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Data breach at climate research center in U.K

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Juliet Eilperin - Nov. 20 (News Report) - Hackers broke into the electronic files of one of the world's foremost climate research centers this week and posted an array of e-mails in which prominent scientists engaged in a blunt discussion of global warming research and disparaged climate-change skeptics.

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The Digital Economy's Coming Subprime Crisis (And What You Can Learn From It)

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

harvardbusiness.org - By Umair Haque - Nov. 17 (Opinion) - Today's media players aren't investing in better ads. They're investing in more — and more toxic — ads. Uh oh: it's the economic equivalent of the subprime crisis. The parallels, to me, are too striking to ignore. Here are eight time-worn steps to crisis that Wall Street took yesterday, and media's taking today. Toxicity. Wall Street's subprime crisis was built on toxic financial instruments. The mediascape's subprime crisis is being built on toxic communications. Social gaming — Facebook's Farmville, for example — is the hot growth area for VCs, advertisers, and publishers alike. But last week, TechCrunch blew the lid off it: much revenue in this nascent market is derived from scams masquerading as "ads." To me, there are striking echoes of CDOs — a hot new growth market for Wall Street, later revealed to be a house of cards.

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Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It?

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Randall Stross - Nov. 15 (Opinion) - In a patent application, a new way to make consumers acknowledge a pop-up ad. “Some of the best-loved technology on the planet” is how Apple describes its products when recruiting new employees. It’s a fair description. But the love that consumers send Apple’s way could flag if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed. In an application filed last year and made public last month by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics. Filing a patent application, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that the company plans to use the technology. But the application shows, at the least, that Apple has invested in research to develop what it calls an “enforcement routine” that makes people watch ads they may not want to watch.

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Josh Silver: Too Big to Block? Why Obama Must Stop the Comcast-NBC Merger

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Josh Silver - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - This train wreck of a deal will hurt all over. It will mean increased costs for cable television service; currently free online NBC content locked behind a pay wall; less opportunity for the distribution of independent media; even fewer choices and less programming diversity.

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Good Riddance To Mainstream Media?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

National Public Radio - By John Donvan - Nov. 12 (Opinion) - As newspapers go under, the network newscasts lose viewers and the mainstream media in general see more and more of their audience shift online, are we as a society better or worse off? Some argue that the diversity of voices available on the Internet to provide information and analysis makes for a better system. Others say a decline in traditional journalism means lower standards and fewer resources to investigate crucial stories. A panel of experts took on this topic Oct. 27 in an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate: John Hockenberry, Michael Wolff, Phil Bronstein, David Carr, Katrina vanden Heuvel. Three panelists argued for the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media" and three against in an Oxford-style debate. Before the debate, the audience at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts voted 25 percent in favor of the motion and 50 percent against. Twenty-five percent was undecided. After the debate, 24 percent supported the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media," while 68 percent opposed it and 8 percent remained undecided.

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Toward a Slow-News Movement

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Mediactive - By Dan Gillmor - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it’s unreliable if not false. It’s my own version of “slow news” — an expression I first heard on Friday, coined by my friend Ethan Zuckerman in a wonderful riff off the slow-food movement. We were at a Berkman Center for Internet & Society retreat in suburban Boston, in a group discussion of ways to improve the quality of what we know when we have so many sources from which to choose at every minute of the day. One of society’s recently adopted cliches is the “24-hour news cycle” — the recognition that the once-a-day, manufacturing-based version of journalism has essentially passed into history for those who consume and create news via digital systems. Now, it’s said, we get news every hour of every day, and media creators work tirelessly to fill those hours with new stuff.

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Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Nov. 06 - Journalism and curation—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine where the one ends and the other begins. The chicken/egg relationship between the two solidified into conventional wisdom during the aftermath of the Iranian election this summer, when journalists—mostly barred from shoe-leather reporting and other, more traditional methods of newsgathering—were forced to play the role of social-media editors. In the...

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Edit This Page: Is it the end of Wikipedia?

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Review - By Evgeny Morozov - Nov. 05 (Review) - Wikipedia owes its existence to the nerdy culture of the first online discussion systems, such as Usenet; the unlikely success of moderated social sites, such as Slashdot, which was so influential in Wikipedia’s early days that the project was briefly known as “the Encyclopedia That Slashdot Built”; and the emergence of a tight community around WikiWikiWeb, the first application to use the wiki style of editing. The dotcom recession also helped by freeing a supply of superbly talented technologists from the burdens of paid employment.

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Curating, not moderating, the flow of content and participation

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Headshift - By Robin Hamman - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - User generated content is, for many media companies and other organisations, more of a problem than a solution. Vague calls to action lead to waves of irrelevant content submitted by audiences who have taken time, effort, and in some instances spent money to do so - only for that content to, in most instances, be ignored. Online communities require moderation to keep discussions on the right side of the law. Breaking stories of importance, or topics that capture the imagination, lead to floods of content that quickly overwhelm processes and technical platforms. In all these situations, which will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked at the social media collision point between audiences and organisations, very little of value is extracted from what can be a costly exercise, primarily because most "social platforms" have been built to pull in audiences and allow moderators to police user activity.

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Out to lunch

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Nick Paumgarten - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - The week before last, two Northwest pilots overshot Minneapolis, their destination, by a hundred and fifty miles, apparently oblivious of their instruments and their internal clocks, as well as of a barrage of increasingly desperate radio calls from air-traffic control. Afterward, they explained that they’d logged onto their personal laptop computers and become so engrossed—not in FarmVille or porn, or even good old off-line activity, such as a fistfight or a nap, but, rather, if you believe them, in the nuances of the airline’s new crew flight-scheduling procedure—that they’d essentially forgotten where they were and what they were supposed to be doing. Which was landing a plane. The equivalent for a text-messaging driver might be for him to veer off a turnpike into a cornfield and drive twenty miles through the corn rows—stalks thumping the hood, G.P.S. lady losing her mind—without once looking up from the task of typing a heartfelt response to a wireless provider’s auto-generated telemarketing text. That is, it’s almost unimaginable.

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FCC Fine Print Could Undermine an Open Internet | Save the Internet

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

savetheinternet.com - By Tim Karr - Nov. 03 (News Report) - Buried in the fine print of the FCC’s proposed Net Neutrality rules is a potential loophole that if left open would undermine the future of Internet freedom.

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Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Read/WriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Oct. 28 (Opinion) - Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

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Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Daggle - By Danny Sullivan - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - I’d thought I’d heard it all in the debate over Google and newspapers, but yesterday Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson took it up a notch. He accused Google of making people slutty. If we’re using sexual metaphors now, here’s another one. Why doesn’t the Wall Street Journal and News Corporation in general put a condom around all of its content, to protect itself from Google? There’s a good brand called robots.txt that will help.

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'Net Neutrality' Is Socialism, Not Freedom

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Examiner - By James G. Lakely - Oct. 20 (Opinion) - Advocates of imposing "network neutrality" say it's necessary to ensure a "free" and "open" Internet and rescue the public from nefarious corporations that "control" technology. Few proposals in Washington have been sold employing such deceptive language -- and that's saying something. But few public policy ideas can boast the unashamedly socialist pedigree of net neutrality.

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Advertising - F.T.C. to Rule Blogs Must Disclose Gifts or Pay for Reviews

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Tim Arango - Oct. 06 (News Report) - The government will seek to slow the spread of false “word of mouth” promotions in exchange for free product samples.

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College for $99 a Month

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Monthly - By Kevin Carey - Oct. 05 (Special Report) - Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

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Hellman to invest $5 million in journalism nonprofit

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By James Temple - Sep. 25 (News Analysis) - San Francisco financier Warren Hellman will invest $5 million to develop a nonprofit journalism venture that will provide regional news coverage online and feed stories to media partners including KQED and possibly the New York Times. The goal of the organization, which is expected to begin next year and create "more than dozens" of positions, is to ensure thorough coverage of local politics, social issues, education and other topics as the traditional media industry shrivels. "We've lost a lot," said Hellman, who specifically bemoaned dwindling reporting on subjects like the San Francisco Ballet, local business openings and vetting of political candidates. "We're going to be meeting an unmet need."

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Banish the Cyber-Bigots

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Michael Gerson - Sep. 24 (Opinion) - The Internet could represent a flourishing of democracy. Instead it amplifies hate. The brutality of public debate on the Internet is due to one fact above all -- the option of anonymity

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How the Real-Time Web Is Leaving Google Behind

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Clive Thompson - Sep. 23 (Special Report) - ... the real-time Web behaves in the opposite fashion. It's all about "trending topics"—zOMG a plane crash!—which by their very nature generate a massive number of links and postings within minutes. And a search engine can't spend days deciding what is the most crucial site or posting; people want to know immediately.

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Neutering the ’Net

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Holman Jenkins - Sep. 23 (Opinion) - Like Chekhov's gun, "net neutrality" gets dragged down from the mantel for every act of the broadband rollout. It's getting dragged down now for the rollout of wireless broadband.

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12 Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - Warning: The people's ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble.

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Is the Internet melting our brains?

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Vincent Rossmeier - Sep. 20 (Review) - By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

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The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Read/WriteWeb - By Sarah Perez - Sep. 17 (Opinion) - Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative.

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Google Releases News-Reading Service

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Miguel Helft - Sep. 15 (News Report) - Google is making a bold attempt to be seen as its friend with a new service it hopes will make it easier for readers to view newspaper and magazine articles.

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Zappos, the online shoe shopping utopia

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Alexandra Jacobs - Sep. 09 (Special Report) - Owning a large collection of shoes in various styles and colors has, in the past decade, gone from being considered a sign of ultimate imperial excess (Imelda Marcos) to a constitutional right of the average American woman, and Zappos is at least partly responsible.

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