From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

In order to pay for the inauguration, Obama has said he will rely exclusively on individual donors and will not accept funds from corporations, political action committees or unions. Individual contributions are capped at $50,000, which gets donors a four-day package of tickets to the swearing-in plus other events.

As of Monday evening, the Presidential Inaugural Committee had raised slightly more than $24 million, including $944,700 from Washington state residents.

Many of the top givers here have Microsoft connections. Among those who have written checks for $50,000: Ballmer; Ballmer's wife, Connie; Melinda Gates; William Gates; and Microsoft executive Steven VanRoekel. (It's unclear from the committee's listing whether the William Gates donation came from the Microsoft chairman or his father, both of whom hold positions at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith and Chief Research Officer Craig Mundie both donated $25,000.

Ballmer, Smith and Mundie did not contribute to Obama's general election campaign.

One of the great mysteries of the banking cataclysm is why the media — who after all, are supposed to be the ‘Fourth Estate’ of the realm — failed to expose the insanity of what was happening in the world of shadow banking. In a chilling article in the New York Review of Books, Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger suggests one answer, by recounting what happened to him and his newspaper after they were sued for libel and worse by Tesco, the UK’s version of WalMart.

Some of the most critical developments concerning economics, security, the environment, and social policy are immensely complex and worthy of careful explanation. But they do not necessarily sell newspapers. News organizations in the Western world, struggling with declining audiences and revenue, are shedding journalists, closing down foreign operations, and cutting costs. But they are also increasingly inhibited by efforts—of government officials and of private corporations—to prevent them from protecting sources or from carrying out difficult investigations. Many minds are rightly focused on the regulatory, economic, technological, and legal issues that news organizations committed to serious journalism should be addressing. A starting point would be to reform one of the potential obstacles to their doing so—the British laws of libel. Do not be lulled into a false security by the word "British": in the Internet age the British laws can bite you, no matter where you live.

Rusbridger’s account explains why even public-spirited and trust-funded newspapers find it nearly impossible to report accurately and critically on the doings of complex and powerful industries.

A full-scale defamation case develops an awesome momentum of its own. Letters rain in day after day, week after week—drafted by counsel, amended by junior partners, redrafted by senior partners, few of them earning less than $500 an hour. Their tone is alternately sneering, bullying, threatening, and demanding. Within seven weeks of receiving the initial writ of libel, The Guardian’s costs alone of responding to the bombardment of Carter-Ruck demands and drafting a defense had mounted to more than $500,000. Within nine weeks Carter-Ruck submitted an estimate of their own costs to date of $808,607. The firm’s lead partner claimed $78,200 for the 93 hours and six minutes he had toiled over the case (at $850 per hour). Another partner had clocked up $67,269 for 131 hours and 54 minutes (at $510 per hour), much of which appears to have been spent composing needling letters. The accountants Ernst and Young eventually wanted $173,000—for advising Tesco’s lawyers on Tesco’s own accounts. Berwin Leighton Paisner, the specialist tax lawyers who helped set up the offshore companies The Guardian had written about, billed Tesco for a further $361,000—presumably for explaining to Tesco’s lawyers the precise nature of the company’s own tax structures. Three barristers specializing in defamation law charged Tesco a further $155,125.

These remarkable sums for explaining the tax structures were all the more ironic since Tesco was fond of contending that The Guardian’s error was an elementary, “absurd” one. The total cost for both sides of fighting the action to the bitter end—which could have ended up largely being borne by either Tesco or The Guardian—could have been in the region of $7.6 million. All this for a case where any damages would have been relatively insignificant.

It’s a sobering story. I’ve been sued twice for libel in my time, and once had an article (about Robert Maxwell) spiked for fear of litigation. Believe me, this stuff is no joke, and I’m awestruck by Rusbridger’s courage in the face of intimidation. (Remember the Jonathan Aitken case?) But at least the Guardian is owned by a Trust and so is not subjected to the vicarious expectations of the stock market. Shareholder-driven media groups will be far more chary of incurring the litigious wrath of corporations. So it’s hardly surprising that the gathering banking catastrophe went largely unreported. Imagine for example how the bastards who ran Bear Stearns or Lehman Bros into the ground would have reacted to a newspaper report that suggested their business was built on fantasy and sand.

So… Even in the old world of powerful and rich newspaper groups, the media proved to be an indifferent, erratic and deficient watchdog. A big question is whether the emerging media ecosystem of innumerable, lightly-funded reporters and journalistic organisations will do any better. Conventional wisdom might suggest not: what blogger (or ISP) will resist a threatening letter from the likes of Carter-Ruck (the libel specialist employed by Tesco to fight the Guardian)?

Jeff Jarvis has some gloomy thoughts about this in response to Alan’s article.

In my various scenarios for the future of news that relies more heavily on independent practitioners and networks, libel suits remain a huge question for which I can’t find an answer. It’s enough to ask, as Rusbridger does, why a (financially struggling) news organization would go ahead in reporting on large companies with the chance of errors and crippling punishment for them or of legal harassment. It’s another matter for an individual reporter – a Josh Marshall (even if his wife and business manager is a high-level attorney who used to work for Dow Jones) or a HuffingtonPost blogger – to take on the risk of financial ruin for the sake of reporting. The Media Bloggers Association has arranged libel insurance for bloggers, but in the face of prosecution of the level Rusbridger describes, that would be just spitting in a volcano.

There is, however, a chink of light in the gathering darkness. Rusbridger spells out in great detail the huge cost of retaining the specialist accounting and legal expertise needed to understand the Tesco transactions. But one rule of the new ecology is that there is wonderful expertise out there on the Net, and there might be ways of harnessing all that collective knowledge — rather as Linux harnessed the distributed skills of great programmers across the world to build a ferociously complex operating system; or as Larry Lessig and Charlie Nesson have crowdsourced the task of preparing legal briefs for pro bono cases.

Lisa Benson’s Christmas cartoon.

Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian and a keen pianist, made the pilgrimage to the Musikverein in Vienna for Alfred Brendel’s last public performance. He’s written a lovely account of the event.

At 8.13pm on Thursday night, one of the greatest pianists of his, or any, age sat down to play in public for the last time. Alfred Brendel spread his tails behind him, adjusted the stool and, for the final time, beamed his readiness to the conductor.

Two weeks before his 78th birthday, he was ready to bring down the final curtain while still at something like the peak of his powers. To choose such a moment of finality is, for a pianist, a comparatively rare thing. Arthritis gets some in the end; others die in harness; for some, the phone gradually stops ringing. Brendel decided he would rather be in control of the moment. His chosen exit was characteristic. Not for him a last Prospero-style pronouncement – not Beethoven's Op 111 or Schubert's D960, but instead, a youthful Mozart piano concerto, K271 in E flat.

There were demands for encore after encore, as you’d expect. In the end,he played

Liszt’s Au Lac de Wallenstadt. In an irony that would not have escaped him (he has written a poem on the subject), he played to the accompaniment of a ghostly mobile phone ringtone for a few bars.

He had first played Liszt in this hall 51 years ago. These last minutes marked not only the end of his career, but the severing of the thread that links generations of the great instrumentalists.

At the end of all the appplause – perhaps 20 minutes in all – Brendel smiled with what looked like a surge of relief and gestured down into the audience, which included all four of his significant pupils: Kit Armstrong, Imogen Cooper, Paul Lewis and Till Fellner. He seemed to be saying, “That’s me. Now it’s over to you.” And so the baton was passed on to the next generation. For Brendel, the rest is – in public, at least – silence.

Oh to have been there.

Strange paradox about the web: it’s a space in which anyone can become a global publisher, so, in theory you’d expect that blogs would have readerships distributed according to a normal distribution, with most blogs having an ‘average’ number of readers. In practice, of course, it doesn’t work out like that at all — as Clay Shirky observed a long time ago, blog readership follows a Power Law distribution, with a relatively small number of blogs having large readerships, and most blogs (the long tail of the distribution) having tiny audiences.

This fact — which, as I say, has been common knowledge for a long time — has led to occasional outbreaks of (generally clueless) mainstream media speculation about the “death of blogging”. I’ve argued that this is an idiotic misreading of the statistics. The main value of the blogosphere, IMHO, resides in the long tail, not in the small number of super-blogs with huge audiences.

Nevertheless, the tendency to confuse numbers with authority continues to flourish. The latest outbreak concerns Twitter, the ‘micro-blogging’ social networking service. As far as I can see, the firestorm was started by Loic de le Meur* in a blog post arguing that the search facility in Twitter was useless because it didn’t filter results. “What we need”, he wrote,

“is search by authority in Twitter Search. Technorati had nailed it years ago by allowing searches filtered by number of links the blogger had. It would be very easy for Twitter to add an authority line in their search criteria, with the number of followers so that you can search for say, only people who have more than a thousand followers and see what they say. React as fast as you can for criticism from them. It is not a criteria for being smart or not, but clearly a criteria for how fast something can spread.”

This touched a raw nerve, with lots of prominent Twitterers logging vociferous objections.

For example:

Robert Scoble: “Here’s why it’s a stupid idea: everyone is gaming the number of followers. And, even if everyone weren’t, popularity on Twitter isn’t a good way to measure whether a Tweet is any good or not.” [Ok, but it is a good way of determining how loud that message was]

Dave Winer: “I think it’s a bad idea.”

Sarah Lacy: “No one could be this nakedly egotistical and self-serving.” [this one was my personal favorite. Sarah is clearly worked up over this idea.]

Steven Hodson: “some-one like me with next to no followers wouldn’t even rate showing up in search results even if I started to topic being searched for” [no, only if someone turned that filter on in the search]

Sam Harrelson: “I think this is a terrible idea.”

MG Siegler: “this absolutely would ruin one of the most compelling things about Twitter: That it’s completely democratic.”

The fundamental problem here is le Meur’s concept of ‘authority’. What he really means is ‘influence’. And a rather limited kind of influence at that. For example, he cites an interesting experiment that he conducted:

Comments about your brand or yourself coming from @techcrunch with 36000 followers are not equal than someone with 100 followers. Most people use Twitter with a few friends, but when someone who has thousands, if not tens of thousands of followers starts to speak, you have to pay attention.

Brands do pay attention and already start understanding the difference. We made the experiment with Ben Metcalfe. I started complaining that Sprint was not offering the new Blackberry (they still don’t, I want a BB Bold with worldwide unlimited data) on Twitter and minutes later a Sprint representative contacted me and offered me VIP customer service. I loved it. For the experiment, @dotben started also complaining about the same issue (and really would love a Bold too, it was true) but nothing happened for Ben. Why not? Sprint understood that I have nearly 10x the number of followers of Ben so I had to be answered immediately, even with my weird last name no one can pronounce.

This is influence all right. But it’s not authority. It’s the same kind of influence that big newspapers and broadcasters wield. It’s the kind of influence that enables Stephen Fry to destroy the credibility of the BlackBerry Storm in a couple of critical tweets. So we need to unpack the concept of ‘authority’.

One way of doing that is to go back to Steven Lukes’s wonderful book in which he argues that power can take three forms: 1. the ability to force you to do what you don’t want to do; 2. the ability to stop you doing something that you want to do; and 3. the ability to shape the way you think.

In my experience, the last interpretation comes closest to describing the authority of the blogosphere’s long tail. It’s got nothing to do with the number of readers a particular blog has, but everything to do with the intellectual firepower of the blog’s author. That’s why I pay attention to Ed Felten, Tony Hirst, Nick Carr, Bill Thompson, Richard Posner, Dave Winer, Quentin Stafford-Fraser, Martin Weller, Lorcan Dempsey, Larry Lessig, Andrew Brown, Jeff Jarvis, Charles Arthur and a host of others. Their importance to me derives not from the number of readers they have (though some have large audiences) but from the fact that they are original, well-informed, thoughtful people.

Which brings me to Twitter. I find it a valuable service, but think that for for most people one’s Twitter_index (i.e. the ratio of those you follow to those who follow you) ought to hover around 1.0. (As I write, my index is 78/78, i.e. 1.0, but it varies slightly from time to time.) Otherwise one gets into the online celebrity, power-law nonsense that le Meur describes. My tweets are ‘protected’ — that is to say you need my permission to see them, and I only agree to a ‘follower’ request if the person seems to me to be interesting — so my ‘authority’ (in de Meur’s sense) will continue to be minuscle. Since many of the requests come from PR firms or marketers who are clearly eyeing my role as an Observer columnist, that’s just fine by me. I’d prefer to be taken seriously by my 78 ‘followers’ than to have the power to make T-mobile pay attention to the fact that unless they come up soon with the BlackBerry Bold on their network then I shall have to get an iPhone from O2.

Footnote: * Apologies to Loic for mis-spelling his name.

Later: Jeff Jarvis picked up on this and usefully extends it.

Le Meur’s not wrong when he tries to find a way to express and calculate the idea that it’s not the author who holds authority but his or her audience. But his critics are also right when they say that number of followers won’t get him there. I think there is no easy measure, but if it exists it will be found instead in relationships: seeing how an idea spreads (because it is relevant and resonates) and what role people have in that (creating the idea, finding it, spreading it, analyzing it) and what one thinks of those people (when MrTweet.net tells me that John Naughton follows someone, I’ll see more authority in that than, say, whom Robert Scoble follows – no offense, Robert – because Naughton is so highly selective). That is what the totality of the press-sphere will also look like as various players add varying value to add up to a whole (and in 3D, the sphere will look different to each of us, so one-size-fits-all measurements will become even more meaningless).

Jeff also points out that the obsession with metrics that has surfaced again in discussions about the “death of blogging” is a carry-over from an age of mass media:

In mass media, of course, big was better because you had to be big to own the press: Mass mattered. We still measure and value things online according to that scale, even though it is mostly outmoded. Indeed, we now complain about things getting too big – when, as Clay Shirky says, what we’re really complaining about is filter failure. That is why Loic Le Meur suggested filtering Twitterers by their followers; he’s seeking a filter.

The press was the filter. And the press came to believe its own PR and it conflated size with authority: We are big, therefore we have authority; our authority comes from our bigness.

“The last thing we need or want in the web”, he concludes, “is Nielsen ratings”.

Right on!

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