BuzzMachine

We have superchurches in America; there’s a proposal to build a supermosque in Britain with multiple buildings holding 70,000.

The Guardian calls George Clooney “the voice of liberal America.”

How about this as a fundamental principle of content and conversation on the internet:

I have a right to know when what I create is read, heard, viewed, or used if I wish to know that.

That is my followup to the whine about RSS — and content — caching below.

If this simple principle were built into applications — not the internet, per se, but in how readers and viewers work — then caching and P2P, which both serve creators by reducing bandwidth demand, would not be issues. This also would help those who want to make use of advertising (though actually serving ads is a different matter).

I’d like to see this as a technical add-on to Creative Commons: Distribute my content freely, please, on the condition that you allow applications to report traffic back to me. And applications designers should build such reporting in. The creator is still free not to require this and the end user is still free not to consume those things that require ping-backs. But simple traffic reporting is at least common courtesy.

I’d like to see this work for RSS, HTML, audio, and video.

: ALSO: Scoble, Winer.

: LATER: Just want to emphasize that My Yahoo will provide the data. It is not now because something broke in an upgrade but two Yahoo folks have confirmed that they will continue to play nice, for which I am grateful.

: LATER STILL: Matt Cutts of Google says he will mention this to the guys at Google Reader and believes there’s no reason not to build it into a next version of that new product. Bravo again.

Newsdesigner shows us the front page of one of two Polish papers that blacked out many of their words to protest censorship in neighboring Belarus.

Two dozen members of congress, led by Dennis Kucinich, write a letter to the publisher of the LA Times objecting to the dismissal of columnist Robert Sheer. If they were just readers writing to a paper complaining about something the paper had done, fine. Wonderful, in fact. But they don’t write as readers. The letter starts: “We, as Members of Congress, object to the dismissal…” What does being a Member of Congress (capitalized) have to do with this? Is this an effort to intimidate the press from an official position? Remember, people, we don’t do that here. In fact, you are sworn to protect against just that.

Next time, folks, write as readers.

: I posted a different version of this at Huffington here (I spared you the FCC/PTC rant).

Hey, My Yahoo, Google Reader, Pluck, Newsgator Enterprise and other RSS readers: Hand over my numbers. You are taking my RSS feed and caching it to serve more efficiently, which would be fine if only you told me how many times you are doing that. But you’re not.

Brad Feld is much more polite than I am about this. He complains that My Yahoo just stopped reporting how many subscribers a feed gets there and Google Reader never did report and many others, including those I list above, don’t report subscribers, even though there is an easy and automated way to do that.

That’s theft. If you took a song and cached it and fed it out to lots of people these days without reporting back to the owner, you’d get sued or slapped in jail.

Well, all I ask that you do for caching my feed is to report back the number of subscribers. Not much to ask. And not doing that is tantamount to theft.

Why do I care? Because I have an ego. Because I want to see how much RSS I serve and learn about it. Because I want to see how efficient my advertising is. And just because. Damnit.

RSS is becoming a ever-more-important transport mechanism but without metrics, some will refuse to be transported by it. My Yahoo and Google Reader are making hay including RSS in their new products. They should practice good citizenship and share the data those feeds generate with their creators.

I can’t go to the Syndicate conference this time, because it’s in California, but if I were there, I’d wear a T-shirt and carry a picket sign to all the players listed here and in my Feedburner report:

FREE MY FEED SUBSCRIBERS. HAND OVER MY NUMBERS.

: LATER: I should add that I’m not against caching because it saves on my server load. But I do want to maintain a relationship with readers who subscribed to my blatherings and the barest way to do that is to get statistics. I also am not crazy about services changing feeds without my permission; some cut my full-text feed back to just headlines. Do newsstands refuse to tell you how many copies of your publication they sell? Do they cut out pages and give you only covers? No. Online distributors should operate by similar rules of the road.

: UPDATE: Jeremy Zawodny, of Yahoo, reports in the comments that the Yahoo counts will be back; it’s a bug to be fixed. Bravo. Now how about you, Google?

: LATER: See a followup post on a fundamental principle, above.

: LATER CONFIRMATION: I also just heard from a Yahoo exec who confirms that, indeed, something got broken in an upgrade and that they will feed back stats on feeds. Once again, thanks, Yahoo.

: LATER STILL: (Repeating this from the post above): Matt Cutts of Google says in the comments here that he will mention this to the guys at Google Reader and believes there’s no reason not to build it into a next version of that new product. Bravo again.

In the Wall Street Journal, Historian John Q. Wilson writes the speech he thinks George Bush should deliver on Iraq:

We are winning, and winning decisively, in Iraq and the Middle East. We defeated Saddam Hussein’s army in just a few weeks. None of the disasters that many feared would follow our invasion occurred. Our troops did not have to fight door to door to take Baghdad. The Iraqi oil fields were not set on fire. There was no civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites. There was no grave humanitarian crisis.

Saddam Hussein was captured and is awaiting trial. His two murderous sons are dead. Most of the leading members of Saddam’s regime have been captured or killed. After our easy military victory, we found ourselves inadequately prepared to defeat the terrorist insurgents, but now we are prevailing.

Iraq has held free elections in which millions of people voted. A new, democratic constitution has been adopted that contains an extensive bill of rights. Discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, or politics is banned. Soon the Iraqis will be electing their first parliament.

An independent judiciary exists, almost all public schools are open, every hospital is functioning, and oil sales have increased sharply. In most parts of the country, people move about freely and safely….

The progress of democracy and reconstruction has occurred faster in Iraq than it did in Germany 60 years ago, even though we have far fewer troops in the Middle East than we had in Germany after Hitler was defeated.

We grieve deeply over every lost American and coalition soldier, but we also recognize what those deaths have accomplished. A nation the size of California, with 25 million inhabitants, has been freed from tyranny, equipped with a new democratic constitution, and provided with a growing new infrastructure that will help every Iraqi and not just the privileged members of a brutal regime….

We made no mistake ending Saddam’s rule. We have brought not only freedom to Iraq, but progress to most of the Middle East. America should be proud of what it has accomplished. America will not cut and run until the Iraqis can manage their own security, and that will happen soon.

I got into lots of blog hot water once when I said that much of Bush’s problem is a PR problem. Yes, that was too glib. But I am still amazed that for all the spinning he does, he’s still bad at it. He should hire Wilson as his speechwriter.

: Meanwhile, Dave Winer points to a speech his father, Leon Winer, says Bush should deliver (both blogging and bluntness are hereditary, one way or the other). It is matter to Wilson’s antimatter:

1. I have put my expected gain ahead of the well-being of the people of the United States. In seeking to maximize my wealth and the wealth of my family and close friends, I have ordered our military to invade Iraq. My objective was to grab half the Iraqi oil - worth $50 billion per year, and rising.

2. In implementing my attempt to grab Iraq’s oil, I have caused the deaths of more than 2000 Americans and uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqis. I have also caused the maiming of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. I have also wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of US Treasury funds in fighting the war in Iraq.

This is why wikitorial was doomed to fail. This is how far apart we are on our interpretations of what is happening in Iraq.

Steve Rubel points us to an IKEA fans’ blog, which points us to a blog by a guy who allegedly is vowing to visit every IKEA in the world and then there is the IKEA fan site and the IKEA haters site but let’s not forget a site dedicated just to pictures of the IKEA Jerker desk. I’ve already confessed my strange IKEA obsession.

I let Umair Haque’s Bubblegeneration blog pile up like unread, guilt-inducing copies of The Economist and The New Yorker and anything Clay Shirky writes because it takes time to read and let sink in what he has to say. So here’s my homework, Umair on:
* Media 2.0
* Peer production.
* Edge Competencies.
* Network economics.
* The fabled attention economy.
* And here’s a current post on edge compentences and newspapers, which warns:

Newspapers are canaries in the coal mine. The economic shift that is disrupting the structure of the media industry is deep and pervasive; within the next five years, it will touch all consumer-facing industries. What’s happening to newspapers should serve as a warning signal to players across markets that the deep economics of consumer-facing businesses are undergoing radical change: change as fundamental as that which marked the shift from the industrial to the knowledge economy. To understand this change, let’s define the problem the news market is facing.

The publishers, like the rest of the media industry, are facing a radical shift in industry economics; a structural disruption. Barriers to entry have been vaporized, as have switching costs. At the same time, the market power newspapers could exert over content creators and advertisers is eroding….

News executives must invest in the new media value chain. … What are the segments of this new value chain? As we’ve outlined, microplatforms allow prosumers to create personal media. Smart aggregators syndicate and distribute it. Reconstructors build individualized ‘casts of media for communities of connected consumers….

PaidContent has details for a job overseeing Verizon Mobile’s music strategy.

The Customer Evangelists report that Amazon is experimenting with product-information wikis (more here) so we the customers can share and update information on products for sale. Damned smart. The evangelists also make some good suggestions.

: Rob Hof has more.

There is a death pool for Pajamas Media (I suggested it back here). Some in the comments there are suggesting side bets on which bloggers bail first.