Mainstream media stealing stories that break on the blogs? It’s like 2001 all over again! A group of independent movie blogs who are tired of Variety and The Holllywood Reporter printing day-old blog news and claiming it as their own are banding together to boycott the trades. Now, because those bloggers aren’t really buying the print edition of the trades, the way they’ll be wielding their power is by refusing to link to either paper. Oooh, Internet warfare! [Folio]
News that Bronx prosecutors subpoenaed the indie political Room 8, looking to identify some of the site’s anonymous commenters — and threatening legal action if the blog even mentioned that they’d been served with a subpoena — shouldn’t have been entirely surprising. Because where there are blogs, there are potential lawsuits.
Actually, not just potential lawsuits. Actual lawsuits. Like this one against Perez Hilton. CONTINUED »
Former New York Times science writer and current Santa Fe Review blogger George Johnson, who set up a live webcam feed of the lot neighboring his home — which just so happened to be where Tom Ford was building his new house in the Santa Fe area — is the victim of a burglary, where $7,000 of equipment, including “a brand-new Apple Mac Pro computer, two display monitors, two digital cameras, a digital recorder, an iPod, a cell phone, two older monitors, a copy machine and, perhaps worst of all, his backup hard drive and backup power supply” was nabbed while he and his wife slept downstairs. Oh, and the webcam aimed at Ford’s house. Johnson plans to replace it, with insurance money.
Good news, everyone! Kanye West has yet another bone to pick with a random victim, but this time he forgot to use his caps lock key. Evidently Harper’s Bazaar misrepresented a piece of artwork in Kanye’s home in a feature on his decorating skills in the September 2007 issue. No, seriously. This was almost a year ago.
Social news website Mashable put together a list of celebrities with blogs, and then broke down the list into sections like Actors (Jackie Chan, Zack Braff), Athletes (Anna Kournikova), Musicians (Moby, Kanye West), Comedians (Margaret Cho, Rosie O’Donnell), and the people you care about: News (Brian Williams, Daryn Kagan) and Writers (Neil Gaiman, Kevin Smith). [Mashable]
The left-leaning blogger Brian Beutler, the Washington correspondent for the Media Consortium, was shot in D.C. yesterday. “Some of the details of the incident are still sketchy. According to [MC project director Tracy] Van Slyke, Beutler was walking with a friend after leaving a bar in Washington’s Adams Morgan section when the two were confronted by a man demanding their cell phones near 17th Street and Euclid Street. It’s unclear as yet what happened, but the man fired several shots at Beutler. One bullet hit him in the spleen and he was hit twice in the shoulder. A D.C. police official said he wasn’t aware of any arrests made in connection with the shooting.” Though Beutler is expected to bounce from stable condition to full recovery, this whole thing is sad, because it’s quite likely he was not even shot for his political leanings. [TPM]
Actress Jessica Biel, who is often photographed by the paparazzi looking very unhappy next to professional jerk Justin Timberlake, blogged her first bloggy blog item on The MySpace yesterday! She’s down in South Carolina filming the movie Nailed with Jake Gyllenhaal and Tracy Morgan, and she’s only got a few minutes of rest while sitting in her trailer, probably drinking SmartWater, because that’s what celebrities like her do, so she’s punching out her very first item where she reports she is “thrilled to join the tech revolution!” And we are thrilled to welcome her! But for being such a novice blogger, Ms. Biel has already learned rule No. 1 of blogging: self-promotion. This medium is barely worth the effort if you aren’t going to rush from the gate and start plug-plug-plugging away at your own projects. CONTINUED »
O! YO! YO!!!! ON THE REAL, CALL ME ANY NAME YOU WANT…ARROGANT, CONCEITED, GAY, SQUID BRAINS, BABY KNEES, MACACA, DONKEY LIPS, NIGGARDLY…ANYTHING…BUT DON’T EVER SAY I’M NOT A FUCKING MISOGYNIST!!!! SHIT!!!! FUCK! I’M TYPING SO HARD I’M ABOUT 2 BREAK MY JAPANESE COMPUTER WATCH DESIGNED BY FUCKING GRASS-FED MONKS! WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT JAPANESE HERBIVORE MONK WATCHES YOU STUPID SWATCH-HAVING BASTARDS!??? ANYWAY ASK ANYBODY THAT’S BACKSTAGE AT THE GLOW IN THE DARK TOUR…THEY KNOW I HUMILIATE WOMEN ON THE REGULAR, BABY. WHY YOU THINK I GOT THIS PICTURE OF THAT TRANSFORMERS CHICK ON HER HANDS AND KNEES ON MY BLOG?!!!!!!!!!!!
Media fingerprint technology isn’t exactly new. Movie studios use it when they send out screeners to track down who’s leaking copies of Hancock on BitTorrent. Record companies do the same with advanced albums. And now … the Associated Press? Using a technology from Attributor, the AP plugs its copyrighted content into the software, which then crawls the web to match strings of that content against material published elsewhere. If a match is made, the AP (or other clients) are alerted, and “the software can be programmed to automatically send out ‘takedown notices’ that require sites to remove contested content, and the data it generates could end up being used to build a case against alleged copyright infringers.”
That’s how the AP originally found all that material on The Drudge Retort, and started a flame war with bloggers.
One big problem: The software will likely have a hard time, or no ability at all, to determine actual fair use (like a video clip snippet for a movie review) and genuine infringement, which means there’s room for plenty of false positives. And if the software automatically fires off a DMCA takedown notice, folks like the AP could find themselves in trouble of their own: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act bars copyright owners from issuing this types of requests for instances when there is no actual infringement (i.e. sending the notices as a bullying tactic), and can hold those owners liable for the defense’s damages, including legal fees.
But this type of software, it turns out, can be used for good! And surprise of all surprises, none other than Conde Nast sees the light. CONTINUED »
So much for that whole “Associated Press v. The Bloggers” scandal. After launching an attack on liberal site The Drudge Retort for its supposed, ahem, liberal use of headline and article excerpts, and then getting hosed by anyone with a Blogger account and a basic understanding of Fair Use, the AP says the issue has been resolved. “The resolution of this matter illustrates that the interests of bloggers can be served while still respecting the intellectual property rights of news providers.” Not that anything was actually resolved, like whether the wire service actually think people are going to pay to quote five or more words. [PC]
Though billionaire investor and Yahoo pain in the ass Carl Icahn was supposed to start blogging today, about corporate governance, at IcahnReport.com, the website’s only piece of content thus far is this: “This page is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com.” Perhaps the domain Carl should’ve registered is Icanh’tReport.com.
Credit card company Advanta is offering a business credit card aimed specifically at blogger types. [Blueprint]
When Reed Elsevier “quietly asked” a blogger to stop chronicling its hopeful sale of Reed Business Information, the blogger complied.
With its revamped website and Graydon Carter’s video introductions to each new issue, Vanity Fair clearly considers itself a major player in the Internet leagues. That VF grasps so desperately at each new meme, however, isn’t a publishing industry triumph; it’s a sad little whimper from inside Conde Nast, where they’ve been unable to trade up their celebrity currency for online relevance.
And then came “How the Web Was Won,” the lengthy “oral history” of the Internet, which debuted online as the biggest piece of link bait yet. (You know how us Internet types like to link to things that talk about our own kind.) And with it, a Web 2.0 sidebar: “Blogoptican,” which throws a few dozen Internet titles – many of them not even blogs – on a matrix, measuring them vertically between news and opinion, and horizontally between scurrilous and honest.
That Jossip appears toward the scurrilous pole is not so much an honor, but an expectation; of course we’d end up there.
And then there are the celebrity gossip titles, which generously populate the list, and go a little something like this: CONTINUED »
Blogging grandpa Jeff Jarvis wants reporters to identify themselves when leaving comments. Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter wants bloggers to identify themselves when conducting interviews, especially ex-president Bill Clinton.
In this era where “citizen” and “journalist” are paired as often as “drunk” and “uploaded the video to YouTube,” who’s responsible for disclosing what here?
Should we just assume everyone is, at some level, a reporter? And if they aren’t doing the reporting, isn’t everyone at least a source? CONTINUED »
Editorial Director
