Earlier the year, the FTC announced it would be holding a two day workshop in Washington DC on Dec. 1 & 2 called “How Will Journalism Survive The Internet Age” to explore issues such as fair use, aggregator impact on journalism and related issues. The agenda has now been posted, with remarks from heavy-hitter speakers such as Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington and White House CTO Aneesh Chopraspeakers, along with Josh Cohen of Google and Lem Lloyd of Yahoo. A number of panels will be held, and I’m taking part in one, “Emerging Business Models for Journalism.”

The agenda is in PDF form here. For those who dislike PDF, I’ve reprinted the agenda in HTML format below. There are limited seats for those who wish to attend live, and the entire thing will also be webcast live with more info to be posted the days it happens on the workshop’s home page.

The agenda:

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

9:00 am – Welcome  – Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission

9:15 am  – Remarks  – Paul Steiger, Editor-in-Chief, President and CEO, ProPublica & Former Managing Editor, The Wall Street Journal

9:30 am  – Remarks – Rick Edmonds, Media Business Analyst, The Poynter Institute & Co-author, The State of the News Media 2009

9:45 am  – Remarks  – Rupert Murdoch  - Chairman and CEO, News Corp.

10:05 am – Panel – The State of Journalism Today and Tomorrow

• Mark Contreras, Chairman of the Executive Committee, The Newspaper Association of America & Senior Vice President/Newspapers, E.W. Scripps Co.
• Martin Kaiser, President, American Society of News Editor & Editor and Senior Vice President Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
• Jonathan Knee, Director, Media Program, Columbia Business School & Senior Managing Director, Evercore Partners
• Nina Link, President and CEO & Magazine Publishers of America
• Bryan Monroe, Visiting Professor, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University &  Former Vice President and Editorial Director, Ebony and Jet
• Robert Picard, Hamrin Professor of Media Economics and Director of the Media Management and Transformation Centre, Jonkoping University, Sweden
• Tonda Rush, Of Counsel, King & Ballow, On Behalf of National Newspaper Association
• David Westphal, Executive in Residence, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California & Former Washington Editor, McClatchy Newspapers
• Fred Young, Retired Senior Vice President of News Hearst Television Inc.

11:35 am  – Remarks  – Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post

12:00 pm – 1:30pm  – Lunch Break

1:30 pm  – Presentation  – Leonard Downie, Vice President at Large and Former Executive Editor, The Washington Post

1:45 pm – Presentation – Lem Lloyd, Vice President, Channel Sales, Yahoo!

2:00 pm – Presentation – Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager, Google

2:15 pm – Panel – Emerging Business Models for Journalism

• Chris Ahearn, President, Reuters Media, Thomson Reuters
• Mark Bide,  Rightscom Limited, Project Director, Automated Content Access Protocol
• Steven Brill, Co-Founder,  Journalism Online, LLC
• Lauren Rich Fine, Research Director, ContentNext Media
• Jeff Jarvis, Associate Professor, Director of the Interactive Program, City University of New York, Graduate School of Journalism
• Srinandan Kasi, Vice President and General Counsel, Associated Press
• Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
• Robert Thomson, Managing Editor, The Wall Street Journal

3:45 pm  – Presentation – Mike Bloxham, Director of Insight and Research, Center for Media Design, Ball State University

4:00 pm  – Presentation – Susan Athey, Professor of Economics, Harvard University

4:15 pm  – Presentation  – David Evans, Visiting Professor, Faculty of Laws University College London & Vice Chairman of LECG Europe

4:30pm  – Panel – Online Advertising and Consumer Demand Trends

• Barbara Bacci Mirque, Executive Vice President, Communications and Best Practices, Association of National Advertisers
• Mike Bloxham, Director of Insight and Research, Center for Media Design, Ball State University
• Jeff Chester, Executive Director, Center for Digital Democracy
• Pam Horan, President, Online Publishers Association
• Joe Laszlo, Director of Research, Interactive Advertising Bureau
• John Meyer, Director of Digital Media, WTOP and Federal News Radio

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

9:00 am – Welcome  – Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission

9:15 am – Presentation – James Hamilton, Charles S. Sydnor Professor of Public Policy Professor of Political Science and Economics & Director, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Sanford School of  Public Policy, Duke University

9:30 am – Presentation – Matthew Gentzkow, Professor of Economics, Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

9:45 am  - Presentation – Karen Dunlap, President and CEO, The Poynter Institute

10:00 am  – Panel – Public and Foundation-Funded Journalism

• Joaquin Alvarado, Senior Vice President for Diversity and Innovation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• Tom Leonard, University Librarian and Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley
• Charles Lewis,  Executive Editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication
• Mark MacCarthy, Adjunct Professor, Communication, Culture and Technology Program,  Georgetown University
• Jon McTaggart,  Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, American Public Media
• Eric Newton, Vice President, Journalism Program, Knight Foundation
• Vivian Schiller, President and CEO,  National Public Radio
• Josh Silver, Executive Director, Free Press

11:45 am – 1:00pm – Lunch Break

1:00 pm – Panel - Reducing the Costs of Journalism

• Bill Adair, Editor, PolitiFact, Washington Bureau Chief, St. Petersburg Times
• Bill Allison, Editorial Director, Sunlight Foundation
• Bill Buzenberg, Executive Director, The Center for Public Integrity
• Aneesh Chopra, Assistant to the President, Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director for the Office of Science & Technology of the Executive, Office of the President
• James Hamilton, Charles S. Sydnor Professor of Public Policy; Professor of Political Science and Economics Director, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
• Alisa Miller, President and Chief Executive Officer, Public Radio International
• Aron Pilhofer, Editor, Interactive News Technologies, The New York Times & Co-Founder, DocumentCloud
• Eric Umansky, Senior Editor, ProPublica, Co-Founder, DocumentCloud

2:30 pm  – Presentation- Knight Foundation Commission on The Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy

• Reed Hundt, Senior Advisor, McKinsey & Company, Former Chairman, Federal Communications Commission

2:45 pm  – Panel – Engaging and Informing Consumers in the Internet Age

• Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Professor and Director of the Communication Technology and Community Program, Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California
• James Gaines, Editor-in-Chief, FLYP Media & Former Editor, Time
• Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corp.
• Debra Osofsky, National Director, News and Broadcast, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
• Tom Rosenstiel, Director, Project for Excellence in Journalism, Pew Research Center
• Jason Seiken, Senior Vice President, PBS Interactive
• Linda Solomon, Photojournalist, Committee Member, Citizens to Save the Eccentric
• Kathy Times, President, National Association of Black Journalists

4:00 pm  – Presentation – Lisa George, Assistant Professor of Economics, Hunter College

4:15 pm – Panel – The New News

• Jim Brady, Allbritton Communications
• Christopher Callahan,  Dean, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication,  Arizona State University
• Elisa Camahort Page, Co-Founder and COO, BlogHer
• Bill Densmore, Vice President, Director, and Co-Founder, CircLabs Inc.
• Andrew Jay Schwartzman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Media Access Project
• John Servais, Founder,  NWCitizen.us

5:30 pm  Concluding Remarks

So Google wants to speed up the web, to the degree of saying if your site isn’t fast enough, you might suffer a ranking penalty. I’m all for speed. So here’s a suggestion. Google, take a leadership role in developing a web tracking API, so I can have one script that does it all.

Here are tracking scripts I currently consider essential:

• Google Analytics (because I want a nice overview of what’s going on at my site)
• Quantcast (because I think it’s important to have a public reporting of our traffic data)
• BLVD Status (because I can’t tolerate Google Analytics giving me a six hour delay to know what’s happening on my site)

Now on top of this, I’m also testing Chartbeat for instant analytics. Here on Daggle, I’m testing ValueClick to deliver ads. Google AdSense also runs for one ad unit. That’s six different JavaScript codes that need to run.

Why can I have one JavaScript code that does it all? OK, I know for ad delivery, that might be hard. But why can’t we have a universal JavaScript tracking code that works for Google Analytics, Quantcast, BLVD Status or anyone who wants to provide hosted analytics data? One script that sends the key data back to a central place, that in turn passes it on to the tracking services we select.

Personally, when I encounter a delay with a web site, it’s not that the page is having some CSS issue. It’s that some script is taking time pulling back or sending data to a third party firm.

My fifth grader is having to learn US geography — in particular, to look at a blank map and write in the correct name for each of the states. I think that’s great. I love maps and geography. But that’s a lot of states. I’ve been sharing with him a number of ways I’ve somehow remembered where states are located, and I’m curious to hear what others have to say.

California is easy. I grew up in the state, and he’s already learned it simply because I’d always point to it so much. But look at the shape. See how it’s kind of like a C? So it’s C for California.

Texas is another “letter” state for me. It kind of makes a T shape. Next to it, Louisiana looks like an L.

Then there are states that look like objects. Oklahoma, I always remembered it as being the state that looks kind of like a frying pan. Kentucky always looks like a chicken drumstick to me, appropriate when there’s Kentucky Fried Chicken out there. So that was another one easy to remember.

As I mentioned in a similar post on this topic from 2005, I learned from Laurie Keller’s great book, The Scrambled States of America, that Michigan has a glove shape.

I really got put to the test in helping him with his own real test, however. For some states, it was simply running him through those on the map. Damn, New England has a lot of states! I suggested that Alabama kind of looks like an A. That since he knew at a glance where Florida was, and it began with an F, the state above was the next letter — G — for Georgia.

Getting him to recognize either North or South Dakota or either North or South Carolina also meant he pretty much could get the other. The same was true for Virginia versus West Virginia.

So far, he’s gotten 100% on his two tests (he’s learning by region), so the repetition seems to be working. Still, I wish there were more tips or tricks or funny ways to look at a blank state on a map and know what it is.

I did find some interesting US geography online tools here, and there are some other tips here on how to remember state names and capitals. But those are more ways to remember lists, rather than locations on a map. Heck, it’s just easier to remember the Fifty Nifty United States song (written by Ray Charles, no less!). For those who don’t know it, here you go:

Anyway, if you live in a particular state where you’re taugh a particular way on how to memorize it, I’d sure love to know. Last time I tried this, I learned from a reader that aside from looking like a glove, folks in Michigan also remember their geography by thinking “The High Five State.” That’s cool.

Next, how to memorize the Gettysburg Address. Can you guess which homework lessons fall to me around the house?

In some of my posts, I have mentioned
The fact I like using Twhirl
This little post is more to the point
Scroll down and lend me your eyes

I like Twhirl. It makes me a jolly good fellow
I like Twhirl. It’s small and light and makes me feel mellow
(Makes him feel mellow)

Seesmic Desktop’s too big,
Tweetdeck had too many panes
(but Tweetie rocks for the iPhone)
This little refrain should help me explain
As a matter of fact I like Twhirl

With apologies to Tom T. Hall and his I Like Beer song. And a bit more not in verse…

Loic, I know Seesmic is supposed to be your next big thing when it comes with Twitter apps. I know it has even more features out today such as list support. Got it. Heck, when I was at the August Capital party after the TechCrunch Real Time Stream CrunchUp event, you had a table out showing me Seesmic and half convinced me to move over to it from Twhirl.

I complained I didn’t like all the panes, that I like how I can tuck Twhirl into a side of my laptop and keep up without giving over all my screen real estate. That I could easily toggle to see replies, direct messages and so on. You responded that Seesmic could do all the exact same things and toggle between accounts. OK — I took a few Seesmic stickers (have one on my front door right now even) then went off to try it.

Couldn’t install. It wouldn’t install. Some bug with the Mac. So I never got to using it. About two weeks ago, I finally got it going. Guess what? Not that impressed, so far. For one, there was no way to import all my account settings from Twhirl. You want me to migrate? Don’t make me reenter four different Twitter accounts I monitor, along with a FriendFeed account plus API keys for these for Bit.ly.

Second, Seesmic still takes up more room than Twhirl, as far as I can see. But to help, in a future post, I’ll really lay out side-by-side why Twhirl still does it for me and what I’d like changed to make me a Seemic user.

In the meantime, when I am using Twhirl and posting to Twitter from Twhirl, don’t report in my status line that I’m using Seesmic like this:

That’s not on. And don’t tell people this is because they’re using a “Seesmic” product, as has been done.

Really, it looks like you’re doing it because plenty of people still use Twhirl, but if you report Twhirl separately, then you risk dividing your usage for those top application lists that people obsess over.

I get that. I feel for you about it. But it’s still not right. I’m using Twhirl — so say that. And also don’t make me feel that Twhirl’s going to die at any moment, as you do on the Seesmic home page:

Twhirl’s your “previous desktop client?” That makes me think it’s going away. Hey, your decision to make. I’m sure that would force some people into finally using Seesmic, weird name and all. I might be one of them, if you can keep it as light as Twhirl.

Then again, I might go elsewhere.

Your Halloween pumpkins don’t have the same old boring designs. Get some pumpkin stencils and carving! You can make some amazing stuff, including Star Wars pumpkins or for Twilight fans, Edward and Bella. How about Jay Leno? The Kool Aide guy? A Cylon pumpkin? Some tips and links, below.

Like many, I’ve been carving pumpkins for ages for Halloween. But about 10 years ago, I was transformed into a master pumpkin carver by virtue of living in Britain. There, Halloween wasn’t widely celebrated at the time, and carving pumpkins wasn’t commonly done. When some friends saw my basic Jack-O-Lantern, you know — eyes, nose and a basic toothy grin — they wanted me to teach them my “masterful” skills.

That started an annual pumpkin carving fest. I started bringing back Halloween pumpkin carving tools on trips back to the US. These often where bundled with stencils. I dived into making more complex pumpkins.

Last year, I thought it would be fun to make an Obama pumpkin. It occured to me to search for a carving pattern. I not only found one but also discovered there are stencils for all types of pumpkin designs on the web.

This year, I specifically went looking for some fun patterns and was amazed at what’s out there, for free. Some links are below. But first, some very fast pumpkin carving tips:

1. Scrape out your pumpkin very well. It should feel fairly dry when you’ve done it right. I mean, it’ll be moist — but it won’t be wet.
2. Never, ever, wash the inside of your pumpkin after scraping. It’s like sending an invitation to Mr. Mold
3. Definitely buy some cheap carving tools, which are often sold in local supermarkets. The small knifes are save for kids and adults and really work.
4. Tape your pattern over the top of your pumpkin. If it is too big, use a copier to shrink it down.
5. Use a poking tool to punch along the lines of your pattern, making a little follow-the-dots trail in the pumpkin itself that you’ll cut.
6. When done, keep the pattern to refer to as you cut. It’s very easy to make a mistake and cut where you shouldn’t, so look to your pattern
7. When all else fails, and you’ve made a mistake, a paper clip or toothpick often works as a way to “glue” something you’ve cut back into the right place.

A little note to those who make pumpkin patterns. Promise me you’re actually trying to carve using them. Often they include tiny holes or cuts next to another one that are extremely difficult to actually do.

How about those patterns?

Star Wars Pumpkins: Put a Sith or Darth Vader on your porch with these free Star Wars pumpkin patterns from StarWars.com. The ones I did last night were above. The Stormtrooper, ugh — the entire thing fell apart, patched back up with paper clips. But it was fun to try.

Twilight Pumpkins: If you’re a big Twilight fan, I stumbled across these free Twilight pumpkin stencils from Gather.

Cylon Pumpkins: Sadly, I didn’t find any good Battlestar Galactica stencils. That’s probably because I got distracted by these stories about how to make Cylon pumpkins with red LEDs.

More Pumpkin Patterns: eHow has a nice collection of free simple templates, as does Celebrating Halloween. Check out the vomiting pumpkin that anyone can do. Squidoo has a nice page with links to some templates, examples of tools and tips. Pumpkin Glow has an amazing collection of un-Halloween patterns. Jay Leno pumpkin? The Kool Aid guy? They’ve got them, and for free. If you want to pay, Zombie Pumpkins has what looks to be a nice collection. You can get over 200 for $20.

Postscript: Now you want to see a real master? Look at Noel Dickover’s work here. Yes, that’s a friggin’ Death Star pumpkin! And look at the detail for the Where The Wild Things Are one.

I’d thought I’d heard it all in the debate over Google and newspapers, but yesterday Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson took it up a notch. He accused Google of making people slutty. If we’re using sexual metaphors now, here’s another one. Why doesn’t the Wall Street Journal and News Corporation in general put a condom around all of its content, to protect itself from Google? There’s a good brand called robots.txt that will help.

The accusation was lobbed at yesterday’s Web 2.0 Summit session called “Wither Journalism.” Be sure to watch the video, which I’ve listed at the end of this post. I’ll also link to key sections of the video, as well. It’s a stunning contrast between two cultures, Thomson and Google’s vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer, who was also on the panel

Google’s goal, Thompson said, isn’t really to send people from its site to other places. In reality, Google seems to have a nefarious plan to keep everyone on its own site:

Google wants to be the home page or wants to be the front page, and Marissa unintentionally encourages promiscuity. It’s about digital, the whole Google model is based on digital disloyalty. It’s about disloyalty to creators.

There was a murmur through the audience as the promiscuity reference that I’ve bolded was put out there. Even moderator John Battelle exclaimed, “Wow.” I’m not sure if the reaction was due to a new crass low point being reached in the overall debate about Google and newspapers or whether so many people likely disagreed with Thompson.

Somehow, in Thomson’s mind, Google has trained people that they don’t need to read newspapers at their own sites. This is despite the fact that Google didn’t even have its own news product until 2001. That it wasn’t the first news aggregator out there. That it wasn’t even the first search engine out there.

Hearing stuff like this, it’s hard not to agree with Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s assertion that Google gets blamed for changes wrought by the internet itself (see my Google CEO Eric Schmidt On Newspapers & Journalism article for more on that).

Thomson had also said earlier:

Having a debate about it obviously is important, which is clearly what we’ve been doing, provoking and stimulating and maybe unintentionally insulting.

Congrats. You were insulting. Not only did you say that Google encourages people to be news sluts, but you also accused many good people of being “net neanderthals:”

There are three types of people in the world.

There are the net neanderthals who think everything should be free all the time.

There are people who pay for ISP, 19.99 a month of whatever, and actually a lot of them think they’re getting access to content buffet. [I think that's the amount he said, hard to hear]

And there’s a third group of people who are already on top of that paying for content.

Let’s skip the fact that there’s some debate on whether neanderthals were actually idiot savages. Really, if I expect some content for free, I’m some type of brute?

Last night I watched an episode of The Simpsons, broadcast on Fox, which is owned by News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal. It didn’t cost me anything. Sure, I watched it through Direct TV, and I pay a subscription fee for that. But it’s also broadcast over the air for free. My TV with an ordinary antenna would have picked it up. Later, if I wanted, I could have watched news content from Fox for free on the same channel.

Why am I a highly valued viewer in the “real” world but on the internet, if I read something for free at the Wall Street Journal, I’m some type of savage taken down the wrong path by Google?

Why also is the Wall Street Journal itself feeding those savages? Over at Nieman Journalism Lab, earlier this year WSJ executive editor Alan Murray explicitly talked about how and why the WSJ deliberately puts stuff outside a paywall. Be sure to watch that video and read the interview summary. At one point he says:

If it’s a big news story, if we report a takeover and — we could hold that behind the pay wall, but if we do, BusinessWeek or someone else will simply write a story saying ‘The Wall Street Journal is reporting x,’ and they’ll get all the traffic. Why would we do that?”

Note that it’s BusinessWeek that gets mentioned there, not some blogger, not some aggregator but another mainstream media outlet that could potentially do what mainstream media outlets have long done to each other, report on what each other is saying. But no one calls them out on that these days. It’s the aggregators, the search engines and the bloggers that get attacked.

I don’t know what research Thomson has to back his “three types of people” model. I think things are more subtle than that. I think there are plenty of people who will pay for stuff even if they’re used to expecting lots to be free.

In the real world, we have free and paid. On the web, we can have it as well. Paywalls DO have a place, and I’m not opposed to them. But the puzzling thing is that the Wall Street Journal has used its own paywall very well to both make money on the web yet also still get people from Google. They have their cake and get to eat it too. It’s a head-scratcher. What exactly is Thomson so upset with Google for?

Let’s go back to Thomson’s suggestion that Google is trying to keep traffic within its own site. Just after talking about Google’s “disloyalty” to creators, he discussed a unique feature of Google News that shows quotes. He challenged the audience to search for Hamid Karzai to see how Google fails to promote clickthrough:

In tiny, tiny font, you’ll see where the origin of those stories are …. there’s is absolutely no intention on that page to drive traffic.

Bring it on. First, most people are probably searching for hamid karzai at Google itself, not Google News. They’ll see this:

At the top of the page, three articles are listed. Those are smaller than the main link to the overall news results “News results for hamid karzai,” but they’ll still pull traffic. In fact, I challenge Thomson to give us a case study. It’s easy enough for him to know when he’s featured in that section. Is the WSJ really not getting traffic?

Also prominently featured are links to non-news sources. Fair to say that not everyone searching on Google for “hamid karzai” is after news content?

Now let’s drill into those news results. See? Google’s trying to keep people within its own site by doing that, driving them into Google News!

Sure, you can argue that. But you can also argue — and I will as someone who’s watched search habits for 14 years now — that the bigger issue is that people who DO want news content fail to actually go to a dedicated news search engine. So that link is part of the overall Universal Search change designed to help surface the right content for them.

On the news results for hamid karzai, you get this:

Now you can see what’s ticked Thomson off. To his eye, the top of the page is dominated by a quote, with the entire intent being to pull you from that into a further page of quotes (as I’ll show) rather than send you on to news stories. That’s to the eye, by the way. A search marketer would know that the actual result is much different.

The quote feature is just over a year old. My guess is that most people bypass it, moving down to click on one of the actual news stories shown. I say that because typically, things that do not look like “real” results usually get little click through (ask anyone who runs search ads about this). As I’ll point out, Thomson — if he wants — can tell us if he really gets no traffic from these or not, in relation to the amount of traffic he gets overall from Google.

How about that font? Look below the quote, and you’ll see Reuters is credited (and overall, Google’s found 120 occurrences of that quote on other news sources). The credit isn’t “tiny, tiny” to me. It’s maybe one size lower than the quote itself.

Still, that’s not the actual font he’s so concerned about. See how there are two arrows in the screenshot above? The one to the right points to a link that lets you get to a page of quotes from Karzai:

This is the page that Thomson was so upset about, the one he says where there’s absolutely no intention to drive traffic, in part because of the “tiny, tiny” font used to source the publications. In reality, the source font is identical in size to that used for the quotes.

Now, I’ll readily admit, most people who make it into a quotes page like this probably aren’t clicking off to the news publications. But then again, I think most people at Google News aren’t heading to these pages at all. Most of them are probably clicking on actual news stories, since that was their main intention for doing a news search in the first place.

Also keep in mind that quotes like this tend to show high on a page mainly when you search for the name of a newsmaker. Let’s look for a story was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal as I wrote this, about Nokia suing Apple. When I do that search, I get this:

See the arrow? There’s the Wall Street Journal listed at the top of the news unit. As I said, the WSJ can measure the traffic they’re getting off links like this. How much free traffic did they get?

Let’s drill in:

There’s no quote shown at the top of the page, because we’re not searching for about a newsmaker. Instead, what we get is the Wall Street Journal ranking at the top of the search results. And trust me, anyone who runs a news site will tell you being in that spot is sending you lots and lots of traffic.

If Google’s intention was really to keep traffic from papers, papers would see a trickle, not the flood they get. And Thomson either knows this is true for his own publication or deliberately prefers to put out misleading information.

After hearing Thomson make more accusations against Google, I’d finally had it and thought (again) why doesn’t the Wall Street Journal (and all of News Corporation, for that matter), just block Google? It’s easy. You put up a robots.txt file, and your content is out of Google.

At that exact moment, I cheered John Battelle from afar for asking that exact question:

If Murdoch’s so mad about this, why don’t you just put in robots.txt, don’t crawl?

And Thomson responded:

We can do that any time we like. But obviously we’re at the, the idea that the web has entirely evolved is ridiculous. You’re asking that question as if we’ve reached the epitome of our life, and we know that that’s not true. I think one of the questions for Google is, is the very definition of the verb to Google going to change over the next couple of years. Will it mean in the end you’re sort of rummaging around [something] content?

I couldn’t catch the exact word he used at the end of that quote. But the implication was that Google again had done something wrong. And the main point is that Thomson didn’t answer the question he was asked. At all.

Thomson took a simple question — why don’t you block — provided a non-answer and then spun things back on Google. Well, you can’t say he’s masterful.

I say, enough the hypocrisy. Let’s go back to the sex metaphor that Thomson kicked things off with.

A robots.txt block is like putting a condom around your entire web site. It keeps Google away. So if Thomson really thinks things are so promiscuous out there, have the WSJ practice a little safe news sex. Roll that robots.txt file on.

Otherwise, stop prattling on about how wronged you are by Google. The WSJ and other News Corporation sites are knowingly having unprotected indexing relations with Google. Don’t then complain that you’ve caught some type of neanderthal disease from it. Especially, when it turns out, all that’s really happened is that Google keeps knocking you up with millions of visitors.

Sadly, and I do mean this with all sincerity, underneath there are signs that Thomson is actually a reasonable person. That he doesn’t have completely crazy views. That when he’s not singing from what appears to be the hostile Murdoch songbook, he could actually be a partner for sensible change rather than as a poster child for the “newspapers are dinosaurs” crowd.

At one point in the session, he said:

We need to have a rational debate that’s almost platform neutral about professional journalism. Because in the end it’s not so much the means of delivery but the means of creation. And it’s that very issue that is the sort of thing that we should all be talking about. And it doesn’t mean that professional journalism is the antithesis of citizen journalism. There’s almost a false dichotomy there.

Agreed. So let’s have that, please. A rational debate, without accusations that aren’t backed up, which don’t hold water.

For more, see these reports of the session:

• Live Blog: Marissa Mayer & “Wither Journalism” At Web 2.0, Search Engine Land
• Live-Blogging the ‘Whither Journalism’ Panel With Google, HuffPo, NYT and WSJ, Wall Street Journal
• Newspaper, Internet titans duel at Web 2.0 Summit, AFP

You can also watch the entire video here:

Condom picture modified under Creative Commons license from here.

If you’re link spamming, you suck. If you know someone who is link spamming, they suck — and you should tell them so. If you don’t know why you suck, here’s a story about the human impact of what you do.

About a year ago, my wife Lorna Harris launched a social news site for woman called Boudica. You won’t find anything there now. The site’s closed due to a link spamming attack and will probably never reopen.

Lorna wanted a place where women could share stories relating to women but without a predominance of “mommy” content she’d found in some other places. Not finding what she wanted, she dived into creating Boudica.

She assembled the site entirely on her own, finding a programmer, working to develop the features and watching over the small community that made use of it.

Most of her time was spent dealing with the inevitable spam attacks that a community site faces. While her site had some defenses, this latest attack was too much. Someone decided the world needed another 500+ links about discount prescription drugs.

Wiping the links out would be fast work for a programmer that knows Drupal, which her site was based on. But that’s still time and money for a small site that hasn’t generated income. Plus, the version of Drupal that she’s running really needs to be upgraded to prevent future attacks. That’s more time and money that’s not likely worth spending.

If Boudica had been more successful, doing the work would make sense. But it has remained small, and the link spam attack will probably tip her over to a decision she’s already been debating, of whether it makes sense to continue working at it. She doesn’t want to feel a failure if she abandons it; my feeling is that she’s learned much from doing it, so look at it as a building block for future success.

Still, being small doesn’t excuse the attack. Nor do other excuses that typically get trotted out carry much weight with me, such as “You get what’s coming if you don’t have strong defenses” or “it’s Google’s fault — they created the link economy that drives this demand.”

No, the core problem is that the web has people who think nothing of vandalizing other web sites. That’s what link spamming is. You’re not adding value to a site. You’re simply spray painting garbage on someone else’s property, for your own personal benefit. You have no manners. You have no morals. You ought to be ashamed.

Ironically, I was in a debate this week where I was sticking up for the SEO industry (see SEO FAQ That’s Not From The Land Of Unicorns). To some, that means I’m sticking up for link spamming, since they see the SEO industry as synonymous with link spam.

SEO doesn’t mean link spamming in my book. There are SEOs who also link spam, clearly. Aside from hurting individual site owners, you give the entire SEO industry a bad name. You should stop. Or call yourself something else — perhaps link spammer would be a good title?

I’ve written against link spam before. Back in 2005, I tried to get some consensus that automated link spam ought to be condemned by those in the industry overall. One example I pointed out during that campaign was Mike Grehan’s classic story of fending off link spam of a memorial web site in 2004.

Seriously, who wants to stand up in defense of dropping links on a site dedicated to a dead man?

Who wants to stand up for causing someone (me) to take time away during Thanksgiving last year to deal with link spam (see Crappy MP3 Sites, Comment Spamming & Enough Already)?

Who wants to stand up for killing a site that a mother was making time for in between the already full-time job of watching her kids?

In the US, we got CAN-SPAM primarily to help get junk spam email in control. It’s helped, though clearly spam email hasn’t gone away. Still, I think the time is overdue to look at updating CAN-SPAM to include link spam. I intend to explore that further.

We shouldn’t need laws as a deterrent, of course. Basic human decency ought to be enough. Those who are link spamming should be able to ask themselves one simple question about what they’re doing and know they shouldn’t go forward:

Is that the type of thing you’d be proud to tell your own mother about?

Postscript: By link spamming, by the way, I include comment spam as that’s often done solely to gain a link.

Postscript 2: Peter, below in the comments, sees this as a crybaby post. It’s not. Let me clarify a bit more, if my points above didn’t make this clear.

I’m not naive. I understand that sites should have anti-spamming filters in place. Lorna’s had some. It could have more. But I’ve also seen spam get through anti-spam filters on my own Sphinn social news site. That site employs multiple-CAPTCHA barriers, along with an array of other deterrents. It also has human moderators. Link spammers still attack it. Link spammers will attack ANYTHING out there, and nothing is foolproof. The first programmer that tells you they have a perfect anti-spam solution will soon after encounter another programmer who will blow that fallacy out of the water.

For success with a social site, or any site that allows user-generated content (such as a blog allowing comments), you have to be prepared to fight spam. Lorna expected it and has been fighting it. She could, if she wants, get this latest huge barrage of spam cleared out on Boudica and improve spam filters going forward, if she choses. She’s currently debating this. It just may be, as I explained above, that this was the thing that tips her toward closing the site, something she was already considering because of low usage.

But the main point is that decision shouldn’t be something forced upon her through an act of vandalism. That on the web, I feel we kind of accept that this type of spam happens, and you have to live with it. It does, you do — but I’m hoping for more than the usual rant that is all those impacted by it feel they have. I’m hoping in a small way that some of those who engage in these actions take a moment to think further about what they are doing. Or that perhaps some who know others who link spam will send a message out to knock it off.

Joy. Citibank closed my credit card today, not because of anything I did but because of some unknown merchant problem. Aside from being an inconvenience to me, Citibank also apparently thought it was a good time to pitch me on credit monitoring. Bad idea.

Apparently, some undisclosed merchant out there had a security problem that has caused Citibank to close the accounts of some unknown number of people. How reassuring.

This is the second time this has happened to me in the past two or three years. Which merchant, I asked, when I called Citibank. They didn’t have that information. I mean, someone at Citibank has it, but their customer service people don’t have it to give out to customers who might wish to avoid that merchant in the future.

Nice.

More fun when I went to activate my new card. After activating it, I got this long sales pitch on how I could get credit monitoring for free for 90 days then $8.95 per month after that, which apparently is some special rate.

You know what? I should just get that for free. A security breach on your end is not a sales opportunity. And when I decline, don’t try to sell me a secondary monitoring service that’s slightly cheaper. And when I question why you’re pushing this on me rather than giving it to me for free? I shouldn’t get told, “We’re just the activation department — you’d have to talk to customer service about that.” Hey, if I’m calling just to activate my card, then do that. No upsell.

Just a last thing. I would so dearly love that if I punch in my credit card number into your automated system, I’m not asked for it again by the human operator. It would just make me feel like I’m wasting less of my time.

One of the disadvantages of having built up someone else’s brand over a decade is that it can be very hard to be disassociated with it. Case in point: three years after having left Search Engine Watch to start Search Engine Land, I still get people who think I work at the old place.

In the past week, I’ve had it happen to me three times now. Once during an media interview, another during a press briefing and once just talking with someone in general.

I understand. It took ages for me to stop saying “GoTo” instead of “Overture” or to adjust to other branding changes I’ve personally encountered. But, I figured a reminder was in order on my personal blog.

These days, I write at Search Engine Land. It’s a site I started back in December 2006, so if you haven’t been by, visit! And if you’re not linking over yet or having updated your set of links for some time, please consider it!

On the conference side, I left Search Engine Strategies some time ago and instead run my own Search Marketing Expo conference series these days.

As the Orange County Angels of Los Angeles in Anaheim continue into the playoffs, I’ve found myself not only watching baseball on TV for the first time but also tweeting updates. Meanwhile, as some football teams I don’t know about play against each other in games I don’t care about, I find myself yawning when others tweet those. And so, I introduce the two laws of sporting events and Twitter:

1) Sporting events you’re not at or don’t care about are incredibly boring to hear tweeted

2) Sporting events you’re at or care about are incredibly interesting & MUST be tweeted to the world

There are corollaries:

1A) Those who bore you with their sporting news risk being unfollowed at any moment

2A) Those who find your sporting event tweets boring are sticks-in-the-mud who shouldn’t be following you in the first place

Actually, I kind of like hearing the updates from those at sporting events I don’t care about. It’s an interesting window into what those I follow are interested in. As for me, well, if the Angels keep winning, I’ll probably be tweeting. But I’ll try to keep it selective!

Insult to injury. About two years ago, I wrote Virgin’s Not So Generous Frequent Flyer Program, covering how hard it was to find available mileage award seats through Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Club program. Tonight, I’m struggling to understand how those “free” tickets cost $350 in fees.

I just priced a roundtrip economy ticket from Los Angeles to London: $687 for the ticket, plus $162 in additional fees, for a total of $859.

That’s a lot in fees, almost 1/4 of the core ticket price. What are the fees for? The “Fare Breakdown” link offered in association with the quote broke down nothing, simply saying: “USD 161.83 Taxes & fees.”

Poking around the site, I managed to find a FAQ page that says this:

Can you tell me more about fare taxes and charges?

You can find our policy on fares, taxes, fees and charges by viewing Article 4 of our Conditions of Carriage.

Don’t get excited. That article 4 provides no breakdown:

Applicable taxes, fees and charges imposed by government or other authority, or by the operator of an airport, shall be payable by you. When you purchase your Ticket, you will be advised of taxes, fees and charges not included in the fare, most of which will normally be shown separately on the Ticket.

To me, a breakdown is a breakdown. Who exactly is getting what amount of these fees? Looking at the US specials page, it suggests there’s a number of them:

All passengers must pay the applicable airport taxes, air passenger duties and the September 11th security charges of approximately $250.00.

The above advertised fares from Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York (JFK), Newark, Orlando, San Francisco and Washington DC include the addition of a $111, one way ($222 round trip) air carrier security and fuel surcharge.

OK, who gets what. And more important, how can those fees go up when you’re using mileage?

Same ticket, this time using 40,000 miles with Virgin for what you’d assume was a free ticket. OK, so the mileage page does have a little note saying:

*Flying Club reward flights are free in terms of fare, however applicable taxes, charges, surcharges and fees are payable and this is advised at the time of availability which can be found in the booking engine or via the contact centre when booking your flight.

Still, you wouldn’t think the fees would be that much. You certainly wouldn’t think the fees would be more than if you actually bought a ticket. But they are. That mileage ticket comes with “taxes, fees, charges & surcharges” of $347.13. That’s more than DOUBLE the fees if you just bought the ticket.

So how’s that work, Virgin? How do those fees go up so much more than if I bought a ticket? I’d really love to know.

Yes, the Google Wave invites are going out. All logged in? Now it’s time to start tweeting from Google Wave. Here’s how.

The only Twitter client I know of is called Tweety the Twitbot. Today, I’ve also seen it called Twave, though the application itself still doesn’t seem to use that name.

I used Tweety in the Google Wave sandbox preview and completely forgot how I added it back then. So I did some searching and came across a tweet from @oplura explaining that getting Tweety going is as easy as adding a contact. So let’s do it, with pictures.

Go to your contacts window and click the + sign at the bottom to add a new contact:

Enter this address:

tweety-wave@appspot.com

Now make a new wave. Click the + symbol to add a new participant to it. Add Tweety:

Next you’ll get an authenticating message:

A new window will open to connect Wave to your Twitter account:

After you sign in successfully, you’ll get a message confirming this, and then the window will close.

Back in your wave, push the “Done” button if you’re still seeing the authentication message. Then you’ll see this:

Enter your tweet into the top box (first arrow in the screenshot) and push update to send. Keep in mind that it won’t count down the 140 characters. If you go long, it won’t warn you.

Below the tweet box, you’ll see tweets from others (second, lower arrow in the screenshot). You might try reloading the page, if it looks like the names of those tweeting aren’t showing up correctly.

After that, well, I find that the box doesn’t seem to update. Maybe that will improve as Wave stabilizes during the current round of invites or as the app improves or who knows?

I got an email from American Citizens Abroad asking for people to lobby against a proposed insurance health care excise tax that would impact those living outside the US. Apparently, coverage you have outside the US wouldn’t exempt you from the tax.

From what ACA sent me:

ACA is requesting that all members and supports email, fax and/or write their Senators in support of a change in legislative language to the bill “Americas Health Future Act of 2009″ authored by Senator Max Baucus  In the September 16th version of this bill there is wording which would cause great hardship on American citizens living outside the US.  The wording would leave Americans overseas exposed to paying an excise tax regardless of whether they carry health insurance via overseas health providers.

The purpose of the proposed excise tax is to encourage all Americans who benefit from the US health program to participate in its financing.  Americans residing overseas can not benefit from the US health system so for them the excise tax is just that — a tax with no counter-part service.  Currently the maximum excise tax per family for non-participation is $1,900.

Please help ACA to insure that Americans overseas are not unfairly taxed.  Help ACA to bring this matter to the attention of the decision makers in Washington DC by writing to your representative today.  Attached is a sample letter that you can use to write to your Senator. We strongly suggest that you fax your letters as this has the most immediate effect however, you may also email or hard copy mail.  Visit the following websites for address information on your representative.

If I understand it correctly, health care coverage you might have when living outside the United States wouldn’t qualify to exempt you from the tax. That’s stupid, of course. When I lived in the UK, I had great health care — paid for by the taxes I paid to the UK government. Plenty of Americans outside the US have coverage in other ways. As long as they can demonstrate health care coverage, taxing them for not carrying it makes no sense.

More from ACA on the issue can be found here.

A few days ago I was reading about New York City’s new High Line Park, and how apparently it’s a great place to watch people standing naked in the windows of a nearby hotel. I wasn’t so much interested in the naked people as I was in the idea of an elevated train track being turned into a park in the middle of a city.

As it happened, I was in New York today and near the park so went for a walk. It was fabulous, and the only disappointment was that after only a few blocks, the park in the sky came to an end.

Below are some shots taken off my iPhone. It’s such a great setting that I wish I had a better camera and photography skills. An no, I didn’t see any naked people. You can find a map of the route here.

This is the start of the park, or the end, depending on your perspective. You can really see how it is raised well above ground level.

Just past the start. The hotel in the background is where you’ll spot the naked people on display.

Old tracks still run along the park, filled with plants.

I think this is where you cross under the naked people hotel (OK, it’s called the Standard Hotel).

About midway, there’s a section filled with nice wooden benches for lounging around.

More of the path.

Near the other end, there’s a nice plaza area.

One of the best things are the views of the city from up above.

Near the other end of the park.

Looking back along the park from the other end.

Chronic Tacos is a Newport Beach gem. Great, inexpensive Mexican food. Started in 2001 in West Newport Beach, the original store often has a huge line stretching out the door. Now Chronic has the opportunity to expand — allowing places for people to actually sit down and eat — but the Newport Beach planning commission has rejected their application. Disagree? Time to show your support by attending the upcoming appeals hearing or sending a letter.

Local residents objected to the original plan which featured 15 flat-screen TVs, along with sit-down dining and alcohol service. A scaled back plan (and see here) cut the TVs back to 3 and the overall size of the restaurant by about 25%. Alcohol will still be available, but only bottled bear.

We’re regulars at Chronic. We ride our bikes there, just as many other locals do. When the line’s long, as it often is, the kids are dispatched to head inside first and grab a space while we lock up. Occasionally, it would be nice to actually sit there. It would certainly be nice to get good food without the giant lines (though part of me would be sad that this unique Newport experience would go away).

A public hearing happens this Tuesday at 7pm at Newport Beach City Hall. From the notice:

An appeal of the Planning Commission’s denial of a use permit for a full-service, high turnover eating and drinking establishment with beer and wine service and a parking waiver (Chronic Tacos).

The appeal was filed by the applicant/owner of Chronic Tacos, Dan Biello.

This project has been determined to be categorically exempt under the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act under Class 3 (New Construction or Conversion of Small Structures).

NOTICE IS HEREBY FURTHER GIVEN that said public hearing will be held on September 22, 2009, at the hour of 7:00 p.m. in the Council Chambers of the Newport Beach City Hall, 3300 Newport Boulevard, Newport Beach, California, at which time and place any and all persons interested may appear and be heard thereon. If you challenge this project in court, you may be limited to raising only those issues you or someone else raised at the public hearing described in this notice or in written correspondence delivered to the City at, or prior to, the public hearing. For information call (949) 644-3200.

I’m disappointed to be away when the hearing is being held, but I plan to send a letter of support. These types of letters matter, trust me — I’ve seen in my own work on the Balboa Boardwalk safety committee. Email your city representative. They’re all listed here. If you’re a regular visitor to the city and want to voice your support, use the “Send a message to all Council Members” address listed on that page.

Postscript: Plans denied. And Chronic gets ripped on for among other things, having too many colorful stickers on its windows. You know, character.

Back in April, I became one of the rare people to run out of Gmail space. Due to a glitch with Google, I was also unable to purchase more space for several weeks. As a result, I became hyperaware of how much email space gets eaten up each day routinely. Newsletters, product offers, Facebook and Twitter notifications, that person you don’t know who emails you a 7MB file. It adds up. And Gmail’s supposedly “endless” space might not be keeping pace.

None of this is a crisis for the vast majority of people out there. You rarely hear people talking about running out of Gmail space. Those like myself who rely on email so much for business work as to run out of space probably wouldn’t think twice about buying more. I certainly would have done so, if I could have, at the time.

Still, I feel like all this crud going into our email boxes is wasteful. That in the era of cheap disk space and fast bandwidth, we don’t think twice about what we send, what we receive. But all that stuff is consuming disk space, server space, energy. Is there a case for email conservation?

Maybe. People far more knowledgeable than I might perhaps weigh in, and I’d love to hear from them. To kick things off, I’ll serve as a case study. Here’s how I’ve grappled with trying to stay under my Gmail quota over the past few weeks.

Out Of Space!

It was on April 30 of this year that my Gmail account started sending out this message to people who emailed me:

The email account that you tried to reach is over quota.

It surprised me. In the back of my mind, I remembered Google saying something like you’d never run out of space in Gmail. The percentage of my quota used, shown at the bottom of any page in Gmail, had been stuck on 97% for as long as I could remember. I kind of thought that was part of the gimmick — that somehow, Google kept upping the quota in each individual account to always keep it above water. Not so. Despite the promises on the Gmail home page, I needed to delete mail in order to have space for more.

The Gmail Infinity Space Promise

When Gmail launched on April 1, 2004 (yes, it was on an April Fool’s Day), the suggestions of unlimited storage were there at the beginning. From the press release:

Unlike other free webmail services, Gmail is built on the idea that users should never have to file or delete a message, or struggle to find an email they’ve sent or received….

Storage: Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That’s why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage – more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer.

A year later, Google rolled out the “Infinity+1″ storage promise, giving everyone an extra 1GB of space (taking the total to 2GB at the time) and promising to keep increasing this.

By October 2007, Google increased the amount of free storage space it was providing, writing on the Gmail blog:

In April 2005, we started increasing Gmail storage as part of our “Infinity+1″ storage plan. At that time, we realized we’d never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able. That said, a few of you are using Gmail so much that you’re running out of space, so to make good on our promise, today we’re announcing we are speeding up our counter and giving out more free storage.

And, just in case you are like my friend Miriam, whose sister sends minute to minute photo updates of her kids in RAW format, then we still have a paid storage program where you can get your fix, and we’re giving you more space than before for the same price.

By the way, businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps to get Gmail on their own custom addresses (like Google does for our @google.com accounts) will get a storage boost in the coming days, too. Standard and Education Edition storage (now at 2GB) will begin matching Gmail’s counter, and Premier Edition users get a whopping 25 GB (up from 10 GB).

As you can see, at that point, Google had also offered paid storage options. I thought that was great, because some people might need more than even the huge amount Google was providing for free. But “Infinity+1″ implies that buying space shouldn’t be needed. And if you go to the Gmail home page today, you’ll see this message:

Lots of space
Over 7369.392583 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.

The number is constantly counting up (more on this in a bit). The claim is pretty straight-forward. You’ll never need to delete anything. And yet, that’s exactly what I needed to do. Certainly some others have to do the same. So that claim ought to go.

How Much Do They Give You? Not Much!

It’s also easy to assume, with that number constantly ticking up on the Gmail home page, that tons of extra space is constantly being allocated to your account. In reality, it’s about 1MB every three days (Google Operating System said 0.33MB per day back in 2007, and that still seems to be the case). Those in Gmail are constantly being increased. Those using Gmail through Google Apps get a boost to match Gmail whenever there’s a 10MB gap between the two services, it seems. Here’s a chart illustrating this, the maximum space offered by both versions of Gmail over the past few weeks:

For some people, that may seem like plenty. But as I was forced to stay under my quota, I discovered the daily increase in space wasn’t that much. Moreover, while I may have hit my quota this year because of how long I’ve had a Gmail account, it’s possible that if space isn’t increased more than now, many more might hit theirs in years to come.

The Fight To Stay Tight

Let me share a bit more about my situation, then I’ll go more into my observation about how much email junk may be “wasting” space for everyone.

I’m fairly unique in having had a Gmail account since the day it launched. I used that account as a backup to my regular email account, sending a copy of anything I received to it. Last year, I merged all that mail into a Gmail account that runs using my own domain name as part of the Google Apps program. When I was done, I’d pretty much stuffed my main Gmail / Google Apps account full. That’s the account that ran out of space this year.

My immediate thought was to upgrade and add more storage. However, I couldn’t. When I tried, I got a “We are unable to process your request” message from Google. This continued for about two or three weeks, a bug for a small number of users, to my understanding, that Google eventually solved.

I had no choice to conserve space. My first reaction was to sort my mail by size, so that I could find any email with big PowerPoint files or other large attachments. However, Gmail has no sort by size feature. It’s an oversight that’s long due to end. Yes, the Mail Goggles feature to keep you from drunk emailing is funny. But a sort by size feature has been standard in my Outlook email program for as long as I can remember and Pegasus Mail before that. Gmail lacks this? Want to lobby for it? Join this thread at Google Groups.

How about searching for files with attachments, specifically anything with PPT (PowerPoint) files. Sure, I did that. Unfortunately, it still didn’t sort them by size. It was a painful, time consuming process to try and free space up this way.

Another reaction was to search for any email not in English. Unless you want to converse with me in really, really bad German, English is all I speak. Virtually anything in my inbox not in English is spam that’s gotten through the filters in some way. I don’t need it. I blogged about wanting a feature like this back in 2006. It still doesn’t exist.

Among other things, I searched for any Twitter notifications that I’d received. I had thousands of these. Wiping these out saved much more space than I was expecting. That got me thinking about all the other “useless” mail I’ve got stored from over the years, things I really don’t need to save. How much do they consume?

The Useless Mail

While I can pay for more space and probably will soon, I’ve kept to a free account over the past few weeks so that I could study the situation more. Every few days, I’ve looked at my mail to understand how much has come in, what I could free up and figure if I’m staying ahead of the space I’ve been given or falling behind.

For example, let’s take today. When I logged in, my account had used 7,240 MB of space used, out of a total 7,365 MB allowed — 98% of it. That means since I last went in, I’d picked up 74MB in new email.

74MB! In that same period, Gmail had given me 4MB of new space — just 5% of what I’d gained. So much for infinity plus one.

OK, I’m just unusual, right? Maybe, but maybe not so much. To clear space, here’s what I did:

• Killed about 300 Twitter & FriendFeed notifications (message about people following me or taking my feed). That freed 4MB of space.
• Cleared 2,250 spam messages, freeing up 45MB of space.
• Deleted 100 email reports from Google Analytics for five different web sites I watch going back to mid-July, freeing 8MB of space.

Doing these things still left me using 20MB of space more than I was on Sept. 9, a net loss versus the 4MB of space Google had given me in that same time period.

Every few days, I’ve gone through this type of routine, sometimes aggressively. Here are a few more stats to illustrate some of the “dumb” or “useless” email, as I call it, that has taken up space:

• Facebook/Twitter/FriendFeed/LinkedIn Notifications: Virtually none of these are useful a few days after they’re received. Searching for common words would often find hundred of these messages over the years the first time I’d look. Even after clearing them out, I’d find plenty more new ones had been received. Very roughly, 100 of these can equal about 1MB of space.
• WordPress Backups: I watch over two blogs on WordPress and each week get emailed a backup. Handy! But two weeks worth of these for me equaled 7MB of space. Once a new one comes in, I really don’t need the old one — much less one from weeks ago. They just eat space, but because I have (or thought I had) so much space, I didn’t think much about receiving them.
• Google Analytics Reports: Getting regular reports by email are awesome, but as noted above, they take up space. Since I have access to Google Analytics itself, I really don’t need these in the long term.
• Business Newsletters: Killing 150 “Inside Apple” newsletters since 2005 saved 4MB of space. Wiping out 200 Amazon Store newsletters saved 10MB of space. Build-A-Bear has sent me 110 offer emails since 2007. Major League Baseball has sent me 80 in the same period. I had 100 notifications that my credit card statement was ready from my credit card company going back to 2006. 30 message from Tickets Now back to March of this year. I could go on, and some of these counts are low (because the initial count Gmail returns for a search often rises as you go to the second page). The bottom line is virtually none of this email is useful to me in the long-term, yet it takes up more space than you’d imagine.
• Inbox Busters: A PR person sent me a pitch with a 1MB attachment, worth 3 days of “new” space from Gmail. No warning, and not relevant to what I cover. The same person sent me a 0.5MB logo attachment a few weeks before. Someone sent me a bug report with a 7MB screenshot attached. 7MB! Someone I don’t know, who somehow put me on some email list I’m not interested in, which sent me a 4.5MB image. Someone pitching to speak at a conference sent me a 7MB presentation with their email. Wipe out all “dumb” email you want — things like these dwarf those savings.

What To Do?

Like I said, this isn’t a crisis for most people. I also know I’m an usual case. But I think things will get worse for more people over time, largely because we just don’t think much about what we email.

In the bad old days of dial-up, you’d never send someone a 1MB file out of the blue. Just shoving it down the pipes would take forever. Now we don’t think twice. We certainly don’t think that this file is eating up 3 days worth of Gmail quota.

Email messages themselves have increased in size, as HTML email has become more common. All those business emails can add up.

Notifications that are so handy can get out of control. They’re like hundreds of little cuts to your quota. They serve no use in the long term, but they sure consume space collectively.

I know I can just pay to get more email on Google. Yahoo says it has unlimited email, announced in 2007, so I could move over there, if I really wanted to be cheap.

But it’s not about being cheap. It’s just more amazement, I guess, at how when you open things up with seemingly no limits, suddenly conservation gets lost. Maybe there’s no reason for email conservation. Perhaps storage will keep getting cheaper, and none of this will matter especially versus the time it takes to conserve. But it still nags at me. I’m just that way, I guess.

Gmail Suggestions

Meanwhile for Google, some suggestions:

Don’t say you’ll never need to delete on the Gmail home page, since that’s clearly not true. Modify it, advertise it accurately.

Sort By Size. It’s overdue. Offer it now.

Filter By Language. Why are we still waiting for this?

Consider an option that might understand all those “dumb” emails that we get, those special offers from stores, those Twitter notifications, pingback notifications and so on. Maybe sense when we have a lot of these from one particular source and ask us if we want to delete them.

Related, if we unsubscribe using your new auto-unsubscribe feature, perhaps search for related emails when we do this and ask if we want them deleted. And let us unsubscribe without having to use the spam button to do this. That makes no sense at all.

Finally, don’t get me wrong. I love Gmail. It’s a great service, and I’m very happy with it. It’s just through an accident of being unable to upgrade, I got a close-up view of how much storage all those emails I get consume.

In my Making The Balboa Boardwalk Safer post, I mentioned that new safety signs were to be installed along the boardwalk in Newport Beach. They’ve just gone up this week, and they’re pretty cool and eye catching.

If you’re along the boardwalk, I think you can’t help but notice them. They stand out from the “usual” signs with their messages to “Slow Down,” “Share The Path” and “Beach Crossings.” The signs stretch along the entire boardwalk, generally alternating between messages. Here are some more examples:

I think the beach crossing signs is my favorite. Somehow I wonder if we’ll see it ending up on t-shirts and in other places. That picture of a surfer carrying a board is just so symbolic of what you see all the time in Newport. The sign screams out, “beach town.” That’s nice.

Here are close-ups of all the signs:

As many readers here know, I left the Search Engine Watch site I created in 1996 and the Search Engine Strategies conference series I helped start in 1999 soon after Incisive Media purchased those properties in 2005 (I do my own rival Search Engine Land web site and SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series now — next show is SMX East in New York this Oct 5-7, check out the agenda!).

Incisive wasn’t done with the buying. In 2006, it managed to get enough investment to effectively buy itself back into being a private company, then digested American Lawyer Media. But it turns out that it apparently couldn’t handle all it ate. Last week, a deal was cut splitting Incisive Media into two. ALM went back to being ALM; Incisive Media seems to have kept what it had before that purchase, along with the SEW site and the SES series.

PaidContent has a nice rundown on the situation here plus an interview with Incisive chief Tim Weller who says despite having “overstretched its balance sheet” on going private and buying ALM, he still sees this period as the most optimistic in Incisive’s history.

For background on me and Incisive, see:

• Leaving Search Engine Watch
• The Day After & Many Thanks!
• Pondering Next Steps — Making No Fast Decisions

For more about the history of Search Engine Watch, see my Happy 10th Birthday, Search Engine Watch – A History Of The Site post from 2007.

Postscript: The Sunday Times has an interview with Weller where the blame apparently is down to his investment backers:

With an Aston Martin in the drive, a ski chalet in France and £11m in the bank, Tim Weller was enjoying life after striking a £275m deal with Apax, the private-equity giant, to take the listed company he founded private….

Apax persuaded Weller and management of the merits of its go-private deal using a presentation with a slide entitled “The Benefits of Debt”. Over the next six months under Apax, Incisive used cheap loans to buy four businesses and by August 2007 the group had doubled in size….

Weller is scathing about private equity. “The amount of debt was never discussed at board meetings,” he said.

It was all so much more positive when the go-private deal was announced back in 2006. From a Guardian article back then:

Mr Weller, who set up the business 12 years ago, said yesterday he was disappointed to have to take the company private, but an inability to raise cash in the public markets had prevented Incisive from taking part in the industry’s consolidation.

“We have made concerted efforts to try to consolidate the market and yet, even with our outperformance, our share price relative to our peer group has been discounted,” he said. “Apax [however] has made it clear that they want to invest in the business to get it to the next stage.”

There are times after a long day that I simply grow weary of the internet and what it reflects of the greater world — that it seems to be full of complete idiots. Today is one of those days. I’ll vent, get it off my chest, and perhaps some imbecile out there will learn from it. Perhaps that dumbass will grow, impossible though that might seem.

One of the sites I oversee is Sphinn, a Digg-like site for internet marketing news. Got a good story about internet marketing you want to share with a community of marketers? That’s what Sphinn is designed for. You submit a story, and people vote on it (sphinn it, as we say), and the stories that get the most sphinns make it to the home page in front of everyone.

Sounds easy, right? Sure, but as I’ve learned in the two years since we’ve run it, it’s a minefield. Someone does a post about some internet marketer’s birthday — it makes the front page — then people complain it’s not “serious” enough. So you make a rule against that, then someone else complains that a similar “celebratory” story gets through and starts yammering about double-standards.

You make a rule against contest submissions because most of them are crap. Then you get a prominent person who gets upset when THEIR content post gets pulled, and bruised egos lead to conspiracies about censorship and so on.

Hey, it goes with the territory. Building and maintaining communities isn’t easy work. It’s like having a family of thousands. You can’t please everyone, and you hope that on the whole, you make the right decisions overall.

But I really hate the censorship word, when it gets tossed around — and it gets tossed around way too lightly often by people who have no idea what it really means.

That leads me to today. While a community site can be fraught with egos, and concerns about double-standards or fairness, at least you have sympathy for people who are part of the community itself. Who have invested time, or energy or part of their souls to it. You want to do well by them. You want to do nothing for the drive-thru asshole who makes no effort at all.

Tonight after someone’s submission got removed, they sent this message:

what kind of horseshit site is this anyway?  I posted a link to a story, and get banned. So, you are big supporters of censorship I see, so it doesn’t matter one way or another if I use your site at all. I’ll also pass the Internet word around about this horseshit site as well.

Curious, I went to look at what this person had submitted. It was, best I can tell, a country-western short story. He submitted this to a site that, right under its logo, says it’s about “internet marketing news.” To submit it, he used a submission page that said:

Be sure you’ve read the submission guidelines. Done that? Then enter the news story URL….

Those guidelines, right at the top, said:

News submissions must be related to the internet marketing industry and submitted to the most relevant topic category.

Despite all of this, he drove like Homer Simpson through all our warnings and pleas to dump his big silo of pig shit into our lake. And after polluting it in this manner, he has the gall to cry “censorship” and call us “horseshit.”

I shouldn’t have bothered even trying, but I tried to explain things to him. No help. He simply didn’t understand. Didn’t care. Didn’t mind that he’d wasted everyone’s time — mine, his, those of our readers. He makes me wish he had an internet license to drive that could be revoked.

I know. The internet isn’t full of idiots like him. In fact, there are plenty of smart people out there. It’s the idiots that simply stand out most, suck so much energy that could be better used in other ways. It’s sad.

Newport Beach has a great harbor, and I’ve finally become a boat owner — all 10.5 feet of inflatable goodness. Hey, don’t mock my little Zodiac-style boat. It gets our family of four around just fine. But where to go? What to do? Fortunately, Newport Beach has just put out a new guide to the harbor.

Did you know there are public docks in the harbor? I had no idea until we got an old harbor map from a local rental place. The new map also marks these clearly, places where you can pull up, tie-up your boat and leave for a bit.

One thing I love about the new map are the locations of “Dock & Dine” restaurants:

Is there nothing cooler than pulling up in your boat to park at a dock, then getting out and having a meal? Well, I’m not sure our inflatable is what the restaurant owners had in mind, but at least I know where to go

Also shown on the map are local rental places, restrooms, mooring areas and more. Aside from the map, the booklet covers places for long-term mooring (good luck with that, and get your wallet out to pay big time).

One crucial rule I learned about Newport Harbor back when I was in college and learned to sail here is that the Balboa Ferry always has the right-of-way. The guide doesn’t mention this though it does warn to watch for the ferries.

After twice having the local tour company’s boats try to run me down, I also wondered if they somehow has some special right-of-way I didn’t know about. Nope, nothing that I can see in the guide. They’re just captained by jerks, it seems.

Disappointingly, despite the many historic celebrity homes scattered around the harbor (John Wayne being most famous), the map doesn’t pinpoint any of these. I guess that might have hurt the boat tour company’s ability to try and run down all the other boats in the harbor.

The guide — “Compete Cruising Guide To Newport Harbor” — is going to be distributed in print locally in in yacht clubs along the California coast, according to the Daily Pilot. You can also download a copy here (PDF format) from the city’s web site.