Mere days after Wikipedia put up its new and improved plea for donations, the company has already met its goal of raising $6 million. The campaign, headed up by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, asked users to dig deep into their pockets and couch cushions to help the Wikimedia Foundation keep the site running. Now that the organization has met its goal, Wales has posted an update saying that the lights will be kept on through the remainder of the fiscal year (until June 30, 2009).

In the letter, Wales says that 125,000 individuals have donated since July 2008, totaling $4 million in personal donations. The foundation has also received "major gifts" to the tune of $2 million. The money will go towards server costs, bandwidth, and 23 staff members, as well as the development of open source software, outreach events, and other volunteer work.

In a statement sent via e-mail, the Wikimedia foundation said that this year's campaign has been the most ambitious yet, and that after Wales' plea was posted to the website just before Christmas, a "surge of more than 50,000 contributions" came in, closing the gap towards the $6 million goal.

Jimmy Wales thanks you

Of course, even though the organization is funded for another six months doesn't mean it wants people to stop donating. "Any donations beyond our $6 million goal are put in a reserve fund, which will help us to offset operating costs beyond the current fiscal year," wrote Wales. "Your continued support will also serve as a much-needed financial safety net if economic conditions continue to worsen globally."

It's heartwarming to know that the global online community is helping out a mainstay of the Internet by donating, though some critics still believe the Wikimedia foundation should consider running ads on the site—an option that the organization has been adamantly against for some time now.

There are also others who believe that Wikipedia has especially high administrative costs, but Wales insisted in a recent e-mail to Ars that this is not true. "We are an astoundingly effective charity with a tiny budget," Wales told Ars. "The idea that our budget is 'bloated' is ludicrous—we run the 4th most popular website in the world for $6 million a year."

While donations have been slower to pour in this year at places like National Public Radio, Wikipedia has clearly shown that its users truly are what keeps the site alive, both financially and through their volunteer efforts.

Since the humbling results of the November election came in, the conservative movement has been scrambling to assess what happened—and to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Much of this effort, in light of the Obama campaign's much ballyhooed online operation, has focused on closing the technology gap with the left, and getting conservative candidates and activists to make better use of new media. Hence we see sites like Top Conservatives on Twitter, meant to publicize co-partisans on the popular microblogging service and encourage others to sign up. 

The most prominent of the restructuring efforts, though, is Rebuild the Party, brainchild of a group of Republican online strategists who are pushing the idea that adapting to the Internet must be the GOP's top priority over the next four years. They're proposing an ambitious goal of recruiting 5 million new online activists and insisting on a new openness that better integrates distributed grassroots efforts. In the past week, RedState founder Erick Erickson has laid out some more detailed advice to his fellow conservatives—heartily seconded by The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini.

There are plenty of good ideas here, and this is clearly an area where the right needs to make up ground. We now know that strategists on McCain's team actually proposed taking advantage of text-messaging, but were shot down because the idea seemed "undignified." We also know, via the folks who model the blogosphere with an array of sophisticated statistical tools, that there was a lot of grassroots writing and activism going on that never got well intergrated into the And as I reported the other day, Barack Obama is looking at a huge advantage in supporters who are connected, and ready to push his agenda, on the Internet.  It's absolutely true that they've got to play serious catch-up on this front.

But while Nancy Scola at TechPresident lauds Ruffini for avoiding "tool fetishism"—for recognizing that adapting to the Net is more about embracing a certain culture and worldview than about exploiting any particular gadget or social networking site—I wonder whether there isn't a broader technofetishism at work here.  It's not that they shouldn't be thinking about how to do online organizing as well as the Obama team did, but at times the impulse to focus on modernizing tactics and strategy makes me think of the Microsoft execs convinced that the right ad campaign will finally convince people they love Vista. 

Conservatism has much bigger problems right now than a paucity of Twitter skills. (I say this, for what it's worth, as someone who's often classified as part of the broad "right," my frequent criticisms of this administration notwithstanding.) Front and center is that the end of the Cold War and a governing party that made "small government" a punchline has left it very much unclear what, precisely, "conservatism" means. The movement was always a somewhat uneasy coalition of market enthusiasts and social traditionalists, defined at least as much by what (and who) they opposed as by any core common principles. The Palin strategy—recapturing that oppositional unity by rebranding the GOP as the party of cultural ressentiment—is just a recipe for a death spiral. Conservatives don't need to figure out how to promote conservatism on Facebook; they need to figure out what it is they're promoting. To the extent that a new media strategy is part of opening up that conversation, great, but it had better not become a substitute for engaging in some of that painful introspection.

That brings us to Erickson's essay, about which I wanted to say a few more specific things. First, I understand all too well why he insists on getting outside the beltway and talking to technologists rather than political operatives who know a little tech.  Washington is absolutely crawling with snake-oil salesmen who've discovered that you can make a tidy living extracting cash from credulous politicos who didn't learn anything from the last dot-com bubble, provided you're able to sling Web 2.0 jargon passably. "Go outside the beltway" is probably a decent heuristic for anyone who isn't confident they can spot the hucksters.

That said, its worth noting that the folks on the left Erickson acknowledges as models actually tend to be people with political backgrounds who learned some tech, not the opposite. Joe Rospars, Eli Pariser, and Markos Moulistas all have degrees in political science, not computer science.  Obviously, to the extent you're developing your own proprietary tools, you need some people with serious kung fu on your team. But that's probably not the bulk of what a tech strategy is actually going to involve. Especially if you're talking about exploiting social media, a big part of the task is leveraging tools other people have built without any particular partisan agenda. That means thinking of innovative ways to think and use existing tech more than rolling out your own redundant ideologically-branded version of a popular site. (Cf. Conservapedia.)

Moreover, you're still fundamentally doing political organizing. Part of what made Obama's vaunted online operation succeed where Howard Dean's fizzled—and this is something his online people themselves always stress—was that it was an organic component of the broader brick-and-mortar campaign.The core skill set here is still political: What you need are people who know enough tech to understand how the different tools can work with each other, and with more traditional tactics, toward the ultimately non-technical goal of persuading moderates and mobilizing your base. The tech is only useful in the hands of people who are, first and foremost, good at doing those other things.

Finally, and perhaps a bit more contentiously, "openness" is a double-edged sword. There is, frankly, a lot of crazy out there—and a vocal chunk of the rightroots apparently under the illusion that McCain's big lost opportunity was the failure to make sufficient hay of Bill Ayers and amateur forensic analyses of Barack Obama's birth certificate.  This, again, is a recipe for death spiral. What gets lost in the "bottom-up versus top-down" frame is that the left has managed a more useful symbiosis between their grassroots and their intellectuals. What seems to be playing out on the right of late, by contrast, is a frenzy of mutual demonization. Pace some of my progressive friends, I don't think the recent flurry of activity in the fever swamps reveals any deep, eternal truths about conservatism per se; it's just what's filled the gap created by the paucity of useful leadership from conservative intellectuals. What's needed right now is less tactical refinement, and more conversation about the agenda tactics are supposed to serve.

Addendum: I see I'm just in time to be superseded: Patrick Ruffini has a post up at Next Right suggesting that the whole "tech versus messaging" argument is a red herring, since it's "blindingly obvious" that knowing what you stand for is more important than the tools you're using to get the message out.  One hopes. But back when the whole #dontgo movement was getting off the ground, I got the distinct sense that so many people were excited about conservatives using Twitter and hashtags and stuff!!! that it obscured how little traction offshore drilling really had as an issue. But as I note above, Ruffini's clearly got a point that conservatives absolutely need to improve their tech game if they're not to be left in the dust.  This, I think, is the key point:

Technology will play the critical role in this process. And this is where stuff like Twitter actually matters in a political sense. It was a Republican, John Culberson, who was the first member of Congress to use Twitter as it was meant to be used -- as a personal communications medium. More and more members of the RNC are joining Twitter. They aren't just using a cool tech toy -- they're getting plugged into an instantaneous feedback loop where the grassroots can share their concerns and priorities in real time. Imagine what would happen if a Congressman actually had to answer constituent phone calls on the bailout, and you get a sense of the environment politicians enter once they start using technology the right way. Except those "constituent phone calls" a/k/a e-mails or Twitter DMs are less likely to be argumentative because you know the target it actually listening. [....]

Ideological reformation cannot happen in a vacuum. We can't just cloister ourselves in a room and come up with new principles and expect people to adopt them. To the extent we already know what the principles are, the most effective mechanism for change is to elect as our leaders people who value those principles. In that fight, new infrastructure matters and serves as a handmaiden to electing principled leaders. And not just infrastructure, but technology specifically. If our primary communications mediums are still about the few broadcasting to the many, that won't promote real bottom-up participation in the process, and entrenched interests will continue to win at the expense of the grassroots.

 That's not a bad summary of what I was trying to get at above as well, though I'm perhaps less sure than Ruffini that there is that much consensus on what the principles are. Abstraction has a way of masking disagreement: Everybody's in favor of "liberty," for some values of "liberty." 

Perhaps this is the way to put it: Some of these tech tools are very good at mobilizing reactive, oppositional activism—against the bailout, against some liberal media outrage, against this or that Democratic (sorry, "Democrat") politician. The dangerous temptation right now, especially for a party in the minority, is to seek to recapitulate the Cold War coalition model through oppositional self-definition, when something more robust is called for. 

Addendum II: Rebuild the Party principal and erstwhile Romney tech strategist Mindy Finn chimes in down in the comments.

As Time Warner Cable (TWC) customers realized at 12:01am New Year's Day, Viacom-owned channels weren't yanked from the lineup after all. Viacom had threatened to pull all of its 19 channels, including MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central, from TWC after the two companies failed to ink a renewal deal, but both parties agreed to a "good faith" extension late on December 31 that allowed for more negotiating time.

Neither company is offering details of the ongoing negotiations, but Viacom's threat to pull its programming from TWC customers—including its Internet offerings—may be a new Pandora's box for the industry.

The catalyst for nearly pulling the plug on New Year's Day was Viacom's demand for more revenue from the 19 channels that Time Warner Cable provides to its 13 million customers. Viacom wants 25 cents per cable subscriber per month, which, broken down, is just over a penny per channel per month. Add up all that pocket change, however, and Viacom is actually "playing Scrooge" by demanding an extra $39 million per year from the cable operator.

In a statement, TWC President and CEO Glenn Britt accused Viacom of "extortion" and shed a few crocodile tears. "We sympathize with the fact that Viacom's advertising business is suffering and that their networks' ratings have largely been declining," he said. "However, we can't abide their attempt to make up their lost revenue on the backs of Time Warner Cable customers."

This matter exploded publicly on December 30, but Jeremy Zweig, Vice President, Viacom Media and Editorial, told Ars Technica that the two companies have been in negotiations for "several months." Viacom's contract was scheduled to end on December 31, but the two companies presumed a deal would get done. When it didn't, Viacom resorted to blasting out warning messages across the country (even to non-TWC cable customers), and it even took out January 2 attack ads in The New York Times and newspapers in Cleveland, Orlando, Dallas, and Raleigh, for which it has since apologized.

The most interesting part of Viacom's threat was a plan to block TWC broadband customers from access to Viacom's online content, in addition to its TV programming. Jeff Simmermon, Director of Digital Communications at TWC, explained his concern to Ars that Viacom might block TWC customers from accessing videos at sites like MTV.com, VH1.com, and the Comedy Central site, while allowing unencumbered access to competitors like Comcast and satellite services.

While neither Viacom nor TWC wanted to comment further publicly on the issue, a screenshot of Viacom's warning illustrate's Simmermon's fear. The warning states (emphasis added): "Attention Time Warner Cable and Bright House Network Customers, starting tonight, you will lose your favorite MTV shows on TV and online because of a dispute..."

Those two little italicized words raised immediate red flags at TWC headquarters, and they serve as a reminder that content owners increasingly own distribution channels for their work, thanks to the Internet.

As BusinessWeek notes, the relationship between programmers like Viacom and service providers like TWC is getting strained. TV and film studios are exploring new mediums like Hulu and even the iTunes Store, putting the squeeze on cable providers as more customers cut back on premium TV packages in favor of the "fast-enough-for-me" $50-$60 Internet package they already pay for. While access to video content is diversifying, a corresponding drop in service and advertising revenues is creating spats like the one between Viacom and Time Warner Cable.

Viacom's Zweig told Ars that the company was successful in negotiating new contracts with "virtually every cable and satellite carrier," but it pulled a dangerous new weapon from its arsenal when the TWC negotiations went bad. Whether the two companies can in fact work out a more permanent deal remains to be seen.

The music industry finished 2008 with positive sales growth numbers overall, but the grim CD death march continues apace. Overall unit purchases of music in the US increased by 10.5 percent year-over-year since 2007, according to new data released by Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen BDS, and Nielsen RingScan, but the growth is coming completely from downloads—and from vinyl.

More than 1.5 billion songs were sold during 2008, accounting for the 10.5 percent growth since the previous year. One billion digital tracks were sold online, which indicated 27 percent growth since 2007. But the trend toward digital singles continues to hurt full CD album sales—428 million albums (including LPs, CDs, and online albums) were sold in 2008, down 14 percent from the year before.

Album sales were not down across all formats. LPs and vinyl albums were up by a whopping 89 percent, but as the saying goes, 89 times zero is still zero. (LPs and vinyl albums accounted for just 1.88 million sales in 2008).

Comparatively, 65.8 million online albums were sold in 2008, a 32 percent increase year-over-year. Physical CD purchases—both from online retailers and brick-and-mortar stores—bore the brunt of the album sales crash, it seems.

(For anyone who cares, holiday album sales were down 19 percent year-over-year. Guess people just didn't feel that nagging desire to listen to Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You" over and over this year. Again, that is.)

Nielsen's 2008 data reflects the same trends we saw at the end of 2007—online sales are still surging while CD sales continue to tank. And, concerning albums, a number of musicians blame services like iTunes and Amazon MP3 for enabling customers to pick apart their carefully-pieced-together collections.

The way that consumers buy music has changed drastically since the advent of the online music store. While sales are booming, artists and record companies alike are still finding ways to convince music buyers to spend money on more than that one track stuck in their heads. But in an a la carte world, the downloadable single might now be king.