Deep Throat (well, Hal Holbrook) told us (well, Robert Redford) to "Follow the money." in the case of Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-SC), the money takes us right across the country to Hollywood.

from 1997 to 2002, the author of the SSSCA has taken over $264,000 in campaign contributions from Big Content. as a group, they gave more to Hollings' war chest than anyone except for lawyers/legal firms. individuals and political action committees (PACs) affiliated with AOL Time Warner, News Corp, the National Association of Broadcasters, Walt Disney, and CBS (a unit of Viacom)are among his top 20 contributors. it's also worth remembering that South Carolina generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually from film and television production (everything from Forrest Gump to "Dawson's Creek").

you can be sure that Sen Hollings is very well acquainted with the issues vexing Big Content today.

this idea's been kicking around for a while (particularly among the diaspora of my former employer), but i started thinking of it again when this little Radio UserLand tweak started popping up.

if RSS readers share their subscription lists consistently, we're at the file-sharing stage of peer-to-peer evolution (like the old Napster Hotlists): check out someone's blog, peruse their list of RSS sources, plunder it. it's not a bad way to discover new stuff, but there's another step we can take: the recommendation-sharing stage.

the idea is pretty simple: your collection of RSS subscriptions is compared to everybody else's RSS subscription collections. users with whom you share a high coincidence of subscriptions should be an excellent source of recommendations for new sources. these recommendations could even be weighted over time -- if you accept a suggestion by subscribing, future recommendations from your "buddy" would be weighted favorably. that weighting would then be a way of conferring transitive, implicit trust to recommendations that come from your buddy's trusted buddies, and so on ad infinitum.

essentially, your RSS reader represents a node on a network -- the task is maintaining your node's network state in relation to other nodes. a p2p architecture affords greater scalability than having a centralized, consolidated database of hundreds of thousands of users spidering one another.

just a thought.

now that the billionaires are getting into it, the New York Times has devoted some space to the issue of Big Content trying to bring IT to heel. well, actually, they're just recapping some of the highlights of the battle since the Senate Commerce Committee's kangaroo hearings on the issue.

the article passively identifies the fault lines between the entertainment and technology industries. while technology executives like Intel's Andy Grove are asking pointed questions about Hollywood's behavior:

"Is it the responsibility of the world at large to protect an industry whose business model is facing a strategic challenge? Or is it up to the entertainment industry to adapt to a new technical reality and a new set of consumers who want to take advantage of it?"

entertainment executives like News Corp's Peter Chernin are responding with unspecific threats to the consumer:

"[W]ithout copyright protection we will change our business models and the loser will be the public....We may be stupid but we're not idiotic. We're not going to offer ways for people to go and loot our content."

and nonsense comparisons:

"Let's say I decide to broadcast on my network the code for how to make Intel chips or Microsoft software. I think they'd find a way to stop it."

how stupid do they think we are?

today, the Senate Judiciary Committee (chaired by Pat Leahy (D-Vermont))is wading into the fray with hearings of its own. given the witness list, it looks like it'll be more even-handed than the Hollings-sponsored SSSCA rally: Richard Parsons (AOL Time Warner), Craig Barrett (Intel), Jon Taplin (Intertainer), Joe Kraus (DigitalConsumer.org and co-founder of Excite back when it was a search engine), and Justin Hughes (UCLA School of Law). (via NY Times)

the Wall Street Journal's Personal Technology columnist Walt Mossberg tunes his readers into Big Content's efforts to govern personal media consumption (blogaritavilles passim). Walt also steers people towards DigitalConsumer.org, a Silicon Valley-based advocacy group that's taking on Big Content in the legislative arena.

this is, undoubtedly, A Good Thing. it would be A Better Thing if DigitalConsumer.org's base extended beyond the Valley (i'm looking at you, Boston, Austin, Seattle, Northern Virginia, and New York). it would be Better Still if the support for these efforts came from beyond the IT world (i'm looking at you, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and consumer electronics manufacturers). it would be The Best Thing if DigitalConsumer.org's activity was coordinated with that of the EFF on this issue. Big Content (read, RIAA and MPA) is well-funded and influential, so diffusing efforts to combat them in Washington would be suicidally counter-productive.

remember, in an all-digital world your "digital rights" are your civil rights.

Terry Semel's big plan to save Yahoo!? turn it into a trailer park. Yahoo!'s [what am i supposed to do with that "!" when i need to punctuate?] opening a Santa Moncia office to better serve its growing stable of Big Content clients through its Yahoo! Entertainment unit.

given Semel's deep links in Hollywood, the only surprising part of this plan is how long it has taken to develop. as Disney's miserable experience with Go.com demonstrated, not every media company has the wherewithal to build their own consumer portal -- Yahoo!'s in a good position to become the preferred portal-for-hire in Hollywood. their only real competition is MSN. (via Reuters)

somewhere, there's a big story about web services, or maybe one giant corporation is suing another. perhaps a former CFO is blowing the whistle on a Wall Street favorite, but i don't care because Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is coming to the Mac. (via MacCentral)