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Is the future really free?

It seems we've entered an age where there's a land-grab happening for personal data and attention time. Look at all the web start-ups backed by venture capital. They aren't investing out of philanthropy. There's value there. YouTube is "free" but Google paid over a billion dollars for it. Why?

Here's a hint: It's not about the Tube.

Chris Anderson's Wired article was quite bold in its proclamations:

You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be "really special ... and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive." This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand's original aphorism from 1984: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away.")

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

One of the old jokes from the late-'90s bubble was that there are only two numbers on the Internet: infinity and zero. The first, at least as it applied to stock market valuations, proved false. But the second is alive and well. The Web has become the land of the free.

Has it?

TANSTAAFL

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

The idea behind this is that there's always some sort of exchange happening, even if it's not in cash. If I buy you lunch, I'm getting something out of it -- the pleasure of your company, a chance to boast or commiserate, an opportunity to share a new restaurant discovery, freedom from an otherwise mundane meal, relief from a spiritual debt acquired when you bought me lunch last week, whatever.

And yet when I buy you lunch, it does not imply that you now are entitled to inspect my purse, or peruse the messages in my iPhone, or rummage through my dresser. Those things are considered private to most of us, right?

Chris Anderson's entire perception of the "free" present and future seems to depend upon the assumption that not only our time and attention have no value, but that our privacy has no value ... that is, no value to us.

Those things certainly have value to the companies offering the "free" services.

Last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage. Just in case that wasn't totally clear, that's "unlimited" as in "infinite." So the market price of online storage, at least for email, has now fallen to zero....

That's zero in cash. But just because you aren't forking over cash doesn't mean something is really free. With 'free' email, it may not cost you cash, what are you handing over otherwise? It may seem trivial enough, but you are paying for that mail in terms of having advertising rolled in front of your eyes, and in terms of handing over personally identifiable information that can then be leveraged, quantified and sold to others or leveraged in other ways.

It's now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom....

...Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.

This brings us back to the question, Why did Google pay 1.7 billion dollars for YouTube? Answer: It's not about the Tube, it's about You.

YouTube gets your information, your attention for advertising ... and all-media licensing rights to your video in perpetuity. Hardly free. And Google gives away search results information, but sells your attention to advertisers who get to hawk their wares on our search results. If you're like me, you consider this a fair trade-off to access the quality search results Google offers.

It may seem fair and trivial, but it's not free. And maybe that's an important thing to remember.

'Who' is on first

Consider that, for decades, television has been giving you "free" programming by selling a huge percentage of your time and attention watching it to advertisers. It's no secret that television advertisers pay big bucks for your attention. (And sometimes we may even appreciate it. Heck, for me the fun of the Super Bowl comes from the new, often very creative ad spots.)

YouTube also has your attention ... and much much more: If you are registered, YouTube also has your email address, your ISP info, your rough geographical location, a record of your viewing habits, and a fair sense of your tastes and how they match up with other YouTube members. That's a lot more information than your local television channel ever had.

Google bought Doubleclick for much the same reason: Data on your attention, and a structure to monetize it.

And so on down the line.

Obviously your privacy, your time and your attention have value -- big money value.

"Hang on a minute!" you say. "I like watching YouTube, so what's the big deal?"

Perhaps that's the real point: It's not a big deal. The price you pay may be small most of the time -- small to the point of practically nothing. It's not a big deal, it's a little deal. And with millions of subscribers and bazillions of views, those little deals do add up to beaucoup bucks.

So can we at least admit that "free" is not really free, even if it is really really cheap most of the time?

Are you opting out as much as you think?

So you realize how you are making an exchange, trading elements of your privacy and attention for some "free" services. Great.

So now you can take charge of your "free" web usage, and move into the future with a full awareness. Wonderful.

So you can opt out of any exchange that crosses the line according to your own valuations and judgments. Terrific!

But what if the exchange of your privacy for "free" services is not so obvious?

Consider Facebook. AP's Martha Irvine reports that privacy-conscious users aren't as private as they might think:

People often think Facebook profiles and sometimes MySpace pages, if they're set as private, are only available to friends or specific groups, such as a university, workplace, or even a city.

But that's not true if they use applications. On Facebook, for instance, applications can only be downloaded if a user checks a box allowing its developers to "know who I am and access my information," which means everything on a profile, except contact info. Given little thought, agreeing to the terms has become a matter of routine for the nearly 70 million Facebook users worldwide who use applications to spruce up their pages and to flirt, play and bond with friends online....

...So what do these third-parties do with the information? Sometimes, they use it to connect users with similar interests. Sometimes, they use it to target ads, based on demographics such as gender and age (something Facebook and MySpace also do)....

...But experts who track online security issues think there's too much personal information flying around out there, with few guarantees that it's safe. They also think social networkers have little understanding where their information goes and how it's used — and as a result, have a false sense of security.

"I suspect that there's a whole lot of clicking without a lot of thinking," says Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project who studies privacy issues. "So much of this sharing happens in a way that users don't see the consequences. It's kind of a big, black hole."

Part of the risk stems from Facebook applications being created by anyone, some of them tech-related companies and others individuals with know-how. And they could be anywhere in the world....

...Some would argue that it's much like trusting an online vendor with your credit card information.

And of course there's Beacon. Facebook gives us "free" social networking, but sells the "beacon" of our purchasing behavior data. How palatable that is to members is more questionable. Obviously some "free" things are preferable to others.

Facebook scaled back Beacon after a lot of outcry, but the applications system remains largely unnoticed.

[I]t's an honor system, says Adrienne Felt, a computer science major at the University of Virginia....But, in the end, Felt says there's really nothing stopping them from matching profile information with public records. It also could be sold or stolen. And all of that could lead to serious matters such as identity theft.

"People seem to have this idea that, when you put something on the Internet, there should be some privacy model out there — that there's somebody out there that's enforcing good manners. But that's not true," Felt says.

Don't Tread On Track Me

Diane Bartz of Reuters recently reported about a drive to create a "Do Not Track" list much akin to the "Do Not Call" list that was meant to prevent telemarketers from bothering people who don't want to be bothered.

In December, the FTC approved Google's purchase of advertising rival DoubleClick over the objections of some privacy groups.

At the same time, the agency urged advertisers to let computer users bar advertisers from collecting information on them, to provide "reasonable security" for any data and to collect data on health conditions or other sensitive issues only with the consumer's express consent.

In comments to the FTC on online behavioral advertising, advertisers made clear a strong preference for self-regulation rather than government dictates on how personal data are collected, what disclosures are made to computer users and how long the information is stored.

Consumer groups said on Tuesday they were skeptical of self-regulation.

"Self-policing schemes are not enough to protect consumers' privacy and offer no enforcement against improper behavior," said Chris Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, in a statement.

"While companies like Google are trying to put pretty good practices in place, we don't want to rely on the good graces of the companies because they might change their minds," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

CNet's Anne Broache blogged about this:

Without a better way to get around those shortcomings, "we have...consumers and the FTC and industry agreeing on consumer choice and then no way to technically get there," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor and a former lead privacy counselor in the Clinton White House....

...A broad coalition of consumer and privacy advocates last fall called on the Federal Trade Commission to establish such a registry. The concept is this: Any advertising entity that sets a "persistent" cookie on a user's machine would be required to give the FTC the domain names of servers used to place it. Consumers would then be able to import that list of domain names and block them from tracking their Internet surfing behavior.

[AOL Chief Privacy Officer Jules] Polonetsky said that while he supports the concept, "I think the way to do it isn't a government place where your browser goes and gets stuff."

Instead, the former New York state legislator said, "the rule should be that whatever technology platform you're using should have no-brainer, easy-to-use labels that people know how to toggle to turn on or off the kinds of personalization, storing, whatever it is that that particular platform does."

Privacy advocates at Thursday's discussion weren't sold on the idea of self-regulation alone. Ultimately the responsibility to understand how their information is being used should not fall on consumers, but "on business to protect and safeguard consumers to whom they are providing these products," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"The system is already in place, it's too late to turn it back," said Jeff Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, which advocates for tighter privacy regulations on Internet companies. "We need real policy safeguards. The Congress and the FTC need to act."

When the privacy stakes are raised

It's one thing to weigh these issues in the domestic (which, in my case means American) context. There are complexities. As Americans, our two strongly held values of Fairness and Freedom (as in freedom of speech) come into conflict here. On the one hand, we don't want people to be abused by entities without accountability. On the other hand, we don't want Big Brother meddling with one of the sectors of our fragile economy that seems to still be going like gangbusters.

These same issues seem much clearer when it comes to other countries, other regimes, such as China, which as won cooperation from Yahoo, Google and others in censoring the internet to suit the Chinese government's policies. Rebecca McKinnon writes:

Many would agree that being a socially responsible Internet or telecommunications company requires respect for users’ rights to privacy and free expression, but there is great disagreement over how to accomplish this ideal.

She goes on about a case where Yahoo's cooperation led to the arrest of a dissident in China.

For two years after Yahoo’s role in Shi Tao’s case first came to light, the company’s public statements characterized the plight of Shi Tao and the three others as if they were acceptable collateral damage in the great task of bringing Internet information services to the Chinese people. Executives argued that the Chinese people were still better off in the long run thanks to Yahoo’s presence....

...Yahoo executives also argued that the company’s nose was legally clean on two fronts: Not only did employees respond to a legally binding written order; actions by Yahoo’s China-based employees were consistent with the user “terms of service” that Shi Tao and all other Yahoo email users agree to in order to create an account. In these terms the user promises not to use the email account to commit a list of actions, including “damaging public security, revealing state secrets, subverting state power, damaging national unity,” etc....

...But a legal victory would have been hollow because it would not have absolved Yahoo in the eyes of the human-rights community and socially responsible investors. They point out that Chinese law in this area contradicts international law–and that socially responsible companies have an obligation to do something more than participate in a “race to the bottom” as far as global practices on privacy and freedom of expression are concerned....

...With data privacy, things are much more clear cut: when user data is handed over a person can go to jail and his or her life is ruined or shortened. So what to do?

In the "freeconomy" picture Anderson paints, of course, there is no secret police ready to arrest you for buying that book about genital herpes or searching for websites about bankruptcy counseling.

But does that mean you have no interest at all in how that information about your supposedly private behavior is used and shared by other parties? Does that mean that your privacy has no value? Does that mean you can just "choose" not to use the Internet at all?

After all, do such uses of your private information really harm you in any way? How can you quantify it?

And if you can't quantify it, if you can't point to any real damages, then what can you do about it, anyway?

Judging the value of privacy

Lauren Gelman, Executive Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, writes of a recent DC Circuit court ruling:

holding that the federal Privacy Act's requirement that Plaintiffs show actual damages does not require pecuniary harm but can be met by a showing of emotional distress. Am. Fed'n of Gov't Employees v. Hawley, D.D.C., No. 07-00855, 3/31/08.

[T]he plaintiffs' alleged injury is not speculative nor dependent on any future event, such as a third party's misuse of the data, the court said. The court finds that plaintiffs have standing to bring their Privacy Act claim.

...I think this is a great decision that supports the belief that people's harm from a privacy loss is not just another's use of that information to cause financial loss (i.e. identity theft), but that emotional damages and embarrassment are cognizable harms of privacy violations.

Other lawsuits about privacy are hitting the courts. We seem to be reaching the point where companies' right to swing their information-gathering-and-sharing arms is starting to meet private citizens' right to not have their private elbows bumped.

And, last I checked, lawyers aren't free.

And this doesn't even get into cases relating to people's private information where the damages are much more apparent.

Back to McKinnon:

Meanwhile, the rest of us should not simply sit around and wait for our Internet and email service providers, Web-hosting services, and mobile-phone carriers to do the right thing on their own. Technology users around the world have an interest in joining together to insist that the products and services with which we increasingly entrust our careers, our beliefs and the most intimate parts of our lives, will not sell us out because they feel they have “no choice” since all their competitors are selling out their users too.

Who's identity is it, anyway?

The question I keep coming to is this: If the web is so distributed, why are people flocking to centralized management of their information (and in doing so trading away so much of their privacy)?

The answer, it seems to me, is that it's easy that way. GMail is easy. Google Calendar is easy. Connecting with friends via Facebook is easy.

But maybe the easy way is not always the best way. Maybe?

Adriana at Media Infuencer has written something of a manifesto on taking charge of one's own identity:

What I want is option (with set of tools) for individuals taking charge of their identities.* And on the web that starts with exercising sovereignty over my data. This alternative must be networked and not third party dependent or platform based....

...The key is in realising that authorisation and identity are related but separate.

Authentication is the act of establishing an identity - this is separate from the existing identity approach where the focus is on collection and disbursement of bits of data to do with someone. The cheap and cheerful explanation of this is that you can authenticate with a password (i.e. something that only you know). However, that password need not reveal anything about you/your identity. It just reveals that you are someone who knows the password. Therefore, authentication is free to be separate from identity. They are in separate but related domains. Have I mentioned that they are separate?

I owe this point to Alec who explains:

Traditionally authentication is one-or-more of three things.

• something you KNOW, e.g, you KNOW the password
• something you HAVE, e.g, you HAVE the door key,
• something you ARE, e.g, you ARE a 4-star general on an army base

The latter tends to be a bit weak, as authentication goes, in my experience it is prone to social hacking. Good authentication might be combining something like: KNOWING the password that UNLOCKS the certificate that you HAVE on the laptop, that permits a remote website to challenge you and get the response it expects, since it KNOWS that you have your certificate on your laptop....

In short, let me have a go at my identity myself, on my own terms, the web way, without intermediaries, ‘trusted’ parties and hierarchical non-direct ways. Locking me into new ‘better’ platforms, offering ’services’ to manage my meta-identity is like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. Instead, give me tools, flexible and modular, to reclaim my digital personae, help me piece together my fractured identity. And then allow me to drive it forward with all of the benefits that it can bring me and to those I interact and transact with. Learn to live with the unpredictability and emergent juicy goodness that comes from my independence and lack of your control over me.

Object-Oriented Identity?

One approach to protecting privacy in some way draws from a fundamental tenet of basic object-oriented programming: That the data and logic to accessing that data are combined into an object; any other object or entity wanting to access that data engages the object as a whole, and gets what the object is 'willing' to give, under its own logic. This is in contrast to function-based programming, where any procedure or function can access the data by its own means.

(Programmers reading this: please be kind. I'm trying to over-simplify to make a point.)

The same approach can be handled for identity, with systems such as OpenID: Rather than managing identity through multiple sites that parse your information through their own individual functions, according to their own rules, your identity and access to it are managed as a unit -- an object.

You can use a verifiable identity token instead of a password that you may be using on a few dozen other sites. You can keep your profile information in one place, and share it according to your own terms.

It's just an idea, and in its infancy at that, and while it's seeing in-roads with adoption by Wordpress, Drupal and others, it's something that so far has been met with a bit of resistance from some of the major players who have found big money in the identity stakes.

But it seems clear that the way things have been going so far is not how we things will be going in the future. Change is a constant on the web, and that's all the more true in how we treat privacy.

When privacy is protected...

...does this threaten the "free" world of which Anderson writes? I don't think so.

In a guest post on ReadWriteWeb, Rick Hangartner writes:

Fifteen or so years into the evolution of the web, we already have many of the key ideas and technologies in place to start describing and sharing personal preference information - or what we might colloquially call "taste" - in order to personalize web experiences. So, why haven't we yet seen widespread adoption of web personalization? Mostly because user expectations and online business models haven't yet evolved to the point that user-controlled, ‘open taste’ sharing is a viable option.

For the more pragmatic: each time we make choices, we generate data which empirically describes our preferences. This is data that can be encapsulated and shared just like any other picture, blog post, video, or other piece of online content that we create; and which the DataPortability project is focused on.

A few ideas for open taste sharing

As a DataPortability use case, open taste sharing embodies and embraces the culture shift that the Web 2.0 movement represents. With regard to data ownership, the DataPortability concept has even more succinct expression: our tastes should be ours to share, or not. This puts the user in control of their online experience, so they can set the boundaries of how much they want to share and with whom.

Meanwhile, two new companies are offering to ISPs the service of tracking everything the ISPs' customers do, every website they visit, while claiming, counterintuitively (they admit), that their services actually improve the privacy of the users:

Phorm has agreements to work with the three largest Internet providers in Britain and will start operations there in the next few weeks. NebuAd says it is working with several smaller Internet providers in the United States that collectively serve 10 percent of the nation’s Internet users. Both companies are working hard to convince the large cable and phone companies in this country to join their systems. To do so, they must convince the Internet providers that they will not be offending their customers.

“Consumer acceptance is key to our progress,” Mr. Dykes said.

Of course, this "service" is "free" to the consumers, so why should you complain, right?

[This is cross-posted on BlogHer.]

Shelley Powers on discovering that Google Desktop has managed to install itself on her computer "like a benevolent computer virus":

Ew! Ew! Get it off me! Get if OFF me!

ROTFLMAO!!

A few weeks ago, I started telling friends my wild and crazy prediction that Apple will own a majority share of the personal computer market within three years. Apple's biggest weakness is in their vertical monopoly over their own hardware. OSX is fabulous, but their hardware is crap, let's face it. You simply have to figure the cost of Apple Care into any Mac purchase because you can count on some sort of hardware problem.

Despite this -- and who's to say Apple won't change its tune regarding hardware? -- Apple's star is definitely rising, while Microsoft's is in a self-inflicted crash and burn.

Paul Graham, in is post, "Microsoft is Dead," has the quote of the month:

Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck.

The same could be said for a number of companies. Graham recognizes that a number of folks will scoff at these assertions.

Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Graham still succumbs to the notion that all "applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop." Such black-and-white thinking may provide a poetic flourish, or add drama to pronouncements on the future, but my own sense is that the general public is going to start noticing the pound of privacy flesh web companies, like Paul Graham's employer, demand for the convenience of the services they offer.

The desktop is not dead, but it is changing. So is the web (duh), and just as desktop übercompany Microsoft is feeling the heat for their business practices and strategic decisions, we might see the same thing happening to the übercompanies of the web before too long.

So Jeremiah Owyang has started a media consumption diet meme, and Marianne Richmond has tagged us BlogHers, so here goes....

• Web: I used to use NetNewsWire Lite for RSS, but I tried Shrook and found it to me easier to use, with some of the features NetNewsWire makes you pay for. Shrook is easy enough, so I'll stick with it for now. Do I need to mention Firefox? For search, I use Google pretty exclusively (I find myself wondering how Yahoo! gets by, what with all the barriers they put up for people to get listed in their index) and if I'm blog-hunting, I go to Technorati. I blog using Drupal for platform and either Performancing or ecto for blogging client (though neither is optimal -- Performancing repeatedly loses my drafts and ecto keeps embedding cruft into my html, even when I define the tags myself). For online video, I find YouTube too useful to ignore. It can be a bit hard to take, though, just browsing at random.
• Music: I've started trying out Pandora, but in some stations they keep trying to push the strangest things -- sorry but how do you get Foreigner or Journey from Led Zeppelin? -- and they limit how many songs I can reject in a given time. (Am I just too persnickety?) I have several of my old CDs burned to mp3 files, which I play on my desktop iTunes, but as I've moved from my nearly-dead PowerBook to two iMacs to my current MacBook Pro, it's been a challenge carrying those 20GB of files along for the migration ride. (It doesn't help that some of the discs were defective bulk coasters.) I haven't signed up for the iTunes Store, though, because the DRM restrictions and poor audio quality make downloads there less than appealing, no matter how appealing and easy-to-use the GUI is. Stop treating me like a criminal guilty until proven innocent, Apple and RIAA, and you'll have my business. Meanwhile, as CD music continues to fade away at the big box stores, I'm finding my music horizons diminishing, and that's a terrible place to be. My whole live is defined by soundtrack.
• TV: I don't have much time to watch television, especially the commercial variety -- I think I'm more and more intolerant of commercials. I will watch the NewsHour if I'm home early enough, the Daily Show if I'm up late enough (and thank goodness for the 9pm rerun of last night's show), Frontline if I stumble across it and (of course) Battlestar Galactica. I don't do cable news -- it strikes me as an entire industry getting excited about the lint in their own navels. However, since getting HDTV on Comcast, I've found that I'm more likely to just watch anything as long as it's high-def. Well, not anything at all, but it's amazing how much more interesting Nova or Discovery (or reruns of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) are when you can see so much detail on the screen. (Ironic that local news is in high-def, but most network shows are not; the Rose Parade was in high def, but the Macy's parade was not; sports are in high def but arts typically are not; and all HBO seems to play on their single high-def channel is Rome [though it could be worse].)
• Communication: My cell is a Palm Treo 700p, but I hardly ever use it. It comes in handy when I need to keep up on email or check something on the web, but I'm realizing the touchscreen I so wanted (and thus the reason I rejected alternatives like Blackberry or Q) is pretty over-rated. Ah well, live and learn. The phone part is actually great for clarity and reception, but I don't use it as a PDA at all, as the 320x320 screen is just too damned small. Other phonage is Vonage. I haven't had a land-line phone in quite a few years now. --Not that any of this matters, because I really really hate talking on the phone unless it's necessary. For IM, I use Jabber (via Adium), which we have set up on one of our domains, and the sadly unavoidable Skype, which as a relay is an absolute bandwidth hog even when it's just sitting there.
  I don't use Skype much for voice, since so many people seem to have so many problems configuring it to work well. We thought it'd be great for talking to clients overseas to save a few pennies a minute, but all too often it was too much like the Cone of Silence. I use Apple Mail for email, mainly because Thunderbird on Mac is too slooowwwwww (I wish it weren't).
• Movies: Once upon a time, I saw several movies a week, sometimes several in one day, but now that they blast commercials in your face before showing generally sucky movies -- not to mention the overpriced junk food, sticky floors and noisy patrons -- it's just not worth it. It's not fun any more. So I watch movies on DVD, where I'm not limited by the, excuse me, crap selection of the week, and which on an HDTV plasma is an entirely new experience. I tend to buy, not rent, because rented discs always seem to have scratches that make the flick skip or freeze.
• Magazines: I subscribe to Post, HOW, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Macworld and occasionally Wired. I rarely buy a magazine off the rack. It amazes me how many magazines are in print. Do people actually read all these things? Somebody must. I have to say, however, that the supermarket tabloids do keep me informed. I mean, I could've gone for weeks or even months without knowing that Brittney Spears shaved her head or that Brad sent a note to Jen! Eeep!
• Books: I live for novels, but it's hard for me to find writers I like, so I'm stuck with the five or six authors who could write just about anything and I'd read it. Maybe if my life weren't so fast-paced, I'd be able to relax enough to get into a new writer's style, but usually I can't get past the first paragraph, so I do without. Meanwhile I'm reading more non-fiction than any time since I was in college. How She Does It, Blink and Designing Interactions are three of the most recent delights.
• Newspapers: I love reading off paper, but unlike magazines I don't hold the same love of newspapers. I like the print design of the New York Times, but I hate getting newsprint all over my fingers, and at a buck a pop for something I may not even have time to read that day, it becomes a dead-tree guilt and a recycling burden more than a source of news. 15 years ago that wasn't the case -- I loved getting the paper! How life changes in these times! I still read the "newspapers" online, including the NY Times, the Mercury News and the odd site that happens to have the AP wire story I want to read.

So there's my consumption in a nutshell. Now in the tradition of tagging, and because they are such an eclectic group of geeks and artists, I'd like to tag everyone on Planet Drupal.

Technorati Tags: media consumption diet

So after blogging about how Yahoo and Microsoft have adopted Google's sitemap standard, I thought I'd go ahead and re-submit some of my websites with these search engines. After all, now that they were going to read the sitemap, it couldn't hurt, right?

Here's an instance where Microsoft gets it and Yahoo doesn't: When you're trying to build relevance of your search engine, you don't make people jump through hoops.

Take a look at Yahoo's submission page.

Actually, it's not a submission page — it's a login page. Yes, that's right. You have to have or create a Yahoo account in order to submit your site to Yahoo. In other words, their claim of a "free" submission is a bit misleading, because they aren't considering the fact that you're required to give your name, your birthdate, your email address and your zipcode as being a cost. Yeah right.

Okay, so I figured, What's the big deal? I have an account somewhere. Unfortunately, after all the email system crashes and hard drive failures I've had over the years, I could not find my login info. So I figured I'd just make a new account.

Ah, but there's another catch: They want your site browser to accept cookies.

Now call me a tinfoil hatter if you want, but ever since I read about Yahoo's we-track-every-website-you-visit-and-add-it-to-our-database-on-you policy*, I've been a bit cagey with regards to Yahoo. At some point along the line, I did more than opt out of their rather offensive privacy-invading program — I started blocking Yahoo's cookies.

And of course that came back to bite me today, when I was unable to create a new account with Yahoo. Mark me down as a casualty of not wanting to give up my privacy to some faceless conglomerate just so I can add value to their product.

As a contrast, take a look at Microsoft's submission page.

Very simple. Enter your URL and they send their 'bots a 'crawlin'. In other words, Microsoft wants you to help them add value to their search engine. (Even their captcha is easier to decipher.) After all, if they don't have accurate and comprehensive search results, their relevance will diminish and they will lose market share.

This is something Google has known for a long time. While they like you to register for things like analytics and testing your sitemap, they are perfectly happy to index your site even if you have not given them your identification portfolio. After all, what good is a search engine that arbitrarily makes it hard for some sites to be indexed?

Hello, Yahoo! Are you paying attention? Microsoft gets it and you don't. Am I alone in finding this very ... ironic?

*Which I am totally aware may not be all that unique.