Posts from ‘April, 2006’

The Podcasting Legal Guide calls itself “a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting.” Great work by all.

Thanks again to Columbia University for inviting me this week to give the annual Hearst New Media Lecture. The audience was terrific and asked great questions (I don’t have a transcript of that part, sorry.) What follows is the talk as I wrote it out, beginning after the various thank-yous to the folks who invited […]

NY Times: Microsoft, NYT partner on newspaper software. Aiming to offer newspapers a new digital publishing alternative, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday touted a software program that tries to make publications easier to read on a computer screen. Questions: Do very many people really want to read the paper’s journalism this way? How much […]

NY Times: Publisher to Recall Harvard Student’s Novel. Just a day after saying it would not withdraw “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life” from bookstores, Little, Brown, the publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, confessed to copying passages from another writer’s books, said it would immediately recall all […]

Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review asks, “Can newspapers do blogs right?” — and some prominent online journalists offer responses. As someone who wrote a newspaper blog for more than five years, I can assure you that the answer is Yes. The fact that newspapers sometimes screw it up is meaningless, or close to it. […]

Lance Dutson (Maine Web Report): State Contractor Files Federal Lawsuit Against Me. So here I am, one man against the state and its contractors, put in the position of shutting up or being pounded by their deep pockets and a wild misconception of what the court system is supposed to be used for. One person […]

Over at my Bay Area blog, here’s my comment on today’s news that McClatchy will sell the San Jose Mercury News and three other papers, in a differently structured deal that strikes me as a bit smelly.

Guardian: BBC unveils radical revamp of website. The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com. The proof will be in the doing, of course, but this will be a fantastic experiment to watch — […]

I’m heading to New York for tomorrow evening’s talk at Columbia University. Hope to see some of you there…

Dave Winer: Next steps for BitTorrent. Breadth of support is the most important thing BitTorrent needs. We need easier and more servers and clients, more non-infringing content, and more commitments from the tech industry, government, and eventually, of course, the entertainment industry. It’s a very rational, open technology, quite useful, and with a little more […]