There was something refreshing in the political scene Wednesday when congressional sponsors ran away, as fast as they could, from two ill-considered bills that sought to stamp out Internet piracy by more or less stamping out the Internet.

Maybe it was the bipartisanship of the online smackdown’s target. Most Americans are fed up with the never-ending electioneering between Republicans and Democrats, who seem to launch the next campaign as soon as the polls close. Last year, the two parties and the two houses of Congress could not seem to get together on anything. But legislators of both persuasions were elbow-deep in the muck of somehow trying to apply U.S. copyright laws to web sites located everywhere except inside the United States. It was fun to watch them scurry together in search of cover.

Or maybe it was the public humiliation inflicted on the nation’s two most ham-handed defenders of intellectual property, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Most of us know the RIAA for its past practice of suing teenagers, their moms and grandmothers, and dorm-dwelling college students for illegally sharing and downloading music files. Earlier, the good folks at the MPAA were behind the film industry’s attempt nearly three decades ago to squelch video cassette recorders because they feared owners would retain copies of movies that were broadcast on television. Fortunately for the film industry, it lost the Betamax case, and a profitable market for pre-recorded videos developed as a result. These days the studios seem almost deft by comparison, with their public service announcements featuring union-scale crew members who urge viewers not to download videos illegally.

Music and movie companies are not wrong to want to protect their products from theft. They just have a remarkable talent for making themselves look nasty in the process.

I think the most satisfying aspect of this week’s developments is the way the online community rose up to fight back. The most visible blow came from Wikipedia, which blacked out its English-language site for 24 hours to protest the two bills. Some of Wikipedia’s contributing editors reportedly objected to the service, which strives for impartiality in its articles, injecting itself into a public policy debate. But as a financial contributor to Wikipedia, I had no complaints. Precisely because it is non-commercial and user-supported, Wikipedia has no vested interest in the tug of war over copyrighted content, and its point of view (and vast user base) added a powerful voice to the political debate.

Still, Wikipedia could not seem to help itself from being helpful, despite the blackout. It left its articles about the two bills, the Stop Internet Piracy Act and the Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act, accessible during the outage. It even told users that they could circumvent the 24-hour blockade by disabling javascript on their browsers.

Elsewhere, Google covered the logo on its home page with a black patch. Visitors who clicked on the patch or on a separately labeled link were directed to an online petition opposing the legislation. Wired.com blacked out the headlines on its home page. Popular blogging site WordPress.com censored its “Freshly Pressed” highlights page. By at least one estimate, as many as 7,000 sites may have joined the protest. The protest attracted worldwide attention, as outlets like the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper rounded up some of the more interesting screen shots.

To its credit, the Obama administration got ahead of the curve when it announced last weekend that the president would not sign the legislation in its original form. The first drafts of the bills would have demanded that U.S.-based service providers corrupt the net’s domain name service, which is the system that translates a name such as Google.com into a sequence of numbers that point to a particular data server. This would be a technical nightmare and could open all sorts of new possibilities for the thieves, hackers and other genuine black hats who prowl the online world from the most lawless corners of the globe.

But even with last-minute changes, the legislation would have allowed the U.S. attorney general to create a blacklist of foreign sites that allegedly infringed U.S. intellectual property. There would have been limited court review and even more limited avenues for appeal. Search engines would have been required to withhold results from such sites; service providers would be required to prevent American web surfers from reaching them; and payment services such as Paypal would be barred from remitting funds to them. The easiest way for U.S. residents to see the entire Internet, once such legislation is passed, would be to check into a hotel in Canada.

Though the legislation did not explicitly target U.S. providers like Google, those organizations noted that it would impose major headaches, such as vetting every site that hosts a source document or, in some cases, it would force them to lie to users by stating that no relevant search results are available. Also, the American approach to censoring foreign sites would be an invitation for other democratic governments to impose their own restrictions. Britain would likely assert its Official Secrets Act and pre-trial crime reporting restrictions against Americans. France would want to impose its hate speech limits on documents that Google indexes and archives, and Germany’s anti-Nazi laws would get extraterritorial heft. Not to mention the field day that information-restrictive countries such as Singapore would have. The United States would go from being a global role model for free speech to the global standard-bearer for cross-border censorship.

Well before night fell on Washington, the legislation’s former backers were peeling away from it. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called the Senate bill “not ready for prime time,” The New York Times reported. Hatch had been one of its original sponsors.

It is tempting to say that the legislation is dead, killed by a grassroots rebellion of Internet users, but I would not bet on that. Online piracy is not the vast scourge that the old-line media companies pretend that it is when they count each free download as a lost full-price sale, but neither is the theft of American-generated content a trivial matter. Right here at Palisades Hudson, we have had some of our online content lifted and even altered without permission, and in some cases without attribution. Since we are fussy about what we say and where we say it, we take such violations seriously. Our reputation is worth a lot to us.

So the big content publishers will be back. You can sense it in the churlish tweet that RIAA executive Jonathan Lamy posted in the midst of Wednesday’s protest: “After Wikipedia blackrout (sic), somewhere, a student today is doing original research and getting his/her facts straight. Perish the thought.”

As I said, even when they have a valid point, these folks make themselves look nasty. You can’t get far in show business without having some sort of talent.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

I recently pulled a Rip Van Winkle. I did not touch a computer keyboard or cell phone from 2007 until 2011. As a resident of a village in the region of the world depicted in Washington Irving’s immortal short story, I embrace my kindred spirit Van Winkle. Skipping five years of technology in the 21st century isn’t so different than Rip Van Winkle’s 18 year hiatus during the 1700’s. Each week, to create sketches and essays for a hyperlocal community news site, I’m required to immerse myself into the strange ways of this new era of connectivity. Ironically, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., where Irving first published his story of the Hudson Valley hermit, is helping me surf this time warp.

In the years before I unplugged, I was a profoundly busy and public person, engaged in both activism and art. Interactive media was my friend. I had served elected officials and civil rights organizations as a press secretary. In fact, it was with reckless self-confidence that I used a computer to launch my political career. As a press aide to the New York State Democratic Delegation to the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta Georgia, I was asked to produce our daily news letter. I agreed to the assignment before I was shown that instead of a typewriter and Xerox machine, I would be using a computer, an instrument I had never touched.

After 20 hours of non-stop work, I completed my first draft. My work ethic was the immediate stuff of legend but if I had known what I was doing, I could have completed the project in four hours. The fact that I had the stamina for a marathon session of trial and error gave me what I suspect many early computer aficionados enjoyed; the mystique of mastering something that seems difficult but is actually simple if one took the time and sweat to figure it out.

My break with technology occurred with a slip, a splash and a moment of horror. While painting a condo with my ex-wife before putting it on the market, I leaned over a can of paint and watched my brand new Sprint Treo slip from my shirt pocket and disappear into the acrylic soup. The last sound it made was kerplunk, the sound a $700 Treo makes as it turns into a worthless blue brick. Although I quickly replaced it, I never got much use out of it. Several months later, I left New York, leaving behind my Hotmail address and my Sprint phone number.

Jump cut to 2011. The setting is Nyack, NY. The people and circumstances that can re-animate a moribund life converged and I found myself wanting to re-connect. I had the stiffness that racked Van Winkle’s body from years of disuse as he made his way down from the Kaatskill Mountains (sic), but it was my social not physical muscles that had atrophied. I still had my Treo, but I found it as useful as Van Winkle’s rusted musket.

To be connected to friends, family and work associates in 2011, you need to have a presence in the new town square: social media. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter I feel like a rube, unaware of the customs and morays. When Rip and I stepped out of the frame, we were both ruled by a George: his King George gave way to George Washington and when I got back on line, George Bush had been replaced by Barack Obama. In this one comparison, the transitions seem of equivalent historic significance.

Nyack Sketch Log, my weekly online column, has been a way for me to reacquaint myself with both the physical and virtual worlds. For me Nyack is an ancestral home. The landscape of the village that I sketch provides the same comfort for me that one receives from the contours of the face of a familiar old friend. For Rip Van Winkle, after an interval of suspicion and disbelief, the villagers embraced the returning eccentric. My experience has been identical. Like Van Winkle, I pine for the village that I knew as a child, when being social didn’t involve media. I had my first egg cream at Jerry’s soda shop on Main Street; I bought my first bike at De Jung’s on Broadway and my first book, the illustrated version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was purchased at Pickwick Books.

Essayist Michael J Cummings says Washington Irving sees real change as “an amalgam of the old and new.” Hopefully, Nyack Sketch Log validates that theory. My Treo has been replaced by a T-Mobile Galaxy S II. I use this hi-tech gadget to transmit my old fashioned handmade low tech drawings. Hi-tech/ low-tech mash ups demonstrate, to my mind, generational harmony. My favorite example of the merger of modern and ancient is the digital radio with the hand cranked battery. Human progress can be threatened by a culture of stagnation or disposability. Truth be told, Irving’s tale was recycled from similar accounts of many cultures: something old, made new. The plot device of an avatar from the past in myth can be a useful literary device to transmit information of timeless value.

I was shamed into joining Facebook by a friend who thought my absence from the social media platform was evidence that I was over 50. Her remark, and her estimate of my age were way too close to the truth. In the 21^st century, to stay young and stay connected, you get to stay home, login in and post and tweet. I’ll leave it to you to decide if social media is also social progress.

My first tweet, using the Twitter hash tag #RipVanWinkle, will coincide with this post. My twitter handle is nyacksketchlog. My younger self was comfortable with this clumsy feeling that is overcoming me as I take my first strides into a new media landscape. People my age wish to avoid bumbling about in public.

Even more problematic for the twitterverse is my generation’s tendency to be long winded. I hope I can make my point in less than 140 charact

Artist Bill Batson, an activist and former NYC resident, draws sketches and writes essays each week curbside in Nyack, NY. Copyright 2011, Bill Batson.

When a hotel investment firm decided a 10-block stretch of Miami Beach needed a name, the easy part was coming up with SoBe 10, to catch a little of the cachet of South Beach. The hard part was getting the name to catch on.

The firm, Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels, decided the best way to get people to use its made-up name was to pretend people were already using it. Not long after he dreamed up SoBe 10, Gregory Rumpel, the firm’s executive vice president, inserted it into Wikipedia’s South Beach page. The modified entry read, “The ten blocks along Collins Avenue, from 15th Street to 24th Street, also known as the SoBe 10 or Power Mile, are considered to be the epicenter of South Beach nightlife and entertainment.”

Wikipedia’s openness makes it a tempting target for those looking to create their own versions of reality. But while most people know that Wikipedia is not 100 percent reliable, readers still expect entries to have some basis in fact.

Even when the “information” promoters add to Wikipedia is actual, rather than aspirational, it decreases the value of the site. Wikipedia articles are intended to be neutral and objective, like the content of traditional encyclopedias. Business owners and publicists who write or edit where their own interests are concerned are therefore acting deceitfully, implying a neutral perspective they do not actually have.

Wikipedia’s page on Wikipedia spam offers clear guidelines on how interested parties can avoid inadvertently interfering with the site’s mission. Would-be editors are instructed, “If you are here to tell readers how great something is, or to get exposure for an idea or product that nobody has heard of yet, you are in the wrong place.” The page also cautions users against creating pages for their own products and websites, explaining that “Most often, when a person creates a new article describing his or her own work, it is because the work is not yet well-known enough to have attracted anyone else’s attention.” Just as few employers go to candidates’ parents to get letters of recommendation, few Wikipedia readers want to hear that something is noteworthy from its creator.

Unfortunately, often publicists are more concerned with promoting products than they are with protecting the reliability of third-party websites. As we increasingly get our information from user-generated content – from Wikipedia rather than the Encyclopedia Britannica or from Yelp rather than newspaper restaurant reviews – we gain access to new voices and to more comprehensive data, but we lose important information about authors’ interests and motivations. A Wikipedia entry could be written by an expert, or by someone looking to introduce new “facts.” A good review on Yelp may come from a satisfied customer, but it may also come from the business’s owner or from someone who has never even visited the business.

A recent column in The New York Times revealed that a company called Softline Solutions, which provides reputation management among other online services, paid 25 cents for positive reviews posted on Yelp about its client, Southland Dental. Yelp filters reviews that appear to be fake, placing them on a separate page, but acknowledges that some legitimate content gets incorrectly filtered out and some less-than-legitimate content slips through.

Wikipedia’s vigilant editors and administrators, for the most part, ensure that profit motives are kept in line with the site’s mission, preserving reliability. By strictly enforcing community standards and deleting promotional content, Wikipedians send the message that any attempt to take advantage of the site is unlikely to succeed. In a 2010 press release, the public relations company Punch Communications advised other firms to avoid marketing on Wikipedia, not because it lowers the quality of the site, but because the risk of getting caught is too high. “While it may seem like a quick hit at first, once [a] post is deleted, the agency finds themselves having overpromised and under-delivered; something we all hate to do,” Pete Goold, a managing director at the company, said.

The same openness which allows promotional content to enter Wikipedia also helps to weed it out. Shortly after the mention of SoBe 10 appeared on Wikipedia’s South Beach page, an anonymous editor removed it, with the concise justification, “I’ve deleted the following, which is a made-up designation inserted for marketing purposes.”

As wikis become a bigger part of our lives, we owe ever greater thanks to those who keep them as clean and accurate as possible. In a letter on the site, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, writes, “Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.” Keeping advertising out, however, requires hard work and dedication. And surviving without advertising requires the support of readers. Not everyone who reads Wikipedia can afford to donate to its mission, but it’s worth remembering the amount of work that goes into keeping the site free of promotional content, and also keeping it just plain free.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

The tables have been turned on the ratings business.

Predicting that “Nielsen should score big audience ratings on Wall Street,” the NYT thinks the private equity team which took the former VNU company private four years ago has done a good job — and will be rewarded with a successful IPO of up to $1.75 billion. Nielsen’s SEC filing says they plan to use the proceeds to reduce its $8.6 billion debt and “general corporate purposes.”

Here’s the “by the numbers” analysis of Nielsen’s numbers:

• Nielsen takes in about $4.8 billion in revenue each year from nearly 100 countries.
• In 2006,  former GE Exec David Calhoun and a group of private investment firms including Blackstone Group, The Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts bought Nielsen from VNU for about $10 billion.
• Calhoun and company injected another $3 billion in capital into the business, buying up new properties like IAG, mobile measurement firm Telephia and video analytics company GlanceGuide. They also shed non-core assets like Nielsen EDI (sold to Rentrak) and a long list of venerable publications, closing Radio & Records and Editor & Publisher and selling Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter to e5 Global Media. According to the WSJ, Nielsen also cut 10% of their staff after the buyout.
• Nielsen earned about $1.3 billion last year compared to $879 million four years ago.

Where the NYT is bullish on Nielsen’s IPO prospects, a skeptical WSJ calls “bullsh1t.” Noting that Nielsen was acquired in a pre-Twitter and Facebook(-dominant) world where they now trail comScore in Internet measurement, the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Corkery blogs that “anytime savvy investors – such as KKR, Blackstone and Carlyle Group – are selling out in a volatile stock market — potential investors should be asking themselves why.”

At the end of the day, Van Morrison may have the last word on the success of Nielsen’s planned IPO.

In the song “Wild Night,” Morrison writes “…and all the girls walk by dressed up for each other.” If you substitute private equity firms for girls you get some insight into how The Street views Nielsen’s IPO. “An initial offering that comes close to doubling their money would also help dispel criticism that buyout firms are nothing more than undertaxed financial engineers,” says the New York Times.

If anyone has a reality show treatment called “Pimp My Ratings Company” in the works, this would be a great time to do some lunches.

The ways people are consuming content on new video platforms remind me of how I sometimes eat one of my favorite foods – shrimp fried rice.

Traditional linear TV is consumed the way fried rice is intended to be eaten.  The rice, the veggies and the shrimp or chicken or whatever meat is at hand are consumed together.  However, online clips and on-demand video in general tend to promote a bit of cheating.  It’s like those occasions when I’m not all that hungry, and after a few bites I find myself starting to skip over the vegetables and rice, seeking out the shrimp and just eating those.

Think YouTube, and here we are hunting out a clip of one particular segment we like from a TV show, the rest of which didn’t impress us.  And we certainly don’t want to see all of those commercials that ran in the program.  So we go online and find a clip of what we want.  Yum, tasty shrimp!

Even if we watch a full episode of a program on cable on-demand or on Hulu or a network website, we’re still enjoying a distilled version with few, if any, commercials.  An hour long show often magically becomes a 45-minute experience.  And if the streaming software allows it, we may skip around in that and watch only the program segments that particularly interest us.  It’s not just the cable or broadcast network ads that vanish.  Those couple of minutes or more from each hour that the cable systems sell to local advertisers are gone, along with the local inserts in broadcast shows sold by your local affiliated stations.

Lots of people make their living selling these local availabilities.  You can hardly blame them if they feel threatened by digital technology.  There are new revenue opportunities, but there may be periods of starvation before we can develop them to the point of company and personal profit.  For example, “dynamic” on-the-fly commercial insertion in on-demand TV offerings at either the network or local level is still more a promise than reality.  And we haven’t even touched on the effects of DVRs in the viewing mix.

Meanwhile, audiences are learning to skim the cream and pitch out the skim milk.  Pass the shrimp.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

At the 1964 World’s Fair, AT&T introduced a new product that combined the telephone and television into a surefire hit for businesses and consumers. Three million Picturephones were predicted to be in use by the 1980’s. Instead of Picturephones, we now remember the 80’s by a different cultural failure: disco music.

AT&T is estimated to have spent up to $500 million developing the Picturephone. Why wouldn’t you want to see the person to whom you were speaking? If facial expressions weren’t important, why did those thoughtful Internet pioneers invent all of those emoticons to express what words alone couldn’t do? AT&T failed partially because they charged $21 a minute for the bandwidth hungry picture phone in a pre-fiber, barely satellite communications age. Today we can do it for free via iChat or Skype — but even free hasn’t made consumers want to be heard and be seen.

Last week Google announced a new service which will join two commonly used communications technologies. Google TV will marry TV with search to improve the consumer experience and, in Google’s words, “change the future of television.” Anyone who has ever tried to use a remote control to text search a TV interactive program guide can see the possibilities of searching “all of your channels, recorded shows,  YouTube and other Websites” in one place.

Long before the industry anointed  “convergence” as the holy grail of media synergy, AT&T learned that consumers can be a fickle bunch. Google, a dominant communications company of the 21st century, might want to take a history lesson from AT&T, which was the largest communications company of the 20th century.

Google and their technology partners hope to sell new TVs (from Sony) or new HDMI-connectible set top boxes (from Logitech) to merge your desktop and set top digital words. Google TV Product Lead Rishi Chandra says Google TV will let viewers use the voice search feature of Android phones to query Google TV. NewTeeVee.com provided a play-by-play of the new service as demoed at the Google I/O conference. First, Chandra searched for live TV content and scheduled TV programming to program a DVR.

Then he searched for House, and Google TV returned search results Hulu, Fox.com and Amazon. Clicking on the Amazon search result led to the website of Amazon’s VOD service. The search bar can also be used to directly input urls and search saved bookmarks. “It’s just as easy to go to any site on the web as it is to go to any channel on your television,” says Chandra.

Google’s business model is to make money by bringing search to TV and extending the reach of advertising through Adwords. In an interview on the Fox Business Channel, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that because Google TV seamlessly combines TV and computers, “we know a lot more about what people are doing and can make more relevant television advertising  — which should be worth alot of money.”

Will Google succeed where AT&T once failed and Apple TV and Microsoft’s Media Center have stalled? There’s only one way to end an article that talks about almost 50 years of TV and technology: Stay tuned.

Sources: DavidZondy.com, Porticus.org, Google TV, NewTeeVee.com, Digital Daily, Fox Business Channel, BobLucky.com

See Also: Engadget, timeline.com, BusinessInsider.com

Saturday’s October 3, 2009 headline “Palin Holds Own In VP Debate” in the BattleCreek Enquirer tells all you need to know about how Alaska’s Sarah Plain when she went mano a mano with Joe Biden on October 3. The article, which Google News featured prominently at 7a, was at the top of the list of “related” Friday articles about Palin’s chances in 2012.

Only problem is that the BattleCreekEnquirer was a year too late.

A closer read of the story shows that it should have been filed with a dateline of October 3, 2008 — not 2009. The error was amplified by Google’s news-bot-algorithm-thingee when this retro story was grouped with recent comments by former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt said a 2012 Palin nomination would be catastrophic for the party.

Web publishers use CMS (content management systems) to manage stories, dates, bylines and ad placement. Obviously something snafu-ed in Battle Creek followed by the clueless electronic editor-in-chief-bot at Google (There’s no truth to the rumor that the new Google News slogan is “All The Dated News That’s Fit We Publish.”).

One of the funnier quips about this slip out belongs to GeeWizard, a comment poster on the BattleCreekEnquirer website.

I’m excited to see Palin, a fresh face in politics. I’ll bet she’ll be sad to quit her position as Governor of Alaska once the American people unanimously vote her into the White House. She’s not like other slimy politicians who are only interested in self-promotion and million dollar book deals. She loves her state and would stay with it forever if she could. GO PALIN!!

Wait….what year is this?

Damn computers. Can’t live with em. Can’t sue ‘em when they screw up something stupid, either. But I bet there will be hell to pay at the editor’s desk in Battle Creek come Monday morning.

Sources: Battle Creek Enquirer, October 3, 2009, The Atlantic, CNN VP Debate Transcript

Journalists are taught to write in an inverted pyramid getting the most important who, what, when, where and why facts into the first few sentences. PR peeps embrace a similar philosophy, however their idea of the most important info always includes the client’s name and company, eventually getting around to whatever the press release might be about. Consequently, every press release gets rewritten by any journalist worth their salt.

It’s particularly ironic considering how many PR people started their careers as journalists, probably cursing the PR people for how lazy they are and how poorly they wrote. (Does this just prove that what goes around, comes around?)

At one time, the journalists were the sole gate keepers of public opinion. Today things are different. If public relations people can’t place a story on the front page of the Times, you can still blog, tweet and comment your way to viral nirvana.

Unfortunately, the PR peeps need to talk about their client doesn’t trump consumers’ need to speed read what they want. And make decisions in a fraction of a second about what’s interesting and clickable. The online paradigm — where only a headline or the first sentence of a press release is exposed in a news reader for a RSS feed — probably won’t engage the reader before the space is exhausted.

Here are some examples:

New City, NY – County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef, Gordon Wren, Jr., Director of the County’s Office of Fire & Emergency Services, and members of the County’s volunteer firefighters’ community today unveiled…

or…

Clear Channel Airports introduced exciting changes to Oakland International Airport with
a new advertising program featured in both terminals.

or…

Privately held Noble Investment Group (“Noble”), a leading sponsor of private equity real estate funds and an integrated lodging and hospitality operating and development organization,
today announced…

Still awake? (Probably not.) The point is that EVEN if flacks succeed in getting their release into your newsreader the chances are slim and none that consumers will click. Unless you are the competition to the company sending out the release.

Recently, someone new to the PR business asked my advice about creating effective press releases. I cited the public communications gospel of Neil Greenberger, the press guy for Montgomery County, MD and a former Washington Post sports writer. “Rule #1 is make it easy for journalists,” says Greenberger. Write a good lead in your press release and make the story interesting. If it engages the journalist, they will eventually read down to the second paragraph to find out more about your client.

If more public relations people followed this rule, the Web would be a better place. Or at least a more interesting read.

Dave Zornow is editor of MediaNewsAndViews and co-publisher of NyackNewsAndViews, a hyper-local community news site in Nyack, NY.

A man sits down to read a politically provocative novel on his electronic reader only to find that the book has vanished. Without warning, his purchase price has been refunded and the book he’d hoped to peruse has been deleted.

You might think this is from George Orwell’s famous anti-utopian adventure 1984, but it is in fact a scene that played out earlier this month in real living rooms and commuter trains across the country. Ironically, the disappearing book was 1984.

The deletion occurred after Amazon discovered that it was distributing 1984 and other books, including Animal Farm, without the proper permissions. Amazon’s Kindle devices come equipped with digital rights management software that enables the company to do something with ebooks that it cannot do with traditional print copies, which is to step into the customer’s home and take back what has been sold.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, apologized for the incident, saying Amazon’s “‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”

In spite of Bezos’s promise to “make better decisions going forward,” the incident provides plenty of reasons to be uneasy about technology that could potentially be used to monitor and to censor what we read. In this case, Amazon’s electronic recall had nothing to do with the content of the erased books, but, in the future, governments or other powerful entities could conceivably ask (or force) Amazon to use its powers for less benign purposes.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of the book, The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It commented to The New York Times that, eventually, digital rights management software might be used “like a line item veto for content.” He went on to suggest that “It could happen first in jurisdictions like the United Kingdom, where there isn’t as rich a First Amendment tradition and where libel suits happen much more frequently.”

In spite of Amazon’s efforts to make reading a book on the Kindle as much like reading a paper and ink book as possible, events like this remind us that electronic content distribution keeps us discreetly tethered to our suppliers. This is true not only of Amazon, but also of Apple’s iTunes store and cable companies that supply us with set-top boxes. What if the National Football League’s license agreement allowed it to demand that blown calls, wardrobe malfunctions and other embarrassments be electronically deleted from our DVRs?

The First Amendment gives Americans some of the strongest protections for free expression the world has ever seen. Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are not universally respected or even admired. Amazon goofed when it deleted the electronic books it had sold, but it also did us a favor by reminding us that today’s powerful information technologies work in both directions.

Come to think of it, this blog is available to Kindle users for the modest fee of $1.99 a month. If you downloaded this post on your Kindle, I hope you get the chance to read it.

We can bring the bookseller into our homes. The question now is: Can we also keep it out?

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

It’s the stuff from which Sci Fi is made. The Web Search-opoly, which has shook the bedrock of the advertising world, has invested in a company that can cause earthquakes. (Sort of. The investment is real, the earthquakes are a possibility)

What’s best is that Rule #6 of Google’s corporate philosophy is “you can make money without doing evil.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin, meet Lex Luthor and Dr. No.

It’s also about energy and using the heat of the earth to produce clean power without greenhouse gases or fragile geopolitical alliances. Google has invested $6.25 million in AltaRock Energy which plans to drill two miles below the surface to tap geothermal energy in a place about two hours north of San Francisco.

AltaRock hopes to use engineered geothermal systems to pump cold water below the surface to fracture rocks and create fissures. The water, heated under intense pressure, returns to the surface as steam used to turn electrical turbines.

However, the NYT did a little digging (I couldn’t resist) and found that a similar venture in Basel, Switzerland was shut down after it triggered man-made earthquakes which persisted for months after the drilling stopped. AltaRock says they aren’t sure that the Basel project caused the Swiss quakes although local officials in Switzerland are sure that they did.

Regarding geothermal energy, Google says we need “more aggressive government policies to help catch up to other nations, including expanded R&D funding, a national renewable portfolio standard, and reliable tax incentives.”

Here’s the pitch: Corporate greed vs. community need by do global gooders gone bad  at the cross roads of good intentions and the San Andreas fault. Wannabe script writers for History and Discovery Channels — are you listening?

Source: NYT, XConomy, GreenTechMedia, Earthetech