Berkman Buzz, week of December 22

A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, just sign up here.

What's going on... take your pick or browse below.


*Doc Searls challenges potential duopoly.
*Dan Gillmor appreciates progress in the mainstream media.
*David Weinberger insures himself against identity theft.
*Rebecca MacKinnon contextualizes bloggers as people.
*David Isenberg crunches C2C call numbers.
*StopBadware.org saves Christmas.

The Full Buzz.


"...We know what vital infrastructures are. Water. Roads. Electricity. Waste treatment. Would we be better off if we jobbed those out to Verizon and Comcast?  Think of what real infrastructure supports. The answer is pretty much everything. That's what makes them infrastructure. Is that what telephone and cable companies do? They could build the Net to support everything, but they never have in the past. They've deployed asymmetrical and crippled services that take a back seat to older businesses they value far more.
Does it make sense to put just those two businesses in charge of building infrastructure for everybody? Well, that's the plan being argued for here. And it will fail..."
Doc Searls, "Nothing Neutral About It"

"The New York Times 'public editor' writes of the paper’s tentative steps into having journalists speak directly with the readers:
There should be even greater reader interaction ahead. Mr. Landman told me in September that further interactive features are being contemplated. One possible feature he mentioned: allowing readers to comment on every story on the site, not just one major article a day.

The fact that this is news speaks volumes about the Times’ slow start in involving the readers. But while other papers are way ahead, this is still better than we’re seeing at many. And it’s more complicated for an institution like the Times to open up than for a small daily.  We should enjoy progress wherever we see it, though, however modest it may be."
Dan Gillmor, "Continued Baby Steps at the NY Times"

"I got a call from a robot today, asking me to call an 800 number about something to do with my Citi credit card. The robot didn't identify me by name, but it did say that it wasn't a sales call. So, I called the 800 number (800 200 8054 in case you care). The person who answered asked me for my name and credit card number, which I refused to give them. Why should I hand that out to a stranger, even if the stranger claims to be with Citi and has a lovely speaking voice? So I spoke with a manager who assured me that it was ok to give him the information. 'It's a common business practice,' he told me.
He also said me that the call was legit because there's a telephone number on the back of my card.
'Is it this number?' I asked.
'No, but you can call it, if you want.'
So I did. They had no notices on any of my accounts, except for a tickler to sell me identity theft insurance.
So, was it all a crafty attempt to either sell me ID insurance or to motivate me to buy ID insurance???"
David Weinberger, "Citi Cards' sloppy security or was it phishing?"

"...This is very much the way I have tended to describe the relationship between blogs and journalists: journalists approach blogs as raw sources. Thus asking whether blogs are reliable is just as useless as asking whether people are reliable. Each tipoff or story idea coming from any human source must be judged in a very specific context: Does that person have any real expertise in the subject at hand? Is his/her knowledge first, second, third or fourth hand? Does he/she bear a grudge or conflict of interest? What is his/her agenda in telling you the information? Etc..." 
Rebecca MacKinnon, "Blogs and China correspondence - survey results"

"Bruce Meyerson, writing for AP, says:
TeleGeography estimates that Skype users are on track to make over 27 billion minutes of computer-to-computer calls this year, with about half of them used for international long distance (all free). While that sounds like a lot, it still represents just 4.4 percent of total international traffic in 2006, up from 2.9 percent in 2005.

Even if most of these minutes are new minutes that are only there because C2C Skype is free, this is impressive -- in part, because with new computer devices, e.g., open WiFi phones, it is getting hard to distinguish a C2C call from a Phone-to-Phone call. In addition, the new computerphones are erasing the ease-of-use factor that keeps us glued to RJ-11.  Hmm. If $27 billion minutes represented 27 billion unspent dimes, presto: the price eBay paid for Skype. At a more realistic penny-a-minute, it's still a price-to-opportunity cost ratio of 10. Viewed through such opportunity cost colored lens, wouldn't it have made more sense for a telco to have bought Skype?..."
David Isenberg, "Skype: 27 billion C2C minutes in 2006"

"...This week we received one of our more interesting calls for help. A website owner, who is legally named Santa Claus, came to us wondering why in the world his site had been submitted to us for review and was being filtered by Google. He had consulted local experts, which we can only assume were elves, but they were unable to identify anything wrong with his site. Away to our research tools we flew like a flash, and with some quick analysis we knew there was much to dread. (I know I should have tried harder to rhyme in this paragraph, but I think you get the point). We noticed right away that nestled all snug in the bottom of his homepage was a nice little bit of code containing a badware link—specifically, an iframe that would attempt to install badware onto visitors’ computers via a javascript exploit..."
StopBadware.org, "StopBadware Saves Christmas"