Atlantic Monthly political blogger Andrew Sullivan takes on the issue of journalism rules for bloggers in this video. He says you can’t regulate or enforce, but that readers will discover who is honest and who isn’t. He believes that bloggers should not lie, should correct things when they are wrong, should not misrepresent, and will earn their reputation for honesty and integrity as inevitably as did the New York Times. He also embraces his own blogger’s rebellious streak, shared with the creators of South Park: “I can say the word ‘fuck’ and they can’t stop me,” he gloats.
Earlier this week a US judge issued an injunction forcing the file-sharing application LimeWire to disable "the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality" of its software. This ruling marked another victory for the entertainnment industry in its ongoing battle against copyright piracy.
To discuss what this may mean for the television industry and viewers like, yesterday I was interviewed about this ruling by Dan Barrett and Simon Band for the Televised Revolution podcast. You can listen and/or download this podcast here.
For the last two weeks I've been slack and haven't posted any Daily Twitter Links. However, now that teaching is over for the semester, I will hopefully have more time and will be able to post them each night.
Here are some of the things I've been tweeting about today:
The local FOX station in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas recorded a segment satirizing social media called “The Fox 4 DFW Roast of Social Media” and it’s pretty funny. Facebook, Foursquare, Skype and Twitter are all spoofed, and we have the YouTube video here.
The anchor opens up with breaking news about a gunman on the loose in City Hall, but every correspondent on the scene is so involved in social media technology that he or she has lost touch with what’s actually happening.
The whimsical animators at Taiwan's Next Media offer their take on the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas seeking an apology from Anita Hill.
We've seen huge growth in the popularity of social networking services. But what happens when you combine social networking with your location? The rise of smartphones has led to a massive increase in geo-location based services. So what are the advantages and disadvantages of providing your location? And in a geo-located world will we ever be off the grid?
Peter Marks ABC Radio National Breakfast's technology editor.
Boy Van Amstel Programmer and co-creator of 'Please Rob Me' website.
Peter Black Senior Law Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology and avid user of geo-location services.
Neerav Bhatt Professional blogger, freelance journalist and photographer.
Every Monday morning I appear on Andrew Bartlett's 4ZzZ breakfast radio show to discuss some of the current public and political issues of the week. This week we discussed the week in Australian politics, the upcoming mid term elections in the US, Mary MacKilop and faith in Australia, as well as my Analog Sunday:
A secret history of the industrial wars behind the rise and fall of the twentieth century's great information empires--Hollywood, the broadcast networks, and AT&T--asking one big question: Could history repeat itself, with one giant entity taking control of American information?
Most consider the Internet Age to be a moment of unprecedented freedom in communications and culture. But as Tim Wu shows, each major new medium, from telephone to cable, arrived on a similar wave of idealistic optimism only to become the object of industrial consolidation profoundly affecting how Americans communicate. Every once free and open technology was in time centralized and closed, a huge corporate power taking control of the "master switch." Today, as a similar struggle looms over the internet, increasingly the pipeline of all other media, the stakes have never been higher. To be decided: who gets heard, and what kind of country we live in.
Part industrial exposé, part meditation on the nature of freedom of expression, part battle cry to save the Internet’s best features, The Master Switch brings to light a crucial drama—rife with indelible characters and stories—heretofore played out over decades in the shadows of our national life.
Wow. Bill O’Reilly‘s appearance on “The View” this morning was one for the ages. The Fox News host got into a heated exchange with a few of the ladies, over the lower Manhattan mosque project, leading Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg to storm off the set.
Early in the segment, O’Reilly said to Behar: “Hold it. Hold it. Listen to me because you’ll learn something.” A couple minutes later, after the exchange got really heated, Behar stood up and said. “This is BS, Bill. I Don’t want to sit here.” She and Goldberg walked off.
Barbara Walters then chided her co-hosts saying sternly to the audience: “I want to say something. You have just seen what should not happen. We should be able to have discussions without washing our hands and screaming and walking offstage. I love my colleagues. It should not have happened.”
Walters then laid in to O’Reilly, saying he was being demeaning and demanded he apologize. See what happens after the jump…
Every Monday morning I appear on Andrew Bartlett's 4ZzZ breakfast radio show to discuss some of the current public and political issues of the week. This week we discussed The Social Network, the Commonwealth Games, the week in federal Australian politics, and a recent workshop on the 2010 election campaign:
Every Tuesday morning I have a regular weekly segment on Breakfast with Spencer Howson on 612 ABC Brisbane talking about technology and how it frames our world. This week we talked about the Google car, toddlers and even pets online, international friend counts, and my upcoming Analog Sunday:
This is the sixth time I have hosted Blawg Review from Australia (I previously hosted Blawg Review #85, #136, #178, #196 and #266). For those who don't know, the Blawg Review is a weekly round-up of posts from around the blawgosphere, and I am once again honoured to be able to host Blawg Review from the the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia, where I am a senior lecturer in law.
Every other time I've hosted Blawg Review, I've usually begun with a self-serving little summary of me and my blog, but I figure that as I've done this a few times now, I can skip that and instead launch into my whip around the blawgosphere this week. Besides, the theme of this Blawg Review is also a little more personal for me and does not fall into my usual areas of teaching, writing or blogging. This is because today is not just Columbus Day and Thanksgiving Day in Canada, it is also National Coming Out Day:
As someone who understands how difficult it is for many in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community to come out, I wanted to focus on this day, as well as other GLBT issues, in this Blawg Review.
National Coming Out Day was founded by Robert Eichberg, a founder of The Experience workshop, and National Gay Rights Advocates head Jean O'Leary during a 1988 meeting of LGBT activists as a day to celebrate coming out. The date of October 11 was chosen to mark the anniversary of the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which had taken place four months earlier. National Coming Out Day is marked by events all over America, as well as in many other countries around the world, any countries, including Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Croatia, Poland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. You can learn all about National Coming Out Day here, and can show your support for this cause with the Coming Out Day Facebook app and by tweeting your support with the hashtag #NCOD. Indeed, the internet has been buzzing in soliditary all day.
Even though Coming Out can be hard, and it is very much a personal journey, rest assured that even if there is no-one else, there is a vibrant online GLBT community that can support you no matter what you are going through. One of the most amazing and enriching things about the internet that I have observed are the extraordinary connections and friendships that can develop online. These connections and friendships, from likeminded people all over the world, can be from people that have never have necessarily met or will even ever meet, but they can still be there for you when you need them most, with a generosity of spirit and a sense of compassion and humour that is genuinely moving. I know in my own journey that some of the people I met through Twitter have helped me more than some of my oldest and dearest friends. It is easy to make fun of the web and the myriad of social networks that exist online but it can also be a source of strength and support when people need it the most. And remember this simple message: it gets better.
The "It's Gets Better" message received quite a bit of attention last week (including this speech from Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett) because of a series of tragic suicides from young GLBT youth. The most prominent of which was that of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University student, who jumped to his death after his college roommate used a hidden webcam to stream a sexual encounter between Clementi and another man online. In a podcast at the May It Please The Court Weblog, J Craig Williams and guests discusses who is responsible for Clementi's death. Simple Justice also discussed this sensitive topic in a detailed post on cyberbullying. Elie Mystal, Scott Greenfield, Daniel Solove, Mike Cernovich and Colin Samuels also made thoughtful contributions to the discussion of this issue.
And that is a wrap for Blawg Review #285. My apologies for the abbreviated nature of Blawg Review this week but my teaching and marking commitments at the moment are extensive. Nonetheless, I still wanted to make a small contribution to National Coming Out Day, and so I appreciate your patience.
Finally, it has been a pleasure to host Blawg Review again for National Coming Out Day. While we may not have reached this happy utopia yet, I am confident that our message of tolerance and understanding is spreading.
Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.
What happens when Banksy storyboards the couch gag on The Simpsons? Well, the artist was given the chance for an episode that went to air in the US just a few hours ago. The work was surprisingly darker than one would expect to see on US network TV, let alone on The Simpsons.
I haven't posted any Daily Twitter Links in over a week, largely because I was in Sydney last week and didn't get the chance. So to make up for it, here are some of the things I was tweeting about last week:
why can't this be in the australian app store? ... "Yap Transcribes Voicemails On Your iPhone For Free" http://j.mp/bk4BVf
Last week Kirsten MacGregor was filling in for Spencer Howson and we talked about anonymity on the internet, the My Lecturer website and the dangers of status jacking:
Every Monday morning I appear on Andrew Bartlett's 4ZzZ breakfast radio show to discuss some of the current public and political issues of the week. This week we discussed, among other topics, the first week of Parliament, the war in Afghanistan, the outing of Grogs Gamut and cyberbullying:
ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel mocked the competition on Wednesday with a song that featured a Jeff Zucker look-a-like singing about failed NBC pilots.
Zucker was ousted as president and chief executive of NBC Universal Sept. 24 in advance of the company's merger with Comcast. He will be replaced by Comcast COO Steve Burke once the merger is complete. Zucker expanded NBC's presence online and on cable, but his tenure was marred by a string of unsuccessful projects in the company's entertainment division and the Conan/Leno late night debacle.
Kimmel showed a musical video during his show that made fun of Zucker's problems in primetime.
"NBC hasn't had a great decade. Things haven't been the same since 'Wings' went away," Kimmel joked.
Kimmel's video featured a Zucker look-a-like singing "Hey Now I Just Got Fired" to the tune of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" and rattling off a list of failed NBC shows.
Marc Prensky coined the term "digital natives" in 2001 to describe the generation that's grown up surrounded by plugs, pixels, and screens. Two films out this month, Catfish, a documentary about an online relationship, and The Social Network, on Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, are giving critics the opportunity to try and best Prensky with their own monikers:
Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: The boot-up, log-on, plug-in generation
Some of you may be aware that I was on The Drum on ABC News 24 on Thursday night. If you want to see my first awkward experience of live TV, you can watch it here:
This blog speaks freely about law, politics and the internet. While the focus is on Australia, developments in other nations around the world are considered as well.
Background
The title of this blog is inspired by the Opinion of the US Supreme Court in Board of Education v Barnette 319 US 624 (1943):
"But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
