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Thursday, April 15, 2004
Web Dude Nets Pounds 
Fuck censorship
| | We have a right to be profane about a President or anyone in power or what they do: F Bush! or F Kerry or F their war or F their taxes or F their laws about the word F! We have a right to be profane about God and church and kiddie-diddling priests. We have a right to be profane and offensive about sex -- as Dan Savage pointed out yesterday, it was profane and offensive by the definitions of some -- but necessary -- to talk about anal sex, for example, at the start of the AIDS epidemic. We have the right to be profane. That is what the First Amendment protects above all. It's not unoffensive, safe, middle-of-the-road speech it protects. It's profane speech. |
| | Jeff lives in New Jersey, where I grew up, and where "fuck" was (and probably still is) more common than "like" here in California. Talk about your fucking "community standards." Watch the Sopranos. It's like that, folks. How about we get the FCC to make an exception for New Jersey? |
| | Whatever, it's time to get over bullshitting ourselves about speech. Congress and the FCC are sending up big fat trial balloons, right now. Let's bust 'em. |
P2P$
| | Interesting background here and here. Sez Willy: |
| | There were two important developments that brought about music file sharing: the development of the mp3 compression algorithm, which allowed audio files to be compressed to about 10% of their raw size, and the development of The Napster file sharing application. The desire to share files was already there, it just couldn't happen on a large scale without these tools. Now perhaps we are seeing the same development in the monetary arena: the development of an exchange system which is outside the normal banking system. And as was the case with file sharing and the music industry, this alternate system will catch the established status quo power structure by surprise. As the Wired article notes, this is not even on most people's radar. I personally did not know about it until today... |
| | Is this one of the killer apps that will eventually change our current monetary system? It's a little too early to tell. I think it's at the very least a pre-echo. Keep your eye on what happens here, it could be very significant. And as with what happened in the music industry, maybe no one will notice until it's too late to stop it. As I and others have said before, the Internet has a great levelling effect, breaking monopolies and allowing a democratic process of searching out the true value of things. The monetary system is another example of a monopoly which is controlled by a powerful elite. It may be just as susceptible to being dismantled and restructured by the 'net. |
| | I never thought about it either. Now it's hard to shake out of my mind. |
| | Possibly related: we used to make change by cutting coins into halves and quarters. |
Overread
| | I think the FCC is using all this indecency crap to kill broadcast television & radio. I think they want the spectrum back. |
Film at now
| | What you see on Technorati is a lot closer to live for the simple reason that the searches are activated by RSS notifications. And, unlike Google and Yahoo news, blogs are not excluded. By virtue of RSS and its relatives, blogs are purposefully included. |
| | So, as long as blogs remain illegitimate as sources of News to Google and Yahoo, the window is open for proving those engines wrong by doing some of their work for them. What work? Well, fisking what the major media say is a fine blog tradition, but deconstruction isn't enough. We need construction too. Do we care about a subject enough to report on it, and not just to opine about it? Then maybe we should do the digging too. |
| | While it's cool that all the blogs found on the Technorati search are more current than the ones found by the other engines, none of them (far as I can tell) contain fresh news about what's going on with Air America. It's just commentary and pointage. Some of it is very good; but still, it's just commentary. No real reporting, as we say in the news business. |
| | Has anybody talked to Arthur Liu at Multicultural Broadcasting, which dropped Air America from two of its stations? How about Evan Cohen at Air America? How about anybody else at either organization? Since Air America said they were taking Multicultural Broadcasting to court, there must be lawyers involved. Who are they? What can they tell us? What else is there to this story that the two parties aren't telling us? Is it possible, for example, that Multicultural Broadcasting is under pressure from program sources or listeners to return its old (mostly ethic and actually multicultural) programs to the air? Those are questions an assignment editor would ask at a newspaper. How many of us are asking those questions of ourselves, and then answering them? |
| | Here's the kicker. I have assignments I'm following right now. That I'm paid to follow. They're not for my blog, which pays me nothing. That means I'm busy and won't be reporting much on this story in the blog. I'll only be following it, and pointing to what others say. If every other blogger is just like me, and we're all one big op-ed page for the newspapers, we achieve a necessary but insufficient condition for definition as journalists of a professional grade. We remain amateurs. I believe that's a good thing, even a necessary thing. But it's also a different thing than what you get from professionals. |
| | I submit all this, by the way, as fodder for Jay's session on journalism at BloggerCon. Specifically, my question is, "If journalism on blogs consists mostly of pointage and op-ed opinions, is it Journalism in more than the literal sense of the word?" |
| | By the way, Jeff is doing an extraordinarily tenacious job of staying on the government's case over this whole stupid "indecency" bullshit. More about that above. |
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