Linked List: April 9, 2009

Thursday, 9 April 2009

Jon Stewart:

I think you might be confusing ‘tyranny’ with ‘losing’.

Ken Silverstein talks to a “former senior CIA officer” regarding our response to the resurgence of real-world honest-to-god hijacking-ships-at-gunpoint piracy. His source makes the case that Thomas Jefferson handled things better 200 years ago.

(This is why I try to use the term bootlegging when discussing casual downloading and sharing of copyrighted material. Piracy is a violent crime.)

Danny Sullivan on Google and the Newspaper Industry ★

Great piece by Danny Sullivan on newspaper executives’ ill-considered decision to blame Google for their problems:

I’m going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with two simple lines. Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Done. Do that, you’re outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall Street Journal at all.

Oh, but you won’t do that.

Kottke on Extreme Borrowing ★

Jason Kottke compares AllThingsD’s “Voices” to Boing Boing:

Metaphorically speaking, the ATD post is like showing the first 3 minutes of a movie and then prodding the viewer to go see the rest of it in a theater while BB’s post is like the movie trailer that gives so much of the story away (including the ending) that you don’t really need to watch the actual movie.

What ends up happening is that blogs like Boing Boing — and I’m very much not picking on BB here … this is a very common and accepted practice in the blogosphere — provide so much of the gist and actual text of the thing they’re pointing to that readers often don’t end up clicking through to the original.

I think this is a real issue, and a serious defect in the format of many popular weblogs, insofar as they deliberately attempt to entirely summarize the article they’re linking to (sometimes with odd results), and therefore discourage rather than encourage readers to actually go read the original. Ostensibly high-traffic “summarize” weblogs, like TechCrunch for example, send surprisingly few referrers when they link to me. But this is a separate issue from the AllThingsD thing.

And yes, this is yet another instance of me standing up and saying that I’m doing it right where others are doing it wrong, so suck it.

Fair Use for Fair People ★

Anil Dash:

If the Associated Press made its argument on the basis of credibility and reputation, transparency and accountability, as the web-native publishers have, it would be far easier to defend their desire to share in the business model developed by the aggregators.

Baseball’s Judicial Branch ★

George Will on Bruce Weber’s new book on baseball umpires, As They See ’Em:

Umpires — the only people who are on the field during the entire game and the only ones indifferent to the outcome — were depicted in pre-Civil War drawings wearing top hats and carrying walking sticks. An account of the (supposedly) first game between organized teams — June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, N.J. — mentioned the umpire fining a player six cents for swearing.