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 Saturday, April 5, 2003
The New York Times Changes Access to Old Content. The New York Times has just changed their archival policy so that all links we've used in the bIPlog that are more than 30 days old will redirect to a page requesting that you purchase the article for $2.95. Links have worked before now, even though articles were months or years old. Vin Crosbie, President of Digital Deliverance, talked last week at the JSchool about news online, and the mechanisms and logic that publishers use... [bIPlog]
This could be the end of the Times as a source of links in the Internet. I will no longer link to any of their pages since no one would be able to see anything after 30 days. Why tell anyone else about something interesting if they will have to pay 3 bucks to read it? For anyone to have to pay $2.95 to read a single article that is over 30 days old is ludicrous. You can get a great deal by paying $25.95 for access to 25 articles. Wow!! That is so nice of them. Plus you get 6 months to use this. Actually, all you buy is access to the article, not the article itself. You can look at the article (without pictures or graphs) for 90 days. Then you have to pay again. And, apparently, this holds true even if you are a subscriber. At least there is nothing on the payment page that says differently
What is funny about this is that scientific journals are going exactly the opposite direction. It costs money to read the current issue but many are making all their work open to everyone after a period of time. PNAS, for instance, allows open access to anything 6 months older or more. So, at least here there is a benefit to having a subscription. You can get access to 6 months of material at a reasonable price. But, if you can wait a while, you will eventually get older material. Plus, if you do not want to buy a subscription to get those 6 months of access, you can access all the articles at their site for for seven days for $15. Now, scientific papers may age more rapidly than newspaper articles. But I am skeptical. The NYT just lost its premier role in links and moved itself way down the list of places to read. (I wonder if the writers get any of that $3 as a residual?) 11:45:30 PM 
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I hate it when I catch a spelling error after posting and change it then have to wait 'forever' for it to get fixed. I do know how to spell, just not always how to type. 9:08:03 PM
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Building the Secret War Machine. Vice Admiral John Poindexter's role as cyberguru to the feds comes as a shock to those who think of him as just another convicted conspirator in the Iran-Contra scandal. A commentary by Bruce Sterling from Wired magazine. [Wired News]
That is what's nice about America. A convicted felon (later tossed out on a technicality) can still do the job he loves: working for the government simply doing the best he can to make us all safe. Just as he did with Iran-Contra. And if the Constitution gets in the way, he can again come up with magnificent work arounds. 12:48:16 PM
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Slices of Social Software. Matt Webb offers some slices of consideration for Social Software. A good ramble.
...There's no single defining feature of social software, no common thread. But some attributes which may or may not be shared: software which uses as data social relationships/properties; software which acts as an intermediary in social activity (conversation, decision making, wearing the same band's tshirt, clapping); software which uses human nature in the design process; software that has moved from providing an environment to providing an environment and tools, or more...
[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
The newer tools of social software will eventually change how we do things, much like email does today. It will take some time but they will become part of the basic fabric of how we interact online. 12:28:44 PM
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This article provides some really interesting statistics, although buried. In the last two months almost 500,000 jobs have been lost. There may be several reasons the unemployment rate has not increased in addition. The telling thing is that unemployment stats do not count people who are not actively looking for new jobs, even though they want to work. If, for some reason, the current economic environment has increased these numbers we could have a huge number of people without jobs who are not counted in the unemployment stats. This article actually provides this and it should be the main purpose of an article because I find these numbers startling.
The total number of unemployed people officially looking for work is 8.45 million. The number of people who are no longer actively looking for work, who are no longer counted by the unemployment stats but who want to work, increased by 558,000 in March to 5.02 million. So we lost 108,000 jobs but also lost 558,000 from the unemployment data. Isn't statistics fun? If we count everyone who wants to work including those who have given up, we get an unemployment figure of 9.4%. I think it will be quite some time before job creations outnumber job losses. 12:13:16 PM
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Political satire can be tough and the Onion does not always succeed but there were a few things here that made me smile, particularly in the context of some of the Republican's outrage at Sen. Kerry's comments. Apparently they feel that you should only support a Republican president during military operations since they were clear during Clinton's term that they only supported the troops not their commander in chief.. 11:32:09 AM
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Is Your Television Watching You?. Here's a nice article for all of you interested in privacy issues. It turns out that under the beloved Partiot Act, the government can now demand from non-cable companies such as TiVo or DirecTV a
list of everything you've watched on your TV - and those companies will be forbidden from telling you that the information has been requested. So, not only can they find out what books you've been checking out of the library, they can also see what sort of subversive programs you've been watching. I'm sure the "Joe Millionaire" watchers are probably considered upstanding Americans, but I'm not sure about all you PBS viewers...
[Techdirt]
I guess this would be really bad if there was anything really subversive being telecast. But it probably is possible to make some things look bad out of context or for embarrassing things to be disclosed. But, frankly, anything they found would be purely circumstantial and not something to build a case on. Maybe I'm missing something but it would seem to me that trying to use the fact that a possible consprirator checked out 'Mein Kampf' is one thing (a pretty small thing in my opinion) but watching the Playboy channel? These sorts of things seemed determined to be used purely for intimidation purposes for law-abiding citizen than having any real effect on evil people. 11:18:16 AM
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I played a co-ed soccer game last night and survived uninjured. The last time I played, 3 years aho, I broke my collar bone. So beng able to walk off is a good thing. Thank goodness for Aleve. 11:01:58 AM
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