Archive for the ‘Internet News’ Category


USA Today stresses digital operations

This is rarely a good sign in the publishing industry: USA Today to Remake Itself to Stress Digital Operations

I give them credit that they’ve realized that a general-interest newspaper distributed mostly at airports, hotels (the only two places I’ve ever read it) and restaurants can no longer compete with free papers like the Metro that repackage much of the same content or sites like Google News that allow online readers to go directly to the source. I also give them credit for not engaging in finger-pointing and blaming the Internet for their problems while at the same time announcing that the Internet will be their industry’s savior… once the Internet is changed to fit the industry’s decaying business model. But this still seems like a pretty steep climb for USA Today.

Google kills Wave: is anyone surprised?

The news today is that Google is ending Wave development and only committing to keeping the Wave site up until the end of the year. Was anyone surprised by this? I was skeptical of Google Wave from the beginning for the simple reason that if someone tells you that their hard to describe product will revolutionize everything, no, it’s not going to do that. It reminded me of the hype that preceded the introduction of the Segway. When you are told that an invention is so amazing that they will be rewriting laws and redesigning cities for it and the product turns out to be a Segway, you can’t help but be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the Segway is an amazing piece of technology, but it’s no wheelchair that can climb stairs or an ultra-efficient Stirling engine.

What would your reaction be if you were told a company was about to release a revolutionary robot personal assistant, something right out of science fiction and new home builders would be smart to scrap their traditional designs in exchange for ones that favor this innovative robot, and it turned out to be a Roomba? You can’t help but be disappointed.

That’s how it was for me with Google Wave. Wait, all the cheering and hype for this? First off, what the heck is it? It’s not email, it’s sort of like a Wiki but it seems a heck of a lot like a chat room. Is it a chat room? Is it one of those over-hyped “collaborative” things? Collaboration is great, but do we really need to be able to edit the same document all at the same time? The inability of Google to answer the simple question “what’s it for?” with a simple, straightforward answer ultimately doomed Wave to be another failed Google experiment.

Followup to “Esquire’s Augmented Reality Issue”

As seen on Gawker this morning: Mailing label fail! To me, this sums up everything that’s currently happening in the magazine industry. Using gimmicks in a desperate attempt to stem the losses of subscribers and advertisers but then getting gummed up (sorry) by old-media elements like mailing labels.

Bad week for Doomsday Theorists

First, NASA debunks 2012 end of the world theories with calm, reasoned arguments like:

“Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012.”

And now The Discovery Channel shoots holes (sorry) into the theory that the Large Hadron Collider will create miniature black holes that will consume the Earth.

What a bummer. The Earth won’t be destroyed in a particularly cinematic fashion worthy of Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich. That is, of course, unless they are lying to us while they set up their Himalayan arks or colonies on Mars for the rich and elite…

Yeah, this won’t get them sued…

I wonder how long before the RIAA sues Libox out of existence. In fact, I’m surprised they haven’t already been sued for the music and movie sharing capabilities. Otherwise, it seems like just an FTP server that uses software to manage the sync setups and a third party server to facilitate connections to get around the dynamic IP addresses most people have. Better than using something like Gnutella that shares it with the entire world, I guess.

Twitter protects freedom of speech and press again

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” – John Gilmore

There is no explicitly guaranteed freedom of the press in the UK and the libel laws in that country are tilted strongly in favor of the plaintiffs. That left The Guardian in a bizarre situation. Under threat of lawsuit, they could not report on something that was already part of the public record (see item 61 under “Questions for Written Answer”). They could not report on the subject itself, the MP asking the question, the minister expected to answer the question, the companies involved, where the information could be found or even why or under what justification that they were being prevented from reporting. They could only report the name of the solicitors suing them, Carter-Ruck.

Cue the Streisand Effect. Random citizens started blogging and tweeting about the injunction, creating enough bad PR to get Carter-Ruck to drop the injunction. The Norwegian press has now broken their part of the story, with a full report coming from The Guardian on their being blocked from reporting on the illegal dumping off the Ivory Coast and elsewhere by Trafigura.

Things like this and what happened after the Iranian election amaze me. Just two days ago the “big” news on Twitter was Miley Cyrus quitting Twitter, which may have been a carefully constructed publicity stunt all along since it was done via Youtube. Like so much of the web, Twitter’s filled inconsequential chatter most of the time, except when it suddenly it springs into action and helps defend press freedom in the UK or reveal to the entire world the protests and subsequent brutal crackdown after the rigged Iranian elections. Maybe LOLcats and other image macros are the price we all pay to hold this capacity in reserve.