Anyone from outside the UK may never have heard of The Daily Mail newspaper, nor one of its columnists, Keith Waterhouse.
Back in the days when print was King, and email was but a rich man’s plaything, we Brits only had to concern ourselves with reading this man’s ramblings if we physically picked up a copy of the sensationalist newspaper and read his column for ourselves.
Now he’s loose on the Internet, and he’s not keen on bloggers. [Read more…]
The Internet transcends geographic boundaries, and this means people can reach out to others regardless of location or distance. However, this also means that the principles governing legal matters might also need re-thinking. For instance, legal jurisdiction is not as easily established as with cases wherein the parties involved are within the same political boundaries.
Laws like the DMCA (among many others) base jurisdiction upon the actual physical location of data -usually the laws in the country where the host server resides would apply. Parties who wish to circumvent such laws usually choose to host offshore (in neutral territory, or one without relevant laws). However, when it’s not the legality of the data itself that’s being debated, but acts done by individuals, then it becomes more complicated. And things become more interesting as people and companies continue to test the limits of the legal systems in various countries.
What makes blogs and bloggers prone to blogfights? Wired just ran a story on the best blogfights of 2006 and I’m sure most of us are aware of at least one of those listed. Remember Kevin Rose vs. Jason Calacanis?
But what really brings bloggers to quarrel? [Read more…]
The debate over comments on blogs is as old as blogging — the meme recently resurfaced when Zoli Erdos declared that The Official Google Blog is not a blog because it doesn’t allow comments. Mike Arrington amplified the debate by running a poll about whether comments are required for a blog to be a blog. At last check, the results were:
Is a blog really a blog if there are no reader comments?
Not a requirement, but comments enhance content dramatically
1223 – 40% of all votesComments are not a requirement for blogs
1009 – 33% of all votesWithout comments, it isn’t a blog
791 – 26% of all votesTotal Votes: 3023
The post itself received over 150 comments. I wasn’t going to wade into this perennial debate again until I came across this Joel Stein column from the L.A. Times, which is a tour de force rant against reader feedback:
[Read more…]
Perhaps the most odious buzzword to emerge from the second coming of the web is “user-generated content” — my objection to this term is not just aesthetic (although it’s quite an ugly term). My real problem with user-generated content is the notion of a “user.” Rishad Tobaccowala of Denuo highlighted the unfortunate double meaning in his keynote at OMMA last fall:
User Generated Content: Since when did I become a heroin addict?
and
Treat me as a person, not some user, consumer, addict, shallow person defined by your brand or some other form of low life.
Worse than the negative word association is that the use of the term “user” in a media 2.0 context has completely obfuscated what is actually happening in media. [Read more…]
