Blogging, Politics and Media
I’m planning to teach a small, seminar-type course for undergrads in
Communication in the Spring : Blogging, Media and Politics. (Terribly
unoriginal title).
Here’s the draft course description. Input appreciated!
SR520 Comments Due Today
Comments on SR520 Draft EIS are due (postmarked) today. The Senate overwhelmingly passed a Class C resolution last Thursday, expressing concerns about the DEIS process in general and about the Pacific Interchange in particular. It resulted in a flurry of e-mail from a UW Law Professor.
Online Demos Break Stereotype
Online demographics are changing — and lots (about a third of the audience) of 40-somethings are trotting around MySpace, YouTube and the like, according to the SF Chronicle. Among the surprises, based on September data from Nielsen NetRatings, is the percentage of under-35s listening to NPR podcasts… 54 percent, compared with 25 percent of its traditional audience. (tip)
MySpace “DRM” Announced
The Rupert Murdoch-owned social networking site has announced it will use technology from privately-held Gracenote to protect digital rights (copyright) by reviewing songs that members upload to the site. Acccording to the LA Times:
The technology compares [songs uploaded] with Gracenote’s database of
copyrighted material and can block uploads without proper rights. Terms
of the licensing agreement were not disclosed.
The penalty? Cancel the member acccount.
The music business is an example of market failure — it’s a highly concentrated oligopoly:
Living The SecondLife
At the Online News Association meeting earlier this month, I asked a panel on “community” about Second Life. I was greeted with blank stares by all but one of the panelists, Jennifer Sizemore, vice president and editor in chief of MSNBC.com. (Hurrah for the home team!)
Even though I knew it was coming, I missed the hoop-de-doo-dah surrounding Reuters‘ entry into the virtual space. [The BBC has a news ticker. cNet launched in September. ] Every day, up to a half-million dollars (US) in real money changes hands, although it has been converted to Linden dollars. So it’s a real phenomena … and it seems to have reached some sort of critical mass, if a mainstream media company has bought land.
Southpark Fun, Take 2
Last year, I wrote about a cool Flash application that allowed fans to create their own Southpark characters. The tool is in its second iteration, so here’s my “Take 2″ as well … I’m using it as my avatar on my faculty website. Obviously feeling more feminine this fall!
Blogging, Politics And Media
Presentation for COM300, 23 October 2006. Keynote - PPT
Time to Raise Hell With Network Webcasts
Updated 21 October. Prior date: 21 March
It’s not a watershed moment, yet, but there has been one improvement since this was first penned in March, at MSN Video.
Imagine, for a moment, that you could watch NBC News only if you owned a GE television. Or listen to ABC radio only with Sony equipment. That situation is too quickly becoming analogous to the one faced by broadband customers who want to watch streaming TV news on their laptops: if it’s not a Wintel machine, with Microsoft software, they can kiss the idea good-bye.
Apparantly network executives — marketing or otherwise — missed Tim Berners-Lee’s (in)famous quote about the liberating power of web standards:
Anyone who slaps a "this page is best viewed with Browser X"
label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days,
before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document
written on another computer, another word processor, or another
network. — Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
I’m not a big TV fan, so I can’t say how long this insidious "it’s gotta be Windows" balkanization of Internet broadband has been going on. But the "big three" mega-corp networks have aligned themselves with Microsoft. (Is the software giant again giving away technology in an effort to protect its operating system?) Cable news, on the other hand, is technologically agnostic.
The Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive
The New Yorker is offering more 4,000 issues of the magazine, ready to
search on an 80GB light-weight external hard
drive. Formatting sounds proprietary (this must be their DRM talking): you must install "The Complete New Yorker program."However, these folks are smart enough to have their software work on both Macs and PeeCees. In the overall scheme of what you’re getting, it’s not that expensive — only $299. Not pocket change, though.
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