As a percentage of all advertising revenue in the United States, newspapers have been steadily shrinking for the past 50 years. It was only recently that things tipped to the point where newspapers were losing money instead of turning a profit.

An old hierarchy wants the newspaper industry to survive. Whether from personal business interests, nostalgia, or an inability to use the internet, there is a subset of individuals who want things to stay the same. In fact, the FTC is holding preliminary discussions on how to put the industry in to cryostasis.

The web has been the best thing to happen to investigative journalism. While critics regularly claim that bloggers just regurgitate and repost articles from traditional news organizations it is bloggers and web publishers who regularly have their stories jacked without any citation or credit. No longer are stories “sat on” by editors for weeks or months, stories are released instantly for people to make up their own minds about.

Here are some of the “considerations” the FTC is currently looking at:
- Restricting news aggregators. Good bye, Google News.
- Preventing others from republishing facts from a news story until after an extended amount of time. Good bye, live search results from Twitter.
- Limiting copyright fair use. Good bye Google Image Search (FTC specifically notes the Perfect 10 case.)
- Surcharges added on to all monthly ISP bills.
- Exempting news organizations from anti trust laws. Hey, if we all block Google in robots.txt then no one will go there when they want news, right?
- Government subsidies.
- Tax breaks.

In the FTC’s defense, they give pretty strong counterpoints to everything but additional government subsidies & tax breaks. Whats scary is that someone at a government regulatory agency which is supposed to protect consumers would take any of these ideas more seriously than cracking down on abductions by aliens in flying saucers.

Can someone tell me whats wrong with this:

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/07/wikipedia-purges-porn/

Final paragraph of Article: “Still, as of Friday afternoon, dozens of categories of explicit sexual images remained on Wikimedia with no indication that they had been marked for deletion.”

If you are a blogger, please re-post this story from SecondShares.

“The second thing the Dodd Bill proposes is to eliminate the existing federal pre-emption over state regulation of “accredited offerings.” This means that venture and angel financings would be regulated state by state, creating a ton of rules and regulations that each financing would need to be subject to. Each financing would require startups to register with the SEC, which could take up to 120 days to review the filing. This may in itself kill most angel investments, since angels like to react quickly to the market, and most technology investments are clearly time sensitive.”

http://www.secondshares.com/2010/04/27/how-the-dodd-bill-may-impact-the-secondary-market/

Who the hell writes these bills? Wasn’t the whole point of finance reform to stop banks from being reckless?

I might be wrong, may be this SF Post article is inadequately describing what actually happened — “The men created computer programs that bombarded online ticket vendors including Ticketmaster.com and purchased tickets automatically by impersonating individual visitors, investigators said.”

The result? “Stevenson, along with Kenneth Lowson, 40, Kristofer Kirsch, 37, and Faisal Nahdi, 36, all of Los Angeles, were charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and unauthorized computer access.”

Problems with your forum, blog, or e-commerce website being spammed by impersonated users for commercial means? The FBI is on your side.

Wow. This guy didn’t even do it, he sold software that did it.

“On Tuesday, US Federal authorities filed criminal charges against Christopher Kennedy, a developer of cookie stuffing software. While the developer claims to have never engaged in cookie stuffing for his own benefit, he is being charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. These charges carry a maximum fine of $250K and 5 years in prison. ”

Does this mean that affiliate networks who tweak pixels to fire only 90% of the time, scrub conversions, or under report sales conversions to their affiliates are committing wire fraud?

Its no secret that this is an industry standard — not an exception. Just sign up for an affiliate network back end and learn all about how affiliate fraud is facilitated.

Great post by Aaron Wall over at digitalbookworld.

It is very rare that someone gives out detailed sales and revenue numbers about their online business. When I see these types of posts I bookmark them or even save them to my hard drive (they have a tendency to disappear.)

SEOBook’s forum is definitely one of the few webmaster boards around which I would describe as healthy.

Many years ago I decided it would be a good idea to learn a foreign language. So I tried.

Then someone told me “If you were a CEO you could just hire a translator.”

Throughout my life I have read and heard plenty of good advice. However, it is extraordinarily rare that this advice is contained in a single sentence and that it is a specific sentence I never forget.

If you insist on doing everything yourself, make damn sure you can count everything you want to do on a single hand. If not, limit your competitions to those with a similar handicap.

The biggest mistake you can make when applying for a job is to not be bothered to read any special instructions to employer provides.

I had a few interesting responses over the past week to several job positions and freelance tasks and posted on different job boards.

For one job opening about 50% of responders followed the directions. Many of the candidates were very well qualified. With a quick glance at their application I could tell whether or not they really read my post. If they didn’t, they had no chance of winning the project.

For a freelance job opening, the person who “won” the project failed to follow instructions for the test project. Oops.

Finally, I had an opening where not a single responder followed the directions. Kind of sucks because it was a very well paying job for something that wasn’t exactly rocket science. And I spent a decent amount of money on the posting’s placement.

In 2009 I learned a lot about hiring people. Biggest lesson: most people are idiots.

I read an interesting but perhaps anecdotal column in the New York Times the other day — “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”

So, it used to be that the people who graduated at the top of their class in Ivy League schools got respectable jobs — judges, college professors, etc. — while the ones at the bottom went to work for Wall Street. Then in the 80s the investment banks started paying tons of money and recruited those that graduated at the top of their class.

This meant suddenly all of the new guys were a lot smarter than their bosses. The bosses couldn’t understand all of the fancy financial stuff and thus we have the financial crises.

I don’t really believe this story.

However, I do believe the part about where people ended up working. My question is, if the brightest guys all work for Wall Street, does that mean dumb people are filling the slots everywhere else?

Secondly, is this actually a bad thing? (After all, if you did make it in to an Ivy League school you probably aren’t brain dead, and if you graduated at the bottom of your class you probably didn’t do much cheating.)

Michael Arrington posted an article defending Cash4Gold’s business. A previous TechCrunch post wrote about Cash4Gold’s $50 million yearly profit margin. A lot of people think they are a scam because c4g does not pay out on the spot price of gold.

Something Micheal’s defending post does not mention: no one is going to pay you for the spot price of gold. I suggest you try purchasing physical gold and then selling it. Here is what is going to happen, you are going to pay a 10%(ish) premium, and then sell it at a 10%(ish) discount. Now how much money did you make?

Cash4Gold or any other old jewelry for money service can pay you pretty much any thing they want as long as they don’t lie to you in the process. It might even be more profitable in the short term for them to start paying out even less.