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NPR's David Folkenflick reported Friday on the continuing campaign to change basic cable TV from flat-rate to "a la carte" pricing. He explained Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin's efforts as an attempt to impose conservative "family values" restrictions on cable, removing from basic services anything that might offend.

In the "strange bedfellows" department, left-leaning filmmaker Robert Greenwald also wants the FCC to do away with flat-rate basic cable. Again, it's an effort to get rid of "offensive" content; in this case it's Fox News.

As I've said before, unbundling basic cable is a bad idea. A la carte subscription models will not work. Cable TV makes for a clumsy, ineffective marketplace. In order for a marketplace to work, consumers need to know what's available. This requires an ability to examine and consider and sample. A la carte pricing would place such a barrier between consumers and content that people would never discover long-tail, niche and fringe content. Serendipitous discovery? Fuggetaboutit.

Consumers have a strong preference for flat-rate pricing, especially in telecommunications. Internet access has gone from metered by the minute to "all you can eat." Ditto for long distance. Under pressure from consumers and competition, even the mobile phone services are moving to flat-rate in areas such as text messaging or in-network calling.

People don't want cable unbundling. The real backers of a la carte pricing have political motivations, on one side or another, and those motivations have no business being injected into the cable regulatory process.

I don't need a la carte pricing in order for me to make up my own mind about what I want to watch.

Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook is being interpreted (by the AP, among others) as placing a $15 billion value on the whole operation.

This is silly for a number of fairly obvious reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that Microsoft isn't trying to buy Facebook, but rather has other objectives in mind.

Anyone who has watched Microsoft for any amount of time knows the pattern: Partner, learn, copy, crush.

For an amount that (for Microsoft) is essentially chump change, it gets an inside view into a process that it desperately needs to understand so that it can adapt its other business processes to the new realities introduced by social networking.

This is a completely different play than Rupert Murdoch's purchase of Myspace, and in no way does it project to a $15 billion valuation of Facebook as a whole.

While reading coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse this morning, I was reminded how, on the Internet, all the world's media resources are just one click away, which is a boon for consumers but creates a difficult environment for producers, who now have to compete with everything at once.

Quite a few comments on the New York Times website were from Minnesotans. "It has been surreal to view images of a place one block away from where I live," wrote one. "My house is about seven blocks from the bridge that collapsed," reported another. "The bridge literally collapsed about two blocks from my apartment. I had gone over the bridge just an hour before it collapsed," wrote a third. Several people posted links to resources on startribune.com.

I drove across that bridge just about every work day for nearly 14 years. There were questions raised about its structural integrity in the early 1990s. I can remember an inspection-and-repair unit that hung off the side of the bridge for months. The bridge is just downstream from a dam that kicks up mist (creating a chronic ice problem in the winter), and like all reinforced concrete structures in Minnesota, it's had problems with road salt that seeps into the concrete and attacks the rebar.

I've long argued that gatekeeping is dead and that our new role is more akin to that of a guide, pointing out both truth and falsehood in a rich and open bazaar of information.

Today David Leonhardt of the New York Times plays that role as he takes on CNN's poseur-defender of the middle class, Lou Dobbs, citing his "somewhat flexible relationship with reality" and his habit of giving "airtime to white supremacy sympathizers," and declaring that "the problem with Mr. Dobbs" is not that he mixes fact and opinion, but "that he mixes opinion and untruths." Pointing to actual government health data, he debunks Dobbs' claim that "The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans."

But it is worth considering that this debunking of Dobbs has been going on for weeks as an assortment of bloggers, activists and even Stephen Colbert fact-check Dobbs and find him wanting.

What's happening is an aspect of the general democratization of journalism. In a world where anyone can publish, anyone can step into the role of watchdog, if only for a brief moment. On those occasions where supposed professional journalists slip into the role of uninformed opinionmonger, we need that.

I haven't posted much lately due to a heavy work/travel schedule ending in several days of vacation in Istanbul. At the moment I'm burning some time in an expat bar near the Sultan Ahmet mosque. My plane leaves at 5 a.m., so I'm closing down the bars and not bothering with a hotel tonight.

So here I am at the junction of Europe and Asia -- literally, the Bosphorus straits -- in a modern city full of wi-fi connections, mobile telephones, and a rapidly increasing standard of living. Satellite TV. Slick new trams. A booming city with a population somewhere between 10 and 15 million people, maybe half again as large as New York.

This is the former Ottoman empire, the former Byzantine empire, a former capital of the Roman empire. Today it is a land with ambitions of sealing the breach between East and West, the Islamic world and the Christian-dominated world, a "joining of the great civilizations" as they say, by becoming a member of the European Union.

It is a place where the burqa and belly dancing coexist, a passionately secular state in an Islamic region. (Mass demonstrations last weekend supported a strong separation of state and religion.) It borders on Greece and Bulgaria on the European side; Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia and Georgia on the Asian side.

In the background, the Clash are on the entertainment system: "Rocking the Casbah."

Half a dozen blocks away there's a labyrinth of shops all organized by craft: Metal workers. Makers of tools to work metal. Button sellers. Shoe stores.

In a world where information was scarce, it was important to cluster such vendors physically.

That's the past.

The present, as always, is a mix of past and future.

Some of us have the entire World Wide Web at our fingertips through ubiquitous free wi-fi connections. Here in Istanbul we have the Aya Sofia, just around the corner, constructed 532 to 537, common era. We have "honor killings" and we have women delivering the TV news. (Keep in mind that women simply did not anchor U.S. newscasts before 1970.)

The future? It's a place where the gross inequities are narrowed. When information is easily available everywhere, when bandwidth is nearly free, information-based jobs can exist anywhere as well. And jobs that depend on information -- isn't that pretty much most of them? -- are liberated from many of the constraints of geography.

For a few this may mean some pain and loss; for the many, it is a gain. It means a happier and healthier human race.

It has been a good trip. I'll be flying home in a few hours, more optimistic than I've felt in quite awhile.

I was struck by Susan Elliott Sim's posting on Slashdot titled "No more coding from Scratch?" To me, the responses seemed to scatter far from the mark. We are reaching a point where the rules of technology development shift at a fundamental level.

This has a direct bearing on those of us working in media, as technology and media are now deeply interconnected. I'll illustrate some of the implications of that.

Many years ago, I learned to code in C. I had a home computer that didn't have any software, but I got my hands on a compiler. Some of my local online friends helped me learn. They were developers who worked for tech companies such as Unisys, Control Data and the Minnesota Supercomputer Center.

One of the things they taught me is that coders live to code. Every one of them had a project in the hopper that involved reinventing the wheel in some way -- writing their own text editors, writing their own command shells, even hacking the compiler and libraries. Creating a better text editor might happen -- but it would be a byproduct. The real product was the joy of wrestling with code. Some people build ships in bottles. Some people reinvent wheels.

There are two ways this applies to us. One has to do with technology; the other is more about journalism.

As we media people build Internet services, we have to employ technogeeks (and sometimes we become technogeeks). Over and over I've seen the pattern repeated:

Webtech gets hired. Webtech disses all existing technology. Webtech sets about to change everything. Webtech writes his own content management system. Webtech then leaves voluntarily, or gets fired for being a twit. Newspaper is now stuck with an unsupportable platform. The next webtech immediately sets out to change everything.

Rinse, repeat. What did we really gain? Nothing. Webtech isn't really interested in our goals; webtech is a victim of Maslow's Hammer: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

But just as the webtech is more interested in pounding code than the social and business value we're supposed to be creating, so are we cursed in our newsrooms.

Reporters live to report. Photographers live for the image. Editors love to edit, the process of redacting and combining and producing the good old product.

Periodically we declare it's time to redesign, which turns into a huge project in which all the deck chairs on the Titanic are reupholstered. We reinvent the newspaper only to emerge with ... the newspaper, even if it may be online instead of in print.

Open the doors? Invite the public into the process? Oh, that quickly turns into "citizen journalism." Get the public to pound the same old nails.

But now the rules are being rewritten in ways that impact both the codehead and the reporter.

Vernor Vinge's notion of the "programmer archaeologist" really is about discovering what's already out there, and placing it into valuable context. The mashup, the journalist-blogger and the participative website are aligned with this concept; the traditional requirements-driven "software engineer" and the traditional newspaper journalist are not.

The open-source movement is changing everything about technology. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP-Perl-Python, Rail, Django, Drupal, AJAX, JSON, REST interfaces and open APIs mean the developer's real challenge is to keep up with what's already out there and rearrange it in ways that add value. It's a different skillset and ultimately all about people and their needs much more than it's about computers and code.

What does that tell us about doing journalism in a networked world where everyone can be, and eventually will be, a publisher?

Over at pbs.org, Mark Glaser takes a look at the history and various labels applied to so-called citizen journalism. None of them seem to fit, making me wonder if we need to admit that these furry, warm-blooded, neocortex-driven reptiles need some other name.

Mammalian or not, I'll be at the Newsplex in Columbia, SC, meeting with a Portuguese media group, and at J-Lab's "Citizens Media Summit II" this week to talk about it. And I'll be attending the Online News Association conference Friday and Saturday as well.