September 04, 2003
Edwards for President Blog
The campaign for Sen. John Edwards has launched an Edwards for President Blog.
andy said:
That's nice, but at the NM debate last night Mr. Edwards didn't seem to set himself apart from the other gazillion Democrat contenders for the WH. That's OK, though. He's young and he'll get another chance in '08, '12, '16.... After all, isn't this Gephardt's second or third try?
BTW, speaking of Dick Gephardt, did ya like his messaging at the Democrat debate last night? Talk about blunt. I don't think he could've repeated "miserable failure" more times than he did last night. Now, folks, that's focused (targeted, deliberate, discplined) messaging.
Does the right of first sale still exist?
Here's someone who bought an (encrypted) iTunes song from Apple and is selling it on eBay. He wonders: Does the right of first sale still exist?
anthony said:
I wonder: Why was the auction cancelled by eBay?
JD said:
Perhaps they believe Apple's encryption was bypassed. This DRM turf is very much a gray area.
It's a peer-to-peer world
Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of Culture and Communication at New York University and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs and next year's the forthcoming The Anarchist in the Library, wrote a four-part series this summer on "The new information ecosystem: cultures of anarchy and closure" for openDemocracy.net (I think a fifth part may still be coming).
This month he's answering questions about P2P and copyright on openDemocracy's discussion forums.
Blogworld: The new amateur journalism
Good piece on blogging's contribution to the media ecosystem by Matt Welch in the Columbia Journaiism Review: Blogworld: The New Amateur Journalists Weigh In. What have bloggers contributed to journalism? (Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.) Excerpt:
No one knows how many active blogs there are worldwide, but Blogcount (yes, a blog that counts blogs) guesses between 2.4 million and 2.9 million. Freedom of the press belongs to nearly 3 million people.So what have these people contributed to journalism? Four things: personality, eyewitness testimony, editorial filtering, and uncounted gigabytes of new knowledge.
"Why are Weblogs popular?" asks Jarvis, whose company has launched four dozen of them, ranging from beachcams on the Jersey shore to a temporary blog during the latest Iraq war. "I think it's because they have something to say. In a media world that's otherwise leached of opinions and life, there's so much life in them." ...
Outsiders with vivid writing styles and unique viewpoints have risen to the top of the blog heap and begun vaulting into mainstream media. Less than two years ago, Elizabeth Spiers was a tech-stock analyst for a hedge fund who at night wrote sharp-tongued observations about Manhattan life on her personal blog; now she's the It Girl of New York media, lancing her colleagues at Gawker.com, while doing free-lance work for the Times, the New York Post, Radar, and other publications. Salam Pax, a pseudonymous young gay Iraqi architect who made hearts flutter with his idiosyncratic personal descriptions of Baghdad before and after the war, now writes columns for The Guardian and in July signed a book deal with Grove/Atlantic. Steven Den Beste, a middle-aged unemployed software engineer in San Diego, has been spinning out thousands of words of international analysis most every day for the last two years; recently he has been seen in the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. ...
Besides introducing valuable new sources of information to readers, these sites are also forcing their proprietors to act like journalists: choosing stories, judging the credibility of sources, writing headlines, taking pictures, developing prose styles, dealing with readers, building audience, weighing libel considerations, and occasionally conducting informed investigations on their own. Thousands of amateurs are learning how we do our work, becoming in the process more sophisticated readers and sharper critics. For lazy columnists and defensive gatekeepers, it can seem as if the hounds from a mediocre hell have been unleashed. But for curious professionals, it is a marvelous opportunity and entertaining spectacle; they discover what the audience finds important and encounter specialists who can rip apart the work of many a generalist. More than just A.J. Liebling-style press criticism, journalists finally have something approaching real peer review, in all its brutality. If they truly value the scientific method, they should rejoice. Blogs can bring a collective intelligence to bear on a question. ...
Great, great stuff here, Matt.
CJR has also published a far-too-abbreviated list of journalism bloggers: The Media Go Blogging.
Matt Welch said:
Thanks, J.D.! Though I must cop responsibility for the all-too abbreviated list....
The One True b!X's PORTLAND COMMUNIQUE said:
One of the things that's been interesting to me as I continue my experiment in "hobbyist journalism" (a term the people I speak with seem to have an easier time understanding instead of going into the whole weblog thing) here in Portland is how easy it's been to establish relationships of various degrees with the powers that be. Having started out as an excuse to force myself to read more about my city because I was going to make myself write about it every day, the Portland Communique is now read by several local "traditional" media people, a handful of City staffers, and at least two City commissioners, one of which occassionally shows up to post comments. And after an unfortunate series of miscues which kept me out of a Police Bureau news conference once, I'm now on the media distribution list for the Bureau, as well as those of various other City offices.
For something done in spare-time, non-professionally, and somewhat experimentially, I'm still somewhat amazed by all of that.
Visual chats, lurkware and an MP3 jukebox
Lots o' interesting stuff in today's Circuits section of the NY Times:
• Adding Eye Contact to Your Web Chats
• Heart of Darkness, on a Desktop. More and more PC owners are discovering software lurking on their computers that they had no idea was there. And viruses are only part of the story.
• Tools for Brooking a Torrent of Invaders
• An East Village bar contains a jukebox with 26,000 songs -- the biggest selection of songs in the world. How? The music is encoded as MP3's.
Digital dilemmas in online news
New from Iowa State Press: Digital Dilemmas: Ethical Issues for Online Media Professionals, by Robert Berkman and Christopher Shumway.
Dems debate on PBS today
Tonight at 6 pm Mountain time, all the major Democratic candidates for president debate in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It will be carried live on PBS.
As soon as the debate begins, the Howard Dean weblog will have an open discussion about it here.
Later: So it looks like the local PBS station here in the SF East Bay still has The Berenstain Bears and Dragon Tales scheduled to air in their usual spots. Same for another PBS station (available on Comcast) in Northern California. We'll see if they'll preempt their programming or not.
No wonder three quarters of Democrats can't name a single Democratic candidate for president.
Still later: Just found it will be broadcast on tape delay here at 11 pm.
anthony said:
6pm Mountain Time? Who uses Mountain Time anymore? TV tells me there are two time zones EST and PST. Let me get out my calculator, EST is +2 from MST. That makes this debate at 8pm. Whew!
JD said:
OK, I thought about changing it to ET and PT, but the debate is in N.M. Didn't want to be a geo-snob. :)
Colleges plan music services
Boston Globe: Colleges plan music services, would charge students fee to download tunes over schools' networks.
It's a worthy experiment. Let's see if it works.
The courts and DVD encryption
From CNN's Law Center: California's Supreme Court and the DVD encryption-cracking code.
Online news pioneers survey landscape
Mark Glaser in OJR begins a two-part series in which online news pioneers share their thoughts on where Web journalism has been, and where it's likely to go.
I happen to disgree with Bernard Gwertzman, retired editor of the New York Times on the Web, who says sites like the Times' should begin charging subscriptions, even though that would lead to a large dropoff in readers. This, despite the fact that NY Times Digital is millions of dollars in the black.
Besides Gwertzman, Glaser sits down at a virtual roundtable with Craig Newmark, Dave Winer, John Battelle and Ana Marie Cox. Some really interesting stuff here.
Cox: ... I think what's really revolutionary about Weblogs isn't their content, but the way that Weblog software has enabled technically unsophisticated people to produce aesthetically pleasing, well-organized Web sites. This is how blogs are different from personal home pages, and why blogging software could be to online journalism what PageMaker and Quark were to magazines: It may allow blogs to have the same effect on traditional journalism as zines did. Which is to say, a few big-name blog authors will get hired by major media publications to zing up their lame output. They will then become disillusioned and leave to write extremely mannered, hugely popular memoirs based on the experience of raising their orphaned little brother. (Is Glenn Reynolds destined to become the Dave Eggers of blogging? Discuss.)Also, as it was for the short-lived zine revolution, the simplicity of the new technology has enabled some talented people without formal training to be recognized for their intelligence and wit. I am for this; the rewards of reading something great are well worth the hours of slogging though warblogs, moblogs, etc. Two of my own favorite blogs -- The Major Fall, The Minor Lift and (excuse the language) Dong Resin -- are put together by proudly unprofessional journalists. I find their content much more reliably informative and hilarious than pretty much anything published by people who get paid to do so.
And this:
OJR: What's the most exciting new development in online journalism, and why?Winer: RSS. Because it levels the field. On the same page I read reports from BBC, The New York Times and my favorite Weblogs. I'm not more impressed by Glenn Fleishman, for example, when he writes for his Weblog, or when he writes for The New York Times. It makes online journalism more competitive and it desperately needs more competition.
Mobile news photos and mobile photo news
Steve Outing in E-Media Tidbits today has this:
Paper Publishes Its 1st Cell-Phone News PhotoG–teborgs-Posten, Scandinavia's second-largest morning newspaper, today published on its website its first news photo taken by a mobile phone. Johan Bostr–m of the Swedish paper's news desk tells me that after a collision between a tram and a truck in central G–teborg, reporter Ralph K”llstr–m reached the scene and filed a brief report to the news desk. Then he used his mobile phone to snap some pictures, picking the best and e-mailing it (via the phone) to the news desk, which added it to the web version of the story. ... But the story's not over. According to Bostr–m, "20 minutes later a photographer from G-P arrived. The pictures he delivered to the news desk an hour later were technically of higher quality but did not compete in news quality." While in the print edition the photographer's photos will be used, on the website they're sticking with the reporter's photo-phone shots.
That's a great example of why news organizations should be replacing all reporters' mobile phones with photo phones.
Meantime, on the online news site, Vin Crosbie points out that worldwide sales of camera-equipped mobile phones now exceed sales of digital cameras. He writes:
Thirty percent of all mobile phones in Japan already have built-in cameras. Cameras will soon become an integral part of all mobile handsets.In the May edition of The Digital Photojournalist, Evan Nisselson, a photo editor who is now a photojournalism business consultant, wrote about what it's to shoot events with a Sony mobile phone rather than a Nikon F1.
Rod K said:
The other night I was watching my local TimeWarner BayNews9 news broacdast and they were showing a BayNews9 Phone Cam image of a news event.
Rod
Drudge makes $1.2 million a year
The Miami Herald has an interview with Internet bon vivant Matt Drudge, who discloses that he makes a cool $1.2 million a year. Perhaps there's a silver lining here for amateur journalists.
As usual, Druge makes a nonsensical distinction between covering the news and journalism:
''I'm a newsman and not a journalist,'' he said in a recent interview, ''nor a cyber this or that.''
I'll confess to having mixed feelings about Drudge's success. It shows the power of the Internert and independent publishing. But Drudge is such a flawed hero for this model. He won't even tarnish himself with the epithet journalist. But the distinction between newsman and journalist is just bullshit. A newsman is a journalist. Unfortunately, Drudge has shown little interest in what a real "newsman" does for a living: pursue the truth wherever it leads.
He also derides bloggers again, though this is more understandable, because he's tired of being called a blogger (he's not):
Since his site is primarily composed of links to stories on other sites and is a Web log, commonly called a blog, how about a blogger?''Nope. Sounds too much like booger,'' he said.
Drudge is still dismissed in mainstream news circles, but he remains a force in Internet news. On a typical day in August, Drudge's site had nearly 6.5 million visitors, and it had 163 million in the preceding 31 days.
Steve Rhodes said:
I question Drudge's numbers. First those are almost certainly page views, not visitors. Second, his site automatically refreshes if you have the page open for about five minutes (it just refreshed for me - still showing the same crappy AT&T ad).
And people basically come to the site because it is a collection of usefull links. If I want to go to a site with a URL that isn't simple to type like Ain't It Cool News or to read Roger Ebert, i just go to Drudge. And he sometimes has links to interesting articles (though none currently).
Still, he does have an audience and needs more scrutiny. When he does have "scoops" they are usually just articles from the next day's paper (which you can sometimes already find online). This is just one recent error.
Another DMCA claim against Google
Gary Price points me to a new Chilling Effects Clearinghouse news item: Westchester Life Magazine complains of copyright infringement and asks Google to remove offending material under the DMCA. As of this moment, still has the link to www.westerchester1.com in its database.
