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FT reports that new trading systems will be driven by news feeds, as well as historical data. Systems would pick out places where a company is mentioned, and predict what might happen to the stock price as a result, and use that information as the basis for buy-or-sell decisions. The hope would be to avoid some of the volatility that recent events have shown are caused by automatic trading systems (at least half of stock trades are now generated algorithmically, not by human decisions on the spot).

Unfortunately, as the article notes, events such as the precipitous drop in United Airlines stock price last fall were caused by reactions to incorrect news items. So we had better hope that the news analysis algorithms will be smarter than human judgment at figuring out which news items should be regarded as trustworthy. (Or perhaps, in the UAL case, how long after selling on the basis of a false rumor to wait before buying back in again, just before everyone else figures out the rumor was false.)

Because the Internet is like so many different technologies in different ways, it incites a variety of anxieties, and a corresponding variety of responses. Governments’ responses are often poorly thought out over-reactions — poorly thought out and little discussed. The past week’s news gives two astounding examples.

In India, a law innocuously called the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill 2006″ allows the government to intercept any form of electronic communications — email, text messages, or cell phone conversations — in order to investigate “any offence.” This is a post-Mumbai anti-terrorism measure, but like the USA PATRIOT Act, it is utterly lacking in provisions that would restrain the abuse of government authority. It was passed quietly, after little debate. Here is a blogger’s account of the bill (India sleepwalks to total surveillance”), and here is an editorial from the Times of India that backs up the blogger’s horrified reaction (“License to Snoop,” which begins, “Big Brother could¬†really¬†be watching”).

Meanwhile, the Times of London reports:

THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

Now it’s not clear what that actually means (are the police going start sending malware via email, just like the bad guys do to steal your account information and passwords?). But the trend is unmistakable: Even in major democracies, law enforcement so fears what people are saying over the Internet that it wants complete access to all of them, with only the cops deciding whether the surveillance and searches are justified.

The price is too high for such measures to be adopted without public discussion. In the U.S., let’s hope for better.

Bella English has a good piece in the Globe today about JuicyCampus, the gossip site for all manner of cruel and mean-spirited postings about college students. She’s got the story pretty much right — what JuicyCampus is doing is appalling and, under CDA section 230, legal. An interesting detail she notes is that two states’ Attorneys General are investigating JuicyCampus for not enforcing its own rules against fraud. In the aftermath of the Lori Drew conviction, such charges may not be over-reaching.

As the article notes, there are mechanisms for at least trying to identify who posts a message if it’s truly defamatory (which requires showing actual damage, not mere cruelty). It’s onerous to bring a libel charge (thanks to the First Amendment), but I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t been attempted — the article, at least, mentions the possibility but not any actual cases where it’s been done. (Though JuicyCampus has turned over IP addresses in other cases where violent crimes seemed to be in the offing.)

The book business has been affected by the digital explosion almost as much as the news business, but in a different way. People buy new books over the Internet, since the prices are low and the selection is large. So local bookstores are closing, and even major chains are threatened. And the aftermarket has gotten incredibly efficient — it is so easy and cheap to buy used copies that no one is buying new copies of the classics.

David Streitfeld takes us through the economics and ethics of all this in the New York Times today. He quotes the editor of a literary review thus: “With the Internet, nothing is ever lost. That’s the good news, and that’s the bad news.” So true. I buy more used books now — if I don’t need something right away, I’ll sometimes buy some 50 or 75 year old book rather than retrieving it from the Harvard depository.

Blown to Bits is part of the new book economy. We’ve posted the whole book for download for noncommercial purposes, and our publisher has priced it so low that (we hope) people will buy it anyway rather than print it or try to read hundreds of pages off the screen. We shall see. And it will also be interesting to see what it’s like to negotiate a book contract in the new economy. Even though we signed Blown to Bits less than two years ago, I have a feeling the experience is going to be different next time.

Since Obama’s victory, an interesting debate has been going on about whether he really tapped the collective energies of Internet users in a collaborative way, or whether the Internet that was just a tool he used to conduct a very effective but fundamentally top-down campaign. There was a conference at the Berkman Center to discuss this and related questions; Yochai Benkler is eloquent in this video taking exception to the way Marshall Ganz had described Obama’s use of the Internet as an organizing tool. Some succinct essays surrounding these issues appear on the Berkman Center site here.

There’s an interesting short article in the Takoma (WA) News Tribune today entitled “Is Obama’s Web-based political revolution real or an illusion?” (It came to my attention because my wife, Marlyn McGrath, was quoted on the subject of how long it takes to read a college application — a number the reporter thought relevant since Obama has received 300,000 online applications for jobs in his administration. Also quoted is Professor Lillian Lee of Cornell, a Harvard PhD who used to be a teaching assistant for me — Lillian notes that the popularity metric used by the change.gov site for allowing certain posts to move up in the list is actually not awfully democratic in practice.)

Obama is trying lots of things, and that’s great. He probably could have been elected without the Internet, though it surely did him no harm to have collected millions of cell phone numbers on the promise that you’d be texted in the middle of the night about his VP pick, and a free “Go! Go! Go! Obama!” ring tone. Figuring out what actually works will take longer.

Google, whose mission is to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible, has decided not to organize and make accessible the world’s scientific data. In the interests of economizing, it is canceling its scientific data service, which promised to store massive quantities of scientific date, from the Hubble telescope for example, for shared use.

Google offers lots of wonderful stuff “for free,” and it’s not surprising that in a recession the company is picking its shots. But as Wired reports, Amazon, which also offers cloud data services, is waiting in the wings and may rush in to fill the void.

Today first: The New York Times has a very affirming editorial about the opportunities the Internet promises, and Obama’s opportunity to use national Internet diffusion as an economic driver for the nation.

And exactly 100 years ago today: The New York Times reported that the government, having considered the opportunities presented by the new pneumatic-tube communication technology, had decided not to “purchase, install, or operate” pneumatic tubes. Here is a scan of the original NYT story, and here is a brief summary.

Somewhere, perhaps Senator Stevens is laughing.

A tip of the hat to TheSync for pointing this out on Slashdot.

Use of the term “Broadband” is unregulated in the US, but more and more people know they want it. Those conditions are ideal for shading the truth.

A new report in Great Britain states that more than 40% of “broadband” connections there are less than 2MB/sec. I’m not aware that any similar figures are available in the US, but I know some services offered as “broadband” are less than 1MB/sec. That’s still a lot better than dialup, which is limited to .06 MB/sec., but nowhere near the rates of at least 4MB/sec that make web surfing pleasant.

Another thing to realize is that ISPs split the channel capacity into upload and download speeds, generally allocating much more for download on the theory you shouldn’t be uploading movies (and they don’t care if you actually make your own). So they will give you two different numbers for the two directions — but it’s hard to be sure you can believe them anyway.

For years, people have been observing that the wonderful surfeit of information sources available through the Web can result, paradoxically, in a narrowing of our perspectives. In the political realm, for example, liberals can now get all their news from liberal sites, and conservatives from conservative sites. As Cass Sunstein observes in Infotopia, speaking and listening only to people who think like us has a polarizing force — everyone just gets more extreme.

The Boston Globe has a good review today of a paper published in Science some months ago reporting that groupthink is affecting even scientific research publications — the lists of cited papers are becoming more homogeneous, not more varied, as the information sources diversify. There is even an analogy with popular music — yes, there is a “long tail” of music now available for special tastes, but the small number of big winners dominate music sales now more than ever. And so it is with scientific papers — with most available online, a smaller number are cited more often than in the past.

The paper suggests that Web search is fundamentally different from search through paper records, which puts more context around sources and causes us to be more critical before pursuing a reference. Clicking on links thoughtlessly is just too easy, and we are losing something in the process.

Hardly an open-and-shut case — the article mentions several dissents — but it makes sense to me.

We keep saying that the digital explosion has good and bad sides. For every meatspace tradition that dies because physicality isn’t what it used to be, a dozen digital innovations are born. But this morning, I’m going to grieve an irreplaceable loss.

The Out-Of-Town News Stand in Harvard Square is closing.

I remember how astonishing it was in 1964 when I arrived at Harvard from Wellesley, Massachusetts — hardly the ends of the earth — and found I could buy French newspapers and magazines (it was the only modern language I could read) and newspapers from a hundred cities across the U.S. It was like Widener Library except that when you came back a few days later, it was all different.

When the huge renovation of the public transportation system took place in the 1980s, the old T station, through which you used to emerge into Harvard Square, became the new home of the newsstand.

The digital explosion has killed the business. Newspapers are shrinking in general as news moves online. But the market for foreign newspapers — days or weeks old by the time they have arrive — has all but disappeared.

I might have hoped the place could stay open selling mostly pornography, but that’s moved online too.

I should have seen it coming a few weeks ago when I bought a Christian Science Monitor there. It’s not a paper I usually purchased, but that day’s edition carried a column of mine. It was a newspaper without news, such a small tabloid that it was folded twice and still seemed thin. I felt sorry for it, as I would feel sorry for a victim of famine. And now the Christian Science Monitor is no more as a paper publication (it will continue on the Web).

No Out Of Town News? I should be happy for all the opportunities there will be in its place, but this one is hard to take.