Bayosphere

TheStreet.com: eBay’s CEO Is Quitting Goldman’s Board. The investment bank did not offer any explanation for Whitman’s departure, although her tenure on the board became part of a controversy when it was revealed that she and other prominent executives received shares in initial public offerings handled by Goldman.

The explanation is fairly obvious. This arrangement smelled to high heaven.

What’s most disappointing about Meg Whitman’s behavior in this case is her pretense that she did nothing wrong. Even it was all entirely legal, as she’s insisted, it was improper.

As examples of greed go, Whitman is penny ante. But I and many others expected more from her, because she and her colleagues built a great company. That’s the big disappointment.

Now she’ll be remembered, in part, as a member in good standing of the “I’m entitled, because I’m in the club of rich people” crowd that turned American capitalism into a sham during the 1990s. A billionaire, she wanted more, more, more. That $1.8 million she grabbed in those offerings was pocket change for her, not for the investing stiffs who lost their children’s college money.

Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right. Whitman doesn’t seem to get it.

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What good news to hear that ElcomSoft was acquitted of criminal copyright charges by a federal jury in San Jose. It was a verdict for common sense, but it’s probably too optimistic to hope that the law sparking the prosecution — the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act — will now be reconsidered.

Coming on the heels of the launch of Creative Commons’ first public license, the ElcomSoft verdict marks a rare occurrence: two good days in a row for the people who want rational copyright policy.

More in my Wednesday column.

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AP: Russian software company found innocent in copyright case. The case against Elcomsoft Ltd. was the most high-profile under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which many in the technology industry consider unduly restrictive.

This is fantastic news. More soon…

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Steve Cisler posted this report about the World InfoCon.

“He stands out for his blandness. Business suit, crewcut, an earpiece to keep in touch with his team leader, and an open newspaper. But he’s looking elsewhere, over his shoulder, at a suspicious character, probably looking at you and listening as well. This man-in-black is the poster child for World-Information.Org’s exhibit and conference in Amsterdam.”

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I’ve been talking about the next version of journalism for a while now. Card-carrying conservative John Podhoretz gets it in his column about Trent Lott.

Tomorrow’s journalism is multi-directional. We are all writers (if we want to be), not just readers. Substitute “producers” for “writers” in that last sentence to include multimedia. The point is: We aren’t just consumers anymore.

Gerhard Fisher also gets it in this piece on FirstMonday, entitled “Beyond ‘Couch Potatoes’: From Consumers to Designers and Active Contributors” — it’s fascinating reading.

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Hong Kong is part of China, but the “one country, two systems” mantra is sounding a bit hollow. That’s because Hong Kong may soon enact Draconian “anti-subversion” measures that are more appropriate to a police state than an open society.

More in my Sunday column.

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Just turned on CNN to catch the headlines. The network is running a report about Iraq and the likely upcoming war.

The channel is also, in the middle of a supposed news report, playing ominous-sounding music in the background while the anchor/reporter talks and the images are displayed on the screen. This is a technique movie-makers use to stir up viewers’ emotions. It works.

Most likely the purpose of this technique is to make the broadcast more interesting. But it’s smells of propaganda, not serious journalism.

CNN’s credibilty has been shrinking for some time. This kind of overt viewer manipulation puts it closer and closer to zero.

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I love this story. A ripoff artist gets caught because the network worked. A human network, in this case, augmenting the virtual one.

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At the very end of this interview on GoodExperience.com comes the following question and answer:

Q: AOL is getting into weblogs?

A: In a way, we’ve had them for a while. A few years ago, in our Digital City area, we called them “comment boards.” Type your thoughts, click a button, and they’re published sequentially on the page. It was essentially the same thing as blogging, only it was a group environment rather than one author publishing to many readers. So yes, we’re looking at that type of environment for members to publish in.

Weblogs, over the last several years, have migrated to replace, in some cases, people’s home pages. It’s natural that the blog and the home page would combine. And when you remember that AOL has the largest collection of home pages in the world, it kinda gets interesting.

Very, very interesting indeed…

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Well, the Airport connection wasn’t working inside the main hall at Moscone Center in San Francisco, where Steve Jobs gave his keynote speech for the Macworld show. Jobs’s famous Reality Distortion Field was on high beam, however.

Actually, I don’t mean that as cruelly as it sounded. Apple did introduce some very cool new products — two in particular, the new iMacs and the iPhoto software package — so the event was certainly worth attending. I predict major success for the highest-end iMac in particular, and iPhoto solves problems that amateur digital photographers never realized they had.

But Jobs’ speech didn’t come close to matching the pre-show hype, which was fed not just by the rumor sites but by Apple itself.

The hype came thudding to earth when Time magazine’s Canadian-edition Web site put up the story on Sunday afternoon. You have to hand it to Apple, though, getting millions in free advertising from Time for products that simply don’t deserve it. The Time cover story, coming on the heels of the ridiculous naming of Rudy Giuliani as “Person of the Year,” would embarrass people at AOL Time Warner if they had a better-developed sense of journalistic shame.

Again, this isn’t to say that Jobs’ announcements were entirely vapid. There’s at least some meat on those bones.

The new iMac is beautiful industrial design, no doubt about it. And the most expensive model, which like others comes with an LCD flat screen, also boasts the “Superdrive” DVD recorder and lots of power (G4, 60G hard disk, etc.). At $1,800 it’s a deal. I’ve ordered one.

I’m wondering, at the same time, how Apple expects to keep selling the much more expensive G4 tower models once these iMacs hit the street. Yes, there’s more expansion potential in the PowerMac, and you can run a bigger monitor off of it. But I have to believe the new iMacs could cannibalize sales of the tower machines — unless the widely rumored G5 tower models are just around the corner. Pure speculation, of course.

The bigger iBook didn’t do much for me, though some users will crave the larger screen. I hope they’ve made the keyboard better.

iPhoto, the image software, is a great product, period. It’s free for the download from Apple’s Web site, but I’d pay for it. For amateur photographers this will be a godsend — an easy way to get pictures onto disk drives, sort and edit the pictures and then publish them to paper, the Web, in a book, you name it. This is Apple at its finest.

There are some things I’d like to see in the software, including a slider that let you change the image density and see how it will look on a Web page at higher or lower density and size. Avie Tevanian, head of software at Apple, told me this is on the list for the next version.

But there was no iWalk, the rumored PDA. No G5 desktop. No wireless breakthrough. In short, there was not enough to justify the massive come-on suggesting a revolution.

What we got was good enough in any other atmosphere. Still, reality distortion eventually has its costs.