Published November 30, 2010

As I mentioned in my story about tax-free holiday shopping, Amazon.com does not provide sales figures. The company did agree to provide a localized list of bestsellers over the four-day shopping period (beginning “Black Friday” and ending “Cyber Monday”).

You might be surprised by which newly published author comes in at No. 1.

Here’s how Massachusetts shoppers spent their (tax-free) dollars on Amazon.com Nov 26-29:

1. “Decision Points” (Bush, George W.)
2. “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth” (Kinney, Jeff)
3. “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” (Hillenbrand, Laura)
4. “Life” (Richards, Keith)
5. “The Investment Answer” (Daniel C. Goldie, Gordon S. Murray)
6. “Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1″ (Mark Twain)
7. “The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have” (Nepo, Mark)
8. “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race” (Stewart, Jon)
9. “Barefoot Contessa How Easy Is That?: Fabulous Recipes & Easy Tips” (Garten, Ina)
10. “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” (Larsson, Stieg)

The Scott Brown effect?

Published November 30, 2010

In this November 2009 file photo, Marcus Marintez pulls items for shipment inside the 800,000 sq. ft. Amazon.com warehouse in Goodyear, Ariz. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)

By all accounts, this is good news for the Massachusetts economy:

Shopping centers across the region saw a jump in sales over the holiday weekend and they expect a robust rest of the season — as long as retailers keep rolling out the deals.

The Globe says five malls “reported a year-over-year increase in sales over the three-day weekend.” Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, estimated a 2 percent increase in sales over the Black Friday weekend.

Even so, Massachusetts retailers lost out on millions of dollars of sales — but it’s difficult to know exactly how much. Why?

“It’s a combination of things. It’s Internet sales. People still buy out of catalogs. … And it’s sales lost to New Hampshire,” says Bob Bliss, a spokesman for the Mass. Department of Revenue.

Those three things have a competitive advantage in common — they don’t charge sales tax.

I suspect mail-order sales are no longer a big threat to Massachusetts retailers; the New Hampshire problem is an old one, but the fact that you have to put on pants and drive there is a deterrent to would-be tax evaders. An Internet retailer such as Amazon.com is hard to beat, though.

I can go to my local Best Buy and purchase a 32″ Samsung LCD TV, on special, for $539.99 + $33.75 tax. Or I can buy the same television at Amazon.com for $537 + 0 tax (and free shipping).

Amazon.com does not have to collect Massachusetts sales tax because it does not have a physical presence in Massachusetts. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo wrote a terrific explainer on how Amazon.com (legally) gets away with this. (I asked Amazon.com for Massachusetts sales figures, but they don’t provide them, so I can’t even make an estimate of lost revenue.)

Now, you’re supposed to report your Internet purchases every year on your tax returns — it’s called a use tax — but who does that?

“The last number I saw was probably 3 or 4 million in (use) taxes that were paid,” Bilss said. Wow, I said, that sounds surprisingly high. “It’s quite minimal,” he said — seeing as total sales tax revenue in Mass. is something like $4.5 billion.

This drives state lawmakers and local businesseses and Jon Hurst crazy.

[pullquote author=”Jon Hurst, Retailers Association of Massaschusetts”]”Amazon.com has a 6-and-a-quarter percent head-start over our own employers.”[/pullquote]

“Government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the marketplace,” Hurst says. “Amazon.com has a 6-and-a-quarter percent head-start over our own employers.”

Earlier this year, outgoing U.S. Rep. Bill Delahunt, a Democrat who represents Massachusetts’ 10th District, introduced the “Main Street Fairness Act,” which would simplify tax collection for states that choose to participate. It would authorize an interstate compact that forces online retailers to collect taxes.

Such a compact already exists, actually, but it is nothing without Congressional approval. In 2009, Gov. Deval Patrick pushed the Legislature to join the compact and pressure Congress. A 2009 analysis by the University of Teneesee at Knoxville estimated that could generate $545 million for Mass.

The debate over a so-called Internet sales tax has gone on for years. Until it’s settled, enjoy the tax-free holiday every day.

____

Full disclosure: WBUR participates in the Amazon Affiliates program.

Published November 29, 2010

Photographer Dennis H Miller submits a lot of pretty pictures to the WBUR Flickr group, but this one is just wow!

Connected (Dennis H Miller/Flickr)

It’s a long exposure (almost three hours) in Sturbridge, southwest of Worcester, where the Pike meets Route 84.

I concur with one of the commenters, Dan Squires, on the Flickr page (who also suggested the title for this post): “I really like how you can see the different colors of the stars.”

Share your photographs if you want to see one featured here.

Published November 29, 2010

The John Adams Courthouse on Beacon Hill (Emmanuel Huybrechts/Flickr)

Massachusetts courtrooms would open up to “citizen journalists and bloggers” under new rules proposed by a subcommittee of the Supreme Judicial Court.

“The proposed rule changes are designed to accommodate the changing nature of both journalists and the way news is reported while still maintaining order and decorum in the Massachusetts Courts,” reads an overview of the changes.

The proposed changes to Rule 1:19 include:

• Allow laptops and other Internet-connected devices inside courtrooms
• Redefine “news media” to include citizen journalists and bloggers
• Add another video camera position for non-mainstream media

…all subject to a judge’s discretion, of course. The rules protect jurors and prospective jurors from photography or recording.

The committee is made up of members of the state and federal judiciary and journalists in print, radio, television and the Web. One member is WBUR’s John Davidow, the executive editor of wbur.org, who recently launched a Knight Foundation-funded project called Order in the Court 2.0. The aim of the project is to experiment with new media in Quincy district court.

Project director Joe Spurr and producer Val Wang have been hired to help build a model for other courtrooms that want to open up to new media.

“We’re attempting to create an ideal environment for the way a modern courthouse should behave,” Joe tells me.

“For instance we’re aiming to set up a video stream — high upstream, high-quality camera, and will have a site that’s usable where citizens can interact. It could be a hub for any citizen journalist.”

The proposed rules are open for public comment until Jan. 28, 2011. You can send comments to Christine Burak at christine.burak@sjc.state.ma.us.

• Scribd: Read the proposed rules

Published November 29, 2010

This is how you communicate when the Internet goes down. (Florian Seroussi/Flickr)

If you’re one of thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) of Comcast Internet customers in the Northeast, you probably lost your connection for several hours last night. If you turned to Twitter to kvetch, as I did, you might have learned a bit about how your Internet connection works.

I was right in the middle of digging into the latest Wikileaks release at about 8 p.m. when the company’s DNS servers failed. Argh! I grabbed my iPhone and tweeted my frustration — and it quickly became clear that the problem affected customers throughout Massachusetts as well as the D.C. area. (iPhones, of course, use AT&T’s wireless 3G networks.)

Twitterer Matt Soleyn (@soleynm) was first with the helpful fix:

Comcast DNS servers are down. Point your computer 8.8.8.8 (Google’s Public DNS) for DNS instead as a fix.

I made the change and got back online in seconds.

So what is DNS? When you open a Web browser and type in google.com, a domain name server figures out that google.com points to 74.125.53.100, an IP address. Humans use domain names because they are much easier to remember than IP addresses. During the outage, you could still type 74.125.53.100 into a browser and get to Google — if you knew that.

A tricky but far easier solution was to switch to a publicly available DNS server such as one provided by Google or OpenDNS.

New York Times tech columnist David Pogue extolled the virtues of Open DNS in August:

Unfortunately, from time to time, your Internet provider’s D.N.S. computer goes down. To you, it seems that the Web itself has gone out, because you can’t pull up any sites at all. In December 2008, for example, 1.2 million Los Angeles citizens thought that the entire Web had gone offline, because of a crashed Time Warner D.N.S. computer.

That story was gleefully provided by OpenDNS, the one-of-a-kind company with a killer idea: to provide a free, alternative D.N.S. service that works better than your Internet provider’s. Faster, more reliably and with more features. You don’t pay anything, sign up for anything or install anything.

It’s a good explainer and worth the read. Soleyn also suggested specifying different providers as your primary and secondary DNS servers, in case one goes out. I set Google as my primary and OpenDNS as my secondary.

Now, I won’t get into the apparently widespread contempt of Comcast, or last night’s competing hashtags, #comcastic and #comcastrophe, or the fact that NPR host Bob Garfield channeled his Comcast rage into a website called comcastmustdie.com.

Funny, no one seemed to care when Verizon telephone service went out last month.

Published November 25, 2010

The Patriots aren't just hungry for Turkey on Thanksgiving. They eat QBs, too. (AP)

Though they’ve been able to celebrate just five wins among them this year, football fans across the country are jealous of fans in Dallas and Detroit.

Every year, fans of the Cowboys and the Lions kick back after a long, hard day of stuffing stuffing on their plates, chopping down thick carrot sticks and drizzling a deluge of gravy on pounds of turkey to relax and doze in front of the TV as their teams square off in an annual NFL Thanksgiving ritual.

The Lions, Cowboys and their fans (oh my!) get to play every year on Thanksgiving, the one day dedicated to the three F’s: family, food and football. What a day.

It seems unfair, though, that the same teams and the same fans get the prime game slot every year.

Pro football on Thanksgiving began as a marketing gimmick, of course, when the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans moved to Detroit and became the Lions in 1934, according to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The Lions have been playing on Thanksgiving ever since.

The Cowboys’ Thanksgiving ritual doesn’t have quite as historic roots, but they’ve played on the holiday every year since 1966, except in 1975 and 1977.

This year, however, fans across New England will get to have their turkey and eat it, too. The Patriots take on the Lions in Detroit at 12:30 p.m.

Today, for once, enjoy your Patriots. And John Madden’s famous Turducken.