Neal's Notes

The Economist recently had a lively online debate about whether more government action is necessary to protect individuals’ online privacy. Will this result in excessive government regulation and finally bring to reality Orwellian controls over every detail of our private digital lives?

Marc Rotenberg, president/executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, argued that there’s currently no definitive check on private sector data collection. He said companies do post privacy policies on websites and then “do as they wish with the personal information they collect.”

He makes some good points – some new Internet privacy laws and regulations may be necessary to stop what these companies are allegedly doing.

But Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, postulated that “the Internet is not for couch potatoes. It is not an interactive medium. While Internet users enjoy its offerings, they should be obligated in watching out for themselves.”

I fall into Harper’s camp. The less government intervention/intrusion, the better. And he made a number of cogent arguments.

All major browsers currently allow users to control online tracking – with Internet Explorer and Firefox you simply click on the ‘Privacy’ tab to customize cookie settings – yet few people even take these simple steps to guard their privacy.

Government regulation, Harper argues, “will make consumers worse off than they could be. The better alternative is to get people educated and involved in their own privacy protection.”

To wit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation provides a list of the Top 12 ways to protect your privacy, itemized/condensed as follows:

• Do not reveal personal information inadvertently
• Use cookie management software
• Keep a clean email address
• Don’t reveal personal details to strangers or just-met ‘friends’
• Realize you might be monitored at work, avoid sending highly personal email to mailing lists, and keep sensitive files on your home computer
• Beware of sites offering some sort of reward or price in exchange for your contact information or other personal details
• Do not reply to spammers for any reason
• Be conscious of web security
• Be conscious of home computer security
• Examine privacy policies and seals
• Remember that you decide what information about yourself to reveal, when, why and to whom
• Use encryption

Pretty basic/common sense stuff – if we all put these practices to heart, we’ll keep the government at arm’s length – digitally speaking. Thoughts?

TweetCongress recently reported that more than 200 members of the U.S. Congress are utilizing Twitter. While this may look impressive, the numbers are still less than 50 percent and in today’s digital world, you would have thought that all 435 members would have quickly jumped on board in order to reach out to constituents – and especially as another fund-raising mechanism.

Most followed? Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), 1,717,550; Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), 45,836; Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), 39,284; Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), 38,786; and Senate Republicans, 21,702.

Republicans also capture all top 5 spots in Tweets per day: Senate Republicans, 7.98; Rep. Charles Djou (R-HI), 4.9; Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), 4.02; Rep. John Carter (R-TX), 3.46; and Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), 3.44.

So how are members of Congress using Twitter – and is it proving effective? Feng Chi and Nathan Yang from the University of Toronto recently released a study entitled, “Twitter in Congress: Outreach vs. Transparency.”

To quote their abstract, “the paper provides some support in favor of Twitter adoption being driven by outreach reasons, rather than the well-popularized transparency motive. Furthermore, outreach considerations factor into a Republican’s perceived benefit more than a Democrat’s.”

Chi and Yang concluded that transparency matters more for Democrats; outreach is more important for Republicans.

“The perceived benefit of outreach is related to the impact it could have in influencing political rivals who are also on Twitter, while the perceived benefit of transparency is related to a representative’s experience,” the pair said. “A representative’s propensity to adopt Twitter increases with the number of bills he/she sponsored, which we argue is a proxy for the perceived benefit associated with government outreach through Twitter.”

Chi and Yang said their study came up short in identifying the role that constituents play in social media.

“While we would expect that politicians keep track of their constituents’ Tweets, we are uncertain whether these Tweets have any direct influence on specific details contained within important legislature. That is, does the content from a constituent’s Tweet every make its way into the content of a bill.”

Chi and Yang further postulated that if politicians are using Twitter for outreach, then they predict that those who adopt Twitter will have greater success in getting bills passed. “If politicians are using Twitter for transparency, then those who adopt Twitter should perform better in approval ratings and elections.”

I expect we’ll see a plethora of related papers on this topic shortly after the mid-term elections – stay tuned.

Five years ago I could pick up the classified section of my local paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and actually feel some substance to it. Today, even the Sunday classifieds are silicon wafer thin.

It’s nothing new to report – the Internet has wreaked havoc with media budgets nationwide. Community newspapers, for instance, used to derive about 10 percent of their annual revenue from public notices. Today, cash-starved state and local governments simply go online and publish themselves, effectively cutting out the community newspaper as ‘middleman.’

And the media continues to be directly/indirectly impacted from other government funding sources – the Nieman Journalism Lab reported that postal subsidies were worth $1.97 billion in the mid-1960s (in 2009 dollars). Today they have shrunk by more than 75 percent to $288 million. A postal fee hike last year, for example, cost The Nation more than $500,000 in mailing costs last year – not exactly good news when the magazine reportedly bled more than $300,000 in red ink.

Is there a solution? Most would agree that free speech and free press are sacrosanct and also essential to a healthy U.S. economy. Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, recently postulated one interesting scenario – enhanced public funding for journalism.

It’s not a new concept – public broadcasting, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab, is, in the aggregate, funded 40 percent by various government entities. In fact, Bollinger reported that both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have initiated studies of ways to ensure that the economic pickle facing newspapers and broadcast news doesn’t deprive Americans of important information they need as citizens.

Bollinger said Americans already depend to some extent on publicly funded foreign news media for a lot of international news – “especially through broadcasts of the BBC and BBC World Service on PBS and NPR. Such news comes to us courtesy of British citizens who pay a TV license fee to support the BBC and taxes to support the World Service.”

He added that this type of state support hasn’t resulted in official control – “the reliable public funding structure, as well as a set of professional norms that protect editorial freedom, has yielded a highly respected and globally powerful journalistic institution.”

Bollinger believes top priority should be given to strengthening America’s public broadcasting role globally. The federal government’s two international broadcasters, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, for instance, can’t even broadcast within the U.S. – an anachronistic Cold War policy.

The solution? Bollinger recommends creating an American World Service that can compete with outfits like the BBC, China’s CCTV and Xinhua News Agency, even Qatar’s Al Jazeera.

“The goal would be an American broadcasting system with full journalistic independence that can provide the news we need,” Bollinger said.

Sounds good to me.

A few months ago, the renowned Pew Research Center launched the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Telephone interviews of 2,252 adults ages 18 and older (including 744 reached via mobile) were conducted between April 29-May 30.

Overall, the results produced nothing earth shattering or game changing, but many of the findings further illustrated a number of handset trends.

Here a few:

Minority Americans are setting the pace when it comes to mobile access, especially via handset devices. African-Americans and Latinos are more likely to own a cell phone than their white counterparts (87% for both; compared to 80% for whites). Both minority groups also take advantage of a much wider array of their phones’ data functions compared to white cell phone owners.

Not surprisingly, 90% of 18-29 year olds own a cell phone and are more likely than those in other age groups to utilize mobile data applications discussed as part of the survey.

Some significant stats for this age group: 
• 95% send/receive text messages
• 93% use their phone to take pictures
• 81% send photos or videos to others
• 65% access the Internet on their mobile device
• 60% use their phones to play games or record a video

And some interesting percentages on the low-end:
• 21% have used a status update service such as Twitter from their phone
• 20% have purchased something using their mobile phone
• 19% have made a charitable donation by text message

The findings also indicated that while overall cell phone ownership has remained steady (82% of all American adults own a cell phone), the use of mobile data applications has jumped markedly as you can see in the above visual:

Figures gleaned for seven additional cell phone data applications also revealed some interesting numbers:
• 54% have used their mobile device to send someone a photo or video
• 23% have accessed a social networking site using their phone
• 20% have used their phone to watch a video
• 15% have posted a photo or video online
• 11% have purchased a product using their phone
• 11% have made a charitable donation by text message
• 10% have used their mobile phone to access a status update service such as Twitter

More than half of mobile web users go online from their phones on a daily basis.

A direct quote from the study:

“In addition to being a growing proportion of the overall cell phone population, users of the mobile web now go online more frequently using their handheld devices than they did as recently as last year. More than half of all mobile Internet users go online from their handheld devices on a daily basis – 43% do so several times a day, and 12% do so about once a day. At a similar point in 2009, just 24% of mobile Internet users went online several times a day.”

The survey added that among mobile Internet users, frequency of use was highest among the affluent and well-educated.

If you’re a legal/journalism junkie, you may have read that a federal court recently ruled that Chuck DeVore, a California senatorial candidate, infringed on former Eagles member Don Henley by using two songs in paid political advertisements.

The songs — “The Boys of Summer” and “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” were reworked in political videos and titled, “The Hope of November” and “All She Wants to Do Is Tax.”

The court blocked their use, stating that since DeVore was not parodying Henley, there was no fair use.

Mike Masnick, in a recent techdirt posting, indicated that under current copyright law, parody is given more leeway under fair use; satire, in contrast, “involves using a work to comment on something other than the work itself.”

Kurt Ospahl, writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, postulated that from a First Amendment point of view, it’s a strange way to address political speech.

“For the court, the political purpose was a strike against fair use, because the court considered the videos to be a commercial use, seeking ‘publicity and campaign donations.’ In contrast, the Supreme Court has recognized that the First Amendment, ‘has its fullest and most urgent application’ to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.”

Ospahl said that the court insisted that Devore prove that the videos would not harm the potential licensing market for Henley’s songs.

“Under that view, however, few satires will ever pass fair use muster,” added Ospahl. “That would inflict more harm on future creators than DeVore did on Henley’s works.  Satire is an art form that has enriched the political process since time immemorial. In the fourth century BC, Aristophanes, a comic playwright in ancient Athens, routinely skewered politicians and influenced the early democracy. Satire has continued to play a vital role in democracies through today.”

But Osprey said that he’s optimistic that courts have begun to better interpret fair use and that it should apply to transformative satires.

“So although the judge in Henley v. DeVore got it wrong, other courts will have a chance to recognize the value of satire and fair use,” he said.

Thoughts?

Whilst recently adding some blogs to our blogroll, our webmaster, Elyssa Malakoff, who heads up central NJ-based ELM Design World (highly recommend utilizing her services!), suggested that I do a posting outlining some of my favorites. Great idea!

So here’s my Top 10 list:

Boy Genius Report – Was founded by an anonymous blogger known as Boy Genius. Has a great online following as he or she has constantly broke stories in the mobile gadget space.

College Fashionista – As someone who is severely fashion-challenged (I strategically line up dress shirts and corresponding ties in a row and also memorize combinations so I don’t walk out of the house looking like a clown), I normally wouldn’t glance at this. But my niece is blogging for them so am slightly biased, and of course, her postings are top-notch.

Daily Kos – This is an online political community with more than two million monthly visitors, established in May 2002. Contributors have included numerous senators, members of Congress, and governors.

engadget – Geek Central for gadgets.  ‘Nuf said.

Gizmodo – More gadgets and technology. Launched in 2002, Gizmodo is now Gawker Media’s largest blog, with more than 100 million page views a month in traffic.

Guy Kawasaki – Always has cogent posts.  He’s a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. and author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.

Lifehacker – Lifehacker is a software and productivity blog providing tips and tricks for streamlining life with computers. The blog “points out software downloads, web sites, do-it-yourself projects, how to’s, tutorials, shortcuts and tips for going beyond the default settings and getting things done in the most clever, unexpected and efficient ways.”

Media Decoder – Published by the New York Times, contains a lot of relevant media-oriented stories. It’s an insider’s guide to the media industry, tracking the movie business, television, print, advertising, marketing and new media.

The Onion – I loved MAD Magazine as a kid and have always enjoyed warped, off-kilter humor. Now I get my chuckles from reading the wicked satire of The Onion. It’s read by more than 3 million people each week, online and in print in select cities. Another million folks listen to Onion Radio News. In 2007, The Onion also launched Onion News Network, a 24-hour video news network.

The Opinionator – Online commentary from the New York Times – lots of interesting subjects, topics and contributors. Worth checking out.

The Computer Industry Almanac now estimates there are more than 1.8 billion Internet users worldwide. But at least in the U.S., we’re not hangin’ out very long on any particular web page (and I plead guilty too) – Nielsen reports that the average American spends only 56 seconds there before moving on.

So are we becoming a bunch of digital gnats – just buzzin’ around, filling our heads with all sorts of arcane facts/figures that are forgotten hours later, or are we actually getting smarter?

Could be a bit of both. Two contributors to a recent Wall Street Journal story, Does the Internet Make You Smarter or Dumber, presented cogent arguments for each supposition.

Clay Shirky, who most recently penned Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, believes that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of the 21st century. Shirky said the Internet “restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.” He added that we’re now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives.

“Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies,” said Shirky.

Shirky stated that we’re going through an explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media links over a billion people into the same network.

“This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about,” said Shirky. “In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching TV, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.”

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, said that the Internet, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers.

“When we’re constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking,” said Carr. “We become more like signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.”

Carr added that he finds it distressing to compare the cognitive effects of the Internet with those of the printed book.

“Whereas the Internet scatters our attention, the book focuses it,” he said. “Unlike the screen, the page promotes contemplativeness. To read a book is to practice an unnatural process of thought – our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival as they reduced the odds that a predator would take us by surprise or that we’d overlook a nearby food source. We now have to strengthen the neural links to counter our instinctive distractedness, thereby gaining control over our attention and our mind.”

Carr believes that we’re at risk of losing this mental acuity as we continue to spend more time online.

So were you able to read this brief essay in its entirety sans interruptions?

Or were you simultaneously texting, using IM, viewing split screens with multiple web browsers going, and chatting with someone on your iPhone or Crackberry?

Spotted an excellent posting by Craig Silverman in the Columbia Journalism Review. We have all stood in line at the grocery store and perused through the often sensational headlines/articles from the National Enquirer. I’ve always wondered how the publication goes about checking their sources and substantiating what’s published.

Silverman interviewed Barry Levine, the executive editor/director of news at the National Enquirer.

Levine told Silverman “obviously we want the public to believe the stories we’re writing but things are different because we’re in the business of revealing secrets … there’s obviously a lot at stake, so the vetting process as it relates to sources really is the most important part of the process.”

Levine, noted Silverman, said that no two Enquirer stories are the same in terms of their verification requirements.

“We have a very particular system that is probably more elaborate than any other newspaper or magazine in America,” Levine says. “We have a battery of devices available to us, and I’ll use as many or all that I feel necessary to bring in a story.”

Silverman outlined some of the safeguards:

Independent Corroboration: Levine regularly has multiple reporters hit the pavement to see if they come back with information that corroborates what the paper has already received from a specific source. Usually, the reporters have no idea what their colleagues are up to.

Polygraphs: The weekly has relationships with several polygraphs experts. “If we have very revealing information about a celebrity or newsmaker, we will have the source sit down and be administered a polygraph test based on specific questions about what they told us,” Levine says.

Affidavits and Recordings: Silverman said that the Enquirer will often have off-the-record sources sign a legal affidavit that attests to the accuracy of their information, and also ensures they will appear in court to testify to their information. This helps the weekly satisfy its legal team, though Levine told Silverman that in a decade with the publication he’s never found himself in a courtroom. Another step is audio taping and videotaping the source to provide a clear testimony. This is to ensure that “a few months down the road they won’t change their story.”

Legal Vetting: The Enquirer’s legal team is very much a part of the vetting and verification process. Levine told Silverman that anything in a story that is new information specific to the Enquirer’s reporting must be sourced and provided to the company’s lawyers. As an example, the Enquirer lawyers required editors and reporters to go back and get additional corroboration before giving the green light to publish about Tiger Woods’s infidelity.

Traditional Fact-Checking: There are six employees in the magazine’s Florida-based research/fact-checking department. They check quotes with people who have gone on the record and verify information such as the spelling of names, addresses etc.

Food for thought next time you see some of those screaming headlines – and here are just a few that the Enquirer currently has online:

Oh-Oh-7!: Daniel Craig’s Steamy Gay Kiss

Tom Cruise Meltdown

Zac and Vanessa: Trial Marriage

The Night Lana Turner’s Daughter Stabbed Her Lover to Death with a Butcher Knife

Over the past few months I’ve read numerous stories on how businesses of varying sizes and all walks of life have utilized Twitter to snag more customers and increase revenues.

Small businesses, in particular, that have limited marketing/advertising dollars to spend have found Twitter to be especially useful.

A New York Times story accentuated this:

“Because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.”

The article also quoted an industry analyst, Greg Sterling, who focuses on the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses:

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these super small businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple.”

Probably one of the most ubiquitous Twitter business success stories is Los Angeles-based Kogi Korean BBQ. Owner Mark Manguera tweets his BBQ truck’s locations and times each day so customers can easily find him. They now have topped 22,000 followers and more than 800 people are served at each stop.

But on a personal note, we’ll be starting project work for a client in the next few weeks – and it was all based on a bawdy Tiger Woods retweet from a friend.

The retweet was seen by a former project manager who worked for a company that we represented for 14 years until they took their PR in-house. I had not corresponded with this soon-to-be client in almost a decade. But somehow he spotted that retweet circulating out there in the digital ether world, tracked me down and contacted me.

And to add to the karmic connections, one magazine example that I sent to him to demo our capabilities also featured his photo (unbeknownst to me) – he was conducting a product demonstration for a public agency official.

Proverbial bottom line – I went out and bought a few extra California Lottery and Mega Millions lotto tickets (haven’t won yet, but there’s always that next drawing) and suggested to my soon-to-be client to do the same. We had a good chuckle over a coffee but were both amazed at how effective social media tools can be, no matter how they may be implemented.

Got any weirder examples? I’d love to hear them.

A recent PR Week/PRNewswire media survey didn’t reveal any startling trends, but definitely reinforced what’s fast become obvious – journalists are relying more and more on utilizing social media to research and craft stories.

The survey queried over a thousand journalists in the U.S. from all genres – blogs, online news sites, TV, radio, wire services, newspapers, and magazines. More than 1,300 PR practitioners were also polled and were asked how the changing media landscape is affecting them and the way they work with journalists.

Some interesting snippets/factoids:

37% of traditional journalists are being asked by their bosses to contribute to Twitter; 39% to a blog as part of their expected/expanded duties.

62% of PR professionals follow individual journalists and media outlets via social networks.

61% of journalists have received pitches via Facebook in the past year; 44% via Twitter.

59% of traditional journalists also have a blog; 31% are also writing a blog for their traditional outlet, up 28% from 2009.

17% of PR pros responding to the survey are pitching to traditional media outlets with less frequency; 66% target bloggers more frequently; 45% go directly to consumers more often.

Two comments from editors for the survey were particularly noteworthy:

“It’s a digital age, and we’re looking for the fastest, most efficient way to reach out to other people in the industry,” said Eric Berger, science blogger for the Houston Chronicle. “These types of outlets provide that efficiency. Just a few seconds online can provide a list of contact information for someone you may be trying to reach, and it’s a time saver. That’s important in an environment where people feel like they have less time.”

Kate Corcoran, technology editor for Women’s Wear Daily, added that Twitter posts are morphing into news coverage – reporters post updates to complement more detailed stories to be published later.

“In covering parties or fashion events, our reporters will use Twitter to talk about what’s going on, and that may coincide with a story that might take a day to write,” Corcoran said. “There’s definitely more of a blurring between the professional and personal with social media than there was before.”