RIAA and Digital Millenium Copyright Act blues

From David Byrne on the RIAA and its warning to him. And from slashdot comes this story about challenges to the RIAA and its ex parte suits. RIAA

The Million Dollar Homepage - Own a piece of internet history!

This is an ingenious way to make money, but I haven't bought into any pixels yet. Apparently by selling the pixels at $1.00 each, he is raking in the cash....The Million Dollar Homepage - Own a piece of internet history!

End of the year contemplation: the $100 laptop

Emerging technologies and their effect on society MIT's Nicholas Negroponte has proposed and gone forward with his "$100 laptop" idea. Negroponte calls it the most important idea of his lifetime. It is about education, not the device itself. This link goes to a neat MIT site where you can watch the speech as a video or just listen (my choice when it is only a talking head.) Note: Negroponte presents the first PowerPoint he ever created, so you might want to watch rather than listen. How McLuhanesque that one of the first and most potent things that the villagers noticed and liked about the laptops was that the laptop provided the brightest light the families had. Hmmm. "Electricity is the most pure form of information." Some of the breakthrough ideas to my way of thinking are:

• "connectivity" is not a problem anymore
• the genesis of this idea is with Papert, Logo, and thinking machines from 1970s
• by putting tech in hands of kids, the tech "bleeds" into the family experience
• the cost of the laptops can be brought down because of the not-for-profit status

Ian from Malaysia has images of the cool laptop 100laptop

Chicagodailynews.org transforming in several ways.

Geoff Dougherty and his new online citizen journalism enterprise was called chicagodailynews.org but the cease and desist letter from the Sun-Times and the threat of litigation has caused him, according to Jay DeFoore, to go for the chitowndailynews.org name instead. No matter what you call it, it is taking shape in pretty good time. I was checking it when it was just a few days old, and there were no zipcodes with stories. On 12/21/05 we looked at the site during a "Chicago Bloggers" meetup and browsing around talking about Geoff's site and all the zipcodes we "tested" had some story, though some were pretty short. Steve Outing in his Poynter columntoday writes about a South African cit journo effort that is paying for good stories, and mentions ohmynews.com which pays for stories, albeit not too much. He missed Dougherty's chitowndailynews.org where reporters get paid and he told me he envisions salaried reporters for some of the beats as the enterprise catches on. And as long as we are talking about some kind of payment for citizen writing, I want to express my distress about Outing's idea that the citizen journos be paid with trinkets. He initially was talking about t-shirts and mugs, and in this latest story he at least moves up to giving out cellphones. I think the idea that good writing is good writing means pay is pay. The trinket rewards sound patronizing to me. As a freelancer, I want to paid for my work, and not treated like a clever child. I know this idea could be threatening to those who are getting paid fulltime to write, but I also think that fulltime writing, especially reporting, is hard and that not everyone who can write well will quit their day jobs to be fulltime reporters. The point is, that almost everyone has at least one good story in them, and if it is a good story, we also respect it. citizenjournalism

Inside Higher Ed :: Easy Targets

Journalists, writers, teachers, students who want to write will find this a good read. Academics discuss the MLA convention and the rocky relationship between journalists and academic writer/scholars. Inside Higher Ed :: Easy Targets This summarizes their gripes but gives you something to think and even write about

Shumway argued that “reporters who cover academics are in competition” with the humanities community for public influence, so it is in journalists’ interest to deny academics the privilege to preach specialized knowledge, and to “create a world where [the journalist’s] own knowledge is enough.” For their part, the journalists on the panel told the professors that they cannot cling to the elite sensibility that comes with specialized knowledge, and then expect that knowledge to be constantly thrust upon a wide audience.