my own life to be expropriated for the needs of others, that I should give up control over my own goals. This is quite disturbing to me and leads to “existential” questions about why I did not “perform better” at certain things or accept the idea of making conventional commitments earlier in life. On the other hand, I understand that when some people say these things they come from a more “collective” mindset that cares more about the group than the individual (that’s all too convenient for some people).

One of the biggest concerns underlying some of my more “challenging” columns is a concern that family responsibility is not always just a consequence of personal “choice” (that is, bringing children into the world an/or saying “I do”). Some of it can apply to anyone, depending on circumstances in that person’s family of origin, beyond the control of their own choices. Informally, many people see this as an issue of trying to "get out of things." We ought to sit down and face this squarely in our policy debates. It's about "personal responsibility" and justice, but it's about that "something else" (coummunity? family?) too. And yes, unelected filial responsibility can have a disparate impact on LGBT people.

How to monetize your presence on Twitter -- if you're popular enough

On ABC “Good Morning America” today (Tuesday Jan. 19), Tory Johnson (“Women for Hire”) covered how one can make some money from tweets. The service is called “Sponsored Tweets” (link) and is working now (after the show it became unreachable for some time).

The story appears on the second page of a report on working from home, “For You, Tweets can mean Cash”, link here.

But it seems as though you need to be pretty popular and famous on Twitter to make this work. You need at least 200 followers, so you need to be sociable. (It occurs to me that someone running multi-level marketing would have that many.) Remember, Ashton Kutcher (twitter page) has over one million followers. Remember also, he told Larry King Live that he doesn’t sleep much and gets up in the middle of the night to tweet.

I’ve always had trouble believing you can say a whole lot in "microblog posting" of 140 characters – Okay, it’s the concatenation or accumulation of them, with links, that says something. Right now, raising money for Haiti is giving celebrities a lot of material. Again, it's the social network that also attracts visitors and potential advertisers, not just self-published content.

I found another service called “Pay My Tweets” here. And it did tell me I wasn't "popular" enough!

A site called “Mashable” (remember “Facemash”?) has an article from last June, “Sponsored Tweets: The End of Twitter as We Know It?” link here.

Uganda reminds us of what anti-gay bias used to be like here; individualism should never be taken for granted

I remember when reading Crane Brinton’s world history textbook (“A History of Civilization”) while taking mandatory European history in college, that the authors would always prefix each chapter with questions as to why people or states or groups behaved and develop in manners that befuddle a modern mind today.

Recently (Jan. 7) the Washington Post ran an editorial about a barbaric proposal in Uganda to track down gay people. I covered it on the LGBT blog. Yet, a half century ago (particularly in the 1950s and early 1960s) homosexuals in this country faced witch-hunts and firings, and, as in my experience in 1961, college expulsions. Justifications for these persecutions were usually stated in religious or sometimes “collectivist” terms (as they were in Uganda, according to the Post editorial). We seemed to have an area of moral thinking that was obsessed with enforcing conformity, as if this were a more important priority that preventing crimes that had actual concrete victims. (Remember the horrific pronouncements and rants of "psychologist" Paul Cameron and author Gene Antonio back in the 1980s?) Over the decades, things changed, as gay rights moved from the area of “privacy” to “equality”, as with the gay marriage debate (particularly in the United States). Today, the term “witch-hunt” usually refers to purges in the United States military associated with the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. Because we have become a more open, individualistic, and technological society, we have changed our minds and perceptions of this issue. But it is still important to understand where these attitudes came from. Ultimately the issue is not homosexuality itself, but a weighing of the rights of the individual against the commonly perceived survival interests of the group.

The mindset that produces legislation like that proposed in Uganda sees the family unit as a basic unit of survival, and life itself as a “gift” (maybe not for many people). Therefore, anything that detracts from passing on one’s genes or partiality toward one’s own blood becomes unthinkable; it seems synonymous with suicide. Back in 1961 I dealt with a similar mindset: as an only male child, announcing even “latent homosexuality” was seen as a “death sentence” for a family lineage.

But gradually any group of people has to deal with individual differences among its members, and it also has to deal with the “unfairness” that an unfettered tribal, patriarchal society inevitably produces. Most of the history we study deals with struggles between nationalities, religious groups, races, and the like, and have to do with reallocation of resources to deal with perceived wrongs. But some of history deals with the development of laws as they relate to individuals, often acting in behalf of “families”, as the compete with or deal with one another. Gradually, religious or tribalistic and “knee-jerk” moral notions based on emotion come under the scrutiny of reason -- and in democratic societies, ultimately constitutional law.

To its credit, the “family values” system, or “natural family” paradigm posed by Carlson and others, accomplishes two big things. First, it gets people (especially men) to care about others in ways that transcend competitive self-interest as they first learn it in youth, and (most important) to transcend introspective or reactive fantasy. (Perhaps the focus on "virtue" in some very conservative religions is a ruse to avoid unwanted intimacy!) Second, besides raising the next generation of children in a stable environment (“the obvious”), its takes care of “less competitive” people (especially the elderly) with less intervention from the state, and provides a local context to make all human life inherently valuable. This second factor, extended intergenerational responsibility, becomes all the more critical today as lifespans increase and families are smaller.

These “accomplishment” get reflected in our legal system. Much of what our legal system does with this is try to enforce monogamy: tie individual men, who might feel incentivized to spread their genes among as many nubile women as possible, to specific spouses with specific responsibilities for the children that they father. No one sees this as controversial. Men are supposed to enter traditional (heterosexual) marriage partially socialized, but be tamed by their spouses (the "women tame men" thing of George Gilder) into transcending their competitiveness and self-focus with new modes of emotion and intimacy.

But it’s another area where the cultural and legal system becomes difficult. Men are more than reproductive or conjugal beings: we have individualized expressions which (especially now in the Internet age) we broadcast with pride. Some of us (like me) would rather stay in our own worlds and not even negotiate the competitive world of dating, marriage and babies. And my experience is that “we’re” a “problem” too for some people. The world sometimes demands that we develop the skills to provide for other people (especially blood family members) even though we have not made the “choice” to have procreative sexual intercourse and create new responsibilities in the form of children. The model is more like this: some of this responsibility is communal, and having children (in legally recognized marriage) earns recognition and support for carrying out communal responsibilities as well as creating new ones. It’s like a double journal entry. The demands for “involuntary family responsibility” can demand deferral or sacrifice of one’s own chosen goals. When I was a teenager in the 50s and early 60s, I thought I had a good shot at becoing a classical pianist and composer, and I would have worked hard enough. But the outside world would not leave me alone from its demands of "manhood" from me!

On the other hand, there is a separate world where adults focus on the value of relationships for their own creative potential, outside the world of social approbation. But communities of adults with this kind of focus tended to do better when they were closed and somewhat secluded. That's tougher in the Internet age.


In a sense, “sodomy laws” used to have the purpose of enforcing or imposing familial connectedness and family responsibility on everyone, whatever one's own separate talents. Married couples monopolized sexuality and those who did not form their own families were expected to subordinate themselves to the family. Sometimes certain provisions were provided: unmarried women could be encourage to become teachers and “enjoyed” a certain amount of prestige and authority (remember “Good Morning Miss Dove”). Unmarried men were worse off, except in the Catholic Church, where they could become priests (sometimes with dangerous results). This way, those who were “different” could not threaten the system by standing at a distance from it and kibitzing. The family model was indeed a collective one, which tended to live off of fears and it never followed the idea of individual personal responsibility that is so accepted in individualistic society today.

Laws regarding "public decency" and now the military "don't tell" law have the effect of preventing "distraction" from family intimacy when it is needed -- at least that's what a lot of people perceive.

The old system had some explaining to do, to be sure. It chided young men (like me) who were not physically competitive (making us feel like mooches), but then it seemed to turn about-face (with a self-serving double standard) and expect us to be interested in marriage and family (even in "acting" as fatherly role models ourselves) even after we had been told we had been competitive “failures” as boys. Some of the “explaining” may have come from the fact that a lot of young male competition occurred in groups (especially team sports, like football, leading to a social structure well suited to the military). The competition was supposed to occur in a context that emphasized that young men owed their “community” something: the ability to protect women and children (hence the era of conscription or the draft, and the morally tenuous student deferments of the Vietnam era -- and a neo-authoritarian mentality that decried physical "cowardice" and said, "If you don't go, someone else has to sacrifice in your place"). In time, technology would help the less “physical” people (the nerds) invent new ways to “compete” (Facebook provides an extreme example), eventually developing and reinforcing a moral value system much more centered on individual responsibility for self than for family per se.

By the 1990s, we had evolved an informal "social contract" that regarded marriage and having children as a purely personal decision whose moral significance rested with the person. That notion has been reverting back in the past few years, as we begin to realize that not only child rearing but longevity in many areas requires a lot more familial and community commitment. "Personal responsibility" now incorporates a sense of understanding one's dependencies on the unseen sacrifices of others, as well as some "existential" responsibilty for sustainability, especially one has spoken out. Curiously, this deeper notion of "responsibility" seems to meld with earlier notions of "biological" loyalty and makes some familial intimacy almost compulsory. The problems of "fairness" in how family responsibility is met, particularly in a world of longer lifetimes with disability, become quite profound. That's really the importance of the gay marriage debate.

Update: Jan 19

The comment source below maintains this blog, "Gay Uganda", here.

Newspaper staff cuts lead to more errors; Post ombudsman weighs in: newspaper staff has to deal with new media, just like bloggers!

Along the lines of the troubles of “establishment journalism”, Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander has an interesting column Sunday, Jan. 17 on p A21, “Is Post editing sloppier?” The online title of the story is “Why you’re seeing more copy-editing errors in the Post”, link here.

Yes, words get mixed up (“principal” v. “principle” – a good mixup not mentioned is “comprised” which is usually correct in active voice instead of “is comprised of”). Little details get misreported.

Alexander explains the problem partly in economy-driven staff reductions, but also in terms of the writing style and technical skills required for effective presentation of the stories (including this one) on the Web. Newspapers really do follow search engine optimization and “cost per click” and other advertising efficiency measures. Because they have to make a profit and make a payroll partly with this revenue, it’s a much bigger issue for them than it is for “citizen journalists” (yesterday’s post), although it raises an “existential” question, what if all bloggers had to prove they could actually make money with their writing to support other people?

The care and attention to detail required in professional journalism is quite remarkable. Foster Winans related all of this in his 1989 book “Trading Secrets” (St. Martin’s) about his career at the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s, with older technology. I've noticed in the past ten years or so that little typos have become more common in "trade" (or "regularly") published books, also. I had my share in my self-published book in 1997.

Update: Jan. 18

Check The New York Times, p B6, Richard Perez-Pena, "As Shrinking Newsrooms Use Upstarts' Content, Vetting Questions Arise," link here.

Is "citizen journalism" (aka "blogger journalism") an oxymoron?

Is the practice of “citizen journalism” or particularly “blogger journalism” a “fundamental right” as part of the First Amendment?

To the extent that citizen journalism is usually unsupervised (with some exceptions where it is sponsored by newspapers) the term is theoretically an oxymoron. “Journalism” implies complete objectivity as well as systematic, rigorous fact-checking.

Most or nearly all “citizens” would have some natural bias about some things because of “inequality” in life circumstances and experiences. If someone has no biases at all, then that person probably has no responsibility for others, so why should we listen to them? (We’ve visited this point before.)

We can speak of citizen “writings” and admit (as I recall from an interchange in a Minneapolis NWU group one time) and accept the idea that they don’t have to be completely “objective” and maybe shouldn’t pretend to be.

Nevertheless, what we call “blogger journalism” can often, in practice, be reasonably balanced and add a lot of nuance to the debate or history of issues on top of what is usually reported by established media.

There may be some people who should not engage in “blogger journalism.” It’s particularly troubling when one is in a position of authority over others in the workplace, at least in the long term with formal reports, and is in the position to make decisions that affect subordinates, or perhaps customers. Some of this bit of ethical concern crawled out of the woodwork (sort of “Outer Limits” style, like a “blob”) when I was writing my book involving (in part) gays in the military and was in a work situation where I worked for a company that catered to military officers – but we determined that I was not in a position to make an decisions that affected anyone, and then I transferred away from this when there was a corporate buyout anyway.

Likewise, someone responsible for a family (most people are, not always by choice) has to be careful that his self-promotion does not jeopardize his ability to earn a living and provide for the family, or otherwise expose the family.

Blogger journalism may sound gratuitous (leading to the “implicit content” problem), and that concern could melt away if the journalism becomes monetized. But that idea gets challenged by the idea that conventional newspapers are having such a hard time today. On the other hand, social media companies are very profitable, sometimes, for the entrepreneurs who started them.

As noted in the previous posting, employers are getting increasingly nervous about associates’ blogging, fearing, not so much outright disclosure of trade secrets, but disruption of relations with clients and stakeholders, and even the prospective fear that employees will write about them after they leave. But even established media companies have hired undercover reporters to work for companies they will report on (as with a famous ABC investigation of Food Lion in the 1990s).

I started down the path of “citizen journalism” myself in the 1990s as a result of my involvement with the “gays in the military” debate, based on earlier personal experiences decades previously. For better or worse, I am linked to it, although in a kind of quasi early retirement (now at 66). The ideology of it is far from perfect. I’d love to be a “real journalist.”

So, Anderson, would I love your job. You bet (but you paid your dues early). I remember, Anderson, when you were wading in the flood waters of Hurricane Rita on a Saturday night in September 2008, reporting. You should have been back in the Big Apple, where the Financial Crisis would erupt the next day.

Employers: "Dooce" and "Pre-dooce"

Here’s a piece I’ve heard about from the San Diego Reader from September 3, 2008[note, just before the financial crash!], “You blog, you’re out!”, by Michael Hemmingson (link)
Here, he talks about job applicants being “pre-dooced” by being asked about blogging: particularly, have they ever blogged about a job after they’ve left the job. You see the existential point: if you did, how does a prospective employer know you won’t do the same thing to “him”? You can’t prove a negative, you know. (By the way, the new verb “dooce” refers to being fired for what you say on the Web with your own resources from home, a term that originated with Heather Armstrong in 2002 and became the name of her famous mommy blog website.)

The article gives a lot of examples of other doocings and pre-doocings, mostly for pretty silly behavior by the “victims.” The issue is clouded by many factors, like a debate over whether amateur blogging is really legitimate “citizen journalism” and the misimpression that the First Amendment would apply to private employers. As far back as 1999, a nurse was fired from a hospital from Arizona for appearing with her husband in a porn site the couple created!!

The article lists a compilation of anonymous blogs (here) including blogs about work, which are not always as safe as they sound. Like social networking sites offering privacy settings, Livejournal (link) offers varying degrees of restricted access. And “Tor Project” (link) will help defend against electronic surveillance, such as of IP addresses (Tor is popular overseas with political dissidents).

As for writing about past jobs, I do think there is an issue of “common sense”. I don’t think there is a problem in discussing how systems technology worked in an IBM mainframe shop or even a non-IBM mainframe 30 years ago compares to how things work today, even if you name the companies, as long as you keep it “general.” (You almost would do this on a resume site anyway.) Yes, I mention NBC, Chilton (Experian), and BCBS, but I don’t think anyone minds because nothing I say is remotely compromising of confidentiality or remotely related to specific people who were at the companies involved.

Even so, it seems as though, still, few employers spell out blogging policies very specifically (although CNN does).

The article concludes with some tonal writing, that bloggers will have to fight to protect their freedom of speech in the practical world. Agreed.


Let me add, I don't set up sites to rate providers of services (like doctors, teachers) etc., and I don't make postings on the many sites around that do rate providers. If I displayed a public propensity to do that, how could they work with me in the future.

MSNBC editorial scathes Facebook, other social media companies on attitudes toward user privacy

Helen A.S. Popkin has a stinging commentary about Facebook on MSNBC today: “Privacy is dead on Facebook. Get over it. Cool kids don’t care about privacy, claim cool CEOs. So, neither should you.” The link is here.

She makes some interesting quotes of executives in other companies. In 1999 Sun Microsystmes Scott McNealy said “you have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” And Google’s Eric Schmidt said “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”

She quotes Mark Zuckerberg as saying that blogging has really taken off in the past 5 or 6 years as a social networking tool – but here she misses a point. Socializing and meeting people is one thing; publishing in order to enter debate (more like what I “innovated” – previous post) is related but not the same thing. True, social norms about what kind of information should can and be shared has evolved over time. But, when I’m a substitute teacher and a kid has found me on Google, I don’t need to be asked why I’m not married and don’t have kids. The1993 mentality that had led to “don’t ask don’t tell” really got blown away by the techie kids.

Toward the end of her piece Popkin echoes Rick Warren as she writes “Privacy isn’t just about you, even if you have nothing to hide. Privacy is also about those in power abusing personal information, or those in power having their personal information abused in ways that can eventually affect us, the little people.”

I remember back in 1996 that the Libertarian Party was going to consider a constitutional amendment that would read simply “The right to privacy shall not be infringed.” Remember how “the right to be left alone” figured into cases like Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas. We have really gone around in circles, haven’t we.

Also, check Meghan Cox Gurden, Commentary in The Washington Examiner, Jan. 14, "It's like being stalked by a computer", link here. Just read it!

Political blogging: just where is it headed?

I’m going to start this post with an extended (and I think, under the circumstances, fair use) quote of a Washington Times editorial dated Oct. 12, 2005, regarding campaign finance reform and blogging (in reply to a related Washington Post editorial the day before). Unfortunately, the Times editorial doesn’t pull up now, but I had saved it because it figured, through a bizarre chain of coincidental circumstances, into a serious incident when I was substitute teaching (see July 27, 2007 here) – events that sound like a humdinger and deserving of movie treatment now.

Here’s the quote:

“Political blogs aren't widely read because they are funded by some multimillion-dollar company through political advertising. As Michael Krempasky, director of RedState.org, testified before Congress last month, money has very little to do with it. ‘Bloggers don't have influence because they start with large chunks of capital -- in fact, most if not all start out as relatively lonely voices with tiny audiences. By delivering credible, interesting, and valuable content, their audience and influence grows over time, ‘ he said. In other words, blogging is an endeavor subject to the rules of the free market. Inside this unbridled exercise in free speech, the good rise to the top, while the hacks and frauds go ignored or quickly disappear. “

This editorial appeared just as social networking sites were heating up, with the public (including newspaper editorial staffs) still not quite grasping how the nature of “online reputation” was soon going to grow. Recently, I covered here how “socializing” and “publishing” online are interrelated but still different concepts. “Socializing” doesn’t always imply a desire for the limelight – and we know that Facebook, when it was started, recognized this fact much more than did Myspace.

But the Washington Times has a terrific point: an individual blogger, just out of the quality of his or her postings, could be in a position to influence how millions think about a particular issue. And the blogger didn’t compete for the approval of others by the usual routes expected in the past, and doesn’t seem answerable to any specific hierarchy, whether business-related, political or familial. Of course that point, as noted here before, invokes the problem of “the privilege of being listened to.” And most of this happened because the "due diligence" and supervision element of publishing simply got dropped as unnecessary (sort of the way junk bonds were justified), with the help of some fortunate legislation (Section 230) and a certain naivete about the ultimate downstream legal risks.

There seems to be a fundamental question: just how significant can a blog be, then, since it can have such unbounded reach? Is this just a theoretical artifact of technology (including the powerful broadcasting effect of search engines – and you really don’t have to pay for placement), or is it something “real” with ethically significant consequences for our social and political system?

But the growth in the concern s about “online reputation” – and the attention that companies like Michael Fertik’s Reputation Defender, or a competitor Reputation Hawk – now garner, seems to answer that question. Online self-publishing, freed from the restraints of supervision and accountability (and especially the expectation of financial returns) can have a real effect on things, ranging from people’s employment prospects to the future of conventional newspapers.

That leads to another concern: it self-produced content seems gratuitous or designed only to grab attention without having to compete through “normal” means or step into taking responsibility for others in manners that often determined by social and familial hierarchies, then the “purpose” of content becomes an important part of it, leading to the novel legal notion called “implicit content”, hardly mentioned before 2006 but mentioned during the COPA trial. Curiously, this notion has grown while bloggers remained largely oblivious to the fact that their public postings bore the same technical legal risks of liability (for libel or copyright infringment, among other things) as more conventionally "published" literature -- leading to the new controversy over pricing media perils insurance.

On the other side of all of this, consider the way our “conventional” way of competing for reward and limelight used to work. “You” were expected to prove that you could serve as an authority figure over others, or that “you” could manipulate others into buying things that you did not produce or invent yourself but that you peddled in order to prove that you could produce more revenue for somebody else’s bottom line than your neighbor across the street. No wonder blogging, maybe combined with a prolonged period of offering free content, seems like such an attractive opportunities for the introvert. Truth counts as much as power.

Back in 2006, Fairfax County Public Schools English teacher Erica Jacobs wrote in the DC Examiner about introducing blogging to her students as a form of literature, but caused nervousness and fear among her school administrators.

All of this melds together, as new modes for the best way of representing oneself online develop, with ideas as to how to develop an integrated presence, coordinating Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, professional publications and perhaps blogs. Gone are the days that I evolved my own presence, the 90s environment where one had one life at work and another “private-public” life online. Peaceful coexistence couldn’t last forever. It was no longer “sustainable” when social media stirred the pot.

Social networking and self-publishing have evolved side by side, interlocked, but gradually coming together. The whole process is one grand “reconciliation” (one of novelist Clive Barker’s favorite temrs) as two views of life: one centered on the value of the individual as a member of the group (especially family), and another on the individual as “competitive” global citizen.

Although I didn’t make much money at it (I’m no “accidental billionaire”, not even by a factor of thousands), I do believe that I helped to “innovate” “political blogging” in the late 1990s, motivated by a couple of specific issues (“don’t ask don’t tell” and COPA) that would engulf other issues like Steve McQueen’s “Blob”. That became the path for the second half of my life, for better or worse.

In bizarre case, plaintiff gets entire sites ordered shut down by New Jersey court, despite Section 230

A court in New Jersey issued an order to shut down three websites and revoke domain associated registrations, all related to allegations made on these websites about the Apex Technology Group, which is involved in bringing technology workers to the United States under H1-B non-immigrant visas. The websites were apparently critical of Apex and also linked to a particular Apex document while providing some sort of commentary on it. Apex allegedly claimed that the defendants were guilty of both copyright infringement and defamation, creating a bizarre situation where a copyright owner defames itself. (A variation of this problem occurred in my own experience: see July 27, 2007 on this blog.)

An article by Kurt Opsahl, “Order to Shut Down Websites Critical of Apex Technology Group is Dangerous and Wrong” link, provides a lot of analysis.

One of the most shocking aspects of the order was the total ignorance of the protections of ISPs under Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Another is that a whole website is shut down because of material related to one plaintiff, which might be a miniscule portion of the entire site.

Juror home Internet access and social networking during multi-day trials becoming a problem

Jury duty has always been a civic obligation, which could disrupt a person’s livelihood, to the point that many employers would cover it. That was the case more me: I got called to jury duty four times in Dallas in the 1980s (with the one day, one trial system) and was foreman once.

But asking jurors to remain mum on the Internet while on jury duty seems too much to ask. Check out the Metro story “Social networking among jurors is trying judges’ patience,” by Del Quentin Wilber, the Washington Post, Saturday Jan. 9, here, mostly about cases in Maryland. Convictions have been overturned or at least challenged after jurors admitting doing “research” on the Internet (even just looking up words on Wikipedida), or when several jurors “friended” each other on Facebook and chatted about the case, potentially “bullying” other jurors to go along.

In the most sensitive cases in the physical world, jurors can be sequested in hotels, and kept away from newspapers and media, including the Internet.

Attorneys could research a juror’s “online reputation”, especially blog postings, to look for prejudices that might affect a verdict in a case; but it’s unclear where appeals courts would consider such post mortem material seriously,