"We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now."

"We knew USG would come after us," says CEO Michael Janke.

It hadn’t been told to provide data to the government, but after Lavabit shut down today rather than be “complicit” with NSA spying, Silent Circle told customers it has killed off Silent Mail rather than risk their privacy....

Silent Circle reportedly had revenue increase 400% month-over-month in July after corporate enterprise customers switched to its services in hopes of avoiding surveillance. The company giddily told Forbes it planned to nearly double staff and significantly increase revenue this year in part thanks to the NSA’s practices coming to light.

I'm sure there's lots of money that could be collected for providing services that are impossible to provide, but that's the catch: The service is impossible to provide.

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Mr. Bezos, tear down that wall.

I don't think the ownership of the WaPo has exchanged hands yet, but my first thought on hearing the news that Jeff Bezos had bought The Washington Post is: He should take down the paywall. For about a day, I imagined that maybe he'd already made that happen. I was getting to lots of articles, but it turned out it was just close enough to the beginning of the month that I hadn't maxed out on the free access yet.

This morning, I'm trying to read "Jeff Bezos, The Post's incoming owner, known for a demanding management style at Amazon" and I have to hit the "reader" button to get to the text. Bezos needs to demand that the wall go. Having more readers is what really matters. Turning all that volume into money is something that can happen later. Isn't that how Amazon works? And anyway, Bezos already has so much money that he doesn't need to use WaPo to get more money. He needs it for his personal prestige and power. More readers suits that goal better than squeezing some money out of some of them.

Anyway, what is this "demanding style"? Paragraph 1 says he ends conversations that go on too long. Paragraph 2 says he has a "famously long-term approach." Interesting combination relating to time: patience in one sense and not in another. He's patient with the development of the product and the market, but wants efficiency internally. Paragraph 3 reinforces that point:

He favors a nimble, loosely organized company in which “two-pizza teams” execute important corporate tasks, because a work group requiring three pizzas over a lunch meeting is inherently too cumbersome. And he often requires employees pitching new ideas to write mock news releases for their product’s imagined launch, a way of focusing their minds on what will most excite customers.

Put it in writing. Don't blather with me for an hour, when you can crystallize your thoughts through the writing process, and I can read it all in a minute.

Reading on, there's lots about efficiency. It's one thing to hate to waste any time — many of us identify with that. What's unusual is the willingness to impose rigorous efficiency on others, to decline the comforts of being nice to the people in your immediate environment, and to do it out of regard for the customers, the people out there, out of your sight.

How will this style apply to running the newspaper?

Bezos has said that he intends to keep his focus on Amazon and keep his home in the Seattle area rather than becoming a fixture in Washington, as four generations of The Post’s outgoing owners, the Graham family, have been.

Good. Be the outsider. Be in it for us, the readers, not to be a part of some sick insider culture.

Bezos also has agreed to keep the newspaper’s top executives in place, though they may need to work without a popular corporate management tool: PowerPoint presentations.

Take away their crutches.

Bezos all but banned such presentations at Amazon around the time Edward Tufte, a computer science professor at Yale, wrote an essay saying that their bullet points encouraged lazy thinking. Amazon employees are required to write papers, known as “narratives,” that are no longer than six pages.

The idea for Bezos, former employees say, is that the act of writing forces people to focus their thoughts and think them through.

So Bezos has been about writing. Writing, marketing, efficiency... Okay. Show us the newspaper.

And stop blocking the view. Tear down that wall.

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Travel bloggers organizing travel bloggers to leverage travel blogging for travel.

It's not just the old problem of how to monetize your blog. It's the special travel blogger's problem of needing to pay for the raw material for your writing, and these people can barely talk about the problem of writing well (or usefully) about things they've been given free in anticipation of good publicity.

You have to get deeply into this NYT article to get to the really complicated commerce that made me write the post title above:

In order to make a go of it, some [travel bloggers have] contractual partnerships with outfitters like G Adventures, which created Wanderers in Residence in 2010. The program currently includes five bloggers, who lead tours, do speaking engagements and write blog posts for the company (the bloggers are compensated monthly)...

A different sort of outlet is IAmbassador, which [a travel blogger] started in 2011. The program...  organizes bloggers and pitches campaigns to tourism boards. There are now about 40 bloggers participating in the resulting sponsored trips, Mr. Jenkins said; he has also formed partnerships with travel blogging networks in Germany and Brazil.

I'm not a travel buff and I don't care about travel blogs or other travel writing, but I understand the appeal of real life activities with other bloggers and the desire to have good travel companions, and why shouldn't some bloggers make money organizing trips? It's just another form of packaged vacation, but part of the organizer's clout is some sort of offer of good press. Once the freebie is acquired, do the bloggers feel compelled to be nice? I'd be inclined to be the blogger who calls bullshit on the other bloggers on my tour who effused too much. Maybe I'd get banned (as a troll).

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The movie industry is "laying down too many big bets without anything else on the agenda."

Said Steven Gaydos, of Variety magazine. "They have to kick their dependency on $300m blockbusters. If they don't, they're going out of business." But it's not going to happen:

"Look at Comic-Con and then tell me if you think Hollywood is going to cut back on its comic-book dependency.... Look at how that event was covered by the critical establishment.... By and large, people are not looking for intelligent, edgy, mid-range movies. They're looking for superheroes and special effects. They're looking for amusement rides. They're like the kids in Pinocchio who still want to go to Pleasure Island. They're voting to be donkeys."

Coming up: Pirates of the Caribbean 5, Thor 2, Fantastic Four 3 and another Godzilla.

Looking at this from the distance — I am old, and I haven't gone to the movies in a year — I think: Good, I hope they fail. Why should I care if these studios collapse of their own rot? I try to summon up some empathy. In the last post, I was surprised by empathy for the soldier fly, bred inside a closed appliance for the purpose of food. (I refuse to consume non-free-range larvae.)

Who are the workers of Hollywood, that we should care? They seem quite awful. Maybe Hollywood should make more movies about the good people who work behind the scenes. A fantastic 4 of The Gaffer, The Grip, The Best Boy, and The Seamstress. We mainly see the snobbish bastards who — as movies have taught us — inspire our lust to gaze upon downfall.

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Why I pay to get through the paywall at the NYT but not the Washington Post.

I'm looking for material to link to from this blog, and if I link to the NYT, my readers can click through to the article without hitting the paywall. That doesn't happen at the Washington Post, so I don't want to spend time reading there. Before WaPo put up the paywall, I had not subscribed to the NYT. I had migrated over to the Washington Post to find material that wasn't obstructed. But when the Post put up the paywall that blocks readers arriving at specific pages through links, it sent me back to the NYT, where I subscribed.

It's one thing to have a paywall, quite another to have a link-deflecting paywall.

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"High-End Stores Use Facial Recognition Tools To Spot VIPs."

Surely, this is the moment when we find ourselves on the cusp between the old and the new.

The Old: There was etiquette and common courtesy, and you felt called upon to regard everyone as a very important person. Sly and the Family Stone sang it best: "Everybody Is a Star." And Jesus said: "Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me."

The New: Everyone will have Google Glass with facial recognition and everyone, high-end or not, will know the identity of everyone, celebrity or not. Everyone will know that you know who they are, and your ability to recognize anyone will say absolutely nothing about your character and discernment.

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"The market has this natural tendency to commoditize things. There’s no longer a face, a place, it’s just quinoa."

You have to understand why that's supposed to be a problem, and how people are scampering to fix it.

"We’re at this inflection point where we want people to know where their quinoa is coming from, and the consumer actually is willing to pay them a little more so they do put their kids through school."

"They" = Bolivian farmers, who after centuries of eating something that was just the only grain they could grow find the whole world clamoring for the stuff as if it's special.

There's a shortage now, but there's a glut coming, as farmers in other places — like Canada — start growing quinoa, using modern farming equipment. Will the Bolivan farmers update their farming methods? Or will their dealers succeed in convincing you that ancient Bolivian artisan-grown quinoa is worth twice as much?

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"Never... ever suggest they don't have to pay you."

"What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will bear."

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"Thai police say they have rescued about 90 famished cats that they believed had been headed to Vietnam."

"They declined to say what fate they had rescued the felines from, but cats are considered a delicacy in their intended destination...."

So — obviously — meat. But why famished, then? Perhaps cats are shipped emaciated, to save shipping expenses, then fattened at the destinations, at some sort of cat feedlot.

You know, some people with no intention of eating any cat meat at all run cat feedlots. Maybe you do. Here are 9 questions to ask yourself.

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"A federal judge on Wednesday found that Apple violated antitrust law in helping raise the retail price of e-books..."

"... saying the company 'played a central role in facilitating and executing' a conspiracy with five big publishers."

Apple’s lawyers noted at the trial that the publishers had long complained that Amazon.com’s uniform pricing of $9.99 for new e-book titles was too low.... But the Justice Department said Apple’s deal with the publishers left Amazon with no choice but to raise prices....


The Justice Department said that the publishers used their relationship with Apple, combined with the most-favored nation clause, to threaten Amazon to switch to the agency model so they could raise prices. If Amazon did not agree to those terms, the government said, the publishers intended to withhold their e-books from the retailer until the more expensive hardcover books had been on the market for awhile....

One e-mail, written by Steven P. Jobs when he was chief executive of Apple, was frequently brought up at the trial. In an e-mail conversation with [Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services] about the contracts negotiated with the publishers, Mr. Jobs wrote: “I can live with this, as long as they move Amazon to the agent model too for new releases for the first year. If they don’t, I’m not sure we can be competitive.”

Good. Celebrate by buying a little something for yourself at Amazon. If you use that link, you'll be supporting this blog (without paying any extra for anything).

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"Surrogate mom offered $10K to abort baby after parents discover she would be born with disabilities."

"Crystal Kelley, 29, ultimately refused the Connecticut couple’s demand that she terminate the pregnancy."

She fled to Michigan to have the baby and was able to find parents willing to adopt the girl, identified as Baby S., born with special needs.

Kelley, a single, unemployed mother, told CNN that she would have the abortion if the couple, who was not identified, would pay her more. She was also getting $22,000 to carry the child....

(This story is from last March, but I hadn't noticed it until just now.)

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