Next week, Encyclopaedia Britannica will hold on online forum about the future of newspapers and news. Called “Are Newspapers Doomed? (Do We Care?),” the forum will open on Monday, at the Britannica’s blog, with an excerpt from my book The Big Switch in which I look at how the economics of journalism change when news moves from paper to the web. Other participants will include reporters Caryle Murphy and Charles M. Madigan, journalism professor Jay Rosen, and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody.

Of particular note, Britannica is soliciting the participation of student journalists. If you write for a college paper and would like to be part of the discussion, shoot an email to the Britannica at this address: blogs [at] eb.com. You can find a few more details here.

Grab a ratty lawnchair and put a case of Busch cans in the cooler because the data center has now officially become the trailer park.

Poindexter, meet Jethro.

Both Sun and Rackable introduced supercomputers-in-shipping-containers some time ago, but it’s a move by Microsoft that pushes the trend into the mainstream. In its mammoth new data center in Chicago, reports Rich Miller, “Microsoft will forego a traditional raised-floor environment … and will instead fill one floor of the huge facility with up to 220 shipping containers packed with servers.” The “bold move,” says Miller, “is an affirmation of the potential for containers to address the most pressing power, cooling and capacity utilization challenges facing data center operators.” In designing the Chicago facility, Microsoft consulted with parking lot operators to ensure that semitrucks would be able to drive into the center and drop off the containers.

Microsoft’s Michael Manos made the announcement in a speech today in Las Vegas. That seems like the perfect choice of venue. Despite all the glitz, Vegas is still a trailer-park town at heart.

UPDATE: There’s more on the data center philosophy of the ‘Soft Boys in this interview with Manos and one of his colleagues. On the attraction of containers: “One of the things we like about them is we can take a bunch of servers and look at the output of that box and look at the power it draws. At the end of the day, we can determine, ‘What is the IT productivity of that unit? How many search queries were executed per box? How many emails sent or stored?’ You can get into some really interesting metrics. A lot of people say you can’t look at the productivity of a data center, but if you compartmentalize it – not as small as the server level, but at some chunk in between – you can measure productivity.”

Mr. Slee wonders what exactly Mr. Google, his exceedingly resourceful butler, is up to.

A gem.

It comes late in Mike Arrington’s loutish attack on Billy Bragg’s modest suggestion that we need to start thinking seriously about creating a system to compensate musicians and other artists for the commercial use of their works online. Here’s what Arrington writes:

“Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist.”

I had to read that a few times to convince myself that he was serious. Here it is again:

“Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist.”

As a printed poem, one assumes, is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of a poet. As a sculpture is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of a sculptor. As a film is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of a director.

In the fallen world of the social network, “awareness” is the highest, most noble accomplishment that anyone could possibly aspire to. Because, you see, “awareness” is a monetizable commodity.

The fact that as you read the web the web reads you has been obvious since Mark Zuckerberg was in short pants. The ability of cookies, algorithms and other software to discern, at light speed, your identity, desires, and intentions lies at the heart of the web’s attractiveness as a commercial medium, and pushing that ability forward is critical to the competitiveness of web firms, particularly those serving up search results and ads.

A patent issued to Google this week – and noted by Slashdot – sheds light on one area where the search giant is hoping to enhance its ability to “read the user.” The patent covers a set of techniques for, as the authors cumbersomely put it, “rendering advertisements with documents having one or more topics using user topic interest.” Google recognizes that web pages or other online documents often have many sections and include many topics. The resulting ambiguity about what a viewer is looking at or is interested in complicates the placement of relevant ads on the page. An ad may be tied to a section or topic that is of little interest to the viewer and thus fails to capture his attention.

What Google has patented is a way to decipher which page regions and topics the viewer is interested in based on the viewer’s behavior after he’s arrived at the page. (Typically, ads are served based on the user’s behavior before he arrives at a page.) The patent’s scope, in defining the elements of behavior, is broad, even open-ended: “Examples of user behavior include (a) cursor positioning, (b) cursor dwell time, (c) document item (e.g., link, control button, etc.) selection, (d) user eye direction relative to the document, (e) user facial expressions, (f) user expressions, and/or (g) express user input (e.g., increasing the volume of an audio segment), etc.” Any of these actions could be used to trigger the placement of an ad or the replacement of one ad with another, as illustrated in the following figure from the patent.

This is yet another example of a patent that appears to cover a very broad range of analytical techniques. More interesting, though, is how it points to an expansion in the ways web companies will be able to, in effect, read our minds. Should the Google methods be implemented – and I don’t doubt they will, in some form – our computers won’t just feed back to companies information about what we click on or where we move our cursors but also, thanks to the ubiquitous webcam, information about our “facial expressions” as we peruse a page. We all have our tell-tales, the tics that give us away, and once you digitize them and run them through an algorithm, they’re pure gold.

Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch are the latest Web 2.0 entrepreneurs to cash in on user-generated content. A little over a week ago, the Birches sold Bebo, the third largest social network, to AOL for $850 million, about $600 million of which will reportedly go into the pockets of their jeans. As for the millions of members who have happily served as sharecroppers on the Birches’ plantation, they’ll get the satisfaction of knowing that all the labor they donated to their “community” did indeed create something of tangible value. No doubt they’re thrilled that the little Bebo plantation, which they’ve tended so lovingly, is now part of the giant AOL plantation, itself part of the Time-Warner conglomerate.

For the many musicians who played a central role in cementing Bebo’s popularity – by freely sharing their music through the site in the usually vain hope of helping their own careers – the Birches’ huge payoff is probably stirring some bittersweet emotions. In an op-ed in today’s New York Times, folk-punk agitator Billy Bragg recalls meeting with Michael Birch a couple of years ago, soon after Bragg had criticized MySpace for seizing rights over the songs uploaded to its pages. Birch was looking for Bragg’s advice, and, one assumes, imprimatur, as he worked to turn the upstart Bebo into “an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work.”

Birch, to his credit, did not claim ownership rights to the music and other creative work uploaded to his site. But neither did he offer any royalties or other financial benefits to the musicians whose work, as Bragg writes, played such an important role in “draw[ing] members — and advertising — to his business.” Under Bebo’s terms of service, musicians grant to Bebo a license to their work that is “fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that Bebo is not required to pay you for the use on the Bebo Service of the Materials that you post), sub licensable (so that Bebo is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet and WAP content delivery networks to provide the Bebo Service), and worldwide (because the Internet and the Bebo Service are global in reach).”

Bragg recalls that, in his discussions with Birch, royalties were “the elephant in the room” that went largely unmentioned. The owners of the Web 2.0 plantations like to pretend that they are simply the impresarios of “communities” and that the power over the sites resides with the “members.” It’s a wonderfully disingenuous idea. Bragg writes:

Social-networking sites like Bebo argue that they have no money to distribute – their value is their membership. Well, last week Michael Birch realized the value of his membership. I’m sure he’ll be rewarding those technicians and accountants who helped him achieve this success. Perhaps he should also consider the contribution of his artists. The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

When challenged in this way, the plantation owners counter that they are doing musicians a favor by providing them with a place to promote their work. But this, too, as Bragg notes, is disingenuous: “Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?”

The fact is, it should. And arguments to the contrary are ultimately specious and self-serving. Exploitation is exploitation, no matter how lovingly it’s wrapped in neo-hippie technobabble about virtual communities, social production, and the gift economy.

Digital sharecroppers of the world, unite!

In the new issue of the journal Democracy, Clinton-era FCC chief Reed Hundt offers a thoughtful review of my book The Big Switch. As you’d expect, Hundt concentrates on the political and regulatory implications of the growth of computing utilities, an important subject that I address only glancingly in the book, and he lays out the case that government should play an aggressive role in shaping the structure of the utility computing industry as it grows in scope and power.

The big question for Hundt is whether the government will favor the large central providers, as, he argues, is the current administration’s bias, or whether it will favor the little guys – the private citizens and the small entrepreneurial firms that, he implies, were championed by Clintonians like himself. Reflecting on the analogy I draw between the development of the electric grid a hundred years ago and the development of today’s computing grid, he asks:

As history repeats itself, doesn’t it follow that government will either own or tightly regulate the data centers? That is what happened with electric utilities … Most assuredly, China will either own or regulate, or both, all its control points; so too, Russia; probably, India; very likely, Europe; and eventually even libertarian America will place some checks on the power of data center owners, just as it did to electricity a hundred years ago. Indeed, as those owners increasingly ask the government for favors, which they cannot resist doing, they are wrapping themselves in the elastic and unbreakable spider’s web of government. The real question is not whether regulation will occur – it will–but whether the American people, as citizens or consumers, will have something to say about these congeries of information.

Hundt suggests that many of my forecasts about the possible social costs of the centralization of control over computing are overly “gloomy,” not so much because he believes that the technology will progress differently than I describe but because he foresees the government stepping in to counter the ill effects of the technological changes. The government will have little choice but to act, he argues, should the computing grid push more wealth into the hands of the few or polarize the electorate or expand the theater of terrorism or infringe further on personal privacy or begin to blur the line between machine intelligence and human intelligence.

I don’t disagree that government policymakers will be forced to throw off their laissez-faire attitude toward the Internet as it turns into our universal medium and universal computer. Indeed, toward the end of the book I make this same point:

As the importance of the Internet as a shared global infrastructure grows, decisions about its governance as well as its structure and protocols will take on greater weight. The new computing grid may span the world, but as the dominant medium for commerce, communication, and even culture it has profound national and regional implications. Very different conceptions of how the grid should operate are emerging, reflecting the economic, political, and social interests of different countries and regions. Soon, governments will be forced to start picking sides.

I find less comfort in that fact, though, than Hundt seems to. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to be slow and clumsy in dealing with technological revolutions, and at least in the short to medium term they can make decisions that amplify rather than counter the ill effects. And, even in the long run, I don’t believe that governments have as much power to control the flow of technological and economic change, and the resulting social consequences, as Hundt does.

But whatever our disagreements, Hundt ends up in pretty much the same place I do when he closes his review by emphasizing the great challenges that lie ahead:

Carr has indirectly and perhaps unintentionally written a list of reasons why the Internet’s next phase of evolution will call for much more public debate than occurred in the salad days of dial-up access, with that era’s insouciant exploration of whatever might happen. That public debate is long overdue … If Carr is even half-right about the twists and turns of the Internet’s odyssey, the next president has – in addition to Iraq, Pakistan, immigration, and most importantly climate change – a roster of very tough and important technology questions to ask and answer.

We’re in the early stages of a grand battle for control of the computing grid. Politicians will not be able to remain on the sidelines for much longer.

UPDATE: If you’re looking for an indicator of the debates that lie ahead, check out Louise Story’s article, in today’s New York Times, about an effort in the New York legislature to “make it a crime – punishable by a fine to be determined – for certain Web companies to use personal information about consumers for advertising without their consent.”