Links for Sunday 31 August

For over a year I used to post to this blog Daily News Links, however I stopped as it was taking too much time to put it together each evening.  As part of my attempt to rejuvenate this blog I've decided to resurrect this feature in a slightly different form.  I plan to regularly post (although not necessarily daily) links and extracts to blogs and news stories that for one reason or another have captured my attention.  So here are some links for Sunday 31 August (which are actually a collection of links from the month of August):

• Google, 10 years in: big, friendly giant or a greedy Goliath? (The Guardian) - "Ten years ago next month, in an innocuous suburban garage, Page and Brin, two geeky students at Stanford University, founded a company called Google. They would go on to create what is regularly voted the world's top brand, earn accolades as the world's best employers and become billionaires many times over. They would also, say their critics, cut a swathe through the laws of copyright, threaten to devour media like a 'digital Murdoch' and harvest more of our secrets than any totalitarian government - smashing the core certainties of advertising executives, book publishers, newspaper owners, television moguls and civil libertarians."
• Online Advertising: The price of a 'free' online world (Microsoft Australia Government Affairs) - "So, while the Internet has truly democratised information and levelled the playing field of access, it has yet to liberate the one constant that has driven media services for the last century – the need to pay for it. More than ever, advertising is the fuel that is driving the information economy with the millions of Web sites, large and small, relying on advertising to pay their way. Unlike the traditional media, though, one of the true benefits of the online model is that consumers are now enjoying much more tailored and immediate experiences with greater relevance than offline media."
• The Future of Free Expression Part I and Part II (Balkinization) - In a two part post, Jack Balkin looks at the future of free expression: "In the Information Age, you would think, there would be no more important part of the Constitution than the First Amendment. After all, free speech guarantees should have a great deal to do with a knowledge economy, and a world in which wealth and power increasingly depend on information technology, intellectual property and control over information flows.  For some time now, I have been thinking about how our understandings of the First Amendment are likely to change in a digital age. Gradually, I have come to the conclusion that we face a transition of enormous irony. At the very moment that our economic and social lives are increasingly dominated by information technology and information flows, the First Amendment seems increasingly irrelevant to the key free speech battles of the future. Or, more precisely, the judge made doctrines that I teach in my First Amendment classes seem increasingly irrelevant."
• Malice in Wonderland (The Age) - "Ideas about privacy — and the need to protect it — have changed radically in recent years. While increasing numbers of people, especially the young, have been sharing their life experiences and personal details online, privacy commissioners and law reformers have been lobbying for more stringent laws to protect individual privacy ... But popular culture exerts pressure in the opposite direction, championing the "ordinary" person's access to fame — often achieved through intimate personal exposure."
• Web Censorship Is So Bad in Turkey That Blogs Are Shutting Themselves Down In Protest (TechCrunch) - "It doesn’t take much to get your Website banned in Turkey.  Pretty much any complaint to a lower court can get a Website blocked in the country. Websites including YouTube, DailyMotion, Alibaba, Slide.com, and some Wordpress blogs have all been banned, usually because of some purported slight to the Turkish government or Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. (The Youtube ban was the result of a sophomoric video claiming Ataturk was gay). The problem has gotten so bad that Turkish blogs are now banning themselves in protest."
• Government 2.0 (Mashable) - In a series of posts Mark Drapeau considers Government 2.0: Government 2.0: An Insider’s Perspective, Government 2.0: A Theory of Social Government and Government 2.0: Being Individually Empowerful.
• Commission on Presidential Debates Boldly Goes to Web 0.2, Launches a Dud (techPresident) - "I don't fault MySpace for this travesty so much as I fault the Commission, for lack of imagination and courage. Recall that at least the MySpace/MTV forums during the primaries included real-time feedback from viewers that the audience could see, and the candidates even saw the aggregated responses, in real time. Also recall that Google/YouTube and the City of New Orleans have been offering their services for a candidates forum on September 18, and surely something creative could have come of that. What they're offering us here is little more than live video streaming, which is like, so, year 2000."
• Blogging 2.0 Meme Doesn't Go Far Enough (/message) - "Duncan Riley is promulgating 'Blogging 2.0' to represent what I consider the erosion of social media by their historic communities under the inexorable rise of flow applications, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Socialmedian, and Feedly (to name only a few).  I think his description of what is happening is overly simplistic, and the appropriation` of the term 'Blogging 2.0' is a jingoistic attempt to leverage the "paradigm shift" magic of the 2.0 suffix."
• Businessweek article on Stephanie Meyer + using social networks to sell millions of books (The Utube Blog) - "So what happens when Web 2.0 hits the traditional book world?  Well, Stephanie Meyer, the 34 year old author of the absurdly popular Twilight vampire books (a kinds of a cool version of Harry Potter), has the answer.  You can sell millions of books.  Read this week’s Businessweek article.  All book publishers should be studying and copying this model."
• Essay: New Media in Old Bottles? (Balkinzation) - "I have posted on SSRN an essay entitled, "New Media in Old Bottles? Barron's Contextual First Amendment and Copyright in the Digital Age," which explores in more depth some of the themes that I have discussed in my posts. In the essay I begin with Jerome Barron's call, four decades ago, for access to media as a First Amendment right as a springboard for examining copyright and its role in shaping public discourse in the digital arena. I focus, in particular, on (1) incumbent mass media's untoward use of copyright as a vertical restraint to stifle the new media that provides platforms for peer speech; (2) copyright's continuing part in underwriting traditional media, which I argue is a salutary function that stands in some tension with the media's use of copyright to suppress new media competition; and (3) copyright's potential for enabling powerful new media, like Google, to threaten expressive diversity in the digital age in much the same way that incumbent media has overwhelmingly dominated public discourse in the print and broadcast era. The full abstract and essay can be found here."
• Macquarie University opens up access to its academics' research papers (Australian IT) - "MACQUARIE University has joined the small club of Australian institutions that require academics to make their research papers freely available over the Internet. In 2004 the Queensland University of Technology became the first Australian institution to usher in a mandatory open access policy. Charles Sturt University followed suit last January."
• Defamation and the Internet: How the Law Effectively Allows Bloggers to Take Risks Big Media Companies Can't, and How Companies Can Work to Level the Playing Field (FindLaw's Writ) - "Increasingly, print journalism is struggling, as advertising dollars move to the Internet, subscriptions decrease, and newspapers find themselves competing with their own websites – which offer much of the same content the print editions do, free of charge – as well as other websites and blogs. Ironically, too, one common way in which newspapers have responded to money pressures is to make cuts in newsroom staff – and thus to decrease their comparative advantage vis-à-vis bloggers when it comes to offering high-quality content. As a result, it is now quite easy to imagine a near-future world in which print newspapers do not exist at all. In this column, I’ll focus on one aspect of this important trend: the way in which it will likely alter the legal landscape regarding defamation and, in turn, affect free speech. "
•  Some Media Companies Choose to Profit From Pirated YouTube Clips (New York Times) - "After years of regarding pirated video on YouTube   as a threat,  some major media companies are having a change of heart, treating it instead as  an advertising opportunity ... So far, the money is minimal — ads appear on only a fraction of YouTube’s millions of videos — but the move suggests a possible thaw in the chilly standoff between the online video giant and media companies. Getting into the good graces of media entities is seen as critical to the future of YouTube, which has struggled to show appreciable revenue for video ads."
• Govt: Cyberbullying is a New Phenomenon, as is Social Networking (Wall Street Journal Law Blog) - "Cyberbullying is a relatively new phenomenon, as is social networking. It is, therefore, not surprising that there have been relatively few prosecutions in this area. . . . the statute does not threaten to criminalize widespread conduct. Because the government must show that defendant acted with the requisite criminal scienter, there is no risk of criminalizing innocent, let alone negligent behavior."