Posts from ‘January, 2007’

Rebecca MacKinnon: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Vodaphone display some cojones. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and others have been getting a lot of heat over the past year for colluding with human rights violations and state censorship in countries like China. Fortunately, three of those four companies have found the wherewithal to do more than just […]

Over at Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel takes note of a new pay-per-performance system at ZDNet, where writers will be rewarded in part based on how many people read what they write. It raises questions, he observes: For example, will a blogger favor writing a sensational post that is likely to get more clicks over one […]

A recent story about acronyms and abbreviations (sorry, it’s behind the Journal’s pay-wall, so I won’t link to it) began: Do your MP3s get tangled in your BVDs? Have you confused an ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund) with an ETF (Effluent-Treatment Facility)? Do you ever order a QPC (Quarter Pounder with Cheese) by mistake at KFC? If […]

Check out today’s WhattheDuck strip. Unfortunately, there’s some likelihood that at least a few newspapers will do just what he’s sarcastically suggesting.

I’m in Cambridge for my monthly visit to the Berkman Center. Today features a Sunlight Foundation mini-conference where people who are interested in political transparency are comparing notes. (See also Ethan Zuckerman’s great notes; and there’s a Technorati BerkmanSunlight taglist.) Berkman director John Palfrey observes that amid cynicism about American democracy, this group is working […]

Pro journalists can apply for the heavily subsidized Knight New Media Center Multimedia Training Seminar, to be held in Berkeley in March. Recommended if you qualify.

SF Chronicle: Owner of conservative radio station KSFO demands liberal critic quit using audio clips. Now, bloggers and media freedom advocates are concerned about the legal reaction from Disney/ABC-owned KSFO. Shortly before Christmas, an ABC lawyer demanded that Spocko remove audio clips from his blog on the grounds that Spocko’s posting of KSFO content was […]

UPDATED I’m at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, where people from around the U.S. (and in a few cases, from other nations) are talking for three days about how to change American media. Some talented folks are here. But the activist conference is also notable for what it’s lacking: any serious participation […]

Tom Stites, a former newspaper editor and a deep thinker about the journalism craft, gave a speech last summer that won plenty of well-deserved attention. In that talk — which we guest-posted here, entitled “Is media performance democracy’s critical issue?” — he posed a key question about our future. Now he’s back with an essay […]

Columbia Journalism Review: Parsing the “Surge”: Now we have “surge,” the word that’s been recruited by the administration to sum up its new Iraq policy, to be unveiled in a speech tomorrow night. Used to describe the addition of 20,000 troops to the Baghdad area, “surge” has become, in the last few weeks, part of […]