I managed to head into D.C. four of the five workdays this week, thanks to various meetings. That’s unusual. And that won’t be possible this week coming up, as I’m departing Tuesday morning for the Demo conference in Santa Clara.

10/7/2013: Documentary Evidence: A Director Opens Up About Distribution, Gatekeepers and Piracy, Disruptive Competition Project

After a visit to Seattle, I wanted to watch a great documentary of the mid-’90s grunge scene, Hype!–but could not, as it had vanished from all the legitimate streaming and downloading channels. So I looked up its director, Doug Pray, and wound up having a great chat over e-mail about the state of movie industry from an indie perspective. I appreciate his honesty… and hope it doesn’t get in the way of him lining up a new distributor so I can see this flick for the first time since 1996.

10/8/2013: Mobile App Monetization Models, Enterprise Mobile Hub

This Twitter chat covered ways to cover a mobile app’s cost: showing ads to the user, charging the user, charging for an upgraded version of the app, or subsidizing it through other means.

10/11/2013: Mugshot Mess Provides A Reminder: You Don’t Want “Search Neutrality”, Disruptive Competition Project

I wrote a response to a couple of thought-provoking pieces: David Segal’s long NYT feature about sites that make it easy to browse mugshots of arrested suspects and also charge to have mugshots removed, then Mathew Ingram’s GigaOM post worrying about how quickly Google and payment processors moved to cut off mugshots sites after they started getting press queries about them.

10/12/2013: T-Mobile to eliminate international data fees, WTOP

T-Mobile announced that it would give its users free 2G data service overseas, and WTOP’s Kristi King sought out my input. My voice sounds sharper than usual not because I was in studio, but because I recorded my end of the conversation with a desktop microphone and then e-mailed the MP3 to King.

10/13/2013: Are any e-mail sites ad-free?, USA Today

A reader asked a question I’d answered last May, but enough things have changed in the Web-mail market for me to revisit the question. And this time around, Outlook.com’s $19.95 ad-free option looks a lot more attractive now that Microsoft’s service supports standard IMAP synchronization. The column also includes a brief explanation of Google’s new “Shared Endorsement” ads and a comparison of them with Facebook’s “Sponsored Stories.”

On Sulia, I posted a couple of reports from an Intuit press event and reception in D.C. (one on how it “ended up distracting the Mint team for the greater good of the company,” another on how its SnapTax app unintentionally makes a case for the direct e-filing that Intuit has lobbied long and hard against), scolded Facebook for taking away the option to hide your name from its search, reported some startups’ testimony about patent trolling, and noted how the advertised prices for CenturyLink’s new gigabit fiber service in Las Vegas understate what you might pay.