Well Pajamas Media, nee OSM, nee Open Source Media, nee Pajamas Media is trying to do some navel-gazing on Thanksgiving and one thing becomes painfully, loudly, self-apparently apparent:
They have no idea what they want to be or why they exist.
Which is what I’ve said from the start.
Really: Just read the closed-loop discussion among only the PM people — no outsiders allowed, no comments allowed (though Roger is thinking about requiring a donation to God-knows-what charity to be allowed the privilege of allowing comments), no different perspectives welcome. And boy, do they need some.
Here’s the challenge, folks: Stand back and see whether you can agree on just one thing. Finish this sentence in no more than 10 words: Pajamas Media is _________________.
Until you can do that, there is no sense in arguing over logos, names, functionality, linking, comments, anything. What are you? Why do you exist? Until you can answer that, you shouldn’t exist. You don’t exist. You are just, everyone there seems to agree, a corporate-looking page that does too little.
Well, this sucks. Hossein Derakhshan, one of the great pioneers of international blogging and freedom of speech online — a friend of democracy and, one should assume, America — has been barred from re-entering the country for six months. He tells the tale on his blog. The long and short of it is that on a quick trip between the U.S. and Canada, the border officials — being Homeland Security, after all — Googled his name, found his blog, and tried to find incriminating evidence that he was living and working in the U.S. without proper paperwork. A copy of Newsweek with his name and a New York address finally did him in.
How do we help him? Global Voices, which Hossein helped create, is at the Harvard Law School. I hope they know some experts in immigration law.
I will write a testimonial for Hossein telling how he is advancing the causes of freedom and democracy in Iran and elsewhere on earth.
I will write to my senators.
And isn’t it sadly ironic that Iran — whose dictatorial regeime he challenged starting the weblog revolution there — also questioned him and let him in and out. But America will not let him in.
That is our loss. And we need to fix it.
: Also see today’s NY Times story about the bloggers of China exercising their freedom where they can in spite of companies, including American companies, helping to censor them by building their firewalls and handing dissidents over to authorities.
We have to get our authorities to see that these bloggers are the peaceful freeådom fighters of our age, using the internet and free speech as the best weapons possible against tyranny. Isn’t that our fight as well? Shouldn’t we be helping them however we can?
: Here’s the Committee to Protect Blogger’s post and here is Journalism.co.uk’s.
Vaughn Ververs writes an odd and emotional and ultimately simplistic analysis of journalistic objectivity and transparency over at CBS’ Public Eye, using me and reaction to Rep. John Murtha’s call to pull out of Iraq as his jumping-off points.
First, Vaughn misses the point on the objectivity debate. It isn’t that with the death of the objectivity ideal — or the admission that it was a false idol — you must now slant every newscast. That’s what he says and that’s what is simplistic, in my view. Instead, I say that the ethic of transparency requires you reveal the biases you do have because your audience deserves to know them, so they can judge your judgments. Having done that, then, of course, you should still try to be accurate, truthful, fair, balanced, and all that. But to refuse to reveal a bias — or rather, call it a perspective — and to, indeed, hide it is a lie of omission. There’s no agenda worse than a hidden agenda.
When Murtha made his call to pull out of Iraq, it was given major coverage — “All three nightly newscasts led with them, as did the New York Times, Washington Post, and other newspapers,” Public Eye reported at the time. But conservatives said this shouldn’t have been given such coverage since Murtha, though once in favor of the war, had long been critical of it. Public Eye linked to Glenn Reynolds saying just that. I didn’t weigh in on that and still won’t, not having studied the quotes.
So now Vaughn mashes this up with an argument over what is newsworthy and who can say what is newsworthy and whether making that call can be seen in this case as evidence of bias:
Now here’s where I have problems with attacks on the idea that the media can achieve a perspective that is unbiased, if not totally objective: If we can agree that there is something called “newsworthy,” then Murtha’s speech qualified.
But, Vaughn, it is a matter of degree, wouldn’t you agree? Was it news, big news, or the top news story in the nation? Couldn’t reasonable people disagree about that?
But, no, Vaughn seems to say it is an absolute — in fact, he attacks me as a relativist, even though I hadn’t even weighed in on the matter.
Jarvis isn’t alone in making the argument for the death of “objectivity” as an idea but since he’s a friend, we’ll pick on him. In Jarvis-world, with no objective criteria for judging events, how does one argue with the conservative advocate who says Murtha’s speech was not news? You can’t, because there’s no common meaning to the word, “news.” It’s total relativism, it trivializes everything and ignores the real world, commonly understood.
That is why we call it news judgment, Vaughn: because people judge it. And we’ve both worked in enough newsrooms to know that there are plenty of disagreements about that judgement, even among the supposed pros at making those decisions. And behind every one of those decisions comes — let’s not call it bias — perspective. That could be the perspective of experience in journalism. It could be the perspective of politics. But it’s not as if you can just feed the news into an algorithm and get universally accepted news judgment. That’s naive.
Vaughn doesn’t stop there. Oh, no, he keeps driving without brakes:
Advocacy that tries to convince you that the Murtha speech wasn’t news is Orwellian, it’s dishonest. An advocate who will argue that Murtha is wrong, misguided or even a pant-load is honest. But in Jarvis-world, you can’t make distinctions like that because, well, everything is relative. Mostly, the Murtha-isn’t-news drumbeat comes from ideologues who, in days of yore, would have been printing pamphlets, distributing fliers or attending demonstrations. It’s nothing new and nothing reserved for one viewpoint or another.
Whoa, fella. When did I become Big Brother? I had nothing to do with this argument and you’re roping me into this without saying that. I wouldn’t call that fair and balanced. And, again, I think you’re misrepresenting what I say about objectivity and transparency in journalism.
In any case, something sure got in Vaughn’s craw. I don’t really know what it is or why. So I wish I knew more about that perspective. Case in point.
But at least he is acting like a blogger, which is what I suggested he do in advice Vaughn quotes. I said when Public Eye started, vowing to be objective:
Try this on for size: I think there’s no such thing as an objective blogger. Or you’re probably not blogging. You’re probably not talking with people, eye to eye. We’re about to kill the myth that journalists can be thoroughly objective; let’s not start trying to accrete that artificial ethic to blogs.
Oh, yes, Vaughn is plenty opinionated. And that’s a good thing.
: LATER: Jay Rosen reacts to Vaughn in the comments:
You have fallen for your own deceptions, Vaughn, casting yourself as the defender of order and others as the bringers of chaos, instead of trying to describe two different ways of ordering the world, both of which have their chaotic contradictions.
Bill Burnham has a good post about Google Base, insisting that it will change the world, or at least part of it. He says it’s all about RSS feeds into a gigantic XML data base that will extrude all kinds of neat new sausages. I await Part II.
Meanwhile, Olivier Travers says that surely Google will open up Base:
…it’s very early to make a call about Google’s intent. I’d say they want to give themselves a headstart in terms of surfacing Google Base content across their services (e.g. Local) but they’ll probably expose it to the outside world sooner or later. Not doing it seems not only at odds with their roots but more importantly it would leave them vulnerable to a more open joint effort by Microsoft and Yahoo, not to speak of countless smaller competitors.
My issue is: Why not open it up now? Why not publish the data format and API? Why not let us in on their intention? Instead, by playing the mysterious hard-to-get game, Google is mimicking Microsoft, the borg: You’ll do what we say because we say so. Once again, Google has succeeded thanks to the very openness of the internet. It should be open, in turn.
1) Take the third floor (newsroom). Move them out and cut some staff. Put them in a big warehouse type space that was computers on the outside wall, and conversation areas inside. Make this warehouse in a public space, open to the public. Put in a coffee bar, open wifi and invite the consumer to come in. Leverage the content the consumer creates in this environment so that the reader is also the (co) writer.
Brightcove, Jeremy Allaire’s new video-serving company, had lots of big news today: investments from AOL, Barry Diller’s IAC, Hearst, and Allen & Co. They also made a deal with AOL to distribute its video there. (Full disclosure: I think I’m on Brightcove’s board of advisors and I’ve introduced them to some companies.)
What I like about Brightcove — besides Allaire — is that they enable many models: ad-supported video, pay-per-view video, subscription video, and free video (that is, paid for by the producer). They make publishing and playing the video easy thanks to copious Flash (remember that Allaire sold his company to Macromedia and was there for sometime).
What will be interesting is seeing how this works with all the other means of video distribution that are popular: Bittorrent, of course; plus iTunes; plus TiVo to iPods and PCs…. There is no question that there is pentup demand for video among consumers and even more among advertisers, who’ve wanted to turn the internet into TV from day one. They want the motion and excitement of video. They also want the ease of buying TV upfront, but those days are over. Over.
Last month ABC and Apple started offering next-day downloads of major primetime programs. It started with Desperate Housewives and Lost for $1.99 per episode, and sparked a reaction (long in the works) from NBC/DirecTV and CBS/Comcast to offer similar content on demand for only $.99. Then, just this week, AOL/Time Warner decided to up the ante by opening up their back catalog of television content on AOL’s online network for free.
How did this on-demand flash happen? Wasn’t this level of à la carte TV consumer control and access supposed to be years off? No; not really. Consumers have already been building their own level of mix-and-match programming and TV personalization with services like BitTorrent and a flood of new independent and user-created content via the web. Learning from the music industry’s late 90’s struggles with Napster and its brethren, broadcasters and studios are offering their content before consumers get too far ahead of them.
From a TV ad and affiliate sales point of view, these developments are like reversing the rotation of the Earth, flipping the script in terms of traditional appointment viewing assumptions. What that means for the next several years is a continued shift toward far more targeted marketing campaigns and a dependence on consumers to invite ads rather than merely accept the ones pushed to them. To get those invitations, advocacy, trust, and customization are the price of entry.
My emphasis.
: Frank Barnako writes about this today and is nice enough to link to my exploding-tv posts. The newer ones are here; the older ones (from the old blog platform), starting in June last year, are here.
Good on the Open Source Media/OSM/Pajamas Media folks for deciding to go back to their Pajamas moniker to do so with humor and grace:
So how did this happen in the first place? Back at the beginning, certain, shall we say, paternalistically minded parties (i.e., the guys in suits) decided that we should act like grownups, and being as yet somewhat immature—at least as businesspeople–we did as we were told.
Which is how, one day, we ended up sitting around a conference table listening to representatives from a “branding” company. What followed is still a bit of a nightmarish blur, but it involved a PowerPoint presentation on the history of names, and such probing questions as, “If you were an animal, what animal would you be?” (Which is how we almost ended up as Jellyfish Media.)
Yes, sometimes having money can cause more problems than not having it. If you can’t afford a branding agency, then you trust yourself. And that, above all, is what blogs are about, eh?
The NY Post’s Page Six speculates about Judy Miller’s severence package with guesses as high as six years’ salary and a lifetime of health insurance. I don’t care about the money but I still want to know what limits both sides agreed to on what they can say.
There’s a generous dollop of irony in Kit Seelye’s profile of The Washington Post’s and CNN’s Howie Kurtz today. She raises questions about his conflict of interest writing about the media and the media companies of which he is a part (he and other defend his performance on those scores).
But the truth is that The Times needs its own Howie Kurtz: a strong voice who will cover, analyze, and criticize the paper as well as media, and not just the current combination of a brothy public editor and the reporter given the bad-luck assignment of covering the latest dustup at the paper. Seelye would be good that that if she were given the chance. There are the sprinkles atop that dollop of irony.
At the Huffington Post, Jay Rosen has a suggestion for Knight Ridder’s sale: Entice local buyers.
I have to disagree with Jay — or at least get tougher than he does — on a few key points:
First, buying a paper as it stands today is a no-win deal. Newspapers are not growth businesses. Though profitable, they are shrinking businesses. So any owner who comes in will be forced to make no end of tough decisions: cutting back staff, including newsrooms, and shifting the business from the formerly high-margin and monopoly print world to the lower-margin and highly competitive online world. Those decisions will be costly, bringing severence and possibly shutdown liabilities, as well as considerable unpopularity.
So I would challenge the business and editorial management and staffs of these newspapers to come up with their own tough and specific strategic plans so they can sell their future, not their past, to prospective buyers:
Yes, they should plan their own cutbacks everywhere in the operation, including the newsroom.
They should find the efficiencies that will allow them to increase the value of their products: Do we really need another movie critic? Do we really need to send our own guy to another damned golf tournament? Can we save money on the commodity news that takes up so much resource?
They should create their own strategies for partnering with the public to grow in coverage and local advertising.
The plans should be harshly realistic about revenue and margins five and 10 years out.
Then they should turn around and create a plan for investment in online and other media and in what makes their franchises uniquely valued: reporting.
In the end, they need to present a plan that shows how they will have a business that is not dependent on paper but instead uses any and all media available to serve and inform the community.
And they should get Knight Ridder to do all the tough stuff before a new buyer arrives, setting in motion and paying for layoffs, retraining, and retooling, so together they can sell a business that has a real strategy and higher value for shareholders, for employees, for the new owners, and for the community.
Second, Jay says that oftentimes, the would-be angels who want to rescue local papers are the worst possible buyers (see: the late Abe Hirshfeld at the NY Post; see also: Robert Maxwell, for whom I ended up working, at the New York Daily News). You don’t want someone who buys purely on ego, for eventually, bankruptcy trumps fame.
To guard against the loons and larceny, Jay suggests that the paper’s editor have veto power over a buyer. I disagree. Editors may pick people who’ll promise to increase the size of print newsrooms — that is, to do the fiscally irresponsible but editorially attractive. Editors are easy to seduce. They are fiscally horny. This has to be about creating a viable longterm business, or it just won’t work. So give the larger management team a veto or find a way to convene a vote of the staff.
Third, this will work only if the staff sees the alternate as dire: folding or continued life under a Scrooge regime at Knight Ridder or under a private equity buyer. So KR has to put forward a realistic vision of the future of newspapers — one that will scare the entire industry. That won’t make them popular in the business but it will let them look at themselves in the mirror a few years hence. KR also must open its books to make the exact financial picture for newspapers crystal clear.
Fourth, I would by no means limit this to local buyers and certainly not to industry buyers. Hell, I’ve moved lots of times and ended up loving the places where I landed. Just because I happen to live in a given town, that doesn’t mean I know more or care more than the guy in the next town. That is a wishful fiction of newspapering: that local is a virtue. Quite to the contrary, the fresher and perhaps farther the blood imported, the better. So why not see Craig buy Miami or or The Guardian Philadelphia or Yahoo San Jose? What this industry needs most is new perspectives, not just local perspectives.
Fifth, I would do the very unPC thing among the antimedia crowd and urge Congress, the FCC, and the Justice Department to grant exemptions from crossownership and even antitrust rules so that other dinosaur media businesses in these towns — TV, radio, online, and suburban papers — could figure out ways to merge and break down the barriers the built between media. That would build truly local news operations that are better prepared to deal with a future. If you don’t like national conglomerates buying local media, then at least allow local conglomerates a fighting chance. I am out there telling media companies that they have to break free of the shackles of their medium — that newspapers must stop thinking of themselves in terms of their paper, broadcast in terms of their broadcast towers — and yet that is how we are regulating media: forcing newspaper companies to own just newspapers, not broadcast, as each industry shudders against the fierce wind of the internet. Keep in mind why Knight Ridder is being forced to sell: because it became just a newspaper company in a new world where the medium doesn’t matter.
: Note: I just posted this on Huffington — my maiden voyage there. And, no, I didn’t do this to further piss off the OSM crowd. Jay started the discussion there so I chose to add to it there. And the fact that I can is rather, well, open-source of them, wouldn’t you say?
I asked Steve Rubel to give his PR professional’s view of the Audible podcasting kerfluffle. Here it is, Steve’s analysis of the company’s MR (media relations) and BR (blog relations). Thanks, Steve. But never satisfied, I’m also curious what he thinks of a consultant going on the attack on behalf of Audible.
And while we’re at it, Steve, what would you do with OSM?
OK, I’ve had a lot of fun with the play-by-play of the trainwreck known variously as Pajamas Media, Open Source Media, OSM, and Open Sores Media. Because, hey, who can pass up such a great bucket of punch lines?
But I do like the people I know who are involved. And so now I’ll give my advice. No punch lines:
1. Fix the name thing and fast. Come up with a new name or simply go back to Pajamas, which had recognition if not gravitas. (That’s not a punch line, really.) Be quick and gracious. And while you’re at it, you might want to consider a different verb that “dig” since Digg.com has pretty much sewn that one up.
2. Make a clear and open statement of what you want to be and why. That’s the real problem I’ve had: I can’t figure out what OSM think it is or will be in editorial, business, or blog terms. So tell us. Before you do, put it up as a wiki for your editorial board and members to edit (which worked well for Global Voices). Then put it out for the world to see.
3. But better yet, be true to the spirit of openness and ask your public what they think you should be, not just your editorial board. Open up the discussion. And given the context, you can feel free to kill the suggestions that you go eat raw eggs. I’d say you’ve already swallowed a few. Keep the best suggestions. And adopt them.
I’ll start the ball rolling: I think you should be a conservative Huffington Post. Stop trying to act fair and balanced; have a worldview and be proud of it. Thank your liberal tokens who were kind enough to join in and give you beard and come out and be right and be proud.
To be Huffington, you’d need to convince some blogless conservative celebrities to contribute. That may ber tough, considering your PR now. But I’d try to call in a few debts.
Ask for suggestions not just in content but also in business: in advertising and, Lord knows, in PR.
4. Get a new design and try to show off as much of the web as you can, not just a few isolated boxes. If you’re going to try to aggregate lots of the web, your design doesn’t show that.
5. Spend as little of that $3.5 million as you can. Stop with the salaries and fancy parties. Build a product and an audience first. The money is corrupting you, just like a bubblicious startup. It’s making you think you ‘re big when you’re not even born. So step away from the checkbook.
6. Consider hiring a manager who’d distant and disaffected, who’ll look at this business coldly to try to find a business. Yeah, I know I just told you not to spend money. But sometimes, managers are worth it. Sometimes.
I don’ t know whether you’ll have a product or a business as the end of the day. But right now, you have the little engine that could crash. So I’d slam on the breaks. Just my advice.
Well, Riffs, the new review-anything site, does one thing right that Amazon should have done from the first: You go to Riffs and write a review and it lets you get an RSS feed, which you can put on your own blog.
Still, I agree with Mike Arrington: “Do we need Riffs when everyone seems very happy writing reviews directly on their blogs?”
Fred Wilson tries out Riffs. But he has long pointed out that Gotham Gal has all kinds of reviews already on her blog. The question is: How do I find what she’s writing and find what other people are writing about the same topic so I can compare? How can I look for new restaurants in New York and find the ones she has found?
The service I’ll pay attention to is the one that lets me find the riffs and reviews (and recipes and whatever else) that people put on their own blogs. That can be a search engine or an aggregator or both that gets people to swarm around tags so they know their stuff will be found. It works inside Flickr and Del.icio.us. It can work outside, in the distributed web.
If I were a VC, I’d be investing in a company that tries to use tags and microformats and social interaction to link together the topics and opinions and information people care about on that distributed web. For that’s the company that won’t waste effort and expense trying to get people to change their behavior and reverse the natural flow of the web out to the edges — ‘come to us and give us your good stuff’ — but instead takes advantage of the essence of the web and leaves control out at those edges by saying: ‘We know you have good stuff and we’re going to help people find it.’ The consumer proposition is then clear: This is how you find the good stuff. This will be the real successor to and competitor against Google. Oh, Google could do it, too, but judging by Base, they’re not doing that. They’re taking control rather than giving it.
Steve Baker says anonymity is the next big industry. I don’t know whether it’s an industry, but there is value to add there. What do newspaper job classifieds and headhunters really provide but anonymizing? In the new world of jobs and resumes where buyer and seller can come together frictionlessly, there is some need for a trusted agent to act as the anonymizer (which may be newspapers’ last hope to keep a foot in that marketplace, if they figure it out and act quickly). Ditto personals, until you’re ready to meet and mate. Ditto some other commercial and informational transactions. It’s harder to provide anonymity in a distributed world but it still had value.
: LATER: Michael Zimmer says in the comments: “ ‘Pseudonymity’ is probably a more attainable goal.” Right, he is. And now let’s butcher that into a verb: pseudonymizing?
I’ve read the little background material on Google’s Base and still can’t see whether the material you put there can be found by other search engines. I also cannot find evidence of an API that shares any standards for tags and structure. Is Base open or closed? So far, closed.
What we need instead is a means of letting you tag and structure your data so it can be found reliably by any search engine no matter where it is on the internet. That would stay true to the distributed internet Google has so masterfully exploited.
I wish I were hearing more noise from the microformats guys to act as competitors — or at least as pressure on Google for openness and standards.
Imagine if you could go to a page that lets you put in your resume or house ad or job ad and it spits out tagged XML you could put on the web anywhere to be found by anyone.
Or imagine putting tags on restaurant reviews you post on your blog so anyone could aggregate or search for, say, all the cuisine=mexican restaurants in location=chicago. Well, you don’t really have to imagine that. If you aggreed on the tags, you could start doing that today via Del.icio.us and Technorati.
And imagine if you could go to Google or other services — e.g., Indeed and SimplyHired for jobs or Baristanet for three Jersey towns — and see the tags they use so you can swarm around those tags and find and be found. That’s the openness we need. If Google spearheads that with a truly open API that can be adapted by the community, then great. That is our distributed marketplace. But if not, then Google is only trying to recreate the centralized marketplaces of old — otherwise known as newspapers. That worked for newspapers when they had monopolies. They don’t anymore. Does Google think it has a monopoly?
: Mark Pincus hopes Google is not trying to recreate Walmart. It’s a heartfelt, practically tear-wrenching ode to what Google coulda shoulda been:
my other big question is whether google is opening this service to the same crawling it has benefitted from to the tune of $108 billion? …
my take is google has chosen between two paths. one which i thought they were on was to be a platform to enable great things on the web. google could have powered everything with its search engine, ad infrastructure, massive crawling and computing power. it could have been a democratizing force, enabling small services to flourish in being found and in serving them a platform on which to innovate.
instead google has chosen to be merely another big corporate titan. like microsoft, it’s choosing to go for the gold, enriching their shareholders rather than enabling industries….
like msft, google is now going after every other oppty around it, taking advantage of its trojan horse position. suddenly every company is at risk. companies as far away as walmart have to have a ‘google strategy’. today, vc’s ask every new startup how they will compete with google. (at least we dont have to answer the msft question any more.) …
in fact, google feels a like walmart today. once the excitement over trying out their latest release wears off we are left with the realization that they are going to ultimately put the corner grocer (being craigslist) out of business, and suck value out of an economy not add back. …
one last thought to all those ‘web 2.0′ers’ listening. WHEN ARE WE ALL GOING TO WAKE UP AND REALIZE THAT NONE OF US COMPETE WITH EACH OTHER? WE ALL COMPETE WITH GOOGLE, MSFT AND YAHOO. the only chance we have of enabling an independent industry is to come together, leverage s resources, create and protect a level playing field. otherwise, we are all in the business of creating great products in the hope we can sell to them before they build it. how fucking boring is that?
Right. That is precisely why some of us are working on figuring out open ad marketplaces and why I wish the microformats guys were getting more ink pixels.
The answer to any monopoly — water to wicked witches everywhere — is openness.
: I’ve been meaning to link to this PC4Media post on microformats for months; now I have the excuse and the memory to do it:
MicroFormats Enable Distributed Applications!
Exactly. Microformats could be as big an innovation as databases were.
If databases let us store information. Microformats let us access the world’s databases. Potentially!
Yes, APIs do this too. But, microformats make the database (or data store) distributed. Not controlled by one entity.
This could be as big as “http”.
If you don’t get how microformats can change your business, prepare to be outdone.
There’s only one question that matters, strategically: is Base the AOL-style walled garden of the 00s?
That is, are returns to info owned by Google going to be lower than decentralized info? …
What that means is that Google keeps indexing the world’s information, albeit at increasingly costly factor prices; while superior returns begin flowing to reconstructors and smart aggregators. This scenario devalues centralized mechanisms/walled gardens, like Base - because they’re not part of the attention ecosystem; they’re part of GoogleWorld (we really do need a name for all the info Google owns)….
But I think what it does do is begin to point to a growing vital point competitors can strike….
Then there’s Amazon, eBay, VCs, and media - all attention economy players, who seem totally intent on missing the tectonic shifts right under their feet, which are eroding all their returns.
The key question for any company today is: How do you play in the distributed world? How do you stop the 1.0 insistence of having to control and own and how do you instead make money by enabling others? That was where Google’s own gigantic growth was. But sometimes it’s hardest to learn the lessons you yourself teach.
Umair adds:
Another, marginally related point - it also points to the uncooling of Google. I mean, Base? Can you get more Orwellian, lame, sinister, connected to all the wrong stuff?
EG: Al Qaeda means “the Base”.
See also: base instincts.
: SEE ALSO: The comments. Good notes there from ROR and SimpyHired.
The Times has a good summary of the Stupid Sony Rootkit Scandal and how bloggers brought them down. I watched this from afar because I haven’t bought a CD in more than a year. CD? What’s a CD? They’re working so hard to protect a dead medium. It’s as if they posted a militia around a graveyard.
