An e-mail tax to publish, or "You've got [paid] mail!"

America Online, gateway and de-facto publisher for so many people who go online, will now be taking money to pass its members their mail. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is up in arms over the AOL plan to let bulk mailers pay to have their messages delivered straight to a preferred in-box of an AOL customer.

Once a pay-to-speak system like this gets going, it will be increasingly difficult for people who don't pay to get their mail through. The system has no way to distinguish between ordinary mail and bulk mail, spam and non-spam, personal and commercial mail. It just gives preference to people who pay.

Non-profits like The Association for Cancer Online Resources are steamed about this, too, because they publish their messages by way of e-mail. Heck, a lot of us do, trying to build a practice or get notice for our publications. The belief now is that un-paid e-mails to AOL customers are going to get rough treatment, like a streetwalker pretending that what you're about to embark on is "a date." Unpaid messages are mail, alright. Just not the kind you'd take home to meet mom.

MoveOn.org is mounting an e-mail campaign (some irony there) to make AOL change its mind. It's referencing reports in The New York Times (which in another bit of irony, was among the publishers testing the GoodMail service that will make the AOL scheme possible) and from L-Soft, which makes the Listserv software that drives so many public interest newsgroups.

Good Morning's bright humor

One of my favorite moments each morning is scanning the headlines from Good Morning Silicon Valley. John Paczkowski pens this wicked, arch look at the top companies' tech news each workday, with plenty of humor embedded. Much of it appears in the headlines for each of the four or five items in the e-mail/blog. For example, a story about Google's ploy to enter the search engine derby in China — by way of censoring searches on things like "democracy" — got this headline: It's like watching little Anakin grow up to be Darth Vader. So much for not being evil, Google.

There's so much hubris, posturing and vapor-work going on in the computer biz. GMSV, run by The San Jose Mercury News (known as the Merc out in the Valley), is a great deflator. You can browse the the high tech lampooning at the GMSV blog, along with real reporting, as well as sign up to get a reminder e-mail in your box each workday. Even if you subscribe to a boatload of e-mail newsletters like I do, this will be the funniest one you read about compters.

One wonderful bonus of each GMSV e-mail: A link to something offsite, but just as funny. For example, Google's grab at the Chinese market, as well as the rolling over by Yahoo and others, is the subject of this Flash cartoon — an ad for iRepress.

When myspace becomes his space

News from the world of the Web, where more than 50 million people belong to social community myspace.com: Be prepared to see even more of your online neighbors. Perhaps one of them will have a staple through her navel.

Playboy has announced that it is searching for females who are myspace.com denizens to appear in an upcoming "Women of myspace" pictorial. Playboy has done this thing often enough before that its editor can compare response in this search to prior "Women of" pictorials. A story in MediaPost tells about the latest success at finding models, presumably of legal age.

"This ranks up there with the best searches we've done," said Editor John Thomas. "We'll probably shoot more than we usually do. We've been overwhelmed with the number and quality of submissions that we've gotten." He estimated that the site could have up to 30 different young women in the feature.

Face it, people want to be noticed and get connected. That's a primary attraction for myspace, although MediaPost notes a story about a 14 year old in New Jersey who was allegedly murdered by a man in his 20s she'd met through myspace.com.

That dangerous outcome would probably make myspace no different, really, than McDonalds, the Big 12 Conference, Baylor University — all places where murder has taken place. Oh, and all subjects of previous Playboy "Women of" pictorials.

It's not that much of a challenge to find posing in myspace, anyway.

With 50 million members, though, some of it is bound to be unclothed. What's attracting Playboy is the same thing luring any other media baron: A link to the glorious 14-34 demographic, the heartland of places like myspace.

Of course, these pictures won't be of any hard-bodied men on myspace. This has the writers on Feministing not exactly outraged, but wondering if they could be co-opted by Playboy in the future on an unauthorized pictorial. Myspace, while taking Playboy ads, isn't exactly cooperating with the magazine on the project.

Wired tells us in a recent issue that hard-core Web addicts call the outside world, where people live, "the meatspace." Playboy's going to do its best to blur that distinction a little more with its pictorial.

Update, Feb. 22

News Corp., makers of your friendly Fox News network, said in a Wall Street Journal article that it's trying to protect myspace users. But hey, who knows about safety better than Fox News, the network usually trying to scare the bejesus out of us?

From the Journal:

[Myspace] also is considering limiting access to certain groups, such as "swingers," to those over 18; blocking search terms that predators could use to locate kids; and encouraging users between 14 and 16 to make their profiles "private," meaning they can only be viewed by people they already know.

"We're going to take some pretty dramatic steps to provide industry-leading safety," says Ross Levinsohn, president of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media unit, which includes MySpace.

It is a delicate operation for News Corp. because the media group wants to retain MySpace's cool factor.

Sony wants to open up a book reader empire

After being beaten to the starting pole by Apple's iPod phenomenon, Sony will take a stab at another consumer media market this spring. The electronics giant that gave us the Walkman — remember Walkmans, those portable radio and tape-playing marvels of the 90s? — will serve up the Sony Reader. This gadget that will sell for about $50 less than the biggest iPod ($349), carries about 160 books, turns 7,500 pages on a single battery charge, and lets readers shop online in the new Sony Connect store for bestsellers and other titles.

It's those other titles that most interest me, since Sony seems to be hinting about making its Connect store a place where a writer might publish a novel or non-fiction book. The prices in its teasing screen-shot (the store's not open yet) show a $19.95 cost for Freakanomics. That's more than $6 higher than the cost at Amazon.com for a digital copy of the book that you read in Acrobat on any computer. Sony will have some work to do in order to get competitive on content. It was the content rights management that killed off the company's chance at catching Apple's wave it began with the iPod tsunami. You could download music from Sony, but good luck at sharing it. It was in a peculiar format, too, and the only way to play your music at first was to convert it to Sony's.

I don't know if Sony's figured out that last roadblock. Fine print on the Sony site says you can read PDF Acrobat files on the Reader, but only if you convert them to the BBeBook format. Same for blogs and newsreader content. Heck, most people don't even know how to use a newsreader, let alone convert its content.

You can't fault the hardware that Sony has built in its efforts. The Reader is lightweight, stylish and small enough to be treated like a paperback. It's got MP3 playing capabilities, so long as your music isn't protected like the tunes you buy at the iTunes music store. Sony is making a big deal of its new screen technology, which is supposed to make reading a digital screen just as comfortable as reading a book.

In the end, it's how many songs or stories or movies you can download that will lift up a new idea like the Sony Reader. If Sony would see the vast collection of under-published novels and books as its new heartland of content, it could offer something not well served already by Amazon and standard PCs. Of course, you'd have to be able to buy these cutting-edge, noveau novels at a fraction of the bestsellers' costs. That won't matter to the writers. We should still make our $3 a book in royalties on this deal, since the "publisher" won't have to buy ink, paper or ship cardboard cartons of our books to the booksellers.

Spreading the word on low-fat's failure

There's manna for the media today. News this morning about the failure of low-fat diets to improve health over a 10-year study of postmenopausal women is like a good hurricane: something everybody can understand and have feelings about. So many of us, my house included, have been working hard to get used to the taste of less fat in our food. After the food companies reeled us in with LOW FAT on the labels, they grabbed us all again in the last two years with LOW CARB. By now, 2 percent milk seems like a splurge in my fridge.

That's going to come undone in some households this week. Spend a few minutes with Google News by typing in Dr. Jules Hirsch, author of the National Institute for Health study — then look at all the spins the media is putting on 10 years of research. The comments range from, "This was bogus advice to begin with" to "Well, yes, the study showed no measureable benefit from eating less fat. But you shouldn't go nuts now."

Trouble is, a 10-year study is massive in medical research. Hardly any run that long. Some media outlets have found doctors who say, "well, they should have run the study longer to get results." Theories die hard.

I'd bet the freezers will be bare of Haagen Daz by the end of the week. Out on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, the readers are already weighing in, so to speak, on being released from their fatless prisons. A typical letter, from Violet Lawton of Alameda:

I have been on a low-fat diet for about 30 years. Four years ago I had a heart attack. A year later, I had lung cancer and a pneumonectomy, so I believe the results of the National Institutes of Health study from bitter experience. It makes me mad that I could have had hot fudge sundaes all these years.

What's clear is that there's no silver bullet to health, despite what the food companies would promote on their packages. You gotta move, you gotta eat smart. A San Jose Mercury News story includes a quote from a Stanford researcher who says, "What we need to be thinking about is a healthy low-fat diet. We really need to hone in on getting nutritious foods into our diets.''

Of course, the coverage was so hurried at the Merc that the quote has a typo: "we really need to home in on..." And perhaps we do need to focus on the home, for those of us who are trying to eat more controlled meals.

Expect lots of coverage of the 49,000-woman study, poured like caramel over Natural Vanilla Bean Blue Bell. If there's some extra intelligence that surfaces, like adding exercise — well, maybe that's the jimmies over the top of this confection of liberation.

Breaking work's chain of command

I subscribe to military.com, a weekly e-mail report distributed by the job resource monster.com and dedicated to the opportunities for US veterans. (I'm a vet from the '70s, post-Vietnam, but I feel some kinship with today's more combat-tested troops My unit, 1st Cavalry, 7th Battalion, only faced the threat of combat with a superpower while out on the Iron Curtain.)

This week's report includes a brief story about joblessness among returning Iraq veterans. This is a story as old as military service; troops who return from combat have often struggled to find a job. For all the sticker-patriotism that cruises on the back of SUVs I've seen, employers still aren't making their contribution to the war they say they support. Vets 20-24 face a jobless rate twice as high as non-vets in the same age group.

Military.com got purchased by Monster in 2004, after starting its life as Military Advantage. It's got 6 million members and markets to them via a weekly e-mail that includes links to stories like the one above. There's media venture capital in there, too. The About page says that "Military.com has raised over $30 million from leading venture investors and strategic partners, including A&E Television Networks." The top management team is all veterans, with the exception of one senior marketing VP, a Harvard MBA who created the Nabisco Web site Nabisco Direct.

The Web site isn't overrun with ads. It's got a low-key, here's-the-facts feel, a rare thing in a medium that markets to such a large group. It's free to join. I always include my military service on my resume, dated as that experience is, but I can't recall ever being asked about it in an interview. Military.com has a middle of the road editorial slant. It's been critical of the way the Iraq war has been run, commenting on strategies that simply chew up the troops without a clear plan. In that regard, it has kinship with more left-leaning Web media like the Salon.com.

Last week Salon ran an article that "investigated" the high use of waivers to get those kids into am Army being sent to Iraq. Waivers are used, just like they were in my '70s Army, to admit people with criminal offenses, both minor and otherwise. That's not a new story, either — but that's because military service can be a poor career move: Low pay, great danger, and then not enough help when you return from public service.

Support the war, or don't — but give a veteran a job chance and repay what you owe as a citizen.

Taking business coverage topless

You need to drive investors to your news sources any way you can, even if it means chatter about taking your top off. In one of the genuine lowbrow moments in financial journalism history, Forbes has put up a video report on its Web site on "The Best Topless Beaches" in the world. They had the common sense to have a couple of young women reporting on this compelling financial news, rather than leering brokers nudging one another in expensive, expansive suits. Swimsuits are business, too.

You might be able track down this legendary coverage at the Forbes site's video barn. Don't worry — the report's video is strictly G-rated.

Technology opens classroom doors for free

Something special has come online from Stanford University, the college closest to Apple's world HQ. The two institutions have teamed up to offer 500 lectures and speeches for free though Apple's iTunes software. Stanford seems to get a lift by showing the world what its educational clout is based upon. Apple, of course, gets another 500 reasons to encourage people to download and use the software which drives millions of dollars a day into its music coffers.

The content is diverse. The front page of the Stanford iTunes site — think of it as an album cover for the university — includes two icons' speeches, from the Dalai Lama and Steve Jobs. Jobs had a commencement address videotaped last summer at Stanford, a remarkable 15 minutes of admissions and inspiration that revolves around Jobs being adopted, cashiered out of Apple in the '80s, and getting a usually-terminal cancer prognosis.

As for the Dalai Lama, well, there's more than five hours of him talking about meditation, non-violence, craving, suffering and choice. Topics that an exile from his native country has been eloquent about for several decades by now. There's also "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" a speech by faculty member Robert Sapolsky about infectious diseases and how Western disease has become a slow death for many of us. Stress kills.

It's all free. Follow the Stanford link at itunes.stanford.edu to get your seat in the lecture hall. Even while Apple has been reselling PBS "Austin City Limits" content in the iTunes store — taking a public broadcasting resource and making "viewers like you" pay twice for it — the company is also reaching out to make some private university resources available to the public.

A less-well-known resource for online lectures has been emerging from New Mexico, well in advance of the Stanford-iTunes collaboration. At the software company AICS Research, a series of public lectures is available for viewing and listening. Wirt Atmar, the founder of the company and a scientist, professor and software developer, has created QCShow, a free player and for-sale authoring suite that captures slides along with synchronized audio to distribute lectures and talks. For the moment, QCShow only operates with Windows. Atmar gave me a demonstration of the technology several years ago at an HP computer conference. Since then he's gotten a National Science Foundation grant to continue QC Show development and content creation.

The Oscars pimp up some talent

This will be the first year the word "pimp" appears on a list of nominees at the Oscars. Yesterday's announcement of the 2005 nominated songs list included the jumping track from Hustle and Flow, "It's Hard for a Pimp." (Great song, by the way, if you have any interest in hip-hop or rap. One of the characters in the film is played by DJ Qualls, who's got a speech where he talks about rap returning to its roots, in the South, and that all good rap is really based on the blues.)

As for the Oscars, I'd kept hearing about Hustle and Flow; it made the 10 Best List in Rolling Stone, and the movie includes a performance by Terrence Howard which drew praise from lots of critics. Howard's had a hell of a year, with broad range from the slick TV producer in Crash who goes along to get along, all the way to the striving, seedy DJay in Hustle and Flow, where he got his Best Actor nomination. Howard's the only actor of color to be nominated this year in any category, so we rented Hustle and Flow last night, since the movie fell into the sweet spot of earning a nomination but already being out on DVD.

The Oscars are a celebration in my house, beating close to the heart of passion for the movies that Abby brought to my life. I always loved movies; I had a subscription to the American Film Institute's magazine in the 70s, well before I met my bride. But in our life together here, movies rule the nights, even though we live in The Live Music Capital of the World (TM, Austin Chamber of Commerce). A band is a band, and you can dance to it. But a movie is a story.

For the last 16 years, the morning of the nominations brought a little joy before sunup. Out in California they announce the nominated films and artists at 5:30, so the list rolls out into the press before 8 Texas time. In the early 90s I'd go log onto Compuserve — remember Compuserve? — and grab the Associated Press story, feeling like the old wire editor I was back on The Daily Texan. Today, there's Google News (just out of beta, I hear), which had 944 stories on the nominations by 1 PM. Lots of those were that AP story, run in hundreds of papers big and small all over the world. But there was also plenty of good analysis by lunchtime in California. (Time's Richard Corliss had a funny, insightful roundup, as did Ebert, a couple of the older pros ready to romp early on with the news.)

As for Hustle and Flow, I'd give it a thumbs-up. I agree with Ebert: it's the rare movie about how art can make a life worth living, especially one that's been without redemption for a long time, like a pimp's. We love this kind of story. One of the most powerful such moments I've seen in a film lies in Pleasantville, when Jeff Daniels, the soda jerk who never knew about color in art, gets inspired by Tobey Maguire, who shows him an art book with famous paintings. Daniels responds by unleashing his art overnight onto the windows of the soda shop, backed by a rousing anthem from Randy Newman.

And so with the nominations ends the "For Your Consideration" season. This year Abby had some extra frequent flyer miles ready to expire, so she put them into subscriptions to The Hollywood Reporter and weekly Variety. Wow, the money spent on full-page ads announcing a movie "for your consideration" to spark a nomination. My favorite was the cover ad (the Reporter sells ads on its cover) with a picture of Darth Vader's helmet. Open the magazine, and you'd hear the sound of Vader's respirator, coming from a miniature player glued inside the page.

You could argue that it worked, too: Star Wars' final saga did earn a nomination for Makeup. The movie's only nod, though. It was shut out of Visual Effects, this year's domain of the Monkey Movie that Couldn't, (only four Kong nominations, all craft, most notable Art Direction), War of the Worlds and The Chronicles of Narnia. (The last movie in the list brings me full circle to rap; check out the SNL parody of a rap on the Chronic-als of Narnia at You Tube.)