Tuesday, September 17, 2002

Current Editorials: Santa Cruz City Officials to Hand Out Marijuana. Santa Cruz Officials show solidarity with city residents in protesting federal agents' raid on clinic without coordinating with local law enforcement. [Morons Dot Org] drugs in the news again in the US. The feds raided a clinic which was dispensing marijuana to people with prescriptions that are legal under Californian law. In protest, the folk at the clinic are going to hand out free marijuana in Santa Cruz. Not sure how legal that will be. 10:30:34 AM

Studios not pirates are the digital rights challenge, says IBC panel.. EE Times Hollywood runs a content cartel that is a far greater barrier to digital streaming than any piracy services - seems the big studios want 60 per cent of all revenue from digital distribution - who are they trying to kid? 10:21:53 AM

Daniel Brandt: Google's Original Sin. [Scripting News] - there was a time when I was all genned up on search engines in their various flavours. Like so many, I've become almost entirely dependent on google for my searches and I'm pretty appaled by what I read in this article. When I stuck my first website online in 1996 I did the registrations and I trawled around sites, emailing requesting link swaps. This practice was pretty effective - like anything else, if you put the work in you get the results. According to Daniel Brandt things have changed radically directly because of Google's dominance in the search world and its highly undemocratic page ranking mechanisms. Here's some scary info: if you take a new website and register with the open directory project that Google uses as a base for its crawling, and then you start touting for links, within a year you can expect 30 visitors a day while the big sites draw many thousands of visitors a day. How can new sites compete? They can't until Google changes its ranking system, suggests Brandt. There may be a cure for cancer out there on the web, he says, but if it's on a new site nobody will know of its existence. 10:07:37 AM

www.libel.com?. In a column for today's National Review Online, Rod Dreher talks about litigation between an author and a critic who voiced opinions in a blog. [kuro5hin.org] After reading this article I worked my way down through the emails that had been posted in response. Seems everyone on the K5 website uses a signature - here's one for the books: "think globally, act loco". 9:42:21 AM