May 19, 2003
'Star Wars Kid' gets bucks from blogs
A couple of webloggers are raising money for an unfortunate teenager humiliated worldwide after a private video of his energetic lightsaber moves was leaked to the Net.Webloggers Andy Baio and Jish Mukerji launched a fundraiser Friday for the young man they call the "Star Wars Kid," whose home video has been downloaded millions of times and watched by people all over the world. ...
By Friday afternoon, the webloggers' fund had received more than 100 individual donations totaling nearly $1,000.
On Google, blogs and web publishing
Doc jumps into the fray on such matters at Dan's piece on OhmyNews and the twin pieces in the NY Times yesterday with this theme, says Doc:
Both carry a subtext that says bloggers aren't serious, and blogging is not Serious Journalism. Also that blogging is, in some way, a threat.
Related to all this, somehow, is Jonathan Peterson's Amateur Hour entry today, Embraceable News, in which he has some advice for big-media publishers, to wit:
In short, the problem isn't blogs or Google, the problem is that large publishers are unwilling to embrace the web. The way to fix that is for publishers to make changes, not Google. Use mod_rewrite to hide that ugly CMS, put content in it's permanent location the FIRST time you publish it, let the search spiders walk your site, read some documentation about search engine placement, leave your archive content visible. Or don't.
Doc has more on printwashing here, with the bottom line:
In the age of the Web, the practice of charging for access to digital archives is a collossal anachronism. It's time for The New York Times and the other papers to step forward, join the real world and correct the problem. Expose the archives. Give them permanent URLs. Let in the bots. Let their writers, and their reputations, accept the credit they are constantly given and truly deserve.
Steven Johnson on blog space
Steven Johnson in Wired: BLOG SPACE: Public Storage For Wisdom, Ignorance, and Everything in Between. Excerpt:
What happens when you start seeing the Web as a matrix of minds, not documents? Networks based on trust become an essential tool. You start evaluating the relevance of data based not on search query results but on personal testimonies.
mentor said:
However, we need to bear in mind that blogs, as a new phenomenon in the Internet space, are not minds, the blogs are only representations of people's minds (i.e. the thinking process) to some extend. Blog entries are documents also, albeit different type of documents with properties and attributes different than stand alone isolated documents (reports, articles, static web pages. etc.).
From: http://www.kmentor.com/socio-tech-info/archives/000075.html
Napster reborn?
Amy Harmon in today's NY Times: Deal May Raise Napster From Online Ashes.
But Wired News is a step ahead, announcing:
Software maker Roxio said Monday it has acquired for about $40 million the online music service pressplay, a venture jointly owned by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.Roxio, best known for its CD-burning software, owns the Napster brand and is expected to relaunch pressplay under the name that set Internet music file-swapping in motion.
