Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

HP Gets a Clue

UPDATED

Thomas Hawk posted a civil but negative comment on a Hewlett-Packard blog. HP deleted it. Hawk raised hell, and got noticed. David Gee, the HP blog host, reversed his decision.

In an e-mail this morning, Hawk said:

I think all in all HP did the right thing. Everyone deserves second chances and I’m optimistic that we will see more responsible corporate blogging from HP going forward.

Companies should think carefully about using comments on their blogs though. Unlike an individual blogger, corporate bloggers have additional constituencies to think about -- namely shareholders and company employees.

I always thought that when you were with the Merc that you did a pretty good job managing comments. Certainly comments do need to be moderated and there are things that need to be censored (spam, racist and offensive language, vulgarity, etc.). But smart companies should realize that simply deleting critical comments is not smart business. You might get away with it sometimes but there is a chance that you won’t -- and if you don’t, the fallout can be much worse. Credibility is a really important thing.

This example also points out two other things.

1. The blogosphere has put tremendous power through the collective into the hands of even the smallest bloggers. You are already keenly aware of this. The ability to get something printed at Slashdot and the ensuing traffic is something that is new and it is real power that smart bloggers and consumers now have. And whether it is Engadget or Gizmodo or Slashdot or Boing Boing or Instapundit or Dan Gillmor, the big blogs really are pretty accessible in a lot of ways to little guys who know how to pitch things right.

The tech blogging community also is pretty tight and pretty fast. Although I think Mark Cuban disagreed with me on my post, within an hour of my posting it and emailing Mark he responded back with his own thoughts through personal email. Robert Scoble put a link up on the story this evening.

2. It shows that corporations still need a lot of work in developing best practices blogging standards. There are already companies like Cymfony (who I suspect was an unnamed company that I once called out in a comment on your blog) that claim to help corporations best deal with the blogosphere. Hopefully these companies do so in a truly constructive and positive way. Open dialog, respectful conversation and transparency will best benefit even the largest of corporations in the end. Robert Scoble has shown this at Microsoft and other companies would be wise to figure out blogging and how best to use it constructively.

Update and corrected: As noted in comments, David Gee says someone else deleted the post and he put it back up.

Blog Nashville

The non-conference conference has begun. I'm leading a session on citizens media this morning.

If you're here, Rebecca MacKinnon's session on Global Voices didn't make it into the program. It's at 10:30 in West Lobby 50. (Competes with my session; oh, well...)

Password for Latte? Oh, Sure

VeriSign claims it persuaded "85% of survey participants" to compromise their computer passwords for a $3 Starbucks cash card, according to this story in Information Week.

Among the questions I wish the reporter had asked:

Did VeriSign verify that these logons and passwords actually worked? Or did most of these people just give out a phony password?

I've put in a call to VeriSign PR and will let you know what they say.

A Win for Fair Use, Consumer Rights

CNet: Court says FCC's 'broadcast flag' is toast. In a stunning victory for television buffs and hardware makers, a federal appeals court has tossed out government rules that would have outlawed many digital TV receivers and tuner cards starting July 1.

Now the entertainment cartel will have to get its wishes the old-fashioned way. It will have to attempt to verbally bludgeon or buy enough members of Congress to get an actual law passed, as opposed to the end run it pulled with its friends at the Federal Communications Commission, which enacted a rule giving the cartel what it wanted.

The broadcast flag rule was an amazingly brazen piece of work. It would force manufacturers of anything that could be used to receive or display a digital broadcast video signal to refuse to redistribute the video. In other words, you could watch the show but, if the copyright holder wished, you could not record it on your VCR or send it to another TV set.

The idea was to prevent unauthorized distribution, obviously, and it's easy to understand why the cartel worries about this. But the broadcast flag sent a message both to customers and innovative technologists: We are in a pay-per-view world of hyper-controlled media, if the copyright decrees it, and you may not do anything to save your fair use or other traditional rights unless we approve.

Librarians and others concerned with restoring some balance in copyright sued to block the FCC's rule, and the court has agreed (here's a PDF of the ruling; 116k). From the ruling:

The FCC argues that the Commission has “discretion” to
exercise “broad authority” over equipment used in connection
with radio and wire transmissions, “when the need arises, even
if it has not previously regulated in a particular area.” FCC Br.
at 17. This is an extraordinary proposition. “The
[Commission’s] position in this case amounts to the bare
suggestion that it possesses plenary authority to act within a
given area simply because Congress has endowed it with some
authority to act in that area. We categorically reject that
suggestion.

Good stuff. Now it's back to Congress, where the battles will continue -- and where this belonged in the first place.

USA Today and Churchill Club Put Public in Dark

UPDATED

Tom Foremski, over at Silicon Valley Watcher, notes that the Churchill Club teamed up with USA Today on an event about the future of media -- and barred the press. I enjoyed Tom's humorous call for assistance (I LOL at the picture he posted), but unfortunately found out about this travesty too late to weigh in before the event.

As Tom put it, "How quaintly dictatorial. No press, no lunch, no questions."

USA Today calls itself the "nation's newspaper." It should be embarrassed to be a part of such a thing. I hope Kevin Maney, the moderator of the program (and someone I like and admire), isn't planning to write a story or column off of this no-press-allowed event.

UPDATE: See Kevin's response below.

The Churchill Club expansively tells us its mission is about information, individuals, ideas -- and then pulls an absurd move like this.

Absurd how? Here's how. If there was a non-journalist blogger in the room, he or she is under no obligation to keep what was said a secret.

The Wall Street Journal learned about the new world two years ago, at the first "D: All Things Digital" conference. The gathering was officially off the record (and working journalists were asked to agree to this in advance), but that didn't stop bloggers from ably covering the thing. The Journal changed its policy the next year.

Back to the Churchill Club silliness: I'm hoping that we'll see a report soon on a blog. And if anyone who was attending wishes to be a guest blogger here, I'll be happy to accommodate you.

Kevin Maney responds:

Concerns about the no-press policy -- which we only started hearing about after the event -- have made us rethink the way we'd handle it next year. Yes, it does seem silly in this day and age. But a little history helps explain why the policy was that way in the first place.

This event grew out of something USA Today had been doing for many years: getting a group of tech CEOs together to talk about a hot industry issue. In the past, we always did it in a USAT conference room -- where, of course, there would be no other press and no general public. We'd get a discussion going, edit the transcripts, then put it in the paper.

About 18 months ago, I suggested that an audience might enjoy seeing those discussions live, and that it would add some excitement. After trying to figure out how to do it, we contacted Churchill and suggested a joint event. We'd get the panel together and use the transcripts in the paper a week later -- so we could take time to edit and package the material well. Churchill would gather an audience and take care of logistics.

That left us with a concern about getting scooped about our own panel. The first of these events took place last May. We decided to bar other press. To give you an idea about how much things have changed so quickly, last year we heard not a peep about that policy. This year, of course, it's different. We just automatically went with the same policy, but maybe that's not the right way to handle it in the future. We're all figuring out this new world as we go, and that's exactly what's happening here.

I'd like to think that the Churchill panel is an act of openness on our part. We could've kept doing the panels in closed rooms. Instead, we chose to let others in on the process. We're trying to do the right thing, not the wrong thing.

As for not taking audience questions, that's just a function of time. Five panelists, one hour. There is barely time for my questions, much less anyone else's.

As for no lunch... um... there is no free lunch.

My response: Had I known about this method in last year's panel, I would have objected then. If you're going to invite the public to an event, invite the entire public. Period.

You expect this kind of thing from the Bush administration and other information control freaks. A newspaper should know better.

Pure Speculation Makes 'News'

UPDATED

Amazingly, a blogger's rank speculation that a major news organization is using comment spam to lower his site's Google ranks -- he offers nothing in the way of serious evidence, in my opinion -- has led to an article on Wired News. I decline to point to the article, because I'd be giving this thing currency I don't believe it deserves.

The blogger, Nick Lewis, whose work I do respect in many ways, asked list members if they wanted to go on the record. Jimmy Wales, of the Wikipedia project, posted a pungent reply, a portion of which goes:

You might not like me to go on record about this, since I say it's ludicrous. If the media is interested, what I'll say is: tinfoil hats and black helicopters have more credibility, to my mind.

Trace the ip number to somewhere or someone interesting, and you've got a story. As it is, you've got spammers acting in ways that are incomprehensible.

As I understood the discussion on the list, the blogger seemed to think that because the IP addresses of the spammers couldn't be traced back to the Big News Organization, that was somehow a big hint that his theory must be true. After all, they'd be clever enough to hide their tracks, right? Wink, nudge...

Sheesh.

UPDATE: Seth Finkelstein offers an alternative explanation.

PR Blog Interview

PR practitioner and blogger Jeremy Pepper called and asked a bunch of questions. I answered them, and the result is here.

(Caution: There are some odd characters -- print type, I mean -- in the text. I speculate it's not rendering properly on my Mac. I've notified Jeremy Pepper.)

Casting the Blog Movie (Or Getting Bloggers to Point to Your Page)

Funny...

Operating Systems and Recent History

(I'm writing a periodic column for the Financial Times. Here's the one that appeared today.)

Early last week, Bill Gates demonstrated Microsoft’s next Windows desktop computer operating system at a conference for manufacturers of computer hardware. Later in the week Apple started selling its latest version of the Macintosh operating system, known as Mac OS X Tiger.

Although the Microsoft product is a long way from hitting the retail marketplace, Gates’s talk garnered lots of coverage in the trade and popular media. The timing, coming next to the Apple launch, was part of the reason; the media can not resist the Microsoft versus Apple story. But the Tiger release and Microsoft hypefest were only the latest engagements in a never-ending campaign for the hearts, minds and wallets of computer users. Their interests, not corporate power games, are why this matters.

Dave Winer: A Toast

I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It was mid-1999, and Dave Winer called to say there was something I had to see.

He showed me a web page. I don’t remember what the page contained except for one button. It said, "Edit This Page" -- and, for me, nothing was ever the same again.

I clicked the button. Up popped a text box containing plain text and a small amount of HTML, the code that tells a browser how to display a given page. Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page. I made a small change, clicked another button that said, "Save this page" and voila, the page was saved with the changes. The software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the earliest blog applications.

Dave was a leader in a move that brought back to life the promise, too long unmet, that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, had wanted from the start. Berners-Lee envisioned a read/write Web. But what had emerged in the 1990s was an essentially read-only Web on which you needed an account with an ISP to host your web site, special tools, and/or HTML expertise to create a decent site.

What Dave and the other early blog pioneers did was a breakthrough. They said the Web needed to be writeable, not just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead simple.

Thus, the read/write Web was truly born again. We could all write, not just read, in ways never before possible. For the first time in history, at least in the developed world, anyone with a computer and Internet connection could own a press.

***

The words above are adapted from my book We the Media, which was published last year. The book is a result of the blog I started in 1999, a blog largely inspired by Dave. The past few years of experimentation and change further inspired me to leave a great newspaper job early this year, to try and see if I could help move along the notion of citizen journalism.

His early fueling of the blog is hardly Dave's only accomplishment. He's been a leader in RSS and podcasting, and has a way of seeing key pieces of the future before the rest of us.

I don't always agree with Dave. But even the disagreements have been instructive. When someone is ahead of things in so many ways for so long, you listen and learn.

Dave just celebrated his 50th birthday, and has been feted by many for that milestone. I add my good wishes here, with my certainty that he has many more years and achievements yet to come.