Seriously, the guy is the Anthony Trollope of political bloggers. We could have paid off the federal deficit, provided gold-plate healthcare for every man, woman, and child in the country, and bought out Goldman-Sachs five times over already.

In fact, in the time it’s taken me to write this, he’s probably generated several 17-paragraph posts, several with at least two multi-paragraph updates.

Much respect–the man is a machine.

Zuckerberg seems to think that full publicity is the inevitable future. He said in January that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” The problem is that actual social science research shows this isn’t true. The Pew Research Center reported this week that (in the words of Web-sociology guru danah boyd) “young adults are more actively engaged in managing what they share online than older adults.” Surely Facebook, if it wanted, could figure out that its line about a youth-driven juggernaut toward publicity isn’t borne out by the data — it’s not like it doesn’t have the user data of hundreds of millions of users at its fingertips. So what gives?

I suspect that while Zuckerberg spins publicity as a social good, he actually believes it’s a moral one. It’s a theme that’s become pretty common among execs of data-collecting, data-publicizing companies: making it so that anything anyone does can be seen by anyone they know is a way of keeping them honest.

These complaints generally follow the pattern of “I trusted Facebook with my personal information, and now they have betrayed that trust by making it public!” Lind’s version of the complaint attributes this betrayal to a different motivation than simple greed, but it’s the same basic idea.

All of these criticisms, as well as what has become a relatively well-established tradition of pointless protests from Facebook’s user-base every time there is a change to the UI, stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what Facebook is, and of what its relationship to its users is.

The misunderstanding is this: Facebook users tend to think that they are Facebook’s customers, but in fact, they are Facebook’s product. The company doesn’t exist to provide you a means to stay in touch with your friends and meet new ones, it exists to sell advertising. Facebook creates a bunch services and features to attract users, these users put a bunch of personal information into Facebook, and Facebook sells access to those users to advertisers. Sure, there is a risk that they will make a change that drives away so many users that their product (i.e., their userbase) becomes less valuable, but that strikes me as being a business problem, not a moral problem

I guess my question for everyone suddenly piling on the Facebook-hate is, what did you expect, and why? It has been pretty clear all along that the whole point of their business model was to make information public, and they have been relatively up-front about the fact that their terms of service were subject to change at any time.

Frank Rich, today:

It would also be nice to think that the “balloon boy” viewers were the innocent victims of a dazzling Houdini-class feat of wizardry — a “massive fraud,” as Bill O’Reilly thundered. But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.

Really? Maybe the reason that so few of us questioned the balloon’s “waft” was that no one knows anything about balloons. As for Rich’s last comment about Hollywood gossip, well, he can speak for himself. I suppose when your beat consists of drawing overly broad generalizations between pop culture and politics this tendency becomes more pronounced.

That’s pretty rich, coming from a magazine that fell hook, line, and sinker for the Bush administration’s ever-changing rationale for invading Iraq.

That a lot of people will mindlessly fall in step with whatever story the media is hyping is precisely the point that Rich is making. Chotiner’s protestations aside, one needed to know exactly nothing about balloons to understand that from the second the “balloon boy” story broke out on the news channels and Internet like a rash until it ended, there was zero evidence that the kid was in the balloon. Nonetheless, news anchors breathlessly reported every development throughout the afternoon, and Twitter was overrun with “balloon boy”-related tweets and re-tweets.

Rather than knowledge about balloons, what was actually required here were critical thinking skills. And to Rich’s point, these same skills would have served a lot of people well, whether the topic at hand be the balloon boy, Iraq’s mythical weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda ties, or mortgage-backed securities that can never ever decrease in value.

Following up on a post by Matt Yglesias, Coates says:

I’d agree that knowing exactly who is reading you is a revealing experience. I’d also agree that, in the sense of generating constant repeating eye-balls, long-form isn’t working on the web. But as a guy who’s worked on the web, and in print, I’d back this analysis up and add something else–long-form isn’t working particularly well in magazines.

There is a point that consistently gets lost in all the screeching about the death of print journalism. In their traditional business model, for-profit magazines and newspapers that contain advertising exist for one reason only: to put those ads in front of readers’ eyes.

Print publications have always told their advertisers “We have a circulation of X million, so all of those people will see your ad.” Based on that, they charge accordingly for ads.

As Coates and Yglesias point out, though, just because I subscribe to a magazine doesn’t mean that I’m going to see all the ads a particular issue contains. Hell, I might not see any of them, and to Coates’ point, it’s not even clear how many of the articles I will read.

Is it possible to port the magazine model of long-form journalistic writing directly over to a web site? If the desired outcome is to keep bringing in the same amount of money, the answer is clearly no. The more interesting question here is whether it even makes sense to try. If journalists and other writers are really looking for the best way to get what they have to say out to reader, then perhaps the better strategy is to use the analytics and metrics that web-based delivery provides in order to figure out how people are actually consuming and using the content that’s being written.

In other words, instead of wondering whether online journalism can sustain the 30,000 word article, maybe we ought to be looking at whether we need to be writing so many 30,000 word articles.

Indeed, he could. Technology makes it possible: We could listen to him – and watch him – on the internet, on our iPods, and even now on our web-enabled phones. There’s no longer a need for a distribution network.

The numbers could be impressive. Stern brought an estimated 6-8 million listeners to Sirius. I’ve talked with a measurement company that did a study on his impact on satellite and concluded that a majority of users were there and paying $12.95 a month because of him. So say that half those people – 3.5 million – would pay half that much – $6 – to get Stern anywhere and on-demand. That’s $252 million.

I’m skeptical.

While I’d like to think Jarvis is right, I’m not sure the audience numbers Stern gets on satellite radio would translate to Internet-only distribution. Personally, while I’d rather not listen to Howard Stern at all, if I had to, I’d prefer it be via the model Jarvis suggests. However, I don’t think I (or Jeff Jarvis, for that matter) are typical media consumers.

For the average consumer, listening to satellite radio is a relatively easy transition from listening to terrestrial radio. Sure, you have buy a special box and subscribe, but otherwise, there’s not that much difference. This setup is fundamentally different from having a PC, laptop, or other “media box”-type computer plugged into your stereo, or downloading and syncing podcasts to a portable media player.

To put it another way, I think the issue is similar to the “What do you mean I have to watch it on my computer?” reaction one gets when trying to explain IPTV to someone who is not technologically savvy. Moving the content over to a different delivery mechanism does not mean all the viewers or listeners are going to follow, especially if the new delivery mechanism is fundamentally different than the old one and requires a change of habits and behaviors.

Given the mainstream media’s disturbing habit of regurgitating talking points and political propaganda, I find this claim to be pretty laughable. The linked post does a good job of taking it apart, so I won’t bother duplicating their work.

Early in the clip, though, Matthews and Time’s Joe Klein briefly raise the point that without large, traditional news organizations like newspapers and national magazines, there wouldn’t be journalists at foreign desks to covers events in other countries. This argument is one that critics of new media tend to make quite a bit when arguing for stuff like paywalls , monopoly exemptions, and prohibitions against linking: If we don’t preserve the existing business models of big media companies like the NYT and the Associated Press, then who will cover stuff that happens in other countries?

Here’s a suggestion: how about the people who live in other countries?

I’m no media expert, but it seems like the need for journalistic entities such as “the foreign desk” and “the Baghdad bureau” made sense when someone writing about what was going on in some far-away country had no means of getting her/his work out to the public. Now, though? Not so much.

Why does Time need to pay for Joe Klein to spend a year overseas uploading blog posts, when there are a whole bunch of people who live there doing the same thing?

At its core, this argument largely seems to be about American journalists who don’t think anyone else can cover the news like they can, and who are looking to preserve the business model that has been sending them around the world.

President Obama stated that he thought that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly.” Predictably, the news media has been completely overcome by a collective case of the vapors regarding this remark, and has been obsessively clutching its handkerchief ever since

Today, Greg Sargent has a post up on his blog about the thus-far “unapologetic” response thus far from White House:

Yes, the White House moderated his tone a bit. But what’s noteworthy is how little, not how much. In his first explanation yesterday, press sec Robert Gibbs did clarify that Obama never called the cop stupid. But that amounted to lawyerly and wholly unapologetic parsing. Gibbs went out of his way to say the President had no regrets.

Unapologetic, sure–I’ll buy that. “Lawyerly” and “parsing”, though? Sorry, but no.

If the President had said that the Cambridge police were stupid, or that the officer who arrested Gates was stupid, some of this handwringing might (and I stress the word “might”) be warranted. However, that’s not what the President said–he said they acted stupidly, which is an entirely different thing.

Pointing out the difference between the two is not lawyerly parsing, a loaded phrase which connotes abstract and meaningless debates about what the meaning of “is” is.

One particular part of the interview really bothered me, so my apologies in advance for the lengthy quote:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was a Pew study recently, and it found that for the first time more people are getting their news online, something like 45 percent compared to newspapers, which is apparently 35 percent. I’m surprised it’s that high.

If people are getting their news from, say, The New York Times website, they don’t get the full benefit, I guess, of the editor’s notion of what ought to be front page news because they aren’t seeing the front page. They’re seeing something else.

JAMES BARRON: Well, they get a different sense of it. Newspapers, if you think about it, are about setting priorities. That’s what editors do by organizing the front page. That’s a snapshot of a day.

If you go to the home page of Nytimes.com, it’s a snapshot of a much shorter period, but it’s still determined by editors who go to the same meetings during the day as the editors who determine what goes on the front page of the print version. So what you get at the top of the home page may be two or three stories at two minutes of 3 o’clock or something. That’s what’s important at that point. It’s a smaller window.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I see what you’re saying, that there still is, you know, very strict editorial supervision of what goes on the home page. But I have to say as a reader, I read it differently. I don’t pay as much attention to those stories that are being featured. I tend to go down to the sections that I want to more quickly, and I don’t get to have the accidental encounter with those other stories that I might see if I were turning physical pages.

So my experience of the paper is very different online, and the importance of those editorial decisions about what comes first is much diminished.

JAMES BARRON: And I think that’s one of the things that journalism is going to have to grapple with if the shift continues that the Pew study found.

Barron does a fairly decent job of sidestepping Gladstone’s rather boneheaded line of questioning. I’m curious to know what she thinks happens to generate the layout of the main page of nytimes.com. That it’s randomly generated? That some know-nothing webadmin throws whatever s/he happens to come across at the top of page and picks a font-size?

Honestly, I do not know what process the Times uses to lay out its web content. However, I’d be willing to bet that a good deal of thought and planning goes into it. Gladstone’s explanation that she doesn’t “get to have the accidental encounter with those other stories that I might see if I were turning physical pages” makes no sense, other than as a cover for “I like print newspapers, not this new-fangled online stuff.”

Economists say it is unclear whether President-elect Barack Obama’s stimulus package is big enough and whether it would provide the most bang for the buck.

Seriously? Perhaps the Times needs to hire an eighth-grader to read over this stuff before they publish it.

Out of Town News, the newsstand that has offered a cornucopia of newspapers and magazines as a Harvard Square landmark for more than 50 years, could close.

The owners have informed Cambridge officials that they have no plans to renew their lease after it expires Jan. 31. City officials say they are hoping to find another newsstand to take its place, but acknowledge that the business climate is grim as more customers get their news online rather than in print.

This story has been all over my RSS reader like a rash for the past few days, and even made it to the headlines on All Things Considered on Thursday. I know I’m supposed to be outraged by a small and historic store being forced out of business by online competition, but I have to wonder if it’s not being blown out of proportion by the prominence of Harvard graduates in the liberal blogosphere.

Beyond that, I find it rather amusing to hear and read a bunch of people complaining about the loss of a store they apparently couldn’t be bothered to patronize enough to keep it in business.