Posts under ‘Issues’

From BarackObama.com, an open letter to Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean urging the DNC to make the video from any Democratic Presidential debate publicly available after the debate for free and without restriction. All well and good, and a step forward. But why doesn’t Obama go the next step, and decline to participate […]

NY Times: How a Number Became the Latest Web Celebrity. A throng of tech-savvy Internet users have banded together over the last two days to publish and widely distribute a secret code used by the movie industry to prevent illegal copying of high-definition movies. The broader distribution of the code may not pose a serious […]

If The SF Chronicle reports on a Santa Barbara News-Press story Sunday that reeks of journalistic malpractice. A data-recovery company found child-porn images on a computer once used by the former managing editor, Jerry Roberts — as well as all kinds of other people, including whoever previously owned the computer and sold it, used, to […]

UPDATED SF Chronicle: Tough decisions on how much to show. Grim video sent by the Virginia Tech killer to NBC News led editors, producers and media ethics experts to resume an uncomfortably familiar debate. “You have to find that line between serving the public’s right to know and the obvious public interest in knowing and […]

Over at Just Another Pretty Farce, Nashville blogger Katherine Coble reports settlement of what was shaping up to be a nasty legal disupte. You can find more about the situation in earlier postings on her blog, but the main point is that the threatening party agreed — after the intervention of a lawyer for the […]

Tim O’Reilly, instrumental in the recent brouhaha over blogging codes of conduct, offers some valuable “Lessons Learned So Far,” which include: * The poor choice of the “badges” I proposed, together with a reiteration of why I thought badges might be useful. * The need for a more modular code of conduct, a set of […]

SF Chronicle: Food bloggers dish up plates of spicy criticism / Formerly formal discipline of reviewing becomes a free-for-all for online amateurs: Just days after opening Senses, his San Francisco bistro, Teo Kridech clicked onto the World Wide Web only to find that his dream business was considered an overnight flop. “Senses is like a […]

Amazingly, the man who concocted the anti-Hillary remix of the old Apple 1984 commercial is proud of himself. After the Huffington Post outed Phil de Vellis, a now-former employee of a consulting firm that has been working for Barack Obama — whose campaign was designed to be the main beneficiary of the ad remix — […]

Last week, March 11-17, was known in journalistic and (some) governmental circles as “Sunshine Week” — a tribute to notions of open government, and a call to action to make it more so. Freedom of information was on tap in all kinds of ways. But now that the official celebration is over, I want to […]

Valleywag points to the incredibly hypocrisy of Viacom, which has sued Google for big bucks over YouTube but encourages its own video “pirates” on a Viacom-owned site. No surprise here, whatever.