Silicon Valley Watcher - conversations and observations at the intersection of technology and media

A response from Cox, and lots of great commentary from SVW readers on the issue of net neutrality and the blocking of Craigslist.org by Cox Interactive. A security suite offered by Cox, and developed for Cox by Authentium, a security software company is the culprit.

Craigslist says it has spent months trying to resolve the issue. It's the type of issue that might become more common if there are no network neutrality laws.

Here are a selection of comments in chronological order :

Sixster writes:

I live in Santa Barbara, CA. My ISP is Cox. I just tried to access craigslist.org, it did not go through. I tried again with santabarbara.craigslist.org and it went right through. I tried again with plain craigslist.org and it went through fine. Meh...

originalgeek writes:

Lyle, it doesn't matter which end of the pipe the ISP employs measures to quash traffic. My money says Authentium does this because they're getting a little payola backscratch from Cox. Follow the money.

Todd Defren over at Shift Communications writes:

Dennis Howlett writes in response to "The last stand of the disrupteed industries will be on The Hill"

Tom: Ben Hammersley gave a very good talk about the threats to free speech at Les Blogs 2.0 - he talked extensively about the threats of censorship in its many forms. This looks like yet another. Note also that Wikipedia has caved into making restrictions.

There will be cases where restrictions should apply for the common good. Comment monitoring is one such. I use it to ensure there's no profanity, obscenity or other mindless rubbish. To me, that's for the common good and for the benefit of all my readers who prefer a more considered tone. And as site owner, I'm perfectly free to do that, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. For me, the issue is about reaching your audience at the level it requires in ALL respects.

But when there is equally mindless legislation - of the kind in France where email could technically be illegal as of tomorrow - then you really do have a messed up world.

Big media will try and muscle this as far as it can but can it truly succeed while adsense rules? Especially if Microsoft weighs in with significant monetary incentives for advertising. Imagine that - Google and Microsoft sharing a team of lawyers? Can you really see legislators wanting to step into that space? I can't. Anywhere on the planet.

[Occasionally I will take an interesting comment posted by our readers and publish it separately. I may sometimes cut shorter such pieces, and correct obvious spelling errors. But I won't mess with the style, tone, pattern of our readers' writing--that's the good stuff! The only non-original text in the following post is in [brackets] and that is my comments or subheads, to make the page easier to read, hopefully :-) - Tom Foremski]

[Orignal story: Real men have Fabs]

By Mark Wendman
Real Men have Fabs is a bit trite.
This is coming from a 22yr veteran process engineer.

The Real Issue - is how to best make money from microdevices and to have your company prosper and grow.

It is not a question of $B fabs, versus nothing, it is a question of given your assets (human, capital and plant) how do you maximize profits. Oftentimes it is too easy to give up and take the easy way out.

Given any kind of business model you can make money if you bother to sweat the details, understand the markets and sell well and profitably.

[Linear Technology gets it]

One excellent fab model with no $B fab vain ego, is the superbly run Linear Technology. They sweat the details and there are NO $B capital expenditures in sight.

I once ran into an IT Support engineer from LT and he was alternately meekly bemoaning the old computers running the business and taking pride in the fact they were old machines (DEC Alphas and older PCs) but that LT's profits ran like clockwork.

[Real men have battleships]

The main unspoken weakness of Fabless models is that there is mostly a huge over reliance on PEACE between CHINA and TAIWAN, that is in fact pretty darn shaky at present. That is the unspoken risk hardly ever faced with a degree of reality by any articles .

Fabless IC yields are significantly harder to improve, because the interface between the Fabless engineers and the Foundry has natural Boundaries of significance not to be trifled with. Only weak management or engineers expect the impossible and misplan with abandon.

This makes for a substantive limiter in rate of yield improvement (process learning for device specific issues); but there are also other factors to consider in the Fabless business model.

[How to cushion low yields]

. . .it's like Doc Searls snowball effect

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

My recent piece about companies such as Technorati collecting data on bloggers and their conversations and selling that to marketing and PR organisations created quite a stir.

I am not against such practices, BTW, I report on the business of Silicon Valley, and much of that business is media technology business these days, Google, Yahoo, etc. And I'm interested in the business models of the second generation media companies and their ecology--which includes companies such as Technorati. The development of successful business models by Technorati and others, will define the look and feel of our future society.

And the selling of the blogosphere, without significant kickbacks in terms of services or value, will lead to the Internet becoming much more private.

We will have an era of the walled garden, the fort, the trusted private networks, the gated communities. There will always be a public face, but the rest of the 90 per cent of people's time online and in real interactions will not be public. imho.

Fractured and separated communities coexisting on servers but not physically, or on culture/ideas/opinion--is something I think about as a possible future scenario. Our current technologies can easily support the creation of millions of private and impenetrable online communities.

It would be good to have a Technorati type service to help a fractured society learn things about itself as a whole.

Here are some reader reactions,(thanks to all, especially Sam Whitmore of the excellent Media Survey.)

From Doc Searls weblog [Doc is on the board of Technorati--he is a master of the art of blogging. I had the fortune to share a panel with Doc earlier this year--and felt like I had robbed the guy, because I walked away far richer from the experience. I learnt a tremendous amount from Doc that day and am still learning.)

The Doc Searls Weblog:

It's interesting to see the ripple effect of The selling of the Blogosphere—Technorati's big push into monetizing its treasure trove of data collected about millions of blogs, by Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher.

read more here...
http://doc.weblogs.com/2005/07/12#departmentOfConnections

Also, hear from the moderator of the panel and Ron from Cisco writes...so click on through...it's all good!

Dear Readers, the comments section of this blog is temporarily out of service . In the meantime, I'm manually posting some of the comments that readers have sent. Please feel free to do the same. Tom @ SiliconValleyWatcher.com, (omitting spaces) will reach me. Thank you. Comments might be edited for length and interest ;-)

[I met Wade recently, we were both on a panel at a The News Market event for Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Wayne was responding to this recent post.]

Tom, nice post. I enjoyed being on the panel with you. You're absolutely right that a "forced" blog is painful to read. One way organizations can avoid this is to give trusted writers the freedom to blog about whatever they want, whenever they want, without a lot of over-the-shoulder monitoring. At Technology Review, I've had the good fortune, under editor in chief Jason Pontin, of being able to blog as inspiration strikes. In fact I have two work blogs -- one on the TR site(http://wade.trblogs.com), and a "satellite" blog off the site that relates specifically to my August cover story about social computing (http://www.continuousblog.net). I try to emphasize quality over quantity, adding a substantive post perhaps once a week on each blog.

Thanks for your comment Wade. I agree with your point about emphasizing quality over quantity. There is way too much quantity in the world! Less quantity is a good thing.

It's a wonderful paradox, that in the online world where there is tons of space—brevity is encouraged by the medium. Yet in the print world, where there is limited space, journalists are often asked to stretch stories to beyond their useful value just to fill the space between ads.

The following is an email from a long-time Silicon Valley communications professional, who prefers not to be named. It is in response to our recent post on changes in top marcomms positions at leading Silicon Valley companies.

Hi Tom,

Hope all's well. Read your blog this morning and couldn't resist offering my two cents on the senior marcomms piece. In my 20 years toiling away in marketing and corporate communications roles, I've seen time and again that whenever an organization is undergoing significant change and faces more than the usual set of business challenges, the tendency is to park many of the problems at the feet of the senior communications person, who is given the job of "fixing up" the company's image.