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This is one of those columns that will piss-off some of my geekier readers. They’ll complain that I am covering this subject at all, they will declare me dead or at least too stupid to be worth reading, and they will claim to be departing Cringelyville never to return. Frankly, I don’t give a damn. And it is important that I not give a damn, because that’s what freedom of the press is all about. This column concerns a particularly damning story about Goldman Sachs, the big Wall Street bank, that is available online now from the Rolling Stone. But I’m not so interested here in Goldman, or even in our ongoing global financial nightmare: I am fascinated by the fact that the story is in Rolling Stone and not in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.

This is not liberal media bias or conservative media bias, it is simple dollars and cents — the inevitable economic pressures that are felt in any media organization that relies on advertising for revenue. If you went to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times they’d tell you there is a wall between “church and state” as it is sometimes referred to in the newspaper business — a wall that keeps ad salesmen from calling reporters and ostensibly gives the news side carte blanche to follow stories wherever they go, no matter who they annoy.

Except that usually isn’t the way it works in real life.

Read the Rolling Stone piece. It is one of a series of long stories about the financial crisis in that magazine from writer Matt Taibbi — stories that paint a scathing and foul-mouthed picture of corporate greed, especially at Goldman Sachs. In this particular installment the writer makes a strong argument that Goldman executives should be in prison. And he’s probably correct.

Why isn’t this story in the Wall Street Journal, minus the cuss words? Why isn’t it in the New York Times? Will something like it ever be in either of those papers? Probably not. And I write this freely admitting that I like the New York Times and I think the Wall Street Journal often does a pretty good job with its technology coverage.

As Deep Throat said, “Follow the money.”

I first noticed this media syndrome as a child reading airplane magazines. I came from a flying family and airplanes have been part of my life all my life, so I grew up reading Flying, and AOPA Pilot, and Sport Aviation. And I noticed that when those magazines reviewed a new airplane they hardly ever said anything bad about it. Yet a few years later, when they covered the same airplane as something you might buy used, it was as though they were flying a completely different machine. The very same writers were suddenly pointing-out “chronic problems” in a plane that might be “something of a dog.”

Airplane manufacturers don’t run ads for their old models, just the new ones. And used aircraft are competition for new ones so it is in the manufacturer’s economic interest for journalists to like the new stuff but not like the older stuff. And that’s how it seemed to play.

So I became, at 12, a media cynic.

Jann Wenner owns Rolling Stone which he founded during the Summer of Love when I was 15. He can publish these stories that don’t appear — and will probably never appear — in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times mainly because his business is radically different from their businesses. Rolling Stone doesn’t look to Citibank or Morgan Stanley for advertising. And Jann Wenner has nobody to report to except himself. Like me, he doesn’t give a damn.  Those other papers have shareholders and boards of directors that inevitably create a cesspool of interests and intrigue no matter what the church-versus-state rules are supposed to be.

This is not to say that the Journal and the Times won’t jump on this story at some point, but that point will carefully be after it is already too late. If Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein goes to jail, those papers will cover it, not predict it, and they certainly won’t make it happen. At best they’ll carefully explain the story after the fact.

If this was an equivalent crisis in the music business, would Jann Wenner cover that as zealously and risk offending his own advertiser base? I hope so, but maybe not.

We’re in the middle of a global trend toward media consolidation so what I decry here is only going to get worse. Against it our best hope isn’t Wenner — though he is for the moment my hero — it is the blogosphere, the edge of which you are touching right now. Longtime readers will recall dozens of pretty darned big stories of technological bullying and badness that were covered right here and often nowhere else. When I was beating the crap out of Microsoft over Burst.com, for example, reporters from Big Media kept saying to me, “I wish we could write stories like that.”

What was stopping them?

As the blogosphere evolves, my worry is that whatever independent voice or impact we have will be lost. I fear that the Huffington Post, for example, will be less useful to society as part of AOL than it was before.

Consolidation breeds mediocrity. What we need, then, are better ways to disseminate both information and opinion. The search engines can’t do it, or won’t. Google News won’t index this rag, for example, so what good is it? Is Google for searching or finding? More on that tomorrow.

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After this week’s Google/Microsoft column appeared in the New York Times, I got a message from an old friend, Rohit Khare, that sparked some thinking about our vulnerability as individuals when our data is held in the cloud — somebody else’s cloud.  How do we save it, get it back, destroy it? Given the recent case of Facebook hanging-on to old user data essentially forever, this is not just a theoretical concern.

“’Cancellation on a whim’ is a key insight,” wrote Rohit.  “After all, with desktop software you at least had the right to keep using what you wanted, as long as you kept the old hardware/software/OS running — I know of mission-critical custom apps still running on Win98!”

“SaaS (Software as a Service) for businesses may have SOME rights, but consumer services leave you completely out in the cold, and are unavailable afterwards at ANY price.”

Well Rohit, whom I met when he was an undergraduate at CalTech, who later earned a PhD from UC Irvine, and has worked for both the World Wide Web Consortium and some startups, ought to know, but I find myself wondering if, in fact, we really ARE out of luck when our SaaS vendor packs it in?

Say your favorite web-based application is suddenly unavailable because the group that wrote it has disbanded, are you truly SOL, those embarrassing pictures of your old girlfriends gone forever?  Today I’d say “yes,” unless you’ve made a heroic effort to save the data in some database or file system that is unlikely to be compatible with the original application. No vendor I am familiar with has created an end-of-life (EOL) migration tool, though they certainly could.  What we need is an API and I am here to propose one.

If web- and cloud-based application software is here to stay (it is) then there will inevitably be backup and EOL issues as platforms and companies die or are acquired.  The best way to handle this in my view is for the Internet Archive to propose an Application Programming Interface to handle data migration and preservation issues for obsolete web applications and services.

I think there is nothing Brewster Kahle, the Archive’s founder, would like better than to preserve for posterity such code and associated data.

Imagine a social network app that would continue to work after death, at least to the extent that members could retrieve (or destroy) their own information.

The problem with this idea, of course, is that this also creates a very attractive interface for hackers and thugs.  But I have an answer to that, too.  What we need is the digital equivalent of one of those envelopes characters sometimes leave in books and movies — an envelope inevitably labeled “to be opened in the event of my death.”

Participating organizations would store compressed and encrypted versions of their data with the Internet Archive, where they would be held in an inactive state but updated frequently.  Then, in the event of that outfit’s death, the digital envelope would be opened, revealing a decryption key and enough application code to get a vanilla version of the original net app up and running.  It would, as archives are intended to do, preserve the final state of the application as well as its final data.

This is going to be a big problem in the future .  I suggest we think about it now.

Meanwhile, back to Rohit, whose new company is called Ångströ.  Two obscure punctuation marks in a single name tell me this is a company to spelled with. Ångströ apparently creates real time notifications when specific data changes in social network applications, creating a kind of cross-platform news feed about you or anyone else you happen to be stalking.  Cool.

Everything Rohit is involved with is interesting.  His threaded discussion group, Friends of Rohit Khare (FoRK) has been around for more than a decade and has long offered some of the most interesting (and funniest) examinations of technology news on the Net.  It is now an age-restricted group on Yahoo.

Rohit does everything his own way.  When he was still an undergraduate I employed Rohit and his business partner Adam Rifkin as consultants, bringing them to Japan to make a presentation to a major client.  The trip was L.A. to Tokyo and back but Rohit and Adam parsed the United Airlines routes until they found a way to get to Tokyo for the same money by going around the world FIRST CLASS, earning quadruple frequent flier miles in the process.  The boys arrived on schedule though lubricated the entire way with Johnny Walker Blue Label.

We dried them out a bit and their presentation was boffo.

A couple times per year the New York Times calls me up asking for an Op-Ed column on some technology topic.  I don’t know how they found me but I’ve been writing these pieces since 1995.  I think they call because I’m good at meeting tight deadlines.  Lord knows that if there was a piece I actually wanted to get in the Times (my idea, not theirs) I have no confidence that I could get them to run it.  Op-Ed at the Times — at least to me — is a sort of black box.

Here’s the column they asked for on Google’s Chrome OS: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html

The opinions expressed, as always, are ruthlessly my own.