Reddit going black to protest SOPA, Wikipedia may join

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The popular blog Reddit will be blacked out for 12 hours on Jan. 18 to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act that is wending its way through the House of Representatives, according to a posting on the site.

The admins of the site write:

Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action.
Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales said he would also like to see the online encyclopedia join Reddit’s blackout, the Washington Post reported.

The protest coincides with a House Oversight Committee meeting looking at the proposed legislation. A number of legislators opposed to SOPA have posted their viewpoints on a site called keepthewebopen.com, including California Republican Darrell Issa, chairman of the committee.

I wrote more about a potential large-scale Web blackout to protest SOPA here.

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Montana insurance commissioner launches online complaint system

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Following on the heels of a similar announcement from the secretary of state’s office, Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Monica Lindeen announced today the creation of an online form for residents to report problems with their insurance.

The new form comes after a $1 million year-to-year increase in the amount of illegitimate premiums and unpaid claims Lindeen’s office returned to Montanans in 2011, according to a written statement.

In that year, her office returned $4.7 million to consumers who had claims wrongfully denied by their insurers.

The online system replaces a paper-based system that relied on mailing, faxing or sending a scanned copy of forms to the state. Last year, Lindeen’s office created an online reporting option for the insurance industry to streamline agent licensing and the collection of premium taxes, the statement said.

For more information on the new complaint form, visit the link above or call 800-332-6148.

A note about the police reports on Facebook

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The jig is up.

Some of the fans of the Chronicle Police Reports page on Facebook have noticed that the blotter items posted there are not posted on the same day they appear in the paper or online. In fact, some of them appear on Facebook several weeks after they first appeared in print.

There is a reason for that, and it involves a little math, so bear with me.

We post five times a day to the Chronicle Police Reports page, at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m., 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. We chose five time slots so that we aren’t overwhelming our followers’ walls/timelines with amusing glimpses of small-city crime.

These are automatic posts — we use a service called Hootsuite to schedule them ahead of time. You’ll have to forgive me for automating part of the process, but it makes life a lot easier to schedule a month’s worth at a time rather than counting on me to remember to post them five times a day.*

Figure that on a typical day when our reporters turn in the police reports, there are between 10 and 20 items listed there. Some of them will be mundane, and we try not to post the mundane ones on Facebook, so you can shave a few reports off that total.

Now, with just five posting slots per day and 10 to 20 new items each day, you can see how we quickly fall behind the print edition’s publishing schedule.

That is why you see some of the reports weeks after you may have read them in the paper or online.

I understand this can lead to some confusion on certain blotter items, but I figure that the entertainment value of the police reports transcends the dates of the incidents involved.

If you’d like to discuss this, feel free to add comments below or to email me at becker@dailychronicle.com or call me at 406-582-2657.

*If you are devastated or otherwise offended to learn that we automate the postings here, I offer this insider tip by way of apology: I try to schedule what I deem to be the funniest reports for the 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. time slots. Enjoy!

Montana Secretary of State launches site to streamline election law violation reports

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Update: Terri McCoy called over the weekend to clarify one issue about the complaints received from the 2010 reporting program. I wrote that 45 submissions lacked enough info for the secretary of state’s office to follow up on. McCoy wanted it to be known that the office did follow up on all of those complaints but found that the majority did not involve any violation of election law.

Montanans have a new way to report violations of election laws, state Secretary of State Linda McCulloch announced Friday in Bozeman.

The Fair Elections Center is an online form citizens can use to report potential law violations in state and federal elections, including activity related to voting and signature gathering for petitions, McCulloch said in a written statement.

“The Fair Elections Center improves the oversight of state and federal elections by creating a simple and centralized procedure for citizens to document their concerns as a formal report,” she said in the statement.

Reports are evaluated by the Secretary of State’s office and forwarded on to county attorneys, county election administrators and other appropriate authorities as needed, said Terri McCoy, spokeswoman for McCulloch’s office.

The secretary of state launched a violation-reporting program in 2010. McCoy said this new site streamlines the old process.

“The website’s really to create a more centralized location,” she said.

McCoy said that the old reporting program drew 68 complaints during its time. Seventeen were forwarded to local authorities, she said. A further 45 submissions lacked enough info for McCulloch’s office to follow up on, and six were sent to the state’s commissioner of political practices.

None were found to be violations of the law, McCoy said. In fact, she said that no one in the secretary of state’s office knows of any violation of election law on record.

“As far as we have found,” she said, “when it comes to state and federal elections our office oversees, there has not been a violation of election law in Montana. We have extremely secure and fair elections.”

So why have a website to record violations when none have happened?

“It further enhances voters’ confidence in Montana elections and increases our transparency, which is always a good thing,” McCoy said.

Plus, she said, the website didn’t cost anything. It was built in-house by the secretary of state’s staff and used existing software.

Web blackout discussed to protest SOPA

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If you haven’t heard about SOPA and PIPA from the people in your online circles already, you will probably learn about it soon, especially if the major Web companies mentioned in this story do what they are threatening to do.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, HR 3261, is a bill proposed by Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith. It seeks to give the government the power to block foreign-based websites that are pirating American companies, often at the request of copyright holders.

Critics say it could create an environment online in which even legal sites could be shut down or blacklisted simply because one of their users posted something that could possibly infringe on someone’s intellectual property.

They worry that the language of the bill would allow the law to be abused by media companies and copyright holders, making it nearly impossible and economically ruinous to maintain sites that display user-generated content. This could create an economic environment hostile to startups and new investment, which would stifle development online and, to some critics’ minds, kill the Internet.

Fox News and other outlets reported today that Google, Amazon, Facebook and other major companies are considering a blackout. Users of those major sites would see anti-censorship warnings instead of their usual content, along with links urging them to contact their representatives in Washington.

From Fox News, quoting Markham Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition:

“This type of thing doesn’t happen because companies typically don’t want to put their users in that position … The difference is that these bills so fundamentally change the way the Internet works. People need to understand the effect this special-interest legislation will have on those who use the Internet.”
 

Bozeman police buying wireless patrol car camera

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The Bozeman Police Department announced Nov. 30 that it received a grant to buy a new patrol car camera that streams data wirelessly to servers back at the station — well, from the parking lot. Not from the road. Still, the Arbitrator 360 — What a great name for a police camera! — beats the old VHS tape system in use now.

Ag cpd10crupAccording to the Panasonic website for the Arbitrator 360, the camera is all solid state, has a 220x zoom and has built-in infrared capability. Here are the specs.

The website doesn’t say how much the camera system costs — it’s one of those things you call to ask about. Neither does the police department release say how much the grant was for, but a Google shopping search tells me that the system costs about $5,500 apiece.

The grant comes courtesy of the Montana Department of Transportation and the Gallatin County DUI Task Force, the department said in a written statement. Dave McManis with the Bozeman police said the department will buy one camera for about $4,200.

‘Silicon Prairie’

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An article published on Inc.com extolls the virtues of the Gallatin Valley as a home for tech start-ups.

Writer Christina DesMarais interviews the head of Bozeman-based Schedulicity and also manages to mention RightNow and TechRanch, hitting all the bases while also managing to sneak in how small-town-ish Bozeman is and how friendly and nice all the locals are compared to big-city Silicon Valley, Calif.

Maybe I’m too inured in the Montana way of life, having grown up here, but I don’t think of us as all that provincial or rural. But that’s probably a skewed point of view, as I haven’t spend a heck of a lot of time in bigger towns and cities.

Anyhow, it’s nice to see the local tech industry getting some national attention.

Departing the social network

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Jenna Wortham at the New York Times gives us this article today, telling the stories of people who are living outside the Facebook empire.

Some of them have never joined up in the first place, but others have quit the site, saying that they are concerned about their privacy. Others worry about the growing gap between themselves and their real world friends. One former user told the Times “I was just seeing their pictures and updates and felt like that was really connecting to them.”

More interesting to me than the reasons people aren’t on Facebook are the comments from Susan Etlinger, analyst at the Altimeter Group. “People may start to ask the question that, if you aren’t on social channels, why not?” she told the paper. “Are you hiding something?”

Societal norms are shifting. That much is certain. Up in the air is whether or not you think the change is a good thing or a bad thing. So… What do you think?

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Washington congressman fires aides over unsavory tweets

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A Washington congressman fired three young aides today after learning about tweets they had sent referencing their on-the-job drinking, the time they wasted at work and their “idiot boss,” the Seattle Times reports.

U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen learned of the tweets at noon eastern time, his spokesman said, and fired the three aides about an hour later. The offending tweets had been streaming out since about August, the newspaper reported.

The Times says the democrat was tipped off by a report published in the NW Daily Marker this morning. That report begins thus:

For young men and women with ambitions toward a career in politics, working in a Congressional office can be a heady, almost dreamlike experience. Left unsupervised, the combination of youth indiscretion and close proximity to the nation’s levers of power produces results that can be ugly, messy and embarrassing for senior staff and even the representatives voters send to the Capitol to do the people’s work.
It’s well worth a read.

The tweets came from staffers Seth Burroughs (@therocketship1), Elizabeth Robbee (@betsysbites) and Ben Byers (@byers_remorse). I just tried to access all three user accounts, but Twitter seemingly cannot find those users.

No matter, you can read a goodly selection of the three aides’ tweets at the NW Daily Marker story.

 

Six days a week

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Media news with a local hook just keeps happening. No matter how much I try to keep the blog centered on tech issues, I find things to report on the journalism front.

The Chronicle’s fellow Pioneer-owned paper, the Herald Journal in Logan, Utah, announced this week that it will stop printing a paper on Mondays. Apparently, the Monday paper was not turning a profit.

The HJ will continue to produce news on Mondays, posting updates online, but no print edition will be inked that day. Publisher Mike Starn, noted in his announcement that the HJ has only been a seven-day news paper for 12 years of its 102-year history.

In related journalism news, MediaNews Group, the second-largest newspaper company in America by circulation, announced today that it will no longer produce Monday editions at six of its California newspapers.

The Reporter (Vacaville, Calif.), Times-Herald (Vallejo) and Times-Standard (Eureka) will stop publishing on Mondays beginning Dec. 19.

These papers were among 23 papers owned by MediaNews that added metered paywalls to their sites in August. As a result of the cutbacks, the papers will be offering their online content for free on Mondays, even to non-subscribers.

The other three papers losing a Monday edition are the Oakland Tribune, Argus (Fremont) and Daily Review (Hayward). These three papers were slated to be consolidated into two, but that decision was reversed by MediaNews’s new CEO John Paton in October.

PaidContent.org reported in September that Paton is a “vocal opponent of using payrolls to increase digital revenue for newspapers.”

Why mention all of this? For one, I think it’s interesting that so many papers are dropping their Monday editions. Mondays are, traditionally, small papers, especially compared to bhe behemoths that land on doorsteps Sunday mornings. That means they have fewer ads in them, which means they make less money.

Secondly — and this is what interests me most — newspapers have come to a point where they are willing to rely on the Web to carry the weight of the news for a day. I’m not talking about the New York Times or Wall Street Journal here. I’m talking about your normal, average-sized local newspaper.

For papers of that size to be willing to rely on the Web as the sole means of distribution, even if it’s only for a day, it means that the Web has reached critical mass. Newspaper honchos, traditionally traditional and resistant to change, have seen at least a small sliver of light.

It gives me hope for the digital future of news at the local scale. There’s lot of work to do to figure out how to make enough money with digital at the heart of a news operation, but it’s a hopeful start.

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