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“Cookies�, we know, are double-edged. They and many more forms of electronic tagging have proliferated throughout our digital communications, and one unavoidable consequence, to many people’s dismay, is the trackability of just about every move we make in today’s digital environment.

It means that Microsoft and AOL can give the government details on websurfers visiting juvenile porn sites (and other information, too, not always evidence of criminal behavior). Google, meanwhile, has tried to resist such cooperation. It also means that the National Security Agency can use the “Echelon� tracking program and others to home in on those of us who might be using suspicious, potentially terrorism-related keywords in our email or phone conversations.

On the more positive side, it’s becoming true that for every development in the internet-frenzied universe, there will doubtless follow an upsurge of watchdogs over that development. The striking transformation of the world’s buying-and-selling life ushered in by eBay has brought its share of fraudulent scams, but it has also encouraged interesting new e-commerce entities whose effect is to closely monitor online auctioneers, and help to correct excesses.

For example a web TV show, AuctionBytes.TV now tracks the world of eBay and its myriad progeny and imitators. It’s part of an originally text-only service, AuctionBytes.com, started in 1999 by Ina Steiner, author of “Turn eBay Data into Dollars� from publishers McGraw Hill, and her husband David Steiner.

The resources of such small business are limited of course. While the Steiners can promise (as their current edition does) a survey of customer discontent with payment methods on eBay, it has been left to Big Media – the New York Times in fact – to do the really heavy lifting in auction scrutiny. With reporter Katie Hafner garnering more than a year’s-worth of detailed information, the Sunday Business section was able to expose the egregious level now achieved in online auctions by old-fashioned chicanery – like phony collectible costume jewelry being passed off on eBay as the real thing, even fake Tiffany stuff.

One of Murdoch’s more lurid properties, the New York Post, has been acting a little out of character, in covering what is usually the most lurid kind of story – the terrible killing of seven year-old Nixzmary Brown in Brooklyn.

With a somewhat jaundiced eye I’ve watched mass media swing into pretty thoughtless action over battered children for more than twenty years. The watch began when I spent 20-something months close-quartered with social services staff, making a TV series that highlighted their usually hardworking and well-intentioned, but also too-often doomed, efforts to protect such children. With Nixmary’s death there was the usual “hound ‘em, shame ‘em, fire ‘em� approach to social workers from much of the press and electronic media. Even the normally sober National Public Radio gave in, I felt, to the common knee-jerk reactions.

In the Post, however, although Nixzmary’s unbearable story was inevitably presented with tabloid shock and horror, there was also a real attempt, in a strongly-reported story by reporters Liz Kelley and Susan Edelman, to show how such gut-wrenching tragedies can all too easily happen — and what staggering sets of obstacles confront the workers whose job is to prevent them.

For a man running one of the world’s biggest communications corporations, Rupert Murdoch appears oddly loath to communicate, in public at least. He rarely does media interviews, and limits his open-forum business appearances to the minimum necessary under rules of company governance. His last performance before shareholders in London, which I reported on – where he was provoked into an undignified table-pounding, caustic yelling match with his critics – may offer a possible reason for his reticence.

But one rare chance for the public to hear Murdoch at first hand has come with a BBC radio appearance (January 22nd, 2006) – on a light-flavored domestic service of “The Beebâ€? known as “Five Liveâ€?, later carried by the corporation’s World Service. Conventional media coverage of the interview gave us headlines that concentrated on Murdoch’s disenchantment with the Tony Blair government, even though he helped Blair come to power.

Less reported but worthy of notice were his predictions for the media industry’s future. They indicate just where his global giant, News Corporation is headed.

Murdoch gave entirely predictable assurances that his old-media companies would not be overtaken in the internet age. He claimed indeed that “we’re on the eve of a golden era�, on the grounds that “all these wonderful inventions� (meaning the kind of revolutionary digital delivery systems he’d just seen at the Las Vegas International Consumer Electronics Show) “are nothing if you can’t put something on them. They’ve got to have content – and that’s what our business is, reporting news and creating entertainment�.

Murdoch also seemed focused, as has often been his M.O., on the mid-term more than short-term. While acknowledging that broadband internet access is currently available to an audience of “at most� 200 million people worldwide, he predicted that “in twenty years’ time everyone in the world’s gonna be able to get broadband�. I wonder if he really meant “everyone�. But I am sure he’s right in saying, as he did: “It’ll be a vast market for successful creators of popular content�.

The interview contained a priceless moment of dissonance when Murdoch, in this new, enthusiastic role of digital visionary (he’s a recent convert, after all, last year calling himself a “digital immigrantâ€? – possibly an Australian joke) bumped into Old Media’s old-style incomprehension. The Chief Executive was waxing lyrical about his acquisition of the US-based MySpace.com, which he described as “an extraordinary thingâ€?. He was gushing about it as “a community site for young peopleâ€?, whose subscribers had grown from 24 million to 50 million in the half-year since he bought it for $580 million. MySpace was, he continued, “going like a fire – people talking to each other, making friends, sharing interestsâ€?, when suddenly the BBC interviewer Jeff Randall interrupted with: “How do you make money out of that?â€? A stunned split-second of silence followed – and then Murdoch’s scornfully obvious answer: “Selling advertisingâ€?.

Just keystroke “lobbying� or “lobbyist� into a Google, Yahoo or MSN search box these days and you’ll find your results list is topped with page-titles like “Lobbyist case threatens Congress� and “Fraud lobbyist pleads guilty�. And we can be pretty sure this owes nothing to Jack Abramoff hiring the services of a search engine optimization company.

It’s just that those particular keywords have become, in these politically cynical times, inseparably associated with felonious behavior in high places.

Words being the basic building blocks of all communication, I find it rewarding to reflect on the origins of any specialist vocabulary or professional jargon – and never more so than when, as now, a word starts to carry newly-strengthened (and especially criminalized) connotations.

“Lobbying� in fact has a venerable, even rather gentlemanly provenance. I’ve been reminded of its origins by Washington’s storied Willard Hotel, now celebrating twenty years of being reopened for business. This longtime resort of the powerful, or merely influential, suffered an ignominious closure when riots scarred the capital’s downtown area in the 1960s. But before that the hotel’s proud history dated back uninterruptedly to 1853.

Ulysses S. Grant (President from 1869 to 1877) was fond, after a not-too-long day’s work in the White House, of enjoying a brandy and cigar over at the Willard, just a brisk walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was there, in the hotel lobby, that subtler petitioners became adept at claiming Grant’s attention – when his guard was perhaps a bit down, compared at least with when he was ensconced at his official workplace.

Hence the noun “lobby� became a verb. Sadly, a verb that is now often more vilified than valued.

Convergence remains an inescapable media buzzword. And almost every kind of linkage between two once-separate media modes, such as the web and traditional TV, can also become a busy two-way street. For instance, Yahoo may be taking a TV show to the fresher territory of the net, but search engines are also on their way back toward the old familiar television screen.

January 2006’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas saw the roll-out of Yahoo Go TV, designed to enable users with computer-connected television sets to conduct video searches over their TVs, and then of course watch the sought-after programming on a big screen – after, that is, downloading Yahoo’s dedicated application to their PCs. For its part, Google announced the Google Video Store, a service similar to iTunes but with video mainly from, in the first instance, CBS shows like “CSIâ€?. More substantial TV inroads were expected from Google later in the season.

A new venue is imminent for a freshly-developed “reality� TV series. Significantly the venue is not on television.

Instead, look for the show – called “The Runnerâ€? – on a computer screen near you, courtesy of Yahoo!

Some years ago Live Planet, the “integrated media� company founded by actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck that originated “Project Greenlight� on HBO and then Bravo, brought the “Runner� concept to ABC. The network warmed to it for quite a while, and then cooled completely.

Now independent producer Mark Burnett – to whom we are all eternally indebted for “Survivorâ€? on CBS, and the way it helped to transform mainstream network fare – is collaborating with Live Planet, and leaning heavily on Yahoo!’s interactivity systems, in order to make the series work on computers and PDAs.

The essential idea is that an anonymous runner attempts to make it through a prearranged journey across part of America, without being detected by a viewing public that is encouraged to find him or her. (In its original barebones story, the notion carries echoes of that seminal late-sixties movie “The Swimmerâ€?, from a story by John Cheever – with Burt Lancaster running and swimming his way across suburban Connecticut, pool by pool.)

We the viewers get hints online about the runner’s whereabouts and identity, and if we successfully make a “capture� we win a sizeable bounty. That’s the theory anyway. Nobody in the three companies involved is talking about it on the record, but I understand we may expect “The Runner� to debut in the Spring of 2006.

Even bigger in influence than iTunes, of course ( – and earlier on the scene) was Napster, whose upheaval in music distribution become so huge a threat to the established recording industry that – amid the sturm und drang of legal suits – Napster’s free file-sharing operation was closed down.

Now Napster’s legacy lives on in a transmuted way – providing a interesting and apparently popular service, though of dubious legality.

Rescuing forgotten recordings, previously available only on antique vinyl, has become a mission for many enthusiasts. Commercial organizations are uninterested in such conservation – except in so far as they can market re-issues to nostalgic baby boomers. (Can there really be hordes of buyers for a boxed collection of 1960s girl-groups, called “One Kiss Can Lead to Another�? Rhino Records in the Warner Music Group seems to think so.)

But enthusiasts for America’s musical history exist in all age-groups. Blue Note Records’ unexpected recent success with a CD of the Thelonius Monk Jazz Quartet joined by John Coltrane’s in a classic 1957 Carnegie Hall concert far exceeded the predictable boomer demographic.

Increasingly music lovers, and especially the younger ones, are declining to wait for copyright holders to respond to this more arcane kind of demand. They are, in a style reminiscent of Napster, now sharing MP3 downloads of forgotten LPs and 45s (do those letters and numbers mean anything anymore?) across the ’net, and also posting them on specific websites devoted to abandoned music. VinylOrphange.com is one such example of what are becoming known as “sharity� sites. It proclaims a motto: “Many have fallen. None are forgotten�.

There’s just one possible problem – one that recalls the unhappier ghosts of Napster. File-sharers know that federal law only protects the copyright owner of recordings made after 1972. But earlier recordings are not automatically safe territory. They are covered by state and common law copyright, and such laws do not have expiration dates.

“Small is beautiful�. That’s a favorite of headline-writers when it comes to stories about small businesses. But small businesses themselves have rarely found small payments very beautiful. Your local corner store would always have a minimum of $20 or so before letting you use your credit card, wouldn’t it?

The “new� media are changing all that. The commercial communications revolution ushered in by Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and his iTunes online music store, selling each music file for 99 cents, is rushing onward and upward.

Small e-commerce payments – that is typically less than two dollars – are now, because of their rapid mushrooming in volume, piling up as enormous totals. A recent survey conducted by the market research outfit Ipsos showed that in the United States 19 million people made a $2 or less purchase online this last year, up from only half that number in 2004.

Also in 2004, a vast Internet-led transformation was just beginning to affect political as well as commercial finances. Howard Dean owes his current position as Democratic National Committee Chairman in large part to his remarkable campaign (albeit a failed effort ultimately, for more old fashioned reasons of political clumsiness) to be the party’s Presidential choice. It was a campaign distinguished by its money-wise use of the web.

Dean’s campaign manager, the Silicon Valley-born Joe Trippi, and his Internet Director, the wonderfully named Zephyr Teachout astonished traditional politicos at the time with the momentum they built up. Not only did they revitalize issue-campaigning by adopting the techniques of internet social networking (employing the then-fledgling service Meetup.com) and engaging in coordinated blogging blitzes, they also set a new record for political fundraising. In the third quarter of 2003 they raked in something like $15 million – unheard of for a Democratic candidate in a single quarter, and garnered mostly in small donations dispatched with a mouseclick.

As Dean spearheads this year’s attempt by the Dems to take back the US Senate (and with House Republicans in such disarray, maybe make inroads into GOP control of Capitol Hill’s other side as well) we can expect small online payments – but many of them – to be an energizing principle of the campaign.

Credit card companies are certainly expecting so, anyway. Whether it’s in politics or business, or both – the country’s card-issuers stand to win, and they are repositioning themselves accordingly in 2006.

Visa, for example, already charges a comparatively low fee of just 1.65% to those merchants who it expects to generate mainly small payments, and who it doesn’t require to gather customers’ signatures on those payments (essentially, charges under $15). They plan soon to substantially increase the size of that favored list.
It’s more evidence that small really is beautiful, so long as it adds up to big.