Tuesday, January 10, 2006|
Online freedom of expression guidelines from Reporters Without Borders. In the wake of several crackdowns on freedom of expression and Internet search in China, Reporters Without Borders has called on the United States government to persuade Internet companies into agreeing on a code of conduct for functioning in repressive regimes. Microsoft has recently shut down a Chinese journalist's blog after being pressured by the Chinese government, censors its MSN Spaces blog and Microsoft and Yahoo censor their search engines for words such as "capitalism" and "democracy." [From Editors Weblog] The First Amendment, and bloggers, under attack? Does a new law make it illegal to write a blog or post comments on a blog anonymously? Tennessee bloggers are looking for answers. The News Sentinel's Michael Silence is reading and quoting a lot of them at No Silence Here. Old media under attack? Black and White and Dead All Over. Michael Kinsley asks the question about the future of newspapers this way: "You gotta trust something called the 'Post-Intelligencer' more than something called 'Yahoo' or 'Google,' don't you? No, seriously, don't you? Okay, how old did you say you are?" Some irony after Kinsley's item: Tech Industry Works to Move Web Content Off PCs is a USA Today "newspaper" story, delivered by Yahoo, telling how Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and others are moving information onto your TV, PDA, iPod, mobile phone and probably anything else with a screen or speaker. In this case, notice where the "Web content" came from. Digging tech news: Alex Bosworth writes about the ecosystem of Digg, which is emerging as the latest generation of reader-edited nerdnews sites: "Digg.com has shot up from non-existence this year to be a net publishing powerhouse, challenging the longstanding giant Slashdot for the crown of nerd news. The way Digg.com did it doesn't seem too complicated, they allow the democracy of users to pick the stories instead of a short list of editors..." [From Smartmobs] The audience is the content: Jean K. Min, director of OhmyNews International, has a commentary in India Infoline: Journalism as a conversation. "What happens on OhmyNews is an intensely interactive online
conversation. Citizen reporters have to persuade OhmyNews[base '] front-line
copy editors to have their stories accepted in the first place. As much
as 30 percent of daily submissions are rejected for various reasons
such as poor sentence construction, factual errors, or its lack of news
value..." [From J.D. Lasica] MacWorld Expo this week may be worth watching. That's enough for now. Spring semester starts tomorrow, and I wanted a few aggregation examples to show the class. 1:05:18 PM 
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Last update: 2/15/06; 10:52:53 AM .
