The Columbia Journalism Review web site offers a searchable list of media properties, timelines for six major media conglomerates, and links to nearly six years of the Review’s articles about media ownership in its Who Owns What section.
File this under “whimsy”. This library is touring around England and Scotland in 2004/05, interviewing folks about the books that they would write.
The collection is evidence of the common desire to write a book and is an ongoing survey of this literary phenomenon.
[Thanks Librarian.net]
Library Dust: Give Me Ten of NYPL Preferred
Here’s a cogent little essay by Michael McGorty. Although he is slightly facetious about initial public offerings for public libraries, he hits the nail on the head regarding why libraries will continue to be important despite the internet — that is IF we librarians don’t buy into the fallacy that libraries need to be more like google and amazon.
Proponents of Internet supremacy regard the thing as the ultimate in democracy. In fact this is precisely true, and precisely for that reason a disaster. It is as though any person could publish a book on botany, regardless of content or value, then have it printed and placed on the shelves of every home in the world, to contend with innumerable competing versions, each with its separate viewpoint and set of factual bases. Those who place their faith in Internet answers roll the dice with every click, and never guess they are gambling.
[Thanks Librarian.net!!]
Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Suppress the Vote?” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/opinion/16herbert.html?hp”> Bob Herbert: Suppress the Vote? (NY Times, 8/16/04) and Herbert: A chill in Florida (NY Times, 8/23/04) . (Free registration required)
Here’s more chicanery from the republican party in Florida, a swing state and state where thousands of mostly black voters were disenfranchised in the 2000 election (see the thorough reporting of Greg Palast)
State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd “investigation” that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November.
EFF: EFFector Vol. 17, No. 30, August 19, 2004
Comments by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on Environmental Protection Agency plans for a new online system.
We propose that the EPA enable bulk data retrieval and use modern technologies such as web services interfaces and RSS feeds.
See also,
EPA takes portal concept to the next level By Wilson P. Dizard III, Government Computer News 08/02/04; Vol. 23 No. 21.
Copyrighting the President Wired 12(8), August, 2004.
Laurence Lessig raises a very interesting point here. Basically, copyright can have a negative affect on political discourse, especially given our 21st century reality of media consolidation and concentration. Read on!
The US president owns neither his words nor his image - at least not when he speaks in public on important matters. Anyone is free to use what he says, and the way he says it, to criticize or to praise. The president, in this sense, is “free.” But what happens when the commander in chief uses private venues to deliver public messages, holding fewer press conferences and making more talk-show appearances? Who controls his words and images then?
Wired News: E-Vote Machines: Secret Testing
The three companies that certify the nation’s voting technologies operate in secrecy and refuse to discuss flaws in the ATM-like machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in November.
Despite concerns over whether the touch-screen machines can be trusted, the testing companies won’t say publicly if they have encountered shoddy workmanship. They say they are committed to secrecy in their contracts with the voting machines’ makers — even though tax money ultimately buys or leases the machines.
Internet Archive Gets DMCA Exemption To Help Archive Vintage Software
The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) has received a temporary exemption fromt he Digital Millenium Copyright Act to archive “at-risk software.” There is no mention here of the larger problem of archiving content and content that is tied to software.
Seeing the Internet Archive do this reminds me of the
Vanderbuilt TV News Archive, which not only started taping and preserving and indexing TV News in 1968, but fought off network attempts to prevent them from doing so, and got their right to do so written in to the 1976 Copyright Act. The law allows nonprofits like the library to legally tape broadcasts if they are opened up to a wide, scholarly audience or to the general public.
See,
TV News Archive preserves network news broadcasts dating back to ’60s
by Jessica Howard. Vanderbuilt Daily Register (10/29/02).
The Chronicle of Higher Education now offers RSS feeds
for “Daily News,” “The Wired Campus,”
and careers.
Why are we highlighting outraged moderates this month? This blog focuses on government documents and other primary sources. What Thad Anderson is doing, besides blogging(!), is distributing government documents via peer-to-peer (p2p) networks through his Download For Democracy campaign. He’s distributing over 600 govt documents in this manner.