Business: March 2005 Archive Page

In 1982, testifying in front of Congress before the Supreme Court had ruled, MPAA President Jack Valenti said, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." --John Borland --FAQ: Betamax--tech's favorite ruling (ZD Net)

A good primer on how the US Supreme Court's 1984 ruling in favor of VCRs factors into this week's P2P hearings.

About 36 million Americans—or 27% of internet users—say they download either music or video files and about half of them have found ways outside of traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services to swap their files, according to the most recent survey of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

[...]

Current file downloaders are now more likely to say they use online music services like iTunes than they are to report using p2p services. The percentage of music downloaders who have tried paid services has grown from 24% in 2004 to 43% in our most recent survey. However, respondents may now be less likely to report peer-to-peer usage due to the stigma associated with the networks. --Music and Video Downloading Moves Beyond P2P (Pew Interent & American Life Project)

Don was sitting at a booth toward the back and waved as he saw me come in. The half-empty glass in front of him indicated that he'd gotten a head start on happy hour. It also portended the tone of our conversation.

"You hear that Arthur Miller just died?" he asked as I slid into the booth.

"I did. What about it?"

"Well, he ain't really dead. His spirit is alive and well and thriving in me. That's because I'm a living, breathing, sickening manifestation of Willy Loman. You, my friend, are looking at a pathetic loser."

I didn't take that as a sign of a happy man. --Mark J. Drozdowski --Death of a Fund Raiser (Chronicle)

Since blogs became the next big thing, an increasing number of companies have come to see them as the next great public relations vehicle -- a way for executives to demonstrate their casual, interactive side.

But, of course, the executives do nothing of the sort. Their attempts at hip, guerrilla-style blogging are often pained -- and painful. --Amy Joyce --More pr than no-holds-barred on bosses' corporate blogs (Detroit News)

I gave a talk on exactly this theme to a group of local university PR professionals, earlier this month.

Blogging clearly isn't going to help that proportion of people who aren't really up to their job, or who are prone to inarticulate flaming, or both. But then, those people tend to have career problems anyhow. Put it another way: not blogging won't protect you from career-limiting moves, and if blogging provokes one, well, you were probably going to do it anyhow.

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.

2. You have to get noticed to get hired.

3. It really impresses people when you say ?Oh, I?ve written about that, just google for XXX and I'm on the top page? or ?Oh, just google my name.?

4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.

5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.

6. Knowing more also means you?re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.

7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.

8. If you?re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.

9. If you?re in marketing, you?ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.

10. It'sa lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

    --Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career (Ongoing)

To blend in, I sat at the $10 craps table and started to lose the magazine'smoney with dispatch. I mean, I had to sit at a table so a Borgata Babe would give me a drink and I could check her out?er, I mean, interview her about the ethical implications of the new weight policy. It'samazing how quickly a reporter'sexpense budget disappears when he'scovering a vital story about the workplace rules for America'scocktail waitresses (cha-ching!) in a casino (cha-ching, cha-ching!) --Gersh Kuntzman --Babes Up in Arms (MSNBC/Newsweek)

Shouldn't there be a period outside that last closing parenthesis?

The real reason I blogged this, besides the good writing, was on page two of the article:

Employers can hire or fire whomever they want to hire or fire. If I run a company and don’t want an office filled with thin people or people who like papaya, I don’t have to hire such distasteful folk. In fact, I don’t even have to hire blacks, women, Catholics, senior citizens, Native Americans or any member of the established “protected classes” – so long as my reason for not hiring them is not because they are black, female, Catholic, old or Native American.

Of course, this is a column, not a legal document or a peer-reviewed scholarly article. But Kuntzman's realization underscores the point I made about weblogs and the workplace: weblogs are just the latest way that people can get themselves in trouble.

Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst at the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said employees often "don't realize the First Amendment doesn't protect their job."

The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory or in retaliation for whistle-blowing or union organizing, labor experts say.

A few companies actually do encourage personal, unofficial blogs and have policies defining do's and don'ts for employees who post online. They recognize that there can be value in engaging customers through thoughtful blogs.

"There's always a risk, but you always have that risk anytime you put an employee on the phone," Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said. --Anick Jesdanun --Firms Taking Action Against Worker Blogs (AP/My Way)

The telephone quotation puts the issue into the proper context, but that headline is a bit alarmist. Bosses and other authorities can clamp down on disrespect without silencing dissent.

At SHU, most students treat their academic weblogs as just another kind of homework, but others blog far beyond what the syllabus requires, even when classes are not in session. They do so for the same widely varying reasons that people blog everywhere else.

It's Spring Break now, and Lou asks for encouragement as he hunkers down to write a romance, Moira marvels that she's spending her break chortling through a required book on punctuation and grammar, Amanda and Karissa take the time to warn their readers that they'll be away from a computer during most of the break. I can also tell from the server logs when a particular URL is being passed around via e-mail and IM.

For some students, the blogs mean something more than just the place where Jerz wants them to post homework. After the server that hosts our blogs was attacked a few weeks ago, and I had to take the blogs down for a while, student Mike Rubio wrote in a column in the school paper, "these recent attacks have caused most of us (or at least the few of us who adore the art of blogging) to realize how much we miss them now that they are gone. | I am hoping that Jerz will nominate a head of Blog-land Security to oversee the protection of our Moveable Type-fueled freedom." In fact, some students get so attached to their SHU blogs that they resent blogging homework, and struggle to find an aesthetically pleasing way to integrate their academic voice with their personal one. (I've posted about the forced blogging paradigm before.)

There are already laws about copyright infringement, libel, defamation of character, and so forth. There's nothing that's illegal to do in blogs but legal in other media, or vice versa. A student who disrupts a class meeting or says something hateful in the cafeteria has committed an act that exists at one point in time. An employee who posts offensive signs around campus has put them in one particular place, from which they can be removed should they be deemed inappropriate. In such cases, the harm is easily confined. But a blog that contains inappropriate content continues to communicate it to each new web visitor.

"We never envisioned that we were going to be playing video game music," conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya said, drawing appreciative laughter from audience members, many of them in their teens and 20s and decked out in everything from tuxes and gowns to jeans and T-shirts.

It was a scene many orchestras would envy at a time when classical groups continue to struggle financially, and when some are branching out to try new formats as a means for survival. --Martha Irvine --Video game concerts draw packed crowds (AP|MSNBC)