February 20, 2003
Thrillers online
Oliver Willis, erstwhile weblog celebrity, humorist and pundit, has posted the first two chapters of his novel online. Valley Girl is a thriller about what happens when an
adult film star becomes the object of affection for a diabolical senator.
I'm there, guy.
Meantime, not long ago I posted all the chapters of my own thriller online. Return of the Legends is the story of a businessman who launches a DNA grave operation to retrieve the genetic profiles of history's most famous legends.
Quick hits
Wired News: DMCA blocks tech progress. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is threatening innovation in Silicon Valley, and it's time for businesses and consumers to mobilize to change the law. That was the message at the Digital Rights Summit in Santa Clara on Wednesday.
Jack Slater on bias in the media, here and here.
Wired News: Peter Rojas on the moblogging phenom.
Mark Glaser in OJR: The LA Times lets its critics loose, letting readers engage in an online Q&A.
Oh, brother: A group of music publishers is suing Bertelsmann for its investment in Napster, and they're asking for damages of at least $17 billion.
LA Times: Thanks to new digital technologies, more solo journalists can go solo into danger zones, reporting a story, writing it, videotaping, editing and transmiting it at the scene.
MediaPost: CNET is re-launching its ZDNet Web site with a new focus as a relationship portal for buyers and sellers of IT products. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.
Gallery: a cool photo utility
Jamie Hutt, a design editor at startribune.com, emailed the online news list about a program he's crazy about called Gallery. Says Jamie:
It's the best of many "donation-ware" photo tools available now. Aside from providing a lovely slideshow utility, it allows you to catalog and organize all of your site's images. Oh, and it makes your pics searchable. If you have zero to little photo automation on your site, but would love to easily improve efficiency and access, I'd really recommend you look at this software.
You can see it in a form that was easily customized for my personal pics at:
http://www.huttstuff.com/gallery(Username: guest Password: guest)
Or sample one gallery here.
These are lovely slide shows.
Sweeping changes in phone and broadband rules
Breaking news: The regional Bell operating companies won one and lost one Thursday afternoon as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made sweeping, dramatic changes in its local phone and broadband competition rules. A sharply divided FCC ruled the Bells will no longer have to share their high-speed fiber lines with broadband competitors but also decided the Bells would have to continue to share their local voice copper lines.
Coverage in Internet.com and the NY Times. The FCC will probably come in for criticism for easing up on on the broadband competitor rules, but from what I've read, the Bell competitors were getting subsidized by the Bells and then sticking it to their own customers. So both rulings seem fair-minded. And it showed some guts on the commissioners' part to break with their chairman, Michael Powell.
One hopes that the customer isn't an afterthought in this clash of the telecom titans, as has been the case all too often.
Guterman on Bloggle
In his latest Media Notes column for Biz2, Jimmy Guterman takes a look at Google's purchase of Pyra Labs. Excerpt:
Both Google and Pyra officials have been relatively quiet so far regarding what they plan to do together, but several elements of the deal are clear. The Blogger hosting service will become faster and more reliable when it's moved to Google servers, and millions of people who have never given a thought to blogs will be exposed to them when they visit Google. The intense bloggers, that small group of correspondents who seem to sit in front of their computers posting all day and all night, have begun the expected insular conversation about what this means for them. I expect that what it means for them, more than anything else, is that they are about to get a lot more company. Some bloggers have carved pleasant, comfortable niches for themselves that are about to get challenged. That might not be great news for the individual bloggers affected, but it's great news for the many thousands of blogs that will be born as a result of this development.
Signs of the Times
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9-11-01: 15 Saudis, 0 Iraqis
Drunken frat boy drives country into ditch
War begins with 'Dubya'
Bush is proof that empty warheads can be dangerous
Let's bomb Texas, they have oil too
How did our oil get under their sand?
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld: the asses of evil
Let Exxon send their own troops
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
Bush is to Christianity as Osama is to Islam
A picture of Bush saying "Why should I care what the
American people think? They didn't vote for me."
Meantime, check this out: These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed.
Oh, and have you received your Evite to the War on Iraq party?
shhhh said:
Sign seen at NYC demonstration: "There's a village in Texas missing its idiot."
The dangers of taking photographs
Just came across this email to the Farber list from a professor at Bryn Mawr:
At the faculty meeting at Bryn Mawr College on 12 Feb 2003, we were informed that a student at Haverford (our affiliated College) was arrested over the weekend when he was trying to do his homework assignment in Philadelphia. As part of the Cities project, he was taking photographs of SEPTA (our regional transit authority) facilities when he was arrested, detained for a few hours, and eventually released. Haverford administration is working to try to ensure that this event not be a part of the student's permanent police record. Apparently taking photographs at transit facilities is cause for arrest during "Code Orange" alert, the authorities explained. Faculty were advised to be careful about assigning "field trip" projects during such alerts.
In response to this, another list member posted this handy one-page foldup, The Photographers' Right (pdf). It's legit -- sent in by Bert P. Krages, an attorney in Portland, Oregon -- and may come in handy in these sad times, it seems.
Alan Reiter said:
Amateur photography is going to explode with the introduction of cellular camera phones that can take snapshots. A few of them can shot brief videos. Samsung is introducing a camera phone that can shoot and store 20 minutes of video.
I believe camera phones will actually revolution the wireless business and change the dynamics of certain activities, including journalism and justice. I wrote about it here -- http://reiter.weblogger.com/2003/02/13.
I also believe the wireless industry and the legal profession need to think much more about the ramifications when tens of millions and, quite possibly, hundreds of millions of cellular subscribers have camera phones.
What happens when millions of people could take photos of "suspicious" characters and send them to the police? It's already happening, as I wrote here -- http://reiter.weblogger.com/2003/02/17.
Given today's political climate and paranoia, we are in for some very "interesting" times because the use of digital cameras + wireless will create all sorts of situations, both good and bad.
Alan Reiter
Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing
