My friend Rich Gordon of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern asks for a plug to get us nontraditional journalists to fill in a survey about the job skills in the trade that will be needed tomorrow. It’s not wholly relevant to our humble craft but please do help influence the stats to show that there’s a newer, simpler way in terms of basic technical skills (but not intelligence). I generally tire of such surveys but this one is quick.
Month: November 2005
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Mondomosque
We have superchurches in America; there’s a proposal to build a supermosque in Britain with multiple buildings holding 70,000.
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Not Arianna?
The Guardian calls George Clooney “the voice of liberal America.”
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A principle: I have a right to know when I am read
How about this as a fundamental principle of content and conversation on the internet:
I have a right to know when what I create is read, heard, viewed, or used if I wish to know that.
That is my followup to the whine about RSS — and content — caching below.
If this simple principle were built into applications — not the internet, per se, but in how readers and viewers work — then caching and P2P, which both serve creators by reducing bandwidth demand, would not be issues. This also would help those who want to make use of advertising (though actually serving ads is a different matter).
I’d like to see this as a technical add-on to Creative Commons: Distribute my content freely, please, on the condition that you allow applications to report traffic back to me. And applications designers should build such reporting in. The creator is still free not to require this and the end user is still free not to consume those things that require ping-backs. But simple traffic reporting is at least common courtesy.
I’d like to see this work for RSS, HTML, audio, and video.
: LATER: Just want to emphasize that My Yahoo will provide the data. It is not now because something broke in an upgrade but two Yahoo folks have confirmed that they will continue to play nice, for which I am grateful.
: LATER STILL: Matt Cutts of Google says he will mention this to the guys at Google Reader and believes there’s no reason not to build it into a next version of that new product. Bravo again.
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What censorship looks like
Newsdesigner shows us the front page of one of two Polish papers that blacked out many of their words to protest censorship in neighboring Belarus.