Monthly Archives: October 2006

Living The SecondLife

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

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.

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Time to Raise Hell With Network Webcasts

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

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.

Apparently 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.

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The Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

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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