Unrequired Reading {7.12.08}

These are some of the things that have caught my atten­tion lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news busi­ness, but then so’s life:

• Kiddie-porn scan­dal lands Wiki­pe­dia a Brit­ish ban [The Sum Of All Human Know­ledge] | Val­ley­wag — “The Wiki­pe­dian child-porn fet­ish is dis­turb­ing. But it’s a sign of a much deeper prob­lem. Wiki­pe­dia edit­ors love to make up bur­eau­cratic rules. It’s part of what makes the site so intim­id­at­ing to new users, and why bias and mis­re­port­ing so often go uncor­rec­ted on the site. Know­ledge­able people are scared away by the need to engage in time-wasting argu­ments with bored teen­agers and obsess­ive Inter­net users for whom enfor­cing these rules is a source of cheap entertainment.”
• Brit­ish ISPs fil­ter­ing Wiki­pe­dia | CNET News — Inter­net ser­vice pro­viders in the U.K. have begun fil­ter­ing access to Wiki­pe­dia after the site was added to the Inter­net Watch Foundation’s blacklist.

  The fol­low­ing notice appeared on Wiki­pe­dia on Sat­urday when many UK users attemp­ted to edit con­tent:
  Wiki­pe­dia has been added to a Inter­net Watch Found­a­tion UK web­site black­list, and your Inter­net ser­vice pro­vider has decided to block part of your access. Unfor­tu­nately, this also makes it impossible for us to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between dif­fer­ent users, and block those abus­ing the site without block­ing other inno­cent people as well.

• The Medium — Con­tent and Its Dis­con­tents | NYTimes.com — In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn any­thing so broad as to “tell great stor­ies” or “make arrest­ing images.” You don’t study the ancient art of storytelling. You learn to pro­duce cer­tain num­bers and styles and forms of words and images. You learn to be suc­cinct when a pub­lic­a­tion loses ad pages. You learn to dilate when an “art­icle” is under­stood mostly as a deliv­ery vehicle for pic­tures of a sexy celebrity. The words stack up under cer­tain kinds of head­lines that also adhere to strict con­ven­tions as to size and tone, and even­tu­ally they appear along­side cer­tain kinds of pho­tos and illus­tra­tions with cer­tain kinds of cap­tions on pages of cer­tain dimen­sions that are often shared with advertisements.
• PA bars Al-Jazeera journ­al­ists from Mukata | Middle East | Jer­u­s­alem Post — “The Palestinian Author­ity has decided to ban a num­ber of journ­al­ists from enter­ing the pres­id­en­tial Mukata com­pound in Ramallah.

  Abbas waves to the crowd before a speech in the Mukata in Ramallah.

  The decision is aimed at pun­ish­ing the journ­al­ists because of their cri­ti­cism of the PA lead­er­ship or for report­ing about the activ­it­ies of Hamas leaders.

  Al-Jazeera report­ers and TV crews are among those who now appear on the PA’s black­list. They have been denied access to the Mukata for the past two weeks.

  Other journ­al­ists work­ing for Arab and West­ern media out­lets have also been told that they are no longer wel­come to visit the compound.

• What’s going on here then? | StreetWire (beta) — A new idea for aggreg­at­ing local info…
• 4IP: The first pro­ject is out, and it’s a foot­ball com­munity tool | The Guard­ian — Good for Rick: “The first pro­ject in Chan­nel 4’s 4IP scheme rolled out quietly today without much fan­fare, but per­haps the broad­caster feels this isn’t the right time to be blow­ing the trum­pet about a £60m innov­a­tion fund. Still, 4IP is start­ing to sup­port some inter­est­ing and exper­i­mental digital media pro­jects and as back­ing from ven­ture cap­ital and angel investors dries up, the pro­ject is going to become an extremely valu­able resource for the star­tup community.

  First off the blocks is #FC, a com­munity con­ver­sa­tion tool for foot­ball clubs that uses the mes­saging plat­forms Twit­ter and Jaiku. The mas­ter­mind is Rick Wag­horn, sub­ject of yesterday’s Elev­ator Pitch for his ‘Addiply’ local advert­ising plat­form, with some sup­port from former IPC music journ­al­ists and web pro­du­cer Neil Mason.”

• The Bail­out Para­dox | Robert Reich — “As a con­di­tion of get­ting a fed­eral bail­out, the Big Three are prom­ising, among other things, to cut costs. Among the costs to be cut will be jobs. This is para­dox­ical, since the reason Con­gress is con­sid­er­ing bail­ing them out in the first place is to pre­serve jobs and avoid the social costs of large-scale job loss (unem­ploy­ment insur­ance, lost tax rev­en­ues, pen­sion pay­ments that have to be picked up by the Pen­sion Bene­fit Guar­an­tee Cor­por­a­tion, and so forth).”

Tagged as: Unrequired Reading