By Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
June 17, 2005, 6:50 p.m.-- Last
week's weblog
$5 for me, $8.50 for you: Open
to Exploitation: American Shoppers Online and Offline (pdf) is
a study released earlier this month by The
Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania:
Sixty-four percent of American adults do not know that it is legal for online
stores to charge different people different prices at the same time of day
for the same product....
If you don't like .pdfs, here's CNN on the study: Study:
Shoppers naive about retail prices online:
...It said 87 percent of people strongly objected to the practice of online
stores charging people different prices for the same products based on information
collected about their shopping habits.
"I don't think people understand this is being done," said Willi
Stabenau, 23, a musician in New York who participated in the survey. "We
don't let ourselves be tracked that way in any other facet of our lives.
Why would you want that to happen while you're shopping?"
The Internet empowers careful shoppers to conveniently compare prices and
features across thousands of stores. But it also enables businesses to quietly
collect detailed records about a customer's behavior and preferences and
set prices accordingly.
...Amazon.com outraged some customers in September 2000 after one buyer
deleted the electronic tags on his computer that identified him as a regular
customer and noticed the price of a DVD changed from $26.24 to $22.74. The
company said it was the result of a random price test and offered to refund
buyers who paid the higher prices.
Take the survey yourself: Seventeen
Facts American Shoppers Need to Know - But Don't another pdf.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers
some tech
workarounds.
This came up today in comments over at Jeff Jarvis's blog, in
a post in which Jeff is preaching we should take cookies and like it.
(Jeff has
recently taken on a consulting gig to work on content development at About.com,
recently bought by the N.Y. Times.):
I am a cookie monster. I firmly believe we need more cookies. We need cookies
on blogs so we, too, can make that money and support this medium...
But there is an idiotic belief in some quarters that cookies are bad because
they somehow impinge on our privacy -- when, in fact, I dare anyone to say
how a content site's simple traffic-tracking cookie violates your privacy
in any meaningful way.
Privacy is the boogeyword of the age. It is tech's version of politically
correct idiocy. All you have to do is invoke the spectre of "privacy" against
someone and they're assumed to be evil. It's a particularly comical form
of nerd McCarthyism: I have in my hand a list of cookies!
All this is leading to stupid moves that hurt the internet: its convenience,
its revenue, its business....
In the pushback
by Jeff's own readers, one mentions,
Amazon.com is a great example of why online privacy matters. Amazon will
charge different prices for their wares depending on what cookies customers
have on their computers. I've seen instances where clearing the cookies from
my browser has made a $5 difference on the price of a DVD. True, this invasion
of privacy only costs me a little, but if Amazon can do this, then what else
is being done with this information by sites that don't have a reputation
to lose like Amazon does?
Tracking web traffic is a laudable goal, but we need a much more secure
way of doing it than cookies. We should all be demanding that the computer
industry comes up with a better way because you are correct that it would
benefit everyone.
The purpose of the Internet is not, and never was, to create revenue and
business. Cookies, registration, the CueCat are all part of attempts to "monetize
the reader" -- and the reader doesn't want to be monetized. It is a failure
of imagination and leadership on the part of corporate news execs to try to
ram these tricks down readers' throats, jaws out, growling, "You want
our content, you give something up."
This is particularly embarrassing in newsrooms, where the culture is built
on the idea of serving the reader.
Find another way. Get rid of cookies and registration. Get your advertisers
to put a shopping cart behind their ads, make the ad say "Buy this product
now for $x" and get fulfillment centers ready to handle the orders. Advertisers
are not going to want any walls between their shopping carts and the vast population
of readers willing to browse a high-quality site.
And when we buy through you, you'll know far more about us than we'll ever
voluntarily give up.
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Lucy (in the Sky with Diamonds) Richardson dies:
The inspiration for John Lennon's tune is
dead at 47, according to Jade Walker's Blog
of Death. There's a
bit more (from the Daily Telegraph) at news.com.au.
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Is it streaming, Bob? Amazon
plans Bob Dylan, Norah Jones concert: Online retailer to stream live concert
on its homepage July 16. Bill Maher will host the live concert in Seattle,
but it's for Amazon employees, not open to the public.
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Weekend game: Text
Twist is for Jumble fans. There may be dozens of small words to tease
out of a group of letters, but there is one six-letter word. Get that, and
you're going to the next round. Nice interface lets you "twist" --
reorder -- the letters. Just one of many online games at ArcadePod.
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More garden blogs: Newly added to the Garden
Blogs list. (I just started a list a coupla years ago for my own pleasure,
and it grew...)
My
Garden: Mia Goff of The Nature
Nut turns us onto this one. Here's what
Mia wrote,
you have absolutely got to check out this new garden blog I discovered today
- My Garden by Sandy on Vancouver Island in Canada...
It is full of absolutely gorgeous photos from a garden to-die-for. Wait
till you see the plant combinations, textures, manicured lawns. I'm sure
your readers will love the scrumptious feast for the eyes.
Sandy is a woman of few words and many photos with an astonishing piece of
land.
Down My Garden
Path Claire Siconolfi of Clifton Park, New York. I learn something from
every garden blogger. Here's Claire:
Snapdragons were always a favourite of my mums back in England and I remember,
whilst growing up, her showing me how if you squeezed them just right on
the sides they would open and close like a mouth. This fascinates me even
today and was the first thing I did with my new blooms!
Diane's Baja Desert
Garden Blog. Diane Varney writes,
Thanks for having your list of garden blogs. I’m sure that it is partially
responsible for my inspiration to create my own garden blog. I live in Cabo
Pulmo, Baja California Sur (this is the state), Mexico. We are 1,000 miles
south of San Diego. My garden focuses on cacti, succulents, and native plants.
I am originally from Northern California.
Diane blogs beautiful, exotic (to a New Englander!) photos of cactus flowers,
some of which last only a day; a spiny-tail iguana; house finch eggs.
Many
cactus flowers only last one day. That means that you have to really take
time to appreciate them. This inspired the "Flower of the Day".
That means that I try to look at it repeatedly and to show the flower to
anyone and everyone I can on its special day.
Most fascinating: She's making
cactus paint " from prickly pear cactus slime, lime (not the kind
from trees, but calcium hydroxide) and salt. I found a recipe on
the web a couple of days ago, marched out to the garden with my pruning saw
and hacked up some paddles to soak."
See the
results.
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Cx: I introduced a space at the end of the url for Farm
Fresh Rhode Island in yesterday's Monday Market item. It's fixed now.
Apologies to all who clicked in vain.
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I'm off for another couple of days. See you Wednesday.
June 16, 2005, 7:00 p.m.
I'm just back from three days off, shoveling like crazy to catch up.
Wet hot work? WaterFire --
Providence's signature evenings of music and blazing braziers on the river
-- has openings for a Production
Manager and a Director
of Business Administration. The "Major responsibilities" and "Qualifications & Requirements" are highly detailed.
Deadline for applications is June 30.
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Local produce (worth repeating): Journal Food Editor
Gail Ciampa covered this yesterday in Food Notes, but Monday
Market -- " locally grown foods and artisan food products" --
kicks off this Monday in Kennedy Plaza downtown. Hours for the market are 2-6
p.m. through Halloween but, for kickoff day, June 20, there'll be speakers
and cooking demonstrations from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
In addition to the seasonal greens, herbs and strawberries, organizers expect
quahogs and scallops, cheeses, corn meal, artisan breads and more. You can
sign up for an email telling you what will be in the market every week.
Related: Farm
Fresh Rhode Island, one of the organizers, has a series of pull-down
links -- on both sites -- of local resources.
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Rock
on, Beethoven: Beethoven
downloads receive more than 600,000 requests The free
downloads at the BBC of the nine Beethoven symphonies are a huge hit.
The first five have come and gone, but here's the schedule for the rest;
Symphony 6 will be broadcast on Monday 27th June, and available to download
from Tuesday 28th June to Monday 4th July.
Symphony 7 will be broadcast on Tuesday 28th June, and available to download
from Wednesday 29th June to Tuesday 5th July.
Symphony 8 will be broadcast on Wednesday 29th June, and available to download
from Thursday 30th June to Wednesday 6th July.
Symphony 9 will be broadcast on Thursday 30th June, and available to download
from Friday 1st July to Thursday 7th July.
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Toolbox:
Great
Site Ranking in Google: The Secrets Out
Google
Guide Quick Reference: Google Advanced Operators (Cheat Sheet)
Yotophoto: A Search engine
for Free Images & Stock Photos
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Radio static: Wayne
Robins writes a column in Newsday (Golden
but not forgotten) about the floundering of commercial radio. (Newsday
bills Robins as a former Newsday music critic, which is understandable, but
omits that he also had the beat in far cooler pubs, such as Spin and early
Rolling Stone.).
Touching on "Jack" (blogged
here last week), the name of a format that's largely an automated playlist
of hits from several decades, Robins notes with some irony that the format
ended the job at CBS radio of
"Bruce 'Cousin Brucie' Morrow, who has spent 46 years in New York radio.
...
An indication of how bewildering the format change is, and how fragmented
the radio market is, can be seen in the speed with which Morrow is bouncing
back, and to where he is bouncing. Last Thursday Morrow was hired by Sirius
Satellite Radio to do three shows: two music, one talk. (He begins July 4.)
No commercials. No playlist. Where do I sign up, Cousin?...
Infinity seems willing to trade CBS-FM's large, mature audience for a smaller,
younger one. But who has more discretionary income, the 25- to 44-year-olds
Jack is aimed at, or the 40-pluses who have embraced CBS-FM's oldies brand
for decades? In business school, this is known as slitting your own throat....
Good stuff. Do you remember The Five Satins' big hit, In the Still of the
Night? Wayne does. I do. Serious heartthrob doo-wop slow-dance track.
Related: Antenna
Adjustment -- Clear Channel is pulling apart its empire as it scrambles to
compete in a changed media world in Business Week.
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Feed your head with your eyes: Unusual
Art at Flatrock (a
stream of consciousness blog?) delivers visual astonishment -- such as Livio
De Marchi, realist in wood, with one of his works (above), Brick Art (trompe
l'oeil murals) and Walking to the Sky, Jonathan Borofsky's 100-foot sculpture
that has to be seen.
I've blogged De Marchi before -- here's
his site -- but hadn't seen this piece, or the other artists whose work
reader Eric Lilius was kind enough to tip us off to.
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How the music hour went: Seans Sands of Rattlehead
Records emails his 2005
Providence Invasion report. (At noon on June 2, bands were invited to
set up throughout downtown, playing unplugged.) Here's much of it:
We had the sun -- perfect weather -- plenty of confirms going into that
day. My best prediction was that we'd see 30-35 bands. We ended up with 21.
A few just simply dropped off the face of the Earth... no one's heard from
them in some time. Some are surprising... The Cringe? Since when do they
pass up an attempt to cause trouble? Well, since they have kinda drifted
away from playing and more into filmmaking, it turns out. Quite a few other
bands (six at last count) actually broke up in the weeks prior. Entropy gets
us all in the end.
On the other hand, a repeat of a new phenomena from last year: we now gain
performers during the Invasion. This year 2 guitarists and a saxaphonist
-- all separate individuals in completely different areas of the city --
all came across our Generals and Invaders, went and got their instruments
and joined the Invasion right then and there. (Unfortunately, they didn't
sign up so there's no way to even thank them.) I even got three invasion
applications the night before.
And the strangest thing about it this year, is how "normal" its
become. I remember the first year we did this; some of you actually refused
to get on board for fear of arrest. Two of you said people would complain
and yell at musicians to go away. And one of you said that it would never
succeed, and it was actually going to hurt the scene.
All of which, by now, can be shown to be false.
Thye truth is, maybe I've just become accustomed to miracles... I saw over
40 musicians -- across all clique and genre lines -- come out and help each
other. During the day, even. I saw people pay musicians more attention (and
more money) than what they usually get during the night at a club. People
are not afraid of musicians. They are intrigued. They love the idea. I even
saw a policeman stopping traffic so a musician could swoop his car in and
pick up his stuff to leave. But I saw all that last year, too.
I sat next to a couple on vacation from Raleigh at headquarters during the
Invasion, listening to the supersweet sounds of 44-Wreck... and they summed
it up nicely: "we have all kinds of local music on the radio down in
Raleigh, the clubs are always busy, too. This is a great idea, and we love
it... but it seems kind of sad that you have to go through such lengths to
get people to notice."
Ain't it the truth.
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Plugged up: America's
Most Unwired Cities: It's good to be unwired -- it means wi-fi is in
your air. Unfortunately, the Providence region is 57th. We have wires coming
out of everywhere, still.
Seattle beat out the San Francisco Bay area this year. Must be the Starbucks
concentration.
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