Journalism

• Fleeing the War at Home. A worthy kickstarter by @BlakeHunsicker
• No Ifs, Ands or Bots. By Bob Garfield in MediaPost. Pull-quote: Relying on CRM to repair BofA is like treating melanoma with Clinique.
• The Strange Case of Barrett Brown: Amid the outrage over the NSA’s spying program, the jailing of journalist Barrett Brown points to a deeper and very troubling problem. By Perter Ludlow in The Nation. More at DemocracyNow.

Loose news

• One third of Kenyans have a bitcoin wallet. By Daniel Stuckey in Motherboard.
• Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever: The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix. By Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.
• Verizon backs Ubuntu smartphone: Verizon Wireless joins the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group. This move sets Verizon up to be the first carrier to bring the Ubuntu-Linux based smartphone to the US. By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in ZDnet.

Markets

• CRM trends: Customer engagement, free range agents and more. By Scot Petersen & Lena J. Weiner in SearchCRM.

Advertising and marketing

• An olive branch to advertising, at ProjectVRM, September 2012
• Retailers, STOP dealing with data brokers, by datacoup
• The Web Cookie Is Dying. Here’s The Creepier Technology That Comes Next, by Adam Tanner in Forbes
• LumaScapes, by Luma Partners
• destructoid.com, a typical small publisher supported by advertising, including third party tracking

Surveillance vs. privacy

• Revelation of NSA PRISM Program Generates Strong Growth for Online Privacy Companies

Media

• Setting TV free, in Linux Journal, July 3, 2013
• From VHS to Google Glass, porn drives the tech market
• Big cable’s Sauron-like plan for one infrastructure to rule us all. By Susan Crawford in Wired. Extremely important, and required reading.

Wikipedia’s current outline of Internet marketing (collapsed to one level)

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Referral marketing
• Content marketing
• Native advertising
• Search engine marketing
• Pay per click
• Cost per impression
• Search analytics
• Web analytics
• Display advertising
• Contextual advertising
• Behavioral targeting
• Affiliate marketing
• Cost per action
• Revenue sharing
• Mobile advertising
• Native advertising

Other stuff

• Here’s Microsoft’s New Strategy Essay and Reorg Announcement (Memos). By Kara Swisher in All Things D. Pull-quote: “Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.” The outline below also talks devices first. Guess they have to make, because the OEM biz is imploding. Hey, works for Apple.
• The Shocking Truth About Doug Engelbart: Silicon Valley’s Sidelined Genius. By Tom Forenski. Pull-quote: “…despite all the accolades and testaments to his genius, Silicon Valley largely ignored him and he spent decades trying to find funding for his ideas, and even someone just to listen to him.” This is true, and resonates for Dave Winer as well: If you want to get the most out of great developers like Engelbart, who are productive well into their 80s, you have to stop digging up the streets, moving the goalposts, bombing the cities, starting over just for the sake of starting over. I had a slogan in my early days programming: Discontinuities suck. I want steady evolution that builds on all past work, and invalidates nothing. Let people continue to develop as they please, even if you don’t understand what they’re doing. And remember that brilliance does not become obsolete. Engelbart had a twinkle in his eye, even through all the frustration. He wanted to see human intellect soar. Too bad we didn’t achieve that with his help, during his lifetime. But maybe we still can.”

Mind-bendings

• How many slaves work for you?
• A brand new way to share everything.
• Why you can’t get tickets to the hottest concerts.

World

• 15 Photos From the Tahrir Square Protests You’ll Never See In Legacy Media. #Egypt #Morsi #Obama. By Doug Ross @ Journal.
• Taksim Underpass: Ask Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Jane Jacobs, and Robert Moses. By Stephen Lewis in Bubkes.

Surveillance

• Did you know John Roberts is also chief justice of the NSA’s surveillance state? By Ezra Klein in the Washington Post.
• Motorola Is Listening. By Ben Lincoln in Beneath the Waves.
• America’s founders would be horrified at this United States of Surveillance: How did we become so fearful and timid that we’ve given away essential liberties? Some are even afraid to speak up. By Dan Gillmor in The Guardian.
• AT&T prepping sale of customers’ anonymous location information and Web, app usage data. By Mike Dano in FierceWireless.
• Privacy and the Internet The Independence Day Edition. In Raving Lunacy.
• European PRISM anger gains momentum with fresh cloud warnings and data threats. By David Meyer in Gigaom.
• From Ike to “The Matrixâ€: Welcome to the American dystopia — Part Orwellian security state, part Huxley wonderland and part “Matrix,” America is three dystopias in one! By Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.

News

• BBC to put 3D production on hold following unsuccessful two-year pilot. By Zach Honig in Engadget.

Life

• Review of Doug Rushkoff’s Present Shock. By Micah Sifry, in Tech President.
• The Death of the Internet – Markus Jacobsson. By Ben Rothke in RSA Conference blog.
• I give up. Repeal Everything. By David Weinberger.

Developments

• Fargo River
• Midata Innovation Lab Launches, at Ctrl-Shift.
• Personal Cloud London Meet-up: Thursday, July 11, 2013 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (BST)
• Firefox mobile device.

Marketing and advertising

• FTC’s Brill Calls for Congress to Legislate New Data Privacy, Stuns Marketers: Commissioner Wants Data Brokers to De-Identify Data And Provide Access to Consumers. By Kate Kaye in AdAge.
• Why AARP Is Adding Data Strategy to Marketing Efforts: A Q&A with Lynn Mento, Senior VP-Membership at AARP. By Kate Kaye in AdAge.
• This Student Project Could Kill Digital Ad Targeting: New School Student’s System Confuses Ad Targeting With Cookie Misinformation. By Kate Kaye in AdAge.

The world

• As Istanbul Protests Continue: “Lider” as “Führer,” a Frequent Characterization, by Stephen Lewis in Bubkes.org. Also Gezi Park: Street Vendors, Vanishing Roots of Urban Economies and Urban Democracy.
• New Regulations for Skype and Viber in Bahrain. By Amira Al Hussaini in Global Voices Online. Also Egyptians Want to Overthrow the Regime.

Surveillance

• EU enraged as Snowden reveals evidence of mass hacking by US. By Paul McGeough in the Sydney Morning Herald.
• Germans loved Obama. Now we don’t trust him. By Malte Spitz in The New York Times.
• Europeans Voice Anger Over Reports of Spying by U.S. on Its Allies. By Stephen Castle and Eric Schmitt in The New York Times.
• False Indignation and Spy vs. Spy. By Lauren Weinstein.
• Beyond feudal security: what’s happening to online security and freedom. By Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing. Sources a talk about digital feudalism by Bruce Schneier.
• Freedom: The Big American Lie: The U.S. try hard to believe in the internet’s liberating power. Therefore the N.S.A. scandal is forgotten and a new movie is already playing. By Thomas Frank in Faz.net
• Greenwald: Snowden’s Files Are Out There if ‘Anything Happens’ to Him, by Eli Lake in The Daily Beast.
• Google Challenges NSA Secrecy in Court. By Sam Gustin in Time.
• Gore Vidal on Charlie Rose, Part I. Lots of other links there too.
• Whole pile of stuff in the Washington Post.
• Washington Post releases four new slides from NSA’s Prism presentation: Newly published top-secret documents detail how NSA interfaces with tech giants such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. By Ed Pilkington in The Guardian.
• What it’s like to get a national security letter. By Maria Bustillos in The New Yorker. Required reading.
• NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama, by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian.
  • Secret program launched by Bush continued ‘until 2011’
  • Fisa court renewed collection order every 90 days
  • Current NSA programs still mine US internet metadata

Marketing, VRM, related topics

• Disrupting Retail 2013, by FirstRetail. Four videos compress a full day of excellent conversation. More about this shortly at ProjectVRM.
• Are you being creepy? By Mark Cameron.
• Escaping advertising’s uncanny valley. By T.Rob.
• United’s new bad deal for frequent fliers. The small print: Starting in January 2014, Premier qualification requirements will include a minimum annual spending level. We will track this qualifying spending with Premier qualifying dollars (PQD): dollars spent on most United® tickets, including partner flights, and Economy Plus® purchases. These changes do not affect Premier qualifying miles (PQM) or Premier qualifying segments (PQS). For 2014, the PQD requirement for Premier Silver, Premier Gold and Premier Platinum qualification will be waived for members whose address with MileagePlus® is within the 50 United States or the District of Columbia and who spend at least $25,000 in Net Purchases in 2014 on a MileagePlus co-branded credit card issued by Chase Bank USA, N.A. There is no PQD waiver for Premier 1K® qualification. You earn PQD for the base fare and carrier-imposed surcharges on qualifying tickets. Certain specialty tickets, including but not limited to unpublished, consolidator, group/tour, and opaque fares do not earn PQD. Just as with Premier qualifying miles (PQM) and Premier qualifying segments (PQS), we will credit the account of the member who travels, not the member who purchases the ticket. Great strategy: Take your most loyal customers and make life harder for them. I’m a million-plus mile flier with United, and a lifetime member of the United Club. I am not happy. And I’m not alone. If any other airline wants my business, I’m available.

Radio, music

• FCC Announces Application Window for New Low Power FM Stations. By Cody Duncan in Future of Music Coalition. Fact sheet.
• Pandora, Apple and the State of Web Radio. By Adam Sinnreich of Rutgers, in SlideShare. Outstanding rundown of What’s Going On.
• Back to Vinyl: The Office Turntable. On YouTube.
• Amazon launches its Autorip feature in UK and Europe. By Stuart Dredge in Musically.com.
• My Routine — Mark Rothstein, Law Professor. In the Louisville Courier-Journal. “I don’t know that people have knowingly, consciously consented to the accumulation of data. We live in an age in which consent should not be mistaken for choice. We click through consent on software without even reading it. Even if we technically consented, I doubt very much whether the average person would say, ‘Oh sure, it’s OK for my phone company to accumulate all this data about me.'”
• Business Matters: What if Pandora Did Direct Licenses? By Glenn Peoples in Billboard.
• Japan Is About to Become the Largest Music Market In the World. By  Paul Resnikoff in Digital Music News.
• As CDs spin on in Japan, Tower Records rocks on. By Yuko Takeo in The Wall Street Journal.
• Bricks-and-mortar retailers link with online brethren; video spending stable. In DVD and Beyond.
• Apple Spells out iTunes Radio Terms. By Hannah Karp and Jessica E. Lessin in The Wall Street Journal.
• iTunes Radio makes offer to NYC labels: Terms from Apple that went out in the last week to the indies are “on par” with what the major record companies were given, according to sources and a copy of the contract obtained by Crain’s. By Matthew Flamm in Crain’s New York Business.

Other interesting stuff

• Douglas Rushkoff on Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, a Berkman Center talk.
• Is Apple the Next Chrysler? by Herb Greenberg in LinkedIn. Since I found it in the San Francisco Chronicle, I thought it was a recruitment ad.
• Who will stop Google? Snowden revealed what many of us already suspected: Google completely controls the web. By Rebecca Solnit in Salon.
• The Arctic Heatwave Hits Central Siberia Pushing Temperatures to 90 Degrees and Sparking Tundra Fires. By Robert Scribbler.
• IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole. By Robert McMillan in Wired.
• Full Show: United States of ALEC — A Follow-Up. By Bill Moyers.
• Privately funded aircraft will look for dangerous asteroids. By Peter Gwynne in PhysicsWorld.

3 lessons for newsrooms from UsVsTh3m and The Guardian’s Firestorm project. By Craig Silverman in Poynter.

FCC Announces Application Window for New Low PowerFM Stations. By Cody Duncan in Future of Music Coalition. Fact sheet.

What’s the ‘Internet of Everything’ worth? $613 billion, Cisco reckons: In 2013, Cisco calculates that companies could produce $613 billion of mostly incremental profit by harnessing the growing networked world of people and things. By Dan Farber in CNet

Tech companies fret over loss of consumers’ trust after NSA revelations, byJennifer Martinez in The Hill‘s Hillicon Valley blog.

Data models for the Internet of Things. By Michael Koster.

Why Pandora bought an FM radio station. By Deborah Newman in The Hill.

On the surveillance thing

• F.T.C. Member Starts ‘Reclaim Your Name’ Campaign for Personal Data. By Natasha Singer in The New York Times. Leverages this speech by Julie Brill of the FTC.
• Gore Vidal in 1998 on the National Security State, on CSPAN.
• Top Ten Ways US TV News are Screwing us Again on NSA Surveillance Story (Iraq Redux), by Juan Cole.
• Facebook’s Creepy Data-Grabbing Ways Make It The Borg Of The Digital World. By Natasha Lomas in TechCrunch.
• The Newsonomics of Spies vs. Spies, by Ken Doctor in Neimann Journalism Lab.

On advertising and marketing

• The Death of Social Media. By Kate Jones in The Age. “And as far as my time goes, the return on investment is not worth it.”
• The Future of Advertising. By Danielle Sacks in Fast Company. “Step one of their therapy, of course, is admitting there is a problem.”
• Enterprises want to capture customers. VRM will blow that philosophy apart., by Which-50.

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