One of the internet’s oddities is WHOIS, the online directory that contains information about the owners of domains. Standing in contrast and opposition to the Net’s prevailing culture of anonymity, WHOIS exposes to all the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of domain owners (unless, through a sketchy workaround, an owner pays a domain registrar to maintain ownership on his behalf). If an owner puts in false information, he can have his domain name registration cancelled.

For years now, WHOIS has been a battlefield between privacy advocates who want to change the system and commercial and law-enforcement interests who want to keep it as is. As Computerworld’s Jaikumar Vijayan explains:

Companies, intellectual property holders and law enforcement authorities have argued in favor of [continued] open access to the WHOIS database on the grounds that it helps them go after phishers, trademark infringers, copyright violators and other crooks. Privacy advocates, on the other hand, have opposed unrestricted WHOIS access on the grounds that it could expose individual domain registrants to spam and unwanted surveillance. They have for some time now wanted the information in the WHOIS database to be shielded from public access.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the directory, has organized a series of committees and meetings in hopes of getting the two sides to hash out a compromise. But no real progress has been made. The most recent attempt, involving a large ICANN working group, ended in another and perhaps final impasse last week, as one of the group’s members, Syracuse University professor Milton Mueller, described in a blog post on August 22:

The ICANN Working Group that was trying to reconcile data protection and privacy principles with the domain name system’s legacy Whois directory, which publishes the name and full contact details of all domain name registrants, was finished today. “Finished off” might be a better term. Despite flirting with the kind of compromises and reforms that might actually reconcile privacy rights with identification needs, in the final weeks of the process trust and agreement among the parties broke down completely.

The working group’s specific charge was to render judgment about a proposal by internet registrars that, as Mueller writes, “would have shielded the registrant’s street address from public view, putting in its place a contact person that consolidated the role of administrative and technical contact in the old system.” Nothing else would have changed beyond the removal from public view of the registrant’s street address. But reaching a consensus on even this small concession to privacy proved impossible, writes Mueller:

It is hard to believe that such a miniscule change could generate three months of contentious work by nearly 60 people, ranging from representatives of each GNSO [Generic Names Supporting Organization] constituency to law enforcement agencies from the US, the Netherlands, and Canada; representatives of the banking and real estate industry; 5 or 6 intellectual property, hoteliers and software producers associations; not to mention a few companies that literally make their living collecting and selling Whois data. But it did.

What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net’s heart – the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved – or not resolved – will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.

What did John Foley, an Information Week editor, do on his summer vacation? He burnished his geek cred by heading off to The Dalles, Oregon, to hike around Google’s mammoth new data center. And he has a stack of snapshots to prove it. [UPDATE: Here’s another set of photos, from when the center was under construction.]

Foley didn’t actually get inside the compound, but two reporters from The Dalles Chronicle did manage to slip inside the chain-link fence last month. After signing a non-disclosure agreement, they were given a tour of the data center by the plant’s manager, Ken Patchett. They report: “Though we saw only some open areas and the interiors of the security building and the cafeteria building, they were quietly comfortable without posh ostentation. Facilities are what you might expect might be provided by a kindly uncle with a soft spot for good food and employee comfort.” They discovered “a pile of Super Soakers just outside the cafeteria” – part of the company’s sophisticated server-cooling system, perhaps?

In an interview with the reporters, Patchett said that Google is learning the importance of “transparency” and is becoming less secretive about its operations. There are limits to the new openness, however:

Patchett addressed an area of puzzlement for some local people: Google’s unwillingness to divulge the number of employees in The Dalles. “How would that give Google’s competitors an advantage?” we asked him. “It’s an extremely competitive industry we’re in,” he said. “The ability to determine how some things are done within the Internet space may also be determined by the number of people it takes to operate a particular facility. So when we talk about how much capacity we have to process the information, that is what’s valuable to our competitors; how fast and how well do we process our information. Some piece of that may able to be derived by the number of people it takes to actually run and support that.”

Patchett goes on to describe the many community-service projects that Google employees are involved in around The Dalles, from wiring an outdoor stage to lending IT support to the fire department. One activity, though, strikes me as slightly troubling: “Google volunteers also ‘weed the shelves’ at the library every couple of weeks.” Hmmm.

In a famous case back in 2000, a French court ordered Yahoo to remove Nazi memorabilia from its auction pages because the sale of such merchandise is prohibited in France. Yahoo officials reacted with outrage, claiming that the French court had no authority over a U.S.-based Internet company like Yahoo. Yahoo’s top French executive, Philippe Guillanton, argued, according to a Reuters report at the time, that “the ruling ran against the international nature of the World Wide Web”:

Guillanton said his company could also seek to bring the matter before a U.S. court. “Yahoo.com is not doing anything unlawful. It is completely complying with the law of the country in which it operates and where its target audience is,” he said. “Yahoo auctions in the U.S. are ruled by the legal, moral and cultural principles of that country.”

Times change, and so do companies. Yesterday, Yahoo argued that a lawsuit brought against it in a U.S. court by Chinese dissidents should be thrown out because the case belongs in Chinese courts. Reports Infoworld:

In a filing Monday, Yahoo told the court that the lawsuit, which seeks to hold Yahoo accountable for the imprisonment and torture of the plaintiffs, should be tossed out [for] various reasons, among which being that the U.S. justice system is the wrong venue for the case. “This is a lawsuit by citizens of China imprisoned for using the internet in China to express political views in violation of China law. It is a political case challenging the laws and actions of the Chinese government. It has no place in the American courts,” the 51-page filing reads.

This time, Yahoo executives are making no mention of “the legal, moral and cultural principles” of the U.S.

If Google has its way, web advertising is about to get a whole lot friendlier – and the definition of spam a whole lot fuzzier.

Recently, the search giant has, as noted by Bill Slawski, filed a series of patent applications that point to a new, more personal way of targeting and delivering advertising. Unlike Google’s highly automated AdWords and AdSense systems, the method relies heavily on manual labor and individual judgment. Rather than being selected by software algorithms, ads would be chosen by people for insertion into their emails, instant messages, and other personal communications. The proposed system puts a crowdsourcing twist on ad targeting. More darkly, it seems intended to put a gloss of respectability, or at least friendliness, on what previously might well have been viewed as spam.

Th system has three essential components. In a patent application titled “User Distributed Search Results,” Google researchers describe the concept of “a universal distributed search system [that] allows users to find and distribute search results (possibly including advertisements) to those with whom they communicate. The search results can be easily distributed by the user via a simple interface that allows the search results to be easily added to the user’s content.” Google has seen that people often put links or other references to related content into emails and other messages they send to friends and acquaintances. The tool described in the patent makes the discovery and inclusion of such content simpler and faster. In essence, it establishes a new way to syndicate Google search results, from friend to friend.

In a second application, titled “Facilitating manual user selection of one or more ads for insertion into a document to be made available to another user or users,” Google researchers describe an associated tool for allowing individuals to insert into their messages ads related to the search results they include. The ads can be either automatically generated, as in the AdSense system, or chosen individually. The tool, as the researchers describe it, “facilitates insertion of manually selected ads into a document that is to be distributed (e.g., transmitted, published, and/or posted) such that the document is to be made available to other users. For example, manually selected ads can be inserted into an email to be sent to another user, a blog to be posted for viewing by other users, a message to be sent to another user, a message board entry to be posted for viewing by other users, a document published and made available to other users, etc. Hence, [user-distributed] ads provide a scaleable advertising platform that achieves at least some of the benefits of manual targeting.”

The patent filing describes a number of ways the system might work, including this one:

Consider, for example, a user that sends an email to members of her book club informing the members of what next month’s book is. Suppose that the user has manually inserted into the email “results” such as an image of the book cover, a UDS search result to a review of the book, and a normal amazon.com search result. When the recipients of this email open it, side-bar, content-relevant ads might also be provided. Such side-bar, content-relevant ads might have been automatically determined using, perhaps among other things (e.g., the textual content of the email message), information derived from the manually inserted “results.” For instance, Amazon might have an ad offering free shipping for purchases made in the next 48 hours.

The final component is a reward system to provide people with incentives to include ads in their personal communications. This component is described in a third patent application titled “Providing rewards for manual user insertion of one or more ads into a document to be made available to another user or users, for distribution of such documents, and/or for user actions on such distributed ads.” Such rewards, according to the filing, “might include one or more of (a) a monetary amount, (b) an enhanced reputation or reputation increase of [the user], and (c) a credit.”

Google’s automated ad delivery system has been enormously successful, generating huge revenues and profits for the company. But the automatic targeting of ads remains imperfect. As the Google researchers note in their filings, “Although advertising systems such as AdWords and AdSense have proven to be very effective tools for advertisers to reach a receptive audience, even automated systems that use sophisticated targeting techniques often can’t match the effectiveness of manual targeting.” The new system that Google has under development would help solve the problem by incorporating the judgments and the relationships of individual people into the selection and distribution of ads. At the same time, it would also mean the injection of commerce, and commercial incentives, into the most intimate of electronic communications.

The New York Times recently got some search-engine-optimization religion, and as a result its articles, including old stories from its vast archives, are now more likely to appear at or near the top of web searches. But the tactic has had an unintended consequence, writes the paper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, in a thought-provoking article today: “Long-buried information about people that is wrong, outdated or incomplete is getting unwelcome new life. People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up.”

Hoyt tells the story of one man, a former New York City official named Allen Kraus, who resigned his position back in 1991 after a run-in with a new boss. The resignation was briefly, and incorrectly, tied to a fraud investigation that was going on at the same time in his office. The Times published stories about the affair, including one with the headline “A Welfare Official Denies He Resigned Because of Inquiry” – and that headline now appears at the top of the results you get if you google Kraus’s name. Kraus is, with good reason, unhappy that his good name is, sixteen years after the fact, again being tarnished.

Many other people now find themselves in similar predicaments, and they are contacting the Times (and, one assumes, other papers and magazines) and asking that the offending stories be removed from the archives. The Times, of course, has routinely refused such requests, not wanting to get into the business of rewriting the historical record. Deleting the articles, one of the paper’s editors told Hoyt, would be “like airbrushing Trotsky out of the Kremlin picture.”

But if the Times is using search-engine-optimization techniques to push articles toward the top of search-engine results, does it have any ethical obligation to ensure that old errors, distortions, or omissions in its reporting don’t blight people’s current reputations? Times editors are discussing the problem, writes Hoyt, and in some cases the paper has added corrections to old stories when proof of an error has been supplied.

The Times’s predicament highlights a broader issue about the web’s tenacious but malleable memory. Hoyt touches on this issue in his article:

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, … thinks newspapers, including The Times, should program their archives to “forget” some information, just as humans do. Through the ages, humans have generally remembered the important stuff and forgotten the trivial, he said. The computer age has turned that upside down. Now, everything lasts forever, whether it is insignificant or important, ancient or recent, complete or overtaken by events. Following Mayer-Schönberger’s logic, The Times could program some items, like news briefs, which generate a surprising number of the complaints, to expire, at least for wide public access, in a relatively short time. Articles of larger significance could be assigned longer lives, or last forever.

With search engine optimization – or SEO, as it’s commonly known – news organizations and other companies are actively manipulating the Web’s memory. They’re programming the Web to “remember” stuff that might otherwise have become obscure by becoming harder to find. So if we are programming the Web to remember, should we also be programming it to forget – not by expunging information, but by encouraging certain information to drift, so to speak, to the back of the Web’s mind?

John Markoff, writing on the New York Times tech blog, points to “an obvious market opportunity” in the portable computing market: a lightweight, thin-client, ultralight laptop that draws its data and applications off the Internet. On a recent trip, the hard drive died in Markoff’s Mac laptop and, desperate to get his work done, he tried running the computer off a CD with a copy of the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Turns out, it worked like a charm:

What I discovered was that – with the caveat of a necessary network connection – life is just fine without a disk. Between the Firefox Web browser, Google’s Gmail and and the search engine company’s Docs Web-based word processor, it was possible to carry on quite nicely without local data during my trip.

I had already stashed my almost 4,000 sources and phone numbers on a handy web site which I had access to, and so I found the only things I was missing were the passwords to online databases and my files of past reporting notes and articles which I occasionally refer to.

Bouncing between hotel rooms to Wi-Fi-enabled lobbies and conference rooms, I was easily able to stay online and file my stories without incident. Afterwards it made me wonder why there aren’t more wireless, Web-connected ultralight portables for business travelers.

Markoff’s may well be right. The time seems ripe for the debut of a simple, cheap, lightweight portable with a browser, a wi-fi card, and nothing else. (OK, maybe a little flash drive, too.) If you really want to jumpstart the adoption of online productivity apps by business folks – and make Microsoft very nervous – create a cool CloudBook for road warriors. With the iPhone, Apple is demonstrating that the Web itself can be a platform for writing and running software. Why not take the next step?

(The first part of Markoff’s post is here. See also my sort-of-related post from earlier today.)

The statistics on job losses in journalism have not been pretty. According to a study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), the newsroom staff of U.S. papers declined by four percent between 2001 and the end of 2004, with a net loss of 1,000 reporters, 1,000 editors, and 300 photographers and artists. Another study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, estimated that between 2000 and 2005 the total number of newsroom professional jobs in American newspapers fell by between 3,500 and 3,800. During 2006, ASNE reported that newsroom professional employment fell by another 600 jobs. Although overall statistics aren’t available yet for 2007, the steady stream of layoff announcements from papers doesn’t bode well.

Looking at media more broadly, the news remains bad. An early 2007 study by Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that media companies announced 17,809 job cuts in 2006, up sharply from the 9,453 cuts announced in 2005. U.S. Department of Labor statistics show that employment in the publishing and broadcasting business as a whole fell by 13 percent in the six years from 2001 through 2006, with nearly 150,000 jobs lost. During this same period, even the number of Internet publishing and broadcasting jobs dropped by a sharp 29 percent, from 51,500 to 36,600.

Mark Glaser, in a new post on his MediaShift blog, titled “Traditional Journalism Job Cuts Countered by Digital Additions,” contends that, despite the reported statistics, things aren’t really so bad. When I saw Glaser’s headline, I assumed that he had some new data that would provide a counterweight to the mountain of depressing stats showing a steady draining of reporters, editors, and photographers from newsrooms across the country. Alas, he doesn’t. All he offers is a string of cheery anecdotes, mainly about job listings, that add up to little.

Glaser tells us that, “when I heard about job cuts at the New York Times Co. last winter, I took a quick look at the company’s online job listings, and saw a healthy supply of digital jobs still up for grabs.” What, exactly, is “a healthy supply,” and precisely what sorts of jobs were they? He doesn’t say. He continues: “And while Tribune Co. has been in the news for all its devastating cuts to the L.A. Times staff, there’s still a selection of 85 interactive job openings at the parent company, including a handful at the Times.” I followed his link to the Tribune “interactive” listings – there are 86 of them at the moment – but what I discovered was hardly cause for excitement. The 86 jobs were split between business-side posts (ad reps and the like) and digital production jobs, bearing titles like Senior Internet Administrator, Web Developer, Junior User Experience Designer Intern, Fall Interactive/Website Intern, Managing Director of Software Engineering and Development, Database Administrator, Internet Software Development Administrator, and Software Developer, Ruby on Rails. Not one of the openings, so far as I could tell, was for a reporter, an editor, or a photographer.

Just today, Tribune Co. announced, according to the AP, that “its revenue fell 5.9 percent last month on a continuing tailspin in classified advertising sales that resulted in an even steeper decline in its newspaper division.” So anyone counting on an upsurge of employment at the company, whether interactive or not, will probably be disappointed.

The third piece of evidence Glaser offers for “digital additions” is this: “Similarly, the MTV cable networks have had far-reaching cuts and reorganizations, yet there are dozens of digital job openings listed online.” I have no doubt that such listings exist, but in isolation they tell us little. Even when an industry goes through a general decline in employment, jobs are still routinely filled – people not only get laid off but they retire, go to other companies, or switch careers, and to continue operating companies have to fill some of the open slots. Unless you look at the broader dynamics of the job market, generally or within individual companies, seeing a few dozen job listings tells you little. Some media outlets, for example, may well be hiring software programmers as they fire reporters, but while that’s good for coders, it’s hardly a boon for journalists.

Glaser’s post continues in the same vein for many paragraphs, with more surveys of job board listings and anecdotal comments from headhunters and others. Some of his anecdotes are intriguing – he shows, for instance, that there are a few hundred openings for journalists at small-town papers – but he provides no hard evidence to counter the statistics that show a substantial decline in the number of professional journalists employed in the country. There seems little doubt that there will be a relative increase in digital media jobs compared to print media jobs in the years ahead, but as the statistics from the Department of Labor and other organizations show, the general direction in journalism employment, whether online or off, is downward – and strongly so. It takes more than a handful of exceptions to counter a general trend.