I don’t think the New York Times ever publishes anything that isn’t intended to push some agenda. It seems to me every single headline and article has a mission. It’s not just news or information or entertainment, but rather some mission-based effort to make some point or present some perspective. So when I read today’s article trashing the AOL brand, I wondered what’s up between the Times company and AOL? Probably just helping out the Time-Warner folks, I suppose.

It was fun to read nonetheless. I always enjoyed hearing people make fun of AOL because it’s so easy and stress free. AOL just being AOL has been funny for years. No need to stretch the truth or spend any effort explaining the context - AOL “jokes” are just plain funny. But I thought those days were over because I rarely see any mention of AOL at all these days. But the Times sees a need to tarnish:

“it is clear that AOL’s brand faces significant challenges. The general scorn for the company was encapsulated by [sic] by Cosmé McMoon, who wrote ‘AOL = America’s Oldest Luddites.’ It sounds like there are as many people regularly imploring their aging parents to give up using AOL as there are people asking them not to drive in the dark.”

As always, there are people who take something cheap and easy and hope that someday, if they hold on long enough, it will be cool even if only because it is old. Apparently that has now happened with AOL:

“Several people had nostalgic associations with their e-mail addresses, which have been part of their lives for many years. And there were a few folks who seemed to like AOL for a sort of retro-chic.”

Retro-chic? Wow. Most of us know that “nothing expresses professionalism like an AOL email address“, but I bet few realize that @AOL.com is now retro-chic. The Times notes:

“When I get an email from an AOL address, I begin worrying before I open it that the question will be completely clueless,” said a person who works as a webmaster.

The Times attempts to sum up the trash-fest with this observation (emphasis added):

“And even AOL’s fans didn’t use the sort of words that people associate with growing brands like Apple and Google. You didn’t hear about innovation, quality or service. You didn’t even hear about a community, which once was AOL’s strength. Easy to use, another core part of AOL’s success did still echo from the AOL users. Ultimately, a brand is a promise of a consistent experience…Our little experiment in market research shows that AOL’s brand, at least among Bits [sic] readers, is hardly thriving. Even among satisfied users of the company’s services, the name evokes compromises and stasis, a tough position for a technology company.”

Ouch. Funny though, how the New York Times, with it’s hundred+ years of literary history, has so many typos in its published materials. I rarely have to write [sic] when I blog but I needed it twice for this little piece of trash… umm… I mean trashing, as in piece of AOL trashing. Well, you know what I mean.

References:

Since the New York Times has a policy of not linking to the web, I can’t link to their article here. But I can tell you how to find it. Simply go to Google.com and search for “New York Times”. When Google gives back a results page, ignore the main listings and look all the way to the right side of the page. You’ll see a few listings in a vertical column along the side edge. Look for the one that has URL “nytimes dot com” and click it. Once you get to that landing page, there is a “search” box in the upper left, below the masthead. Enter the following search term into that box: “so-thats-who-uses-aol” (you can cut and paste from here) The only result should be the actual article I mentioned here. (They’d make their website so much easier to use if they’d just stick to following web standards and link to things, right? Geesh.)

Nicholas Carr says in “Apple declares war on sneaker hackers” that Apple is pushing for a patent for DRM on the clothing/device personal network. He’s noting a New Scientist report of Apple’s desire to restrict pairing of sensor devices to “authorized garments“. An example given in the application describes “sneaker hackers” removing sensors from iPod-linked Nike+ shoes and using them elsewhere. The Apple patent application seems to want to make sure that those Do-It-Yourself hackers who read MAKE Magazine and shop at OEM.com to build toys they can brag about on Slashdot can’t continue to “inappropriately” toy with the Nike+ system

A commenter suggests that it is Nike, not Apple, pushing for this, and that Nike simply wants to secure the shoe sales.

I went into a local running shoe store here in Adventureland Northwest and was told quite directly that Nike sneakers are not really running shoes, but fashion shoes. I was told to stick to “real” running shoes for running, to avoid problems and get better value in “the long run”.

I’d say Nike has much bigger problems than Slashdot/OEM.com hackers fooling around with their Nike+ shoe sensors.

Things are heating up world-wide when it comes to Google, privacy and competitiveness, so it’s no surprise that the rhetoric delivered to Google critics has gotten harsher. These days if you say things questioning Google someone will call you a conspiracy theorist, and someone will call you out on “negativity” or otherwise make a move to distract from the real issue. The One Big Real Issue is that Google is the most powerful commercial entity ever known to mankind. If you doubt that statement, I suggest you look at the available power Google has garnered and try and come up with any other entity (government or institutional) with more potential power. Please limit your discovery to the planet Earth and non-fiction. Feel free to go way back, but I don’t consider the Holy Roman Catholic Church to be a commercial entity in this context (yes I know, I know).

With power comes opportunity to exploit that power. That’s what I look at, and not because I think I can “fight” something like the whole world adopting the Internet and giving Google massive commercial power.. don’t be silly. I just find it interesting. I really, really do.

When Google announced yesterday that they were voluntarily reducing the length of time they keep non-anonymized data from 18 months to 9 months, calling it “Another step to protect user privacy“, I hopped on over for a quick read of the announcement. Sure enough, down around paragraph 5, line 4 on my screen, I got the information I sought. Google can reduce the length of time they keep the IP data because — are you ready — they figured out a way to still know enough of what they want to know, without saving the non-anonymized IP data:

After months of work our engineers developed methods for preserving more of the data’s utility while also anonymizing IP addresses sooner. We haven’t sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymizing as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work.

That’s no suprise to me. Google has partnered with the biggest and most aggressive information management companies in the world (including NASA and Acxiom, for example) in the past. If anyone knows or can learn and master information pairing, that someone is Google (information pairing is the process of putting data sets together to figure stuff out that didn’t exist in either set. It has other names). Remember Google owns Doubleclick now.
Apparently Google has proven internally that it doesn’t need that raw log (IP) data as much as it used to think, because it has figured out good enough use-based data reduction techniques, and redefined the term anonymized along the way.

That IP data is not as valuable to them as they thought. It’s not worth keeping the raw data 18 months now, especially as the costs keep increasing (in the face of the EU privacy complaints, for example). They note that the new definition of “anonymized” they will use for the 9 month data is not as strong as the previous definition they use for “anonymized” data saved after 18 months. Yeah, I know. The Evil is in the Details. They continue to ask us for a lot of trust in those details.

Nothing amazing in this announcement, just not a simple “wow they gave in and granted us more privacy” like some are suggesting.

If you’re about to comment that I’m a conspiracy theorist, or trying desperately to make another Google good deed look evil, please have a cigarette or take a walk or something. This blog is not for you.