Posts from ‘November, 2006’

Charlie McCollum (San Jose Mercury News): Fox digs deep in the sleaze, comes up with an O.J. Simpson special. Mike Darnell, the head of Fox’s alternative programming department and the man most responsible for bringing “If I Did It” to the airwaves, did say in the release that “this is an interview that no one […]

Seth Finkelstein: Wikipedia, and the difficulties of criticizing digital-sharecropping. In brief, there’s two important ideas somewhat in conflict: 1) (fact) There are new businesses which can be built on data-mining or large collections of small amounts of unpaid labor 2) (belief) There is social or economic value in openness and commons Fascinating discussion here, stemming […]

A company just emailed me this pitch (in part): The 2006 Elections are now over, but the excitement continues. With newly elected Members and a change of party control in the House, it is now time for a flurry of changes to leadership positions, committee leadership, committee and subcommittee membership, and staff. All of the […]

It’s called The Lede, and I’m still not quite sure what the mission is despite this description: In the news business, the opening sentences of a story are referred to as its “lede” — spelled that way, journalism lore has it, to avoid confusion with the lead typesetting that once dominated newspaper printing presses. Although […]

Lawyers for YouTube apparently sent lawyers after Techcrunch for an copyright offense that doesn’t sound offensive. Bozo behavior ascendant.

In a piece for the Washington Examiner, “Small steps forward for Net politics in 2006 campaign,” I ask: In a world where digital communications can fuel collaborations of all kinds, how can the political class take the Net to the next level?

Peter Scheer, executive of the California First Amendment Coalition, asks, “What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?” He writes: Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period — say, […]

David Carr, NY Times: Dubious Mix: Rich Suitors, Ailing Papers. Each potential buyer of the Tribune papers has said, mostly through surrogates, that profits are not the point, but men who spent their lives piling up money hate to watch it evaporate. And any experienced business reporter will tell you the average titan has little […]

The Independent in London asks: Is print heading for obsolescence? Or can it re-invent itself and reach out to a generation brought up looking at screens? Lots of answers from lots of media people. Worth reading.

NY Times: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level […]