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COMMUNICATION

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    Facebook Misstep? Yeah?

    So Facebook hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google. What you gonna do about it? Get over it, already… although it isn’t right, obviously… MG Siegler on the latest Facebook “slimeball stunt”: Like it or not, Facebook is too integrated into the fabric of the web now for everyone to just walk away. As has been proven time and time again, people will get really angry with them for some misstep, and then totally forget about it a week later. 110512 TechCrunch >>>

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    Google CEO talks privacy

    Your privacy online? Who cares about it? Google CEO Eric Schmidt, that’s who: Those concerns are real – I’m not trying to move away from them. The fact of the matter is that if you’re online all the time, computers are generating a lot of information about you. This is not a Google decision, this is a societal decision. In Britain, you all allow yourselves to be photographed on every street corner. Where are the riots? 100701 You can trust us: Shane Richmond: Daily Telegraph >>>

  • Crossing the Line

    Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert plan to return to TV on 7 January while their writers stay out on strike. Off air for two months, the latte-drinking (probably), liberal-leaning (certainly) presenters, funny men, princes of political satire etc say they would much rather return with their comrade writers — beyond this, words (as well as their principles, perhaps) fail them: If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence. – NY Times 071221 >>>

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    Shooting War

    Just published, graphic novel Shooting War by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman: it’s 2011 and anti-corporate blogger Jimmy Burns is working as an embed for Global News – ‘Your home for 24-hour terror coverage’ – in President McCain’s Iraq. And boom. The beta online version is available here. . >>>

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    Net Costs

    … conned by the numbers from their web departments and aided and abetted by laughably inconsistent web metrics… newspaper owners will strip newspapers of the resources they need to reinvent themselves in order to nurture an internet beast that they believe is a rottweiler puppy but is, in fact, a fully grown poodle. They are barking mad. – John Duncan, former managing editor of the Observer, 1999 to 2005, Press Gazette >>>

  • Virginia Tech @ The Social Web

    The public spaces on the internet served as the most important arena for exchange of information on the events yesterday. Almost every news story cited a Facebook or Myspace page or a livejournal entry as a source. The Wikipedia entry and discussion on the event hashed out validity of sources and the semantics of tragedy. And then the jarring cell phone footage on Liveleak was among the realest indicators that this gruesome event had actually happened. The events as documented on the social web became the authority. … These past two days have made it ever so much more apparent… >>>

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    Sign of the Times

    Spot the change in the new logo at the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE ): Before And After Yep, “newspaper” is so 20th Century. ASNE president Dave Zeeck thinks ASME may eventually drop “newspaper” altogether for something more up to date. – Strupp’s Notebook >>>

  • Viacom Sues YouTube

    YouTube uses its users to steal from the work of honest artists toiling to create original content, says Viacom as it finally sues YouTube for “massive intentional copyright infringement”: YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps… >>>

  • Cookie-Cutter Journalism

    Flip away from the enthusiasms of the Web 2.0/participatory media crowd; the future suddenly loses its shine. In a paper published last year by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, Robert G Picard gives a detailed account of what’s gone wrong with American news journalism: Many of the challenges of news organization today exist because the professionalism of journalism and journalism education have determined the values and value of the news, commoditized the product, and turned most journalists into relatively interchangeable information factory workers. Average journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask… >>>

  • Manipulating Media

    Steve Bryant only buys (into) media he can do stuff with: Media is changing from entertainment into utility. Media that can’t be manipulated is almost useless. When I listen to NPR, I wish I could freeze the broadcast and pull a link from the radio, send it to a friend. When I watch TV, same thing. When I go to the movies, same thing. But I can’t. I can only do that online. Those tiny transactions I make online make a greater imprint on my psyche than any single media event inside a theater — or inside a DVD —… >>>