- Indulgences Return, and Heaven Moves a Step Closer for Catholics
Shortcut!
- Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky
The thing that seems, to me, to be missing from this debate over the so-called iTunes-ization of the news is that journalism is fundamentally a different sorta thing than music, movies, whatever. It has a public service component that, I'm not ashamed to say, I believe is best addressed by people steeped in the practice making decisions about what busy, distracted people need to be reading. To put it another way, *demand* is not, IMHO, the way to determine what should be served up to the masses. Who's actually going to chose to "micropay" for content on the fighting in Congo? Call me elitist. Don't care. Besides, something I don't get about these micropayment models is at what point readers choose to chip in some coin for their preferred content. Do they get to read an excerpt, and then they decide whether it's worth their dollar? I'd rather reporters report rather than spending their hours slaving over the lede that's going to maximize how much immediate gratification they provide.
- How to Save Your Newspaper – TIME
- The Feed – Farm Living (Subsidized by a Job Elsewhere)
Familiar story, eh? Farming is segmenting into a few really big corporate behemoths and the rest of us freelancers.
- Google Mobile – Sync
Keep your iPhone synced up with your GoogleLife. Scola intrigued. I mean, having access to Exchange is one of the better reasons to belong to a big organization.
- The 'patent pending' problem – The Boston Globe
Science Progress/CAP's Rick Weiss on the pernicious prolonged patent pendency problem.
- Slipstream – Prop 8 Donor Web Site Shows Disclosure Law Is 2-Edged Sword
Hmm, transparency can raise some concerns, particularly when it's used as a political weapon. One can imagine the outreach if maps like this were used to harass pro-gay funders.
- Vilsack Says USDA Must Serve Eaters as Well as Farmers – washingtonpost.com
New Ag chief wants to be the defender of those of us who eat.
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February 11th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Transparency is a huge issue. It's not enough that we users have insight into what "Big Brother" is doing. "Big Brother" is all too able to react to what I'm doing or saying, while I am not able to respond equally forcefully. The technology behind such tools is cool. However, our culture is not nearly as open as we are being encouraged to be technologically. How do we respond to this?
February 11th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
It's a fair (and complicated) point, but there is a good and unanswered question about how open we want our culture to be. That might not be popular sentiment, but there is the possibility that some amount of shadowy cover is beneficial to anyone not in power or without access to it. We can bang the drum about making government as transparent as humanly possible, but do we need to draw some distinctions about exactly who needs to "go naked" and expose every detail? In other words, are we setting up a good-for-the-goose-like situation where all politics is expected to be conducting in the sunshine, whether it's a Treasury Department meeting or a meeting of my neighborhood cabal?
The neat thing is, I think, that in the Obama-era we're all starting to realize that open government is in the details, and some tough but essential distinctions will have to be made.