news corp and myspace and money, oh my!

i'm traveling this week, so i take work breaks by blogging in the hotel room...

first, I'm very happy for Liz who had baby Sage while i was off the grid. Penelope's book also arrived while i was away, and i'm looking forward to reading it - the first glance impressed me.

i noticed that (liberal) huff post is sounding the alarm that (conservative) news corp will be able to track political donations via its myspace subsidiary. campaigns indeed rely on myspace as a solicitation platform.

the fact that this huge company has this information isn't particularly distressing to me -- campaign contributions are public information anyway. the fact that they leverage their web presence and the communities that frequent it to enhance their own stature as "bundlers" is also not surprising. That's what Jerome does. it's what all the big beltway blogs do. If you have a problem with it, Jerome says stop whining. The difference is, I think, Jerome doesn't necessarily have a list of his contributors. (Perhaps I'm naive about this, but i don't think he collects this and may not have the capacity to do so.)

the question that remains unanswered for now: will they compile this information and what will they do with it? News Corp is for-profit. the raw data is public, but it takes resources to compile in a meaningful way, and News Corp will be able to do it quickly. such a list is unquestionably an asset with real financial value. should a for-profit company decline the opportunity to profit from compiling public information? should they restrain themselves from providing their assets to political candidates they deem favorable? Sure, they'd have to report the in-kind, but so what?

and will we now see dems decide they have to boycott myspace since it's owned by news corp? will facebook become the networking site of dems now? (Brad tells me facebook is more robust anyway.)

i think the nugget that SHOULD be raising eyebrows is the absolutely mind-boggling amount of information the government, companies and organizations can strategically compile. we're now adding a record of political contributions to the staggering amount of data that's available on just about any American...

... like your prescriptions.