Links for November 17th 2009 through November 23rd 2009:
Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact [FT.com] - "Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage. However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine. News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment." (NewsCorp + Microsoft = B(e)ing Evil!) [Via]
Teachers warned off online Facebook contact with students [PerthNow] - "Teachers[in Western Australia] would be banned from contacting students on social-networking websites like Facebook or Myspace under proposed changes to their code of ethics. The move comes after the WA College of Teaching disciplinary committee reprimanded about 10 teachers in the past year for inappropriate cyber interaction with students. The behaviour included teachers sharing private photos with students and in some cases engaging in online sexual innuendo. WACOT's disciplinary committee chairwoman, Theresa Howe, said the code of ethics needed to be updated to specifically target inappropriate and over-friendly computer correspondence between students and teachers."`We're seeing an increase in it and it has to be specifically addressed,'' she said. `That should be in both the code of ethics and in professional development courses for teachers.''
Reporter Center's Channel [YouTube] - A fantastic resource to help up and coming reporters, journalists and media students think about how to go about, and improve, the way they do things. [Via mUmbrella]
BigPond pulls plug on Second Life [The Age] - "Telstra has decided to close its doors on Second Life, evicting the residents of its virtual BigPond Island and revoking their unmetered usage, in a move that has infuriated some subscribers. BigPond's presence will cease on December 16, signalling an end to its two-year “experiment” with Second Life, and residents of the swanky virtual Pond Estate have been given a month to relocate elsewhere. Second Life is a virtual world that enables members to build or trade in-world objects and interact through their "avatars". In its early days, new users flocked to the platform and organisations raced to set up a presence there to find new ways of engaging with their public, but the buzz surrounding virtual communities has since waned. According to a Second Life enthusiast, as many as 1600 users could be affected by BigPond's closure, many of whom are socially isolated or disabled and unable to afford to continue maintaining their presence on the virtual world without unmetered usage."
Google’s big news for the month is that they’re now hard at work on their own operating system, Google Chrome OS. They’re also getting better at explaining these releases quickly, and so in that spirit here’s the What is Google Chrome OS? video:
Also useful is this concept video of Chrome OS (keeping in mind a concept video means this isn’t ready yet!):
And if you ACTUALLY like really long product announcements, you can find the 80-minute Chrome OS launch here. For me, the most exciting thing about this OS is the speed – skipping most of the traditional aspects of desktop operating systems means this will be amazingly quick and, as the developers right note, a lot of people want to know one thing: how long until I can get onto the web?
The initial report on Chrome OS from the BBC quite sensibly points out that this could be a very direct challenge to Microsoft, but the New York Times points to the key difference with current desktop OSes, it’s all about working and storing in the cloud:
But with the Chrome operating system, Google is not trying to build a better version of Windows. Instead, it is aiming to shift users toward its vision of “cloud computing,” a model in which programs are not installed on a PC but rather are used over the Internet and accessed through a Web browser. In Google’s approach, a user’s data will also reside on servers across the Internet, rather than on their PC.
Meanwhile, Steve Rubel suggests Chrome OS is redundant since pretty much everyone will see their phones as their primary non-desktop device, but he doesn’t seem to comment on the important facet that Chrome OS will have everyone using it thinking about desktop computing and mobile computing in exactly the same way! It’s far from ready today, the great thing is that Chrome OS is open source, so you can go and see what’s happening and, if you’re so inclined, go tinker with it. Google have set the official release target as a year from now; if Chrome OS can do everything promised by then, they’re definitely going to give Microsoft something to worry about!
This year I’ve been enjoying designing and implementing a series of new assignments and assessment techniques with students in our Internet Studies programmes. One of the most challenging things about working in Internet Studies is trying to make assignments authentic – which basically means doing assignments which can end up being meaningful and, ideally, viewable by the world-at-large on the Internet. One assignment that has worked particularly well and I thought worth sharing is from the unit Online Politics and Power, which looks at power in various guises and instances online.
One of the most interesting ways power is deployed online is through those infamous Terms of Use and Terms of Service which 95% of people never read, but always agree to, when signing up for a new service. So, I thought it’d be useful to ask students to really interrogate the Terms of Service of some online tools and platforms. More to the point, I wanted this to be a useful assignment beyond the confines of a university unit. So, I asked students to find a way to communicate the core elements of some Terms of Use in a way that would be accessible to the general public, hence an Online Policy Primer. (If you’re interested the assignment outline and requirements are online here.)
I have to say, I was blown away by how good the Primers are, and how, ultimately, useful they are, too. Also, while we did discuss the Creative Commons, I didn’t stipulate that students had to use a CC license, but I was delighted that many chose to do so. Of those that did, I’d like to share three stand-out examples.
The first, by Paula (@MXYZ_), takes a close look at Flickr’s Terms of Service and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attributions Share-Alike license [CC BY SA]:
The second, by Simon (@whoisimon) explores the Terms of Service for Slideshare and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license [CC BY NC SA]:
And the third, and final, policy primer I wanted to highlight is by Chea Hwey Yea, looking at Twitter’s Terms of Service and is also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license [CC BY NC SA]:
As you can see, these students have a lot to be proud of and have, in many cases, created Primers which are likely to be useful well beyond the confines of the unit!
Links for November 15th 2009 through November 17th 2009:
Nose, face, cut, spite: Blocking Google [BuzzMachine] - Jeff Jarvis has a neat little summary of what the research suggests would happen to Google is Murdoch stops letting the search engine index his news properties: in short, not much damage to Google, and whole world of loss-of-revenue pain for News Corps. Interestingly, pulling Wikipedia out of Google searches would do more damage!
I’m Belle de Jour [Times Online] - "Meet Belle de Jour, the anonymous blogger and former prostitute whose explicit, funny, articulate, eye-popping online Diary of a London Call Girl has fascinated millions of readers worldwide. Here she is: Belle, the famous tart, whose books became runaway bestsellers, who was played on screen by Billie Piper in the television series based on them, whose brand is instantly recognisable to anyone who uses the internet or bookshops and who has stirred up a considerable amount of controversy through her writing-as-a-whore career, not least because she has always refused to condemn prostitution as being necessarily bad or sad: our very own second-wave Happy Hooker. [...] She’s real, all right, and I’m sitting on the bed next to her. Her name is Dr Brooke Magnanti. Her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health."
Links for November 12th 2009 through November 14th 2009:
Labels may be losing money, but artists are making more than ever [Boing Boing] - Interesting figures that show while music labels might be losing money, artists are making more than ever. Live performances are the key revenue raisers. (The figures don't break down much further than that, but it's important since it asks whether artists or just labels are the ones who are really fighting "piracy".)
Massively Increasing Music Licensing Fees For Clubs Down Under Massively Backfires [Techdirt] - Time for a few Creative Commons licensed nightclubs to rock Australia: "We've noted the ridiculous and self-defeating efforts by many music collections societies around the world to jack up their rates by ridiculous amounts. None was more ridiculous than the attempt in Australia by the PPCA where some of the rate changes would rocket up from figures like $125/year... to $19,344/year. Well, it looks like it's already backfiring badly. Reader Dan alerts us to the news that the organization that represents night clubs and similar businesses in Australia, appropriately named Clubs Australia, has set up a system whereby the organization will specifically go out and seek music by artists not covered by the collections effort, and distribute that music to clubs and other establishments"
Moving forward with our media studies search [Just TV] - Jason Mittell is leading the search for a new comparative media studies faculty member at Middlebury College in the US. What's fantastic is that as the search leader, he's blogging the process and trying to explain how decisions are made - given the absolute paucity of jobs available today, these insights are remarkably valuable (and do turn an often opque process into a very human one: "But I think a key lesson for candidates to realize is that not making the cut is rarely a referendum of your worth as a scholar or teacher – it’s usually more about a sense of the position and internal needs that are hard to articulate, combined with the inevitable comparisons among the applicant pool."
NASA finds 'significant' water on moon [CNN.com] - Wowzers, there's water on the moon! "NASA said Friday it had discovered water on the moon, opening "a new chapter" that could allow for the development of a lunar space station. The discovery was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete at a midday news conference. "I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit; we found a significant amount" -- about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, he said, holding up several white plastic containers.
His Facebook Status Now? ‘Charges Dropped’ [NYTimes.com] - Facebook status updates as an alibi: "Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem. ... words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford. But when Mr. Bradford, a skinny, short 19-year-old resident of the Farragut Houses, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery, the words took on a level of importance that no one in their wildest dreams — least of all Mr. Bradford — could have imagined. They became his alibi. His defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery. The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the status update had actually been typed from a computer located at 71 West 118th Street in Harlem, as Mr. Bradford said. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped."
The talk is an hour long, but is well worth your time. There’s a few notes on the talk over at Inside Higher Ed. The guts of Lessig’s talk: we need to ensure that copyright doesn’t continue to be a mechanism which distances educators, researchers and scientists from sharing their thoughts, ideas and findings with the public and wider world. [Via D’Arcy Norman]
Links for November 5th 2009 through November 10th 2009:
Murdoch may block Google searches [BBC NEWS | Business] - Murdoch plans to pull News Corps stories from Google. And apparently he thinks he can do away with fair dealing, too. I fear the old tiger is roaring his last roars: "Rupert Murdoch has said he will try to block Google from using news content from his companies. The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google's search indexes, including Google News. Mr Murdoch's News Corp had previously said it would start charging online customers across all its websites. He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results. "There's a doctrine called 'fair use', which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. "But we'll take that slowly.""
Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media [bronwen clune] - Bronwen Clune's Media 140 talk in which she makes some very sensible noises about journalists on Twitter: "Participatory media doesn’t mean you letting your audience participate in the creation of news, it about acknowledging that you participate in news creation along with your audience. ... We’ve heard Jay Rosen’s quote here a few times today about “the people formerly known as the audience.” To which I’d like to add: Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media."
Iran, Twitter and the new media world. [Off Air] - Mark Colvin's thoughtful and detailed look at the Twitter Revolution in Iran, looking at the ethics and practice of getting information via Twitter, some sensible methods for gauging accuracy of tweets, the danger in distorting figures on both sides, and the fact that, at the end of the day, Iran's Twitter Revolution failed ... but there were seeds of hope: "The first victory is that for millions of people around the world, Iranians were not faceless Middle Easterners ...You cannot bomb a regime without bombing its people ... The second victory is that they saw themselves as we saw them, and they saw us cheering them on. They saw ordinary people in countries like America – which the ayatollahs call The Great Satan – and Britain – The Little Satan – coming out in support of their hopes and fears. For once that couldn’t be censored by State media."
Links for November 3rd 2009 through November 5th 2009:
The ABC of social media use [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] - How bizzare: social media use guidelines in a major corporation which actually make sense! "ABC managing director Mark Scott has announced new social media guidelines, which the national broadcaster's journalists and staff must abide by. [...] In an email sent to ABC staff this morning, the new Use of Social Media policy gives four standards which staff and contractors must follow when using both work and personal social media interaction:
1. Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute.
2. Do not undermine your effectiveness at work.
3. Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views.
4. Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work."
The temporary web [BuzzMachine] - Jeff Jarvis articulates some important concerns about the way Twitter and other social services are contributing to a more temporary, less archivable (or, at least, less searchable in the long term) web: "...search is turning social and our search results are becoming personalized, thus we don’t all share the same search results and it becomes tougher to manage them through SEO. Put these factors together – the social stream – and relationships matter more than pages (but then, they always have). "
Internet piracy [Background Briefing - 1 November 2009] - Australia's Radio National programme Backgroud Briefing takes a look at copyright in the digital age, featuring the big arguments and comments from everyone from AFACT to Lessig and Girl Talk. Segment by Oscar McLaren.
Teens Sue School Over Punishment For Racy MySpace Pics [Huffington Post] - "Two sophomore girls have sued their school district after they were punished for posting sexually suggestive photos on MySpace during their summer vacation. The American Civil Liberties Union, in a federal lawsuit filed last week on behalf of the girls, argues that Churubusco High School violated the girls' free speech rights when it banned them from extracurricular activities for a joke that didn't involve the school ... some legal experts say that in this digital era, schools must accept that students will engage in some questionable behavior in cyberspace and during off hours. "From the standpoint of young people, there's no real distinction between online life and offline life," said John Palfrey, a Harvard University law professor and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "It's just life."" (It's called MYspace for a reason, methinks!)
