Dr. Dobb's Journal May 2003
There's a case before the U.S. Supreme Court now involving Internet filters in public libraries. The Feds say, through the Child Online Protection Act, install filters or forget about federal funding. Libraries, by a large majority, say "whoa there." Since it's now a Supreme Court case, there are lots of complex arguments, pro and con, but one particular exchange shows off how the Internet changes the landscape of information dissemination.
The Feds argue that libraries have always exercised judgment and selectivity in the materials they provide, just as schools carefully select their textbooks and editors carefully vet the articles that their magazines publish (even if they do let columnists get away with just about anything). The filtering that the Feds are demanding is just another form of selectivity.
The librarians respond that they are neither teachers nor editors, and that the only reason that libraries spend time selecting what books to purchase is that they have limited budgets, shelf space, and time. If they could, they would provide everything.
When it comes to providing access to information over the Internet, none of these things matter. With the Internet, providing access to everything is the default, and actually costs less than trying to select, edit, filter, or censor the content. Fundamentally, this case deals with the role of libraries in a democracy, but all I'm trying to say here is that the Internet does force one to rethink everything one thought one knew about publishing and information dissemination.
I've known for some time that my web site, Swaine's World (http://www.swaine.com/) needs to change its format. Currently it carries, on most weekdays, a dozen or two lightly annotated links to the most interesting (to me) tech news stories of the day. The flaw in this model is that the site's readers have access to the same news sources as I, and my comments don't add as much as they might to the news items. Fewer links and more analysis is probably the direction I should go. That would be consistent with current weblog thinking.
Then again, I may not be thinking far enough out of the box. Why not develop a new form of news coverage, incorporating all the components that weblog-style journalism really need?
Mulling this over, I came up with the following tentative list of necessary components of a weblog item:
Here's how it might work:
News Item: "The SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX) reported a net loss of $724,000, or $0.06 per share, on revenue of $13.5 million, compared to a net loss of $11.0 million, or $0.77 per share, on revenue of $17.9 million for the comparative quarter of the prior year... '[W]e expect that revenue for our second quarter...will be in the range of $23 million to $25 million.'" (PR Newswire.)
Interpretation: SCO has got its losses down to under a million dollars a quarter, but that's as far as it can go without help. It expects to get that help, a walloping $10 million dollars worth of help in the next quarter, from an unusual source—its competitors. It seems that SCO owns patents on key UNIX technologies, and it has set up a division consisting of nothing but patent lawyers to extort money from other UNIX vendors.
Disclaimer: Twenty years of prior artistic license demonstrates unequivocally that the metier of this column is badinage, not reportage. In particular, the word "extort" (above) is used in the moral—not the legal—sense and is, therefore, outside the domain of expertise of any lawyers who think they smell blood here.
News item: "The top five destinations for paid content were Yahoo, Match.com, RealNetworks' Real.com, Classmates.com, and Dow Jones' WSJ.com, according to the report. Other top sites for content sales were Weightwatchers.com, Consumerreports.com, ESPN.com, and Playboy.com." (CNET News.com.)
Interpretation: The typical online content buyer is a lonely (Match.com), overweight (Weightwatchers.com), couch-potato sports fan (ESPN.com) who buys make-out music (Real.com), and bones up on specs on the hot new consumer electronics gadgets (Consumerreports.com) and impressive financial jargon (WSJ.com) to impress an imagined but unlikely date (Match.com), while further hoping to use said date to impress those snobbish high-school classmates (Classmates.com).
Disclaimer: Mr. Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal, CMP, and United Business Media all wish to make it clear that they mean no disrespect to lonely, overweight couch-potato sports fans who were not part of the in crowd in high school. That describes half of our readership. The aforementioned parties further wish to clarify that it's not the half that YOU are in, of course.
Hmm, maybe I'll keep doing the site the way I have been.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com