How misunderstood is direct messaging?

With the British coalition Energy Secretary pulling a non-sexual* Anthony Weiner and tweeting something he wanted to direct message, this question is relevant. It is extremely ironic that the Telegraph itself misunderstands how Twitter direct messaging (in a paragraph that's sure to be pulled):

It was not clear who the intended recipient was, although he would have only been able to send a Direct Message to one of the 87 people he follows, who include about 30 national journalists and several fellow MPs. 

No, that's not the way it works. You can only send direct messages to people who follow you. Whether you follow them is irrelevant. I've received DMs from people who never followed me, but I of course followed them. It makes sense when you look at following as a granting of trust, and you can only send people DMs if they trust you.

*He wanted to rubbish some unknown person but to do it from the shadows. This proves once again that Chris Huhne is a backbiting git.

Update: Sure enough, the paragraph has been corrected. It now reads:

It was not clear who the intended recipient was: he would have been able to send a Direct Message to any of his 7,616 followers.

The dark side of Wikileaks' anarchist shotgun approach to leaking

The Belarussian government is using the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks to go after dissidents. I wonder how many will be caught in the Wikileaks cyber-blast radius when all is said and done.

The paywall seems to be working for the New York Times

The article-writer's snarky attitude aside, this is an interesting development. I wasn't expecting this to be positive for them any more than anyone else, at least not until I saw how porous the paywall really was. That, I think, is the key to its success: most people will never see the paywall since they barely ever read the Times except for Twitter, Facebook, and blog links, which don't trigger the paywall. The "digerati" themselves are savvy enough to set nytimes.com cookies to be session-only so their article quota resets every time they restart their web browser. I strongly suspect if they locked down the paywall and made it water-tight things would be different.

It is worth noting, though, that the biggest benefit of the paywall is to encourage more print subscriptions. One reason is that the print version comes with digital access. I guess that's okay, but it does feel like promoting obsolete technology because they haven't figured out how to make as much money on the new technology. I don't think it really is, but it feels that way.

The take-home for this is that the New York Times has hit on a winning formula for general interest newspaper paywalls. Let's hope they don't change it.

Does this count as biased headline-writing or a pig-in-a-poke?

Daily Telegraph headline:

Hay Festival 2011: ex-CIA man claims Barack Obama 'doesn't have a clue'

The real story: it's Michael Scheuer restating that no Western leaders have a clue and that we could largely end the terrorist threat by dumping Israel and the House of Saud and pulling out of Afghanistan. Naturally I thought reading the headline that I'd get some right-wing attack on Obama for not torturing enough prisoners or something. Instead I got a left-wing attack on the United States and Britain.

So, is this bias on the part of the headline writer trying to spin this into an anti-Obama story? Or is it the headline writer trying to trick right-wing readers into exposing themselves to a point of view they'd usually roundly ignore?

The Daily Telegraph is a conservative paper, but it is a British conservative paper. I guess anti-Obama Tories might be anti-militaristic too. It was Labour that was gungho for Iraq, after all.

The Secret Service has a Twitter account?

Wow. I had no idea. Cutting him off from the official account seems appropriate. I do hope that the Right doesn't press this issue and try to get the poor guy fired, though. That would be ridiculous.

Ah, the joys of instant news

I thought this headline was peculiar:



 

This sort of thing used to happen a lot in the print world too, though. It still does from time to time, of course. Fortunately, now it can be fixed instantly. When I clicked through, the headline was normal.

The New York Times doesn't allow comments on letters

I find that strange. Why not allow people to respond to other reader's responses to Times articles. Considering that comments are hidden from readers by default when they are allowed, this seems only reasonable and in no way disruptive.

This was prompted by this letter from a Catholic priest criticizing Gail Collins' recent column on Planned Parenthood funding. The letter itself is representative of how people of his perspective view the matter, but his criticism of Collins' is unjust. I actually think that both the column and the letter are right, to a certain degree. Undoubtedly, the first and foremost reason for the crusade to defund Planned Parenthood is because the anti-abortion activists view it as morally equivalent to the Third Reich (seriously, Godwin's Law is fulfilled every five minutes, or less, in that world). Giving money to Hitler is naturally unacceptable whatever Hitler wants to do with it.

Second is the dubious claim the writer mentions about how giving Planned Parenthood money for contraceptives, etc., increases subsidy for abortion (which assumes that the federal money will not be replaced with increased donations and that PP or donors would subsidize abortion less rather than let contraception and other things be subsidizes less, which contradicts their own demonization of the organization). Ironically, this contradicts the way the good Monsignor's own Church's organizations get money from the government without violating the establishment clause.Third, though, is the Catholic prohibition on contraception and the Evangelical opposition to anything that makes what they deem to be sexual immorality easier.

That's for the activists. For establishment Republican politicians, they pick fights on things like this to keep pro-lifers on the reservation after more than 30 years of doing uncommonly close to nothing on the issue (including thirty-three years of having seven or more Republican justices on the Supreme Court). Even if they didn't get even the Planned Parenthood funding cut, they can at least use the Democrat's fighting to defend it as a means of renewed demonization of them on this issue.

How do you know a mainstream media article is on Drudge?

When all, or nearly all, of the comments attached to said article are contentless right-wing boilerplate. That just doesn't happen normally.

And yes, Biden was asleep.

Apropos of nothing...

ABCNews is a very user-unfriendly site in terms of getting an entire article in one lump-sum. Even the print feature produces a quasi-framed window that is nasty to try to search through and the print-out has two columns.

I just tested out the new New York Times paywall

You can reset your count by clearing out the nytimes.com cookies. Really. You can clear those cookies in 15-20 seconds tops in Firefox. They supposedly spent millions to erect this thing? I'd heard that was the case, but couldn't believe it. Good grief.

Still, I'm not sure how they'd do it otherwise. Keeping track of how many articles you've viewed serverside would probably have to involve going by IP address, and they'd end up getting tons and tons of false positives that way (especially in office buildings and other institutions where they'd be most likely to get paying customers; they aren't going to piss those people off). De facto nagware might be the best they could come up with.

Update: If you set up a cookie exception for nytimes.com that only allows cookies for the current session, then the 20 articles will reset automatically with each restart of your browser. That way, most people will really never see the paywall, unless they change it of course.

Paywall Whack-a-Mole

Now this is a surprise: lots of folks are trying many different ways to defeat the paywall. The New York Times is just going to have to accept that. Shutting down Twitter accounts for dubious trademark violations won't solve the problem. As long as they allow unlimited Twitter linkthroughs, they will have people providing firehoses one way or another. Tweeting all their stuff themselves only makes it ludicrously easy. Heck, just import this OPML file into Google Reader and you're set. At least until they either stop Tweeting or revise their social media linking policy.

The New York Times paywall is porous enough...

The New York Times paywall is porous enough that with only a little bit of effort you'll still be able to get whatever you want for free. It's still a pain, though. From the FAQ:

12. Can I still access NYTimes.com articles through Facebook, Twitter, search engines or my blog?

Yes. We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 20 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you've already read your 20 free articles.

When you visit NYTimes.com by clicking links in search results, you'll have a daily limit of 5 free articles. This limit applies to the majority of search engines.

This means that there are search engines that will work for unlimited click-throughs or you can just search Twitter for the content you want. Now if only someone could whip up a Firefox extension to do all that automatically...

Update: Now we finally see how @FreeNYT works: the owner merely created a Twitter List aggregating the various official NYT feeds into the FreeNYT Firehose. Unless they shut down those Twitter accounts, I don't see how they block it since it is using their own tweets.

Howard Kurtz on the NYT Paywall

Overall a pretty good piece, but I don't get his repeated emphasis on the affluence of the New York Times subscriber base and how that could make the paywall work. Aren't the affluent New York Times readers already likely to be print subscribers? That would mean that they won't be affected by the paywall at all.

Details of New York Times paywall announced

$15 per month. Ugh. There's no way in hell I'm going to subscribe, yet I'm sure I'll bump into the 20 article a month limit. I expect them to lose a lot of traffic, and ad revenue, from this move.

If they want to do this right, they need to something more along the lines of 60 or 90 articles a month free. That way all the casual readers who might click on a couple articles every day in their RSS feed would be okay, but people who really read the paper would have to pay.

They will, like the Wall Street Journal, allow Google News clicks through to the article in question. They are capping it at five a day, though. Interestingly, they are also letting Facebook and Twitter links through and don't seem to be capping those. Someone has already created the @FreeNYT Twitter account which promises to tweet everything on the Times website. How much you want to bet they figure out a way to block those and only those Twitter links.

A thought just occurred to me: how are they going to let Twitter links pass through when virtually all Twitter links go through an intermediary URL shortening service? Would all such services work, or would only nyti.ms (and presumably other bit.ly links) work?