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Category: News of News (Page 6 of 11)

News and comments about news and media

Fredmania – Facebook and Fred on Carolina Week

I just got back from a great talk by Koleman Strumpf at Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He’s added movie trading to his file-sharing study so I got to hear a lot of new news. Basically, trading movies is now worse economically than trading music (at the current quality levels at least).
But when I got back, Fred and a guy from Carolina Week had taken over my office. Except for my shabby mess, it looked like a TV studio. Fred’ll be on later in the week talking about FaceBook and social networking.

Kids, Language and Tech

I’m up to talk to Sergio Quintana of NBC 17 about a couple of things technical and cultural later today.

One will be about tech savvy kids and their use of tech language. he’s all excited that kids know what a wav file is. Heck, in my day we not only knew the name of every car part and its manufacturer, but that stuff was in our music. “Little GTO” “Little Deuce Coupe” “409 (She’s So Fine)”
Now they don’t make songs like that about computers and cell phones! (and it’s a good thing too ;->).

Turning tables on Journalists

My collegue Chris Roush on his Talking Biz News Blog takes the story of a BusinessWeek reporter who has his email interview questions posted by the interviewee.
I disagree with Chris and point to Dan Gillmor’s book in the comments. Dan touches on the story on his own blog for the Center for Citizen Media.
Also in the comments on Chris’ blog, thesanitycheck.com folks post a comment and a traceback to the interviewee’s reply.
Then Chris publishes this update: BusinessWeek reporter calls and is mad; Overstock head responds on Internet again. The reporter hasn’t caught on yet.
Of course I posted a comment to Dan’s blog telling him and his readers about Chris’s posts.
Got all that?
Hang on there’s more. Chris just posted, when I wasn’t looking, another bit from SanityCheck. This time, we learn that CNBC’s marker guru, Jim Cramer is threatening Sanity Check’s webmaster in More from The Sanity Check: Jim Cramer is mad now.

Shield law for bloggers — or for any Journalist for that matter

Dan Gillmor writes from the American Bar Association’s Communications Law conference where a mock Senate hearing about the so-called “Free Flow of Information Act” was underway.
As I comment on Dan’s blog (can’t see how to do a trackback there):

Jeffery Tobin in the current (Jan 16, 06) New Yorker has a lot to say about the background to this discussion in his article NAME THAT SOURCE Why are the courts leaning on journalists?. Worth a read.

NBC 17 news – Windows only!

So there is a link to the edited story on Podcastercon on the NBC 17 News site as “Podcast Convention Set For UNC”. The link takes you to a pop-up window which tells me that I must be running Windows and I must be browsing with Internet Exploiter. Is No News good news? I can’t begin to talk about how annoying this is. In fact, I can’t really give you a link to the story because the javascript/restrictions are so overpowering.

We were brilliant I hear.

Podcastercon is tomorrow and we’re way over the amount of folks we predicted. Should be wild!

Fred in Austin-American

Fred’s Facebook research gets him sourced in an Austin-American story, “Are you on the Facebook?”

A section of the story below:

Of all the online social network services, including My-Space and Friendster, Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla, said Fred Stutzman, who is working toward a doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science.

To its users, the Facebook is just as important as cell phones and laptops, he said.

“It has been totally ingrained in the social system. For the majority of undergrads, it is part and parcel of how they exist . . . online and offline,” said Stutzman, who is conducting a study of UNC freshmen’s use of the Facebook. “It’s the sense that when they’re part of the Facebook, they’re part of the community.”

E and P on Privacy of Blogs

The discussion of the privacy of blogs (remember my concern was with the blogs of kids and that concern supported by Fred’s study of college students) that came up in regards to the murder in Clayton and the coverage following by the News and Observer has gotten Editor and Publisher columnist Greg Mitchell’s attention in his Pressing Issues space.
In many ways, I should feel good that this discussion is ongoing, but the topic has lost the most important element to me — the ethics of dealing with kids blogging. This wasn’t lost on Ted Vaden nor on John Robinson, but I don’t see that most important issue actually discussed in Mitchell’s column. Sure he mentions that issue by quoting Vaden, but even Matt Dees, whose article on the subject of blog privacy got me started on all of this thinking, doesn’t deal much with the age and ethics issues.

Privacy of blogs and ethics of journalism

John Robinson of the News and Record and Ted Vaden of the News and Observer try navigating the questions I raised in my note to Matt Dees earlier this week, questions that were asked again by others in response to News and Observer Editor Melanie Sill’s blog entry on covering blogs as a part of a story. The question is of course which parts of which story? Or as JR restates the thread [taken from Ted Vaden’s NandO piece – pj]: “Can publication of online information be an invasion of privacy? What’s the age cutoff for publishing children’s blogs? How aware is the young person of the effect of publication?”
I’m beginning to see that Phil Meyer and I will disagree on much of this as my own thoughts are getting better formed. I continue to be informed by Fred Stutzman’s study of privacy expectations and of what is actually revealed on the web by students using Facebook as I think about the ethical questions surrounding journalistic uses of information found in personal blogs.

Journalism ethics and blogs?

Took a call last night from a local reporter, Matt Dees, who part of the crew doing a series of stories on a sordid murder in Clayton. Three members of the family involved had/have blogs. Two of those members are kids in high school with Xanga and mySpace blogs. We chatted a bit about blogs in general. I wondered a little about reporting from the blog of a kid who is underage and acting out different identies on his/her blog. I pointed out that most kids even in college, see Fred’s facebook study on privacy, don’t think so much about just how much they reveal about themselves.
After we spoke, I went to the sites. Then I wrote Matt this note:

thinking since we spoke. how ethical is it for a professional journalist to quote from the blog of an underaged child (even a punk rocker)? if we agree that kids don’t actually understand that what they are writing in public, does that mean that their writings aren’t really fair game for news stories?

i don’t have the answers here i’m just wondering now that i’ve seen zzzzz’s site. obviously he’s trying on identities and he has friends who support him, but won’t he look weird to most folks reading the nando? does he deserve a kind of privacy that he didn’t seek for himself? should say kxxxxx’s or lxxxxx’s phone number be news or should it be protected? what is okay to use? remember we’re not talking about adults who should in theory be more aware. not even students at ncsu who put up pics of themselves with beer…

UPDATE: News and Observer editor Melanie Sill has a blog entry about this issue and about not playing the 911 tape. There are many reader comments too.

Future of Music (looking back the past 5 years)

Just off the phone after a longish talk with David Menconi of the News and Observer about tech and the changes in music in the past 5 or so years. A preview of the early 21st century.

My takes – iPods, podcasting, GarageBand, mySpace, blogs, low power FM and high availability of cultural materials in digital form for remix were not really here 5 years ago. This means that music is more of a conversation between listeners and producers in a direct way than any time since the period before piano rolls.

A band produces their music using ProTools or GarageBand. They keep up with their fans on mySpace. They distribute their rough cuts via podcasts. Their listeners hear the music on their pods whilst jogging, on the bus or in my class! They share with their peers via their blogs (or aim). They walk into the low power FM station that will take the risks in tastes that old Am
stations used to take. The music gets remixed to a dance track adding clips for a presidential press conference, say, into yet a new product that circles back thru the fans to the band.

Specific examples were given. Will see what David does with my overlong ramble.

This Blog on WashPost

The Washington Post has added a boxed section on selected pages that includes the Technorati search results for blogs that link to those pages. The result is that a link to the story about Dylan (below) has put this blog right there on the page to which I refered in my blog entry and on a special “links from blogs on Technorati” page. I’m not complaining since I would have used TrackBacks to that story were they available. In fact, I’m delighted to have this blog show up on Washington Post .com even if we had to go through a odd drive around the net to get to where a trackback would have taken me quickly. The advantage for the Post is that Technorati keeps trackback spam off their site and does a fine job of searching blogs that bother to register at the Technorati site.

UPDATE: By making this post, I was suddenly dropped from the Post box and from the “Links” page! A Technorati search on the Post page shows this page as the most recently updated blog (as of this writing).

UPDATE 2: Now this blog is on the Post page twice! I guess there is a bit of a lag on their Techorati driven search and update.

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