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The Honolulu Advertiser, like other Gannett newspapers, has spent a considerable amount of time and effort to set up a hyperlocal blog network at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com. The Advertiser’s web site is littered with small graphical ads that promote individual blogs with the same cookie-cutter approach: the blog’s name, along with the author’s name and picture, with an uninspired tagline such as “A blog by…” or “Blog with…”

Advertiser Editor Mark Platte wrote a progress report in this Honolulu Advertiser op-ed article called Blogs a hit, and we’d love more. One section of this article is interesting:

I’m always on the lookout for new blogs, specifically in areas that aren’t already covered, and I am always asking staffers and those outside the staff if they are interested in blogging. Some have started blogs and decided the time commitment is more than they bargained for, so they drop out. But blogging is about experimenting, and if a blog doesn’t work, there’s no problem replacing it with another authored by someone with a fresh perspective.

This Poinography article from the same day, 15 June 2008, called Editor wants more hits and ad revenue, er, bloggers examined the same section with a cynical view.It’s true that print and broacast advertising revenues have been on the decline for years, as advertisers make more online media buys. The title of this TechCrunch article is a good starting point: Top 100 Advertisers Shifted $1 Billion To the Web Last Year At The Expense Of TV And Newspapers.

As Advertising Age notes, the economy has something to do with this trend: Top 100’s Ad-Spend Growth Grinds to Halt.

The Advertiser has been involved in a long-running labor dispute with its writing staff. The blog network is one way to recruit new, non-union writers who could provide online content during a strike or walkout.

Many of the Advertiser’s bloggers are already union journalists for the newspaper, but the majority of the neighborhood bloggers are new recruits to the Advertiser.

Authority and timeliness

A newspaper’s blogs should be as authoritative and reliable as the print and online editions. I enjoy reading the New York Times’ blogs, especially Bits and The Lede. The blogs provide Some of the Times’ blog articles are a draft or preview of a longer article that appears a few hours later in the print and online editions of the newspaper itself.

A few of the Advertiser’s 36 bloggers need assistance in learning how to blog. Kim Fassler, in an article called Friday Tidbits in her Quarterlife Cafe blog, mentioned that she has problems finding topics for her blog posts:

I suppose Quarterlife Cafe would probably fall into the category of “meaningless fluff” designed to entice the twenty-something crowd into reading the newspaper. But, hey, if I can get just one more apathetic twenty-something to read just one more article and learn just one more important aspect of some Hawaii issue, then I’ll write all the meaningless fluff I can muster.

That post had five subheadings in it, with Kim’s comments on Iran, teenage pregnancy, and cloning. I would have split that single post into 4 articles posted throughout the day.

Some of the comments on Kim’s story were excellent. One person noted that the Advertiser’s blog software seems slow, for example. Their pages do resolve at a lazy pace, but that’s some a good server-side cache could fix.

Tomorrow I’ll post an announcement about a new direction for my blog.

George Carlin, who passed away yesterday, was funny because he understood how language works. His running commentary on the relationship between language and culture was the foundation of his comedy.

I’m lucky - I did see Carlin perform in Honolulu on New Year’s Eve 2004. At midnight Pacific Time, he whipped out his mobile phone, made a call and had the audience scream “Happy New Year!”

We also shared the same hobby - WheresGeorge.com. It turns out that Carlin was the long-rumored “celebrity Georger”. His identity was revealed on the site today.

This YouTube video includes my favorite Carlin monologue - his comparison of baseball and football.

After Monday’s iPhone 3G announcement, the blogosphere is full of opinions. Engadget has a good overview of the new iPhone here. Andrew Dobrow checked the AT&T coverage map for the New York City area and claimed that the 3G coverage was poor. It looks fine to me, as long as you don’t live in central New Jersey. Our 3G coverage on Oahu looks excellent by comparison. 

Related posts on billso.com

• iPhone
• 9 June 2008: iPhone 3G coming on July 11
• 7 June 2008: The impossible solar iPhone
• 29 April 2008: New iPhone will be subsidized, faster and thinner
• 28 April 2008: Should Apple sell hardware on two-year contracts?

From ZDnet, the New York Times and TechDirt comes this story: New York City has subpoenaed a TXTmob server that was used to coordinate street protests during the 2004 Republican national Convention.

The city’s lawyers are litigating civil suits brought by hundreds of protesters who were arrested during the convention. All the city’s lawyers want are the records of every user and message sent on the system.

TXTmob can be used to resend text messages to hundreds of mobile phones in real time. The software is available on the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s web site. Wikipedia has a good article about the service.

Tad Hirsch, the creator of the TXTmob software, does not want to release the information on his server:

“There’s a principle at stake here,” he said recently by telephone. “I think I have a moral responsibility to the people who use my service to protect their privacy.”

Hirsch has appealed for donations on his web site. Hirsch says some of that data no longer exists. He’s been busy writing his dissertation at MIT.

Who’s got the data?

There are many web and mobile services like Facebook and Twitter that could be used to coordinate protests, according to this Wired article. Groups need to consider who operates their messaging servers and who controls the data for their web services. Hosting an application like TXTmob on one’s own server is one way to avoid a Web portal or service provider’s restrictions.

Even so, the server has to be connected to the Internet, and the text messages are resent to subscribers through the mobile phone carriers servers. The telecom carriers routinely archive text messages sent through their systems, as I mentioned on 3 February 2008, and the carriers will provide messages and logs if subpoenaed.

I may have to revisit the article I wrote last year for the Encyclopedia of Business Ethics & Society. Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology had the following response regarding the TXTmob subpoena in Wired’s article, and I agree with him:

“In civil cases, the law seems to prohibit the disclosure of stored communications in response to a civil discovery subpoena because the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 prohibits disclosure of stored messages of any kind,” he argues. “The subpoena clearly is not enforceable.”

But he adds that the case is a reminder that federal privacy law is in dire need of an update to reflect the new era of massive stored communications and web services.

“The notion that any litigant can get any information about any person is an 18th century rule that now can now encompass terabytes of information, and I think it also has an impact on service providers who don’t want to become one-stop shops for every litigant in the country,” he says.

A local example

On Monday, Two hundred protesters used email and phone calls to organize their event at Fort Street Mall in support of Aloha Airlines. The US Bankruptcy Court is in 1132 Bishop, above the MSIS classrooms in the Frear Center. My office is a few steps away. This Honolulu Advertiser article has details and a few pictures.

I didn’t see anything about the march at DontFlyGo. Their web site is difficult to navigate, and the domain name is missing an apostrophe on the banner. Based on this Honolulu Advertiser article, there’s little indication that local groups might try to use mobile messaging to boycott go! flights.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer announced his resignation earlier today, after he and his suppliers were found transferring large amounts of cash among their financial accounts. See Reuters and the New York Times for more details.

Reporting systems

In the US, banks are required to file Currency Transaction Reports when customers make large cash transactions. The regulation is supposed to discourage these transactions, while alerting the Federal government to possible criminal activities. As a lawyer who has prosecuted corporate crime, Spitzer knew about the US$10000 reporting threshold that triggers these notices – and he posted more than 150 transactions that fell just shy of that limit.

Spitzer also knew about the Mann Act, because he led a successful effort to increase New York State’s criminal penalties for international and interstate offenses, as described in this Times article. When the governor made his interstate date, he violated Federal law and a state law that he championed. RootsWeb has a brief discussion of the Mann Act, and there’s always Wikipedia.

People still matter

Important parts of these reporting systems are not fully automated. People have to take notice and action for these systems to work well. Read more about this in Larry Dignan’s article at ZDnet (via BoingBoing), and in the Wall Street Journal. The second figure in Dignan’s article is a handy flowchart of the system.

Updated 2000 HT 13 March 2008: A former student of mine passed along the following information, which I used to update the post. Banks file Suspicious Activities Reports (SARs) when they find a pattern of transactions:

FYI, there may have been some bad data in one of your sources. It’s not a 10K threshold for SARs. It’s a 10K Threshold for CTRs which is for any cash transaction. SARs are based on potential exposure due to suspicious transactions. The more common thresholds are 5K if you can name a suspect and 25K if you can’t.