Monday, November 30, 2009

Goodman treated like Mooseshit at Vancouver Border



Apparently you're Osama Bin Laden if you oppose the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Amy Goodman, who says she didn't even know the Olympics were being staged there, experienced invasive treatment at the hands of border guards as she tried to enter the country to give a talk that had nothing to do with the Olympics.

CBC

Rabble

DN

Canadians: buy a clue: no one in USia gives a flying puck about yr fricking Olympics. But one has to wonder about your ideas of border proprieties, privacy, matters of public interest, and what conceivable justification you might offer for how you're handling your paranoia.

The Globe and Mail carried the story as well. Not oddly, however, this tale of the maltreatment of a journalist at the US/Canadian border is of no interest to the New York Times, which has never acknowledged Goodman's existence -- a calculated inattention worse than the New Canadian Attention.


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Nude Erections in Journaljism



AOL is putting the finishing touches on a high-tech system for mass-producing news articles...

In addition to selling standard ads to run alongside the story or video on a Web page, AOL says it will offer custom content. For instance, AOL says, if its algorithms show consumers are searching for information about the Zhu Zhu Pets robotic hamster, a retailer could pay AOL to sponsor an article about where to find the hot toy. Some traditional media outlets, including magazines and TV studios, offer similar services.
Nick Brien, CEO of Media Brands, a media buying and planning unit owned by Interpublic Group, says AOL's model is a fresh approach to marketing. "Clients like that way of thinking," he says.

WSJ

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Friday, November 27, 2009

National Black Friday of Listening

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Education before JSTOR

Frank Furedi:

The transition from one generation to another requires education to transmit an understanding of the lessons learned by humanity through the ages.


How true. Unless you're JSTOR.

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The market will lead

Mr. THOMAS BLEHA (Author, "Overtaken on the Information Superhighway"): The average access speed in the United States today is around five megabits per second.

RAZ: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BLEHA: In Japan, the average speed is over 60 megabits per second...

RAZ: Six...

Mr. BLEHA: ...or 12 times as fast.

RAZ: How did the United States fall so far behind?

Mr. BLEHA: Well, as you know, at the end of the Clinton-Gore administration, we were among the world's leaders. When President Bush and Vice President Cheney came to office, they simply weren't interested. And on every other advanced country, the government has led. Here, the government said the market will lead. In other countries, governments developed strategies with goals and deadlines, and they also subsidized the advance of fiber broadband.




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Friday, November 20, 2009

Experts are always the last to know

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Three elevantages of an elephant

Christian Fuchs characterizes three vantages offered by participants at the conference on The Internet as Playground and Factory :

In my opinion, three positions on these questions could be identified in
the presentations and discussions at the conference. These positions
partly overlap, are partly complementary, but to a certain extent also
stand in contradiction to each other.

Representatives of the first position hold that there is a symmetric
exchange between users and Internet companies so that the latter make
money profits and in exchange provide benefits in the form of free
access for users to technologies that allow information sharing,
communication, and community building. The Internet is conceived in this
position as being a participatory system because it allows users to
become information producers and to create and share user-generated
content.

Representatives of the second position tend to argue that the
Internet is not a truly democratic or participatory space, but has
deficiencies and is shaped by asymmetric power structures. However,
there would be democratic projects and potentials of the Internet that
allow envisioning the realization of an alternative, people-centred
Internet. The representatives of this position are thus rather
optimistic and argue that projects such as for example peer-to-peer
platforms, open access, open content, free software, open source,
alternative online media, digital art projects, cyberprotest, public
online media, public access projects, etc are likely to bring about
positive changes.

Representatives of the third position see the Internet
as being shaped by asymmetric power relations. They tend to argue that
there are positive potentials and projects for an alternative
participatory Internet, but that the contemporary Internet is largely
shaped by powerful actors, especially corporations, that derive material
benefits at the expense of Internet users, commodify the Internet,
exploit Internet users, and appropriate the Internet commons. Categories
employed in this context include exploitation, class, capitalism,
alienation, enclosure, appropriation, or expropriation. The political
implication of this position is that political movements and
organizations are needed that bring about wider transformations of
society so that a commons-based and participatory Internet becomes
possible.

These three positions on the one hand partly overlap or are
simultaneously present in approaches, and on the other hand are to a
certain degree opposites that result from different political and
theoretical positions. Opposites need not and cannot always be overcome,
it is possible that they stand side by side and create productive
tensions that advance the overall field. This requires to acknowledge
that there are certain commonalities and to agree that there are
disagreements.

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All the other people's writing that's fit to print


This guy* might have a point --
"Is it appropriate for a national newspaper to reprint my personal tribute to Edward Woodward as if it were an article written for them?" tweeted Wright today. "They just lifted it from my blog without asking. And cut off the entire end section about my last meeting with him … I'm not talking about quotes. Am talking about the entire article. But with edits they made that make me look ill informed and unfeeling … Perhaps they would like to send the fee they would pay the commissioned writer of such an article to Edward's memorial... ." Media Monkey
Grosso modo: To what extent are news organizations like the Times trapped in a print publisher's economic model (and, btw, of news) that is already on its way towards being outmoded? And if that's the case, how can they be relied upon to provide us with news?

*via a Jarvis tweet

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Monday, November 16, 2009

Content tax?


The theme is back:

Magid: News tax needed.

NYT candyass poll: Half would pay for news:

Paradoxically, in every country, the people who were willing to pay the most for news online were the people who already pay the most for news: avid newspaper readers.
I fail to see the paradox. This is not going away. An entire industry has retooled itself into bankruptcy. It refuses to consider that those who deliver the bits which are its product, translated, are profiting from having captive millions of subscribers who only go online because "content" is there.

We won't pay because we've paid.

Big Pipes profit, content makers starve. Is there an economic vomit other than that which I, doglike, keep returning to?

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Monday, November 09, 2009

Tweet


The capitalist nightmare: search is both theft and the very ontology of the web.

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Sunday, November 01, 2009

New Homeland Security Concept


Instead of that silly terror-by-the-color system, every head of household in the US gets one of these -

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