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.
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…
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.
“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.
