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document.write('Is Google a monster? | \n');
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As Google continues to grow, it has shown some stripes that clash with its "don\'t be evil" mantra. The idea that Google will leave YouTube intact is possibly wishful thinking on the part of loyal users.
This is especially likely if you look at what Google did to Writely (its Web-based word processor) today -- they combined it with a Web-based spreadsheet application and relaunched it as Google Docs. This comes after buying Writely in March. Since then, Google has changed Writely\'s interface, made a GMail account mandatory, redirected the old site, and deleted the cached version of the site.
It\'s no wonder that Google -- the poster-child for the "post-dot-com-bubble" bubble -- is on NewsCorp\'s hitlist. I think Google should be on every media company\'s hitlist.
As a veritable superpower in information gathering and publishing, we should remember that Google has used its power to censor the Internet in China, and to help itself win court cases through exclusive access to its GMail spam filter data. And in Belguim, Google scoffed at legitimate copyright claims.
The cultural impact of such power is to stifle competition and innovation -- the very things Google says it stands for.
Can someone please step up and say we\'re facing a monster?
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 Comedy Central \n');
document.write('Playing online video: Too often, it\'s a comedy of errors. | \n');
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Here\'s what I mean:
- CNN video requires the latest Windows Media 9 player plugin, which despite repeated attempts I couldn\'t get to install on my brand-new Intel-powered Mac.
- CBS News requires either Windows Media or RealPlayer -- but even though I have RealPlayer installed and it works fine with other sites, it won\'t play CBS News videos for me.
- MSNBC video plays just fine -- but in a separate MSN Video window which I can\'t link to directly. Same with ABC News and Fox News.
- The PBS series Moyers on America requires me to download a mysteriously unspecified plugin to watch episode trailers.
- Finally, I\'d bet that the Daily Show and Colbert Report wouldn\'t get ripped off on YouTube nearly as much if Comedy Central\'s video player wasn\'t such a royal pain.
If you want to put video online, please make it as simple as possible on your online audience. Just use Flash. It plays well on any platform and browser. The plugin isn\'t buggy. You can present it so people can link to it.
Need more convincing? Check out any washingtonpost.com video -- they use Flash. Need more background and information? Read Tom Green\'s The Rise of Flash Video.
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 washingtonpost.com \n');
document.write('Did today\'s top-billed Washington Post online head jump the gun? | \n');
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That stands for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization -- the body that runs the International Monitoring System (IMS), which is how scientists around the world keep a continuous lookout for nuclear blasts.
I learned about the CTBTO and IMS back in 2004, during a two-minute Google expedition. At the time there were widespread reports of a mysterious mushroom cloud over North Korea. (Remember that, anyone?) After hearing that report, my first question was whether scientists had indeed confirmed whether they\'d observed the signature seismic, radiological, and other evidence that accompanies and identifies any nuclear blast. All I could find in the news were vague, threatened, and threatening statements, mostly from government officials -- with the exception of exemplary 2004 coverage from the New Scientist.
Given the deserved black eye many news organizations had taken over lax investigation of Bush administration claims of WMDs in Iraq years earlier, this apparently widespread reliance on government officialdom, rather than appropriate scientific bodies, bugged me enough that I wrote about it in my weblog: North Korean Blast, WMD Echoes, and Missed News Opportunities.
At the time I was amazed that I discovered which sources could give a definitive confirmation on a nuclear blast report in less than two minutes at Google, yet no mainstream news coverage I saw indicated any attempt to get comment from CTBTO (or from appropriate government contacts specifically about what they\'d heard from CTBTO).
Looking at today\'s headlines, I\'m dismayed that this particular bit of journalistic history appears to be repeating itself. So far.
Today, New Scientist correctly reports: "Scientists around the world are taking a cautious wait-and-see attitude after North Korea claimed to have successfully conducted an underground nuclear test on Monday. Only careful analysis of data returned by seismic or atmospheric sensors will determine whether the blast was a success or a damp squib, they say. Nor could they rule out the possibility of a scam, in which North Korea blew up a huge stock of conventional explosives."
In contrast, Time is reporting: "After [N. Korea warned] last week that it intended to test a nuclear weapon, it did -- defying the international community and daring it to do something in response."
Meanwhile, the New York Times clarified that N. Korea\'s claim had not yet been confirmed -- but this came under top-billed online NYT headline: Bush Urges Quick Action on North Korea. Similarly, washingtonpost.com\'s current lead story is World Leaders Condemn N. Korea\'s Nuclear Test.
(UPDATE, 1:46 PM MST: Several national news organizations have now started running stories, such as this AP report, about the scientific quest to verify N. Korea\'s claim.)
This is just my opinion, but... It seems to me that news organizations might do more to repair their dented credibility on WMD reporting by giving priority to legitimate and appropriate scientific investigation of claimed nuclear blasts, before devoting blaring headlines to political saber-rattling. Especially since it\'s so easy and fast to find the most crucial and appropriate sources online.
By the way, here\'s how you can contact the CTBTO.
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document.write('NY Mets Cliff Floyd celebrates with Shawn Green. | \n');
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I went first to MLB.com -- not to the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, or ESPN sites. And I was rewarded for doing so: MLB.com had two "mainbar" stories -- one from the Mets\' side, the other from the Dodgers\'. (I really like that "hometown" coverage balance. The stories essentially were, "Mets Win," and "Dodgers Lose."). Also offered were video clips and a few sidebars. Each story says it was not approved by MLB.com -- that is, they are ostensibly "fair and balanced" reporting.
In contrast, all that NYT, SI and ESPN had to offer was the same AP story. That\'s it.
The game had only just ended, and it was the middle of the night in America. I\'m sure the big media mentioned above will weigh in with a ton of material soon afterward. But MLB -- ostensibly a PR operation for baseball -- offered better, objective, "straight" coverage of the game than the mainstream media.
When the sponsoring organization does better than the news media in covering events of interest in real time, it certainly should be troubling for those concerned about the media\'s future, and damaging to their online traffic patterns.
I will stick with MLB.com through the rest of the playoffs and World Series -- and that doesn\'t even include the possibility of paying for access to live, online radio and video coverage of the games.
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 DHS \n');
document.write('DHS is funding overseas media analysis. No big deal. | \n');
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According to the Times, some people, including Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, call this effort "just creepy and Orwellian."
Yeah, it is. However, it\'s not particularly unusual -- and personally I don\'t find it sinister, either.
Reality check: Every major organization in the world -- and a lot of minor ones -- analyzes media coverage. This goes by names such as "reputation management," and it has its roots in press clipping services. They\'re just using computers to give all the clippings an initial read for guidance to the overall flavor of the "buzz." They are as free to analyze news coverage as we are to publish news, and I see nothing nefarious about that.
Today, companies like BuzzLogic and Umbria offer tools and services mainly for corporations that wish to conduct similar analyses. Frankly, I\'d be amazed if any major government agency wasn\'t using such tools.
The catch is, of course, "overseas." In the age of online publishing, I think that term has become largely meaningless. Stories from U.S. news organizations routinely get syndicated to non-U.S. venues. Also, if you\'re monitoring news transmitted via, say, Google News India, or even a router in Sao Paulo, Brazil, could that content be considered "overseas coverage?" Maybe, if you really, really wanted to stretch the definition.
However, I doubt this sort of analysis will prove as useful as DHS hopes -- mainly because the issues involved at the international affairs level are so complex. With an issue such as, say, detention of "noncombatants" at Guantanamo, individuals are likely to hold different and even conflicting opinions about different aspects of that issue, and all its interrelated issues. If you can\'t sort that out easily for an individual, trying to do that for a mass media audience is bound to be so error-prone as to be virtually useless.
Furthermore, there\'s likely to be a wide gap between the mainstream media\'s "sentiment" and that of various communities in the audience. So assessing media coverage probably won\'t really tell you much about what "people" really think -- just about what they\'re hearing.
Still, there are worse things DHS can -- and does -- waste my money on. Despite the row some privacy advocates are raising on this issue, I\'m not bothered much by this.
What about you? Please comment below.
(Thanks to Media Bloodhound for the tip, even though I disagree with their view.)
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 JD Lasica \n');
document.write('Placeblogger.com founder Lisa Williams (left) wants to make it easy to find town-specific bloggers like Jarah Euston (right) of Fresno Famous. | \n');
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Placeblogger.com (under construction) is the brainchild of Lisa Williams, who hosts a popular placeblog of her own at H20Town, about goings-on in Watertown, Mass. Williams gave a sneak-peek of the new placeblogger.com site Oct. 5 at the Citizen Media Summit II sponsored by J-Lab and Online News Association.
Among the site\'s features will be an RSS feed allowing users to aggregate headlines and other content based on geography. Here\'s an advance look at the site\'s home page via Williams\' Flickr site.
Williams maintains placeblogs are unique sites that are about the "lived experience of a place," rather than the "news" of a place. And their growth is explosive -- 648 at last count.
While she\'s not so certain about their near-term commercial viability, Williams believes such sites have blossomed because they can be maintained by a relatively small number of consistent contributors. She acknowledges, though, that they may rely heavily on hitting what she characterized as a "demographic hotspot." These often are communities with a population range of 20,000-70,000, which can be economically difficult for mainstream media to cover but which have enough scale to create a natural pool of blog participants.
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 emol.com \n');
document.write('Emol.com readers now can easily access this currency converter offered by Valorfuturo S.A. | \n');
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With a little help from your friends -- that was the answer in Emol.com\'s Personal Finance section (in Spanish). Yesterday they debuted a suite of simulators and interactive forms which allow you to simulate loans, review interest rates, and convert foreign exchange. These tools came from government agencies and related sites. When you click on these Emol.com links, the tools open up in pop-up windows which serve this content from the original sites.
All that content plus articles and news written by Emol.com journalists make an interesting package -- and a good solution for content providers.
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 The Post-Star \n');
document.write('The Post-Star clarifies its geographic location on every page. | \n');
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"Maybe a list of clueless Web site atrocities might be an interesting exercise."
It would be a damn long list.
But I\'m game for starting it. I\'ll post one today, and more now and again as the spirit moves me. I\'m encouraging other Tidbits contributors to do the same. I suspect we could develop quite a thread of "Online Pet Peeves" for news sites.
Here\'s one from me. My pet peeve: Hitting a newspaper (or other geographic) site that leaves me wondering "Where the heck am I?"
Mike\'s site handles this right. It says "Glens Falls, New York" right at the top of the page. (And it\'s smart to say "New York" instead of "N.Y." -- lots of international visitors don\'t recognize state abbreviations.)
That\'s my pet peeve (for today -- I have plenty more where that one came from). Yours? Please comment below, or e-mail contributions to Tidbits editor Amy Gahran.
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 CNN.com \n');
document.write('Bill Gates: Newspaper Nostradamus? | \n');
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He says Bill Gates put his finger on the problems facing newspapers when, in the early 1990s, he met with the editorial board of the L.A. Times. "In a comment that has always stuck with me, Gates observed that newspapers delivered a bundle of things -- national, international and local news; brand advertising; classified advertising; event listings -- that didn\'t logically belong together as a bundle."
Weber also takes a very brief look at the concept of local ownership vs. corporate ownership of newspapers, in the context of reports that movie mogul David Geffen would like to buy the LA Times: "I\'d wager that a Geffen-owned Times would quickly have journalists pining for the days when they were at least working for people who knew something about newspapers and didn\'t have personal agendas."
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document.write('"Richard P. Merryweather" explains why monopolies are your friend online. | \n');
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I\'ve been nudging news organizations on the net neutrality issue for some time, since it seems to me that news orgs have much to lose -- financially and otherwise -- if the principle of net neutrality gets undermined. (I\'d love to see some discussion/debate of that here, please comment below.)
But I know -- it\'s an arcane, geeky sounding issue, difficult to get interested in. Point taken.
If you haven\'t yet managed to start caring about net neutrality, check out this hilarious advocacy site: We Own the Internet. It features several great bits of Flash video -- enthusiastic speeches by "Richard P. Merryweather, president & CEO of CT&TCOM American Communications."
A few choice excerpts from "Merryweather\'s" home page speech:
"[We\'re] the largest telephone company in the U.S. I want to make one thing perfectly clear: We own the internet. We acquired it last year with the help of the federal government, and now we\'re about to make some exciting changes. Some people object to this. ...But you see, an open internet is just too confusing for consumers, and not nearly as profitable for us. ...Who better to provide you with a 21st-century technology than a 19th-century monopoly?"
And that\'s just the home page! Definitely explore the site to see more videos. Regardless of your views on net neutrality, these videos are a riot. Especially the "Why You Really Count" page, and the phrasing of the references to real recent news coverage of this issue on the "Latest News" page.
I needed a laugh this morning, and this did just the trick.
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document.write('Baristanet\'s teardown map: yellow = teardowns, red = recent new construction on open space or extra lots, purple = historic buildings. | \n');
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Baristanet, a popular community site and citizen journalism venue that focuses on Montclair, NJ, has decided to track local teardowns. On Sept. 22, they launched their own Teardown Map -- a mashup of the Google Maps API and numerous teardown examples supplied by readers. (See the extensive comments under the map.)
Seems to me that perhaps this kind of tool might be further deepened and automated by using publicly available data from the local or county government on home sales. I haven\'t worked with that kind of data, but I know it exists and I\'ve seen other real estate-focused mashups that use it.
This is a compelling project that could be emulated in any fast-changing community. In fact, Westport (CT) Now has been offering a similar teardown map, and a "Teardown of the Day" feature series.
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