• Data dynamics: How the rules of sharing are changing | Matt McAlister
  Until trust is measurable with explicit consentual triggers, loosely coupled networks that act on the data I wish to protect are going to struggle to talk to each other.
  (tags: identity)
• Dear anyone with a Facebook account: Don’t be stupid | mathewingram.com/work
  Especially if I know you. Fortunately, I don’t know the poor kid Mathew Ingram is writing about. (Is this for real? There’s something about this whole episode that seems a bit like a hoax. Calling snopes.com…
  (tags: facebook humor sad)

[Here's a test: If you don't have a subscription to WSJ.com and you can click this link and end up there, then, well, the WSJ.com is free. See the "update" below for the secret to this trick.]

First, you gotta love the headline from this article at Editor & Publisher, “WSJ Executive: Murdoch’s Free Web Site Talk is ‘Jumping The Gun’” that follows-up the news reports earlier today that Rupert Murdoch told shareholders that WSJ.com will drop its current subscription model.

The article has some, well, interesting quotes:

“A top business-side executive at Dow Jones & Co. said it is premature to assume that The Wall Street Journal Web site will definitely drop its paid subscription model, despite comments by Rupert Murdoch that the change is expected. “It is jumping the gun, people are jumping to conclusions here very quickly. We haven’t even closed the deal yet,” said Michael Rooney, senior vice president and chief revenue officer for the company’s consumer media group. “Mr. Murdoch would like to have the largest, most robust site in business. Free is a way to look at that. But there is a lot of detail behind that. You have to work that out. You don’t just flip the switch.”

Mr. Rooney, who, no doubt, is a wonderful individual, nonetheless, sounds like a Presidential press secretary trying to explain what the President meant to say. However, Rupert Murdoch said what he said. Clearly, he didn’t say “everything that is paid for today is going to be free” and he didn’t say, “We’re going to flip the switch on this as soon as the deal closes.” But according to the AP, he did say this: “We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million, having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth.”

My speculation (based purely on reading and listening to news reports of what Rupert Murdoch and WSJ executives have said over the past 90 days) is this: Almost all of what we today know as the news, features and opinion content of the Wall Street Journal and the “general business news” of WSJ.com, will come out from behind the pay wall. However, access to certain real-time financial data, corporate research, background and other business mission-critical and industry-vertical information and data will continue to be available via subscription — in some cases, a very expensive subscription.

Update: Well, geez, louise. According to Kevin Rose (the Mr. Bigg of Digg), starting tonight, anyone can make a particular story “free” on WSJ.com by merely clicking a Digg button. Of course, that means that someone with a subscription, say, someone like me, would have to click that button first.

Here’s what Remote Digg, WSJ.com style, looks like:

Technorati Tags: news corp, puppy, wsj.com

The white-coat gang at Hammock Labs are playing with Facebook pages. If you’re a Facebookian (Facebooker?) and care to play along, please “fan” Hammock or SmallBusiness.com (or both). As the lab rats have already discovered there’s no button that says, “fan,” here’s their first discovered recommendation: “Tell someone to add your page to their list of product and services — don’t tell them to “fan you.”

Also: I can assure you that no animals were harmed and no lead was used in the creation of the still rather wet-paint (and sparse) pages.

[via: AP]:

“Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the News Corporation, said today that he intended to make access to The Wall Street Journal’s Web site free, trading subscription fees for anticipated ad revenue. “We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million, having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth,” Mr. Murdoch said, referring to The Journal’s online readership.

This ends (at least, it’s the “end of the beginning”) the longest-running media debates of the online-era. I’ve blogged about this topic extensively and speculated recently that Murdoch’s savvy numbers-crunchers had helped make this decision months ago. I’m sure there are some “rest-of-the-story” details, but the facts have been pretty much laid out over the past 90 days.

Indeed, in many public venues, including last month’s Future of Business Media conference organized by PaidContent.org, both WSJ Publisher Gordon Crovitz and WSJ.com’s Alan Murray, were coy in their remarks (publicly and privately) regarding the topic, but clearly telegraphed its inevitability. Publicly, Crovitz indicated there was a clear path to making more content freely available, as a way of expanding readership. The corporate line has been fairly transparent that it was all a matter of when, not if.

[Note #1: This a somewhat long and geeky post about RSS newsreaders and memetrackers. If you aren't obsessed with those topics -- and believe me, if you're not, I understand completely -- you should probably skip it.]

If you use FeedDemon, the RSS newsreader for PCs running Windows from the Denver-based company, Newsgator, you should check out a feature called Popular Topics. According to the software’s creator and developer (and my friend) Nick Bradbury, he’s been working on the feature for over a year — indeed, it was announced and included in the software beta several months ago, but in a rather hidden place. With the current release (2.6) of the software, “Popular Topics” has become a more prominent (and faster) feature.

[Note #2: I'm sure there are at least two people reading this post who are wondering why the heck I'm blogging about software I obviously can't use -- they know I'm hooked on NewsGator's RSS reader for Macs, NetNewsWire. Why I know about Popular Topics on FeedDemon will be clear by the end of the post, promise.]

The FeedDemon feature is, in effect, a meme-tracker. However, instead of analyzing news stories and relevant blog posts that are being linked to by a mysterious universe of topical-bloggers (or folks trying to game it), the feature analyzes the stories that are being linked to by those in a network of bloggers you choose — those to whose RSS feeds you’ve subscribed. (There’s another view that provides a view of what all FeedDemon subscribers are pointing to.) Additionally, the feature allows you to have a “time” view of such conversational clusters. For example, if you’ve been away from your computer a couple of days and you’d like to see what the “popular topics” among your subscribed-to bloggers were on Wednesday, the feature allows you to do that.

In other words, it’s like having a Techmeme that is “memetracking” topics important to just those bloggers you desire to follow, rather than all bloggers who post on the topic.

[Note #3: I'd like apologize to Gabe Rivera, the creator and still champion of an amazing set of approaches and algorithms that power his memetracking marvels (Techmeme.com, Memorandum, WeSmirch, Ballbug) because I did the cheap trick in the subject line of this post when I said Popular Topics is like Techmeme. As I posted recently, bloggers and tech-journalists have resorted to using Techmeme as the comparative benchmark by which they describe any feature or service that tries to pick-up and present links of blog-posts related to some alpha-content. Sorry, Gabe. In reality, Popular Topics is not competing with Techmeme, because no one addicted to news from the Techcrunch/Valleywagosphere is going to unplug from it.]

So, how did I learn about “Popular Topics”? Actually, it was in a conversation over lunch with Nick Bradbury (who, like me, lives in Nashville) in which I was talking about how much I like Techmeme, but how I think it is so skewed towards SF Bay-area news. I told him I wished Techmeme was available in some other flavors that weren’t so covered in Techcrunch/Valleywag syrup. In other words, it would be nice if I could tweak a personal version of Techmeme to leave out all blogs devoted to tracking any sneezes made by Facebook executives, for example. (Actually, I didn’t express my pet-peeve exactly that way, but you get the point.)

That’s when Nick told me he’d been developing a feature on FeedDemon that let’s users create a meme-tracker focused only on the feeds to which the user subscribes. After lunch, I asked him to come to my office and demo it for me (we have several Windows machines). And that’s how I can blog about a feature that I can’t use on my own computer — (Note to Brent Simmons: although it would sure be nice if such a feature were added to NetnewsWire so I could.)

Again, I do not see this replacing, or even competing with Techmeme, as I don’t think people should cut themselves off from the bigger world, however, this is a cool way to get another view of the conversations in your world.

Technorati Tags: memetracker, techmeme, rss