Google Wave: The End of the Wild Web
There will be many – many – blog posts written on Google Wave, and there already have been so many created, that I’m sure this one will be lost in the void, but for whomever keeps ‘The Record,’ add me to it saying: “Google Wave will revolutionize communication.”
I’m throughly shocked by the number of naysayers out there. The reaction on Twitter after the announcement, and the excellent review of the event on TechCruch, was mixed. Some were just as enthusiastic as me, but many have the wait-and-see attitude that, to me, doesn’t recognize the pure awesomeness that is Google Wave. There are only two obstacles Google Wave has to overcome to become as widely used as Google Search that I can see: market penetration and standards adoption.
HTML5
The switch to Wave is going to rely on HTML5, a standard that has been 5 years in the making. That’s a really long time coming. The same year the standard got it’s start gave birth to Facebook, Gmail was still new, and IE was still 91% of the browser market. In Internet terms, HTML5 has been in progress since the middle ages.
Changing the basic language of the web is a drastic change, and we need to be sure that the standard is right. Yet, surely we can adapt to adding new standards at a quicker rate? Because all “modern” browsers are open-source, and have a track record for continuous innovation, it’s inconceivable to me that was couldn’t innovate on a faster scale.
Five years is an awful long time, and it’s incredible how much – of the draft spec – the browsers are already supporting. HTML5 will bring about a friendlier internet – one that feels like a desktop experience. We have the technology to deliver that – why wouldn’t we?
An Economist Approach to the Newspaper Industry
You should really hear my brother and me argue.
It sounds sounds a lot like we disagree on everything, but sit and listen to us, and you realize that we often have the same point of view, just different ways of expressing it.
My brother is the guy who got me inspired/angry enough to write You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce. Phill Baker (who has no online profile to link to), who studies economics and engineering at UPenn and was assigned a massive project – to write a 80 page paper on an industry effected by technological change.
I’m pretty certain that his decision to write on the newspaper industry was in part to piss me off, but in reality, I’m glad he’s doing it. It’s interesting to see how an economist approaches the industry from a macro perspective.
He’s asked me to publish the paper when he’s done, mostly to see what the “industry insiders” think. I’ve agreed, so look for it in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, we're in the process of another email exchange, in which I play futurist and defend us blogging “ilk.”
What follows is excerpts from his email (small edits), interspaced with my responses. Any emphasis or links are my own.
Uh, yea, definitely, as to the last point you made. It's interesting b/c this is a 'classic' example of how success breeds failure under the pressure of technological change. There's some fascinating literature in that topic, but the poignant example is Kodak: they were so focused on being a film camera company, that they completely missed digital. They thought they were in the business of film (they were a pretty sophisticated chemical engineering company), whereas they should have seen themselves in the photography business.
Where we differ is the extent of the change. So the business model has lost its exclusivity and newspapers missed the boat. Now they're facing established competitors in their markets with serious competitive advantages and the benefits of network effects through first mover status (e.g. if the NYTimes had been craigslist, we wouldn't be hearing of the end of newspapers).
Newspapers are not going anywhere. Print will not disappear, there's simply too much demand. 15% profit margins (20% is a bit high, actually the industry average is about 17%), should disappear (they can be maintained at the cost of cutting everything in the paper, but that'd be stupid). Circulation will likely stabilize in the next few years as the cannibalization of the print edition by the internet edition faces diminishing returns.
What's fascinating is that their business model has been co-opted by search. I don't think, and the research backs me up here, that display advertising online will ever come close to replacing the lost advertising revenue that was enjoyed in print. The 'national' papers, or those that are big enough to scale and aren't trapped under burdens of debt due (some serendipity comes into play there), will likely find stability first as they can portray themselves as the replacements to the four TV networks. At the head of long tail, they'll be able to differentiate themselves from commodity news through designer websites, cool visualizations, (hopefully) good journalism and (hopefully) their brand names.
- Agreed. Ads will very likely not be able to fund the entirety of a newsorg in the future. I can say this with maybe… 90% certainty.
- Newspapers enjoyed a profit margin of 20% and higher.
- The issue here is largely mindset. Newspapers are used to thinking of themselves as …newspapers. As they realize that they are really just a specialized subset of the tech sector, they'll come to have a revenue model that is more inline with the industry. Which is to say, one that relies on multiple sources of revenue.
- We really agree on your last three points here. Newsorgs need a great UI, ability to inform using data, and to maintain a solid reputation.
You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce
My brother sent me an email tonight after he heard, Peter Fader speak. Fader is a professor at Wharton School of business at UPenn “doing datamining - they call it marketing.” Apparently, my brother found this talk inspiring, ending his first email in our resulting exchange with:
…he made some damn good points about the subscription model. b2c already is doing ok (campfire, github, etc.), it's time for consumers to pony up. His bottom line: if facebook decided to charge you $10/month, you'd pay it. No questions asked.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or know me, or have listened to some of the top minds in this ‘new media’ business, you’ll be pretty easily pick out how totally my brother has drunk the kool-aid of the bass-akwards mind fuck that the ‘old media’ folks try to sell you.
First there was the stone age
Deep breath.
Let’s try to break this down: We are now in the information age. Where once the pinacle of technology was an iron sword, the new tech is information.
Our economy is based on the trade of IP, and yet, paradoxically, the internet has made information practically infinite. Therefore, attempting to make money by controlling the amount of information is doomed to fail.
Put another way: controlling the scarcity of something that isn't scarce can't work.
History is not a good guide here: The internet is a fundamental shift from anything we’ve experienced before. It’s as revolutionary as the printing press and as radical as the written word. It’s both asynchronous and instant two-way communication.
LINKS | Micropayments Don’t Work, but Everyone Has a Better Idea
Somehow, I missed the links from the latter part of last week, and have been bookmarking like crazy this last week. So, ya'll get a ton of links. Apologies for the long, long list, but I've broken it up with some good videos — and I've edited down! These are the cream of the crop from February 10th through February 20th:
Journalism Business Models
Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight - O'Reilly Radar: “I’m sure Hulu is totally pissed. They pretty much said just that in a somewhat more stilted way. The real insult, though, is calling the people who made them cut Boxee off “content providers.” They…
- Why I dislike micropayments, don't mind charity, but really have a better idea Network(ed)News: What a fantastically simple idea for a journalism business model: charge for interaction with the content creator. Donate some money to the site, and the chances of your comments etc being responded…
- Walter Isaacson: You've got it all wrong | Musings of an Anonymous Geek: Theodor Nelson writes the equivalent of a very long blog post as a response to Walter Isaacson’s use of his name in his argument for micropayments for news. Essentially, Nelson wants to use a…
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Interview: Wired's Chris Anderson on the 'free' business model | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: Chris Anderson, author of Long Tail, discusses the Freemium business model.
- Tech Tools Day 1: Tomorrow's Journalism and Journalists - The Next Newsroom Project: “Readers have never been willing to support this industry economically,” Fine said. “Her advice for anyone in the news biz was direct: ‘I know that not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur,’ Fine…
- DigiDave | Communication is Key: Journalism Beyond Newspapers - Don't Become Nonprofits - Work for Them: Dave Cohn makes a good point: journalists can market their services toward non-profits who need the press and often can’t get their message out there.
- Forget Micropayments -- Here's a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content: Steve Outing endorses Kachingle, a micro-payment service for websites with one distinct caveat: paying is still optional. The user decides on how much they want to pay for their news, and all the…
- Will paid content work? Two cautionary tales from 2004 Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Good look at the failures of the Paid Content model: LAT, and the Albuquerque Journal. End with a reminder: just because Editors think that they are entitled to make money from content, it doesn’t…
- Op-Ed Contributor - You Can't Sell News by the Slice - NYTimes.com: A New York Times op-ed on why paid content won’t work. Oh, and that even if it did, the revenue wouldn’t “save newspapers.”
- What does engagement mean for newspapers? - Eat Sleep Publish: A good summary and batch of links on why engagement on sites is important.
Top 15 of 2008: The leading regional newspaper sites shuffle their ranks Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: The top regional newspapers have seen a significant increase in pageviews.
- lectroid.net Blog Archive Newspapers could actually try online: Really solid advice on how to evolve your print newsroom into a real, online newsorg. Topics include: Staffing, web design, and workflow.
- Reflections of a Newsosaur: How to charge for content. Theoretically.: Alan Mutter jumps on the micropayment bandwagon as the most “logical way” to make money online. He makes the wrong assumption that “Consumers might not like being micro-nickled and nano-dimed for…
Web Journalism
- The Doc Searls Weblog : Saturday, March 24, 2007: Fantastic list of things that newspapers should do on their websites to make them more relevant to users (read: user friendly)
- How an NYT developer built a new way to read the news online: The ‘new’ interface is a great move for the Times. It does distinctly reminds me of http://newser.com and I think corrects one of the major flaws of current online newspaper design: the lack of…
The Internet Broke the Economy
I've noticed that I started to think that every blog post I write must be a fantastic piece of prose. Articles that don't meet the 600+ word count don't meet the cut.
Yea… I've been drinking too much of my own coolaid. Back to the shorter, more frequent posting for me. I suspect that it's more valuable in the long run.
Ofcom Website | Global Citizens and Consumers in the Internet Age
Douglas Rushkoff of NYU has completely blown my mind. It's not often that one finds a completely, world-upside-down, mind-altering … anything. But this is it.
The thesis: The internet has turned the world on it’s head because because it destroys the traditional definition of economy: “rational actors maximizing their value through the acquisition/distribution of scarce resources.”
LINKS | Please, Please Don’t Charge for Free Information
These are my links for January 30th through February 5th:
- Please pay us for our news - please? Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Sums up the argument for and against the paid content model and concludes that users never really paid for content anyway, and that newspapers must add some value to the news to be … valued.
Lab Book Club: Jay Hamilton, Chapter 2:As newsorgs rely on less and less sustainable business models, they become more and more biased. Ends with a call for the non-profit business model.- NYTimes Exposes 2.8 Million Articles in New API - ReadWriteWeb: The New York Times seems to be moving towards establishing itself as a platform of news. Sharing all of it’s content in this matter is a good indicator that they ‘get it’
- On Portfolio Reviews (part 2) (Conscientious): Good advice for getting a photography portfolio reviewed from a variety of people who do it.
- How to Save Your Newspaper | TIME: Didn’t we already have this debate? Paying for essential information doesn’t work. You can charge a niche audience, (a’la Wall Street Journal) but charging the masses just won’t work.
‘New Media’ Chaos
I have too much going on in my life right now. I'm back at school and shooting a ton. Not only shooting, but I'm back to editing.
I have created/taken the position of "Exponent of the Evolution" at The Daily Orange, my student newspaper. I had previously served a year as the photo editor for the paper, and has sort of assumed that my time there was up.
Little did I know that the opportunity would arise to use a lot of the knowledge that I've linked to and talked about on this blog in the 'real world' (however real an independent daily college paper is).
As the Exponent of the Evolution, I have 3 areas of responsibility:
- Promotion and advocacy of 'new media' at the paper. Blogging, audio slideshows, video, podcasting, video podcasting, etc.
- Establishing and expanding the paper's online precense. This can be simple, like promoting the website in print, or publishing headlines on twitter, to more complicated things like the creation of a new CMS for college papers.
- Monetizing. I serve as an advisor to the business side of the paper for online ads. Best online ad practices, new revenue streams, etc
The good news is this: this job has never existed before, and it desperately has needed to. It is critical for the survival of newspapers in the internet age to adapt to the new, online world. At this point, no newspaper has done it successfully.
Papers like The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, have made leaps in the online realm, but none of them are able to sustain their operation entirely off revenue from the online side of the business. If print is dead, it is critical that newspapers, as the sole remaining journalists, figure out a revenue and distribution model that can maintain them.
Since this is already a bit of a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness post written at 6am out of pent up guilt for not writing a real post for so long. Let me provide a list of what I have done for the DO:
- Twittering of all headlines @dailyorange. Our popular sports blog gets special designation for it's posts (as do videos).
- Establishment of Final Cut Pro as our go-to video and audio slideshow editor. The result, as a movie, has a superior quality over soundslides or slideshowpro.
- Our sports section has been publishing 'graphics' prior to games that give details on players, what to look forward to, who to watch, etc. We're trying to move this to an interactive, online, format.
- I've developed a hypothesis: the lone reporter/photojournalist is dead. Instead, reporting will be done in teams that function like (pardon the analogy) terrorist cells. They will be largely autonomous, have a mission (a beat), and be comprised of a small group of people who have unique skills.
TV media has been doing this for a long time – they always send out at least a camera man and a reporter.
These teams will consist of 2-3 people (with an editor back in the office) who need to have 5 skills between them. Those skills are: 1) video 2) audio 3) photo 4) writing 5) 'personality. The last is a poor term for describing the person who is the 'on camera personality' – the person who is the front man for the team – recognizable to the public. These skills can be divided in any manner among the 2-3 members of the team.
I've been working on this 'hypothesis' for months now, recognizing that in this new world it is impractical to expect a single reporter/photog to be able to deliver a complete multimedia piece. Non only is it impossible to shoot video, sound, and photos at the same time, but it cannot all be complied on deadline. Having a team of people working on the same project allows them to deliver a complete multimedia package for every story – on deadline.
The point: I've decided to test the hypothesis: I have a 3 person team (who's beat has yet to be determined). At this point, they're producing a video a week on a chosen topic. We'll see where this goes. - Our sports section now has 2 video podcasts: On the Beat and Just Le Jus. Publishing 3 times a week, I'm hoping that this sort of thing will spread to other sections of the paper (working on Opinion).
- I'm the front man for the DO at coPress, a collective of college newspapers who are developing an opensource, custom, content management system for college newspapers. I've written the first blog post of coPress here. This is a move to get our paper off College Publisher, and onto a more workable CMS – a critical goal for the long-term sustainability of our paper.
- I've hired a couple of web developers (well, had hired, looks like I'm going to have to fight the board on this one) to help develop our CMS. This marks the first time the DO has hired someone specifically to develop code for our site. The sports graphics are a good example of the power that this brings.
- We are now using vimeo for all of our videos. It's a flexible system that allows HD content hosting. We'll have our own branded player eventually, but for now, this is a great, turn-key solution.
- Google ads don't make a ton of money, but they are something, and provide great filler for when we can't sell local ads.
- In order to figure out who is visiting our site (and how), it's critical to have a good suite of analytics software. We're now using Google Analytics.
- Our sports section has been live blogging for about a year now from games. I'm trying to get this work ethic expanded to other sections.
I think that's the list for now. We're/I'm working on doing more. I was just approved as a full time hire, but I'm still doing the job of more than one person, and could really use additional staff to make this all work. I'll end by sharing a very rough audio slideshow I did for a local walk for cancer.
Light the Night from Daily Orange on Vimeo.
Crisis in News: Investigative Reporting on the Web
-FORA.tv - Crisis in News: Investigative Reporting on the Web
A really phenomenal panel discussion from some top dogs in the newspaper business that has a very optimistic view of newspapers online. Undoubtedly funding is the primary problem, but the subscription model seems to be favored.
Make Money by Removing Ads
The TrustE numbers cited by eMarketer said that only 12.6 percent of respondents said that more than a quarter of the targeted ads they were delivered were relevant. Ouch.
-Survey: Advertisers should acknowledge targeted ad concerns | The Social - CNET News.com
I was on facebook today (a rarity for me) and I happened to notice the ad to the right.
Yes, it's fairly creepy, but that wasn't what caught my eye. Notice the links below the ad? That "Advertise' link is fairly commonly found on sites, if you want to advertise through Facebook, click that and off you go. (By the way, Facebook makes it insanely simple to do that.)
But, the other links are, in my experience, rather unique. The "More Ads" link gets you to the full listing of ads that Facebook might provide you. Users can pick their own advertising. Nifty.
But wait, there's more!
Facebook also has those two nifty thumbs up/thumbs down buttons. Unfortunately I couldn't get them to work. I clicked on them multiple times on multiple browsers and nothing happened. But… I really like the idea.
Imagine a site (newspapers, listen up!) that targets advertising to users, in part,
based directly on what they decide they want. The links should be simple and unobtrusive like Facebook's example.
Why would anybody bother to spend the time telling a site which ads they like (or more likely, which ads they don't like)?
Simple. The site can give them the reward of removing the ads they don't like -- completely.
If a user clicks on the 'thumbs down' button, the site shouldn't simply replace that ad with another. Give the user the incentive – remove the ad; remove the hole on the page that was made for it. Get rid of it completely, make it a sort of "sorry to bother you with that trash" message to the user.
Design
As a sidenote of sorts:
Facebook's ads are great in part because they all conform to a similar design standard that in turn conforms with the rest of the site. Facebook insures ads are un-obtrusive.
One common complaint about online ads that they are not nearly as "informative" as print ads are.
a recent survey of American consumers which found that more than three-quarters of respondents said online ads were more annoying than those in print.
-Hard sell - The Economist.com
In general people don't like flashy moving ads and prefer smaller, Google-like, text ads.
"Ironically, the one type of ads that really work on the Web are the small, text-only ads on search engines.
-New online ads squeeze news pages - CNet.com
Make online ads more like print
Therefore, online ads should be made to looks more like print ads. In my own, non-scientific observations of print newspaper ads, there's an obvious pattern that appears in print that does not appear online.
Print ads, generally, list prices, provide coupons, or tell the consumer when a sale is going to be. In contrast, online ads try to get you to make 'free money.' No wonder people prefer print.
The ads newspapers carry are necessarily focused on a local market. Fortunately, this is easy to replicate online.
Faulty logic
I recall watching a video (I can't remember where, otherwise I'd link to it), where an expert explained the newspaper advertising is struggling because of the way advertisers determine the total percentage of the site's visitors that might be interested in their ads.
The gentleman presented the following logic: if the San Francisco Chronicle has an online readership of 1 million, but only half live in the SF Bay Area, then a car dealership that wants to advertise on the paper's site assumes that their ads are only applicable to half of the paper's audience and therefore worth half as much.
This is ludicrous!
If the car dealership has places a print ad, it misses out on the the half million people who visit the site, but have no chance of seeing the print edition. The dealership has effectively doubled its audience.
Not only can the Newspaper offer a greater audience, but technology allows it to localize ads - automatically. If that dealership doesn't want to pay for ads that don't effect users outside the Bay Area, then the newspaper doesn't have to show that ad to the irrelevant users. Instead, they can find car dealerships that are applicable to their non-local users.
A theoretical step
I have no idea how much of the above is already done (or not done), but I here is a proposition for something that surely is not occuring.
A way to solve this problem:
Newspapers need to team up. Not in the media conglomeration sense, but in the Ohio sense. If national newspapers cooperated on advertising, a user from San Francisco visiting the NY Times site could still see advertising from that car dealership near San Francisco.
The NY Times can pocket the revenue and pay a small commission to The Chronicle for arranging the whole deal. The user gets relevant ads that are informative.
The key here is to provide relevant, local, ads that users find helpful, not gaudy.
Digg Strikes Home
I don't think I really have to write about this one. Just a question: What does this mean for social aggregators? Can they support 'real' journalism?
Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO, News Corporation | D6 Highlights | AllThingsD
Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of the News Corporation spoke at the famous All Things Digital today. His interview was rather enlightening. Here is the two part highlight reel:
Interesting to note:
- The conference is put in association with the Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch Owns.
- The interviewers are presumably employees of Murdoch.
- Most of the questions are fairly soft, but there are a couple that have a point to them.
How Not to Do Newspaper Video
...we hear countless calls for help from these newspaper photographers who have made the jump, as their employers – who although they have heeded the call to move to video, don't understand what it takes to do this skill – are beating them down.
So here are the rules. Please pass these on to your editors and publishers:
-How Not To Do Newspaper Video - The Digital Journalist
The Digital Journalist claims to be "the first publication to start talking about how newspapers would need to migrate their brand to the Web, and the key element was going to be with video."
I'm not sure how true that is, but their list of rules for video on a newspaper website is quite good. They are in brief (with my summary and commentary):
- You are not in the television business. A TV reporter can do 4 or more stories a day because they have hundreds of people back at the station supporting them. Photogs have to edit all their own pieces, their only support staff is an editor who is trained to look at a collection of still images and pick the best – they're no help with video. Don't expect a Photog to be able to turn in the quality of work of a TV station.My input: ...which is why we need a support staff back at the paper. The WaPo and (I think) the NYT do something like this already. Far more importantly however, is the point that Newspaper photogs shouldn't be trying to produce the same reports that TV does. They can be more quirky, insightful, and (frankly) cooler than a TV report. TV has their domain – they're very good at it. Newspapers, if they're going to survive in the moving picture business need a new and different draw. This can and should be a photographer's 'creative' approach to their report.
Photogs have been trying to find that new an different angle for as long as there have been PJs, bring that same ingenuity to video and new media.
- Video is a craft. It can take weeks to come up with a good video piece – it's just more work than still images are.My input: Oh how true and under-appreciated that is. Video takes a lot more time for many reasons (you have to download in real-time, you have to edit in slower than real-time, you have to deal with timing to the milisecond, you have to deal with audio, etc...). If pictures are like 2D, than movies are something like 4D. It's a lot more work and requires a lot of training.
True, knowing photography is a big help when you're on scene shooting – both videography and photography require an understanding of light and composition. And there, the similarity ends, video deals with movement in a whole new way. Not to mention, you have to worry about sound. The list goes on...
- Do not think shovelware. Newspaper can't just take footage from a TV station and put it on their website. The TV new report exists for the 45 seconds it's on the air, and then is never seen again. The new media video is accessible online for eternity. Newspapers have the time available to them to present more well-researched, developed pieces.My input: Well said. Newspapers have the opportunity to present a new and better type of video. Simply rebranding TV footage (or doing a TV-like report) is foolish. You can't beat TV at their own game, invent a new one.
- Do not be intimidated by your bean counters. Forget ROI. Video gets goodwill.My input: Oh how true. Video is going to be a costly endeavor for any newspaper to embark on. New equipment, training, and staff are necessary – forget about it. Aside from the "goodwill" video gets you, it's the future. You can try to save money now, but you'll be closing you're doors in five years.
Citizen Journalism, Brought to You by YouTube
It was inevitable, but YouTube has joined the ranks of CNN, FOX, CBS, and Neighborhood America in calling for the average citizen to submit their own news stories.
Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You're conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold.
-Meet the new YouTube News Manager
Ars Techina reports:
Already the Citizen News channel has subscribed to over 70 of YouTube's citizen journalists who are reporting on various issues and niches. "Texascountryreporter," for example, covers "the backroads of Texas to find the people and places who make the Lone Star State one-of-a-kind." "TheRealNews" is a "global online video news network" with impressive production values, boasting "thousands of $10 donations" from users around the world.
-News unfiltered: YouTube embraces citizen journalism
Personally, I have yet to decide if citizen journalism is a good thing for the Media Industry. On the one hand, more people involved in the Fourth Estate is undoubtedly a good thing, especially considering the political landscape of today. On the other, it feel like a cop out for professional journalists to lazily allow the public to do their jobs for them.
Why TIME.Com Is My Hero:
TIME.com is running an article on the history of the Church of Jediism. [please feel free to pause reading and laugh for a while; I did.]
The article, entitled: 'Star Wars' is My Co-Pilot is a Q&A of the weirdest and wackiest coverage that I have ever seen on a major news site. Be sure to check out the disappointingly short, but fantastic video they published with the story. Cheers to TIME for covering (and publishing) this fantastically off-beat story.
Vuze Says Some ISPs Abuse TCP Resets; Data Not That Clearcut
They then ranked ISPs by how many attempted TCP connections were interrupted by reset packets. And guess who is at the top of the list.
If you said "Comcast," you guessed correctly. According to the Vuze people's initial results, the number of reset connections was 20 percent for that ISP's subscribers.
-Vuze says some ISPs abuse TCP resets; data not that clearcut
Well, they are a bit of a biased source – but this is certainly a limit on the internet – censorship in a form not quite as extreme as China's but certainly uncalled for. It is reasons like this that we need government regulation on the internet.
The technology is 15 years old at this point. For a country that depends as heavily as they do on the internet, the US, the internet is still a wild-west of legality.
CNN.Com Survives Random Outages – CNET News.com
To make the attack on CNN a literal truth, Chinese Hackers have launched a DoS attack on CNN.com. They've got so far as to launch a downloadable tool for all those interested in assisting in the next attack.
How does bringing down a media outlet help stop western media bias? …when the bias is that the Chinese society is closed and not open to hearing outside opinions?
EU States Agree That Inciting Terrorism on the Internet Is a Crime
Representatives of the EU's 27 member states formally agreed today to harmonize their respective countries' definitions of criminally prosecutable acts of terrorism by expanding them to include three new types of crimes: "public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, [terrorist] recruitment, and training for terrorism." The definition of "public provocation" was especially controversial, and it encompasses content posted on the Internet, including not only direct incitements to violence but also terrorist propaganda and bomb-making expertise.
EU states agree that inciting terrorism on the Internet is a crime
As a timely follow-up to the recent news that the UK has jailed 6 men for publicly supporting terrorism through speech, the EU has legally declared that internet support of terrorism is also a crime. This is a severe blow to freedom of speech advocates everywhere.
Terrorists are using the internet to spread their message. I don't deny this at all. The problem with making that act illegal is the definition of who a 'terrorist' is. I heartily submit that this definition is by no means concrete enough to make their support illegal.
Al-Queda is a terrorist organization. Banning their internet activities probably enhances our security. Is Hamas a terrorist organization? They are also a political group. Should be ban them? What about PETA? Should their website be taken off-line?
Fortunately, there is still good news. Although the EU has passed this law, they have not really provided a means of enforcing it. Though the paper precedent is on the books, it does not look like it can be acted on … yet.
TIME.Com: Cheers
In reviewing my previous posts in the last month or so, I've noticed that TIME.com has frequently been the starting point for many of my posts. I remember filling out a survey that TIME had on their website back in either October or November 2007 (thereabouts), which said that TIME was attempting to drastically change their online content – for the better. I faithfully filled out the survey which asked real questions like: rate the site's multimedia content, timeliness of content, and so on.
Lo and behold, it appears that they've been good to their word. Content in the last couple of months has been fantastic. Multimedia has been very well done and timely.
So, TIME – here's to a job well done. Good on you for following through.
The News Business: Out of Print: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
The News Business: Out of Print: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
I've been sitting on this article for a while, meaning to respond to the many points it makes, both good and bad. It was published last week. In short, it's an excellent review of the current state of the newspaper industry.
Like I suggest, there are points that I agree with, and points that I don't. I will try to write that post in the near future, but if you have any interest in the current state of f the industry, read this (very long) article.
I will be traveling (in Dublin) this weekend, and will have limited internet access.
Cloud Computing Is Well and Good, but It Can’t Beat the Desktop Computer. – By Paul Boutin – Slate Magazine
One of the nice things about Word and Photoshop is that once I fire them up and start working, I can forget all about the Internet for a few hours. Sometimes, my PC and I just want to be alone.
I couldn't agree more. The idea of putting all sorts of applications online is interesting, but not really practical. Photoshop Express is interesting, but it's no more than a proof of concept to me. Perhaps worth having as a tool on an online picture ordering site (like MPIX) as a means of last minute adjustments.
Similarly, gDocs, is convenient if I need to share text with someone as I type it (and see theirs), but it's really not a replacement to Apple Pages, which I do use instead of Microsoft Word.
This guy's basic point is good. Computing through the browser is an interesting idea, but yet to be practical.
The real money will be made when someone figures out how to use these simple apps as they are – not as desktop replacements, but as quick little apps that plugin into simple web apps. The web is about collaboration, make the web apps about that too.
Neowin.net – Microsoft to Snub Standards Compliant Mode in IE8
Neowin.net - Microsoft to snub standards compliant mode in IE8
well, crap.
Generation Gap: Study Group 2.0
Thankfully, this student wasn't expelled, but the whole this is rather ridiculous.
Basically, this: a freshman at the university of Toronto (Canada) created a study group of facebook. His professors, apparently unaware of what goes on in a study group, not only failed him (he was earning a 'B'), but recommended him for expulsion based on 147 counts (the number of people in the group) of academic integrity violations.
Wow, do they not get it. Online does not equal cheating. Free access to more people and more information is one of the great things about the internet. Using a facebook group to post questions from previous tests, class notes, chapter summaries, etc… is just genius. I wish I could have had such things in high school. It's a logical use for not only the internet, but Facebook.
DailyTech - Student Wins Victory Over School in Facebook Expulsion Debacle
How Google’s Counterculture Changes Everything | the Digital Home – Don Reisinger’s Take on the Tech Closest to Home – CNET Blogs
I don't intend to talk about a lot of negative things, but this one really struck my cord. First off: c|net blogs. Some are okay, some are bad, and some are awful. When these started several years ago, the idea was to have experts talk tech to a general audience. The problem is that blogs require 2 things: an opinion, and constant updating. That's a recipe for disaster. The link below should prove my point.
This guy's post not only has nothing to do with tech in the home, but it has no point. Maybe I'm completely missing his point here, but I hardly see how services that are meant to compete with other services are aimed at getting people to navigate away from a google page. He's either wrong or not making his point clearly. A example of why he shouldn't have to come up with new content all the time.
…which brings me to the second thing that's been pissing me off: all of the blogging/talk/whatever about Google. don't get me wrong – I do like me the Google. They're in my opinion, the best at what they do. But Mr. Digital Home, has no place praising them in a random, poorly worded blog post. It's just the latest example of how web culture works – talk about the hot thing just to increase hits (or some similar motivation, like having nothing better to write about).
Right. done.
