The future of news: rational business decisions

Begin writing the long-term obituary of the American newspaper — at least for the newspaper envisioned by the Founders as a public service and a significant component of the checks and balances that once allowed American democracy to function properly and purposefully.
You think know the now-familiar story: Advertising revenues are down. Circulation’s declining. Corporate ownership [...]

Finally, a welcome extinction - TimesSelect

As of September 19, the New York Times’ subscription service for so-called premium content has been shut down, opening up free access to the NYTimes’ opinion and news commentators, online-only exclusives, and access to the archives back to 1987, content that had been subscription only since 2005. And the reason that the NYTimes is [...]

Staking out the (astro)turf in battles over electronic voting

Earlier this month, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a self-proclaimed “nonpartisan think tank,” released a policy statement opposing the usage of paper audit trails for electronic voting machines. The report’s author, Daniel Castro, wastes no time staking out the ITIF’s position on the issue, calling supporters of paper balloting and audit trails a [...]

Ad revenues at newspapers: More bad news

Conditions at American newspapers are going to worsen, and there’s a billion reasons why.
Because of incompetent or inept or unimaginative top management scared silly by Wall Street profit expectations, you can hardly recognize newspapers any more.
Newspapers have physically shrunk. They’re narrower and not as deep. That means less space for news despite protestations to the [...]

Don’t be evil - unless you can hide it in the Terms of Service legalese no-one ever reads

If you publish your photos online, you’re understandably giving up some amount of control over those photos. Everyone and their uncle can copy and modify the photos, and while you have some amount of copyright protection, that protection is limited. But some online photo companies are moving beyond that and are claiming rights [...]

LiveJournal founder on crusade for “open” social networking

Earlier this month my fellow Scrogue Gavin Chait and I discussed the ins and outs of creating a centralized standard for social networking–basically being able to migrate your “online identity” from LinkedIn to Facebook to MySpace and so on. (Short version: Gavin loves the idea, but I was wary of the potential privacy and [...]

Who will provide answers to the most basic of questions?

As an inquisitive person trying to survive life relatively unscathed and to leave the world at least a little better off for my presence, I need answers to two fundamental questions:
How does the world work?
Why does it work that way?
We all struggle, I suppose, with the really big question: What is the meaning of life? [...]

Comcast and the amazing invisible bandwith barrier

If you’re a Comcast subscriber who likes to use your connection for downloading videos, playing games, or anything more intensive than surfing the Web and checking e-mail, watch out–your connection could get restricted or shut off without any notice.
My esteemed ConsumerAffairs.Com colleague Joseph Enoch has more:
The company has a bandwidth limitation that, if broken, [...]

The Skypeness - blip … blip … blip … beeeeeeeeeeee

What a difference 24 hours makes. Millions of people, hundreds of thousands of businesses, have been out of contact. Skype went offline.
Skype declares in their blog, Heartbeat, that it was the result of an algorithm failure rather than of any nefarious activities. OK. However, that’s not the point.
The point is the unassailable belief that DotCom, [...]

AT&T censors Pearl Jam over anti-Bush lyrics

Craig Aaron from FreePress.Net alerted me to this bit of funny business:
During the performance of “Daughter” the following lyrics were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” but were cut from the webcast:
- “George Bush, leave this world alone.” (the second time it was sung); and - “George Bush find [...]

Scrogues Converse: Open-space, Identity and the Missing Web

Scrogues Converse is our new feature where scrogues engage in informed discussion of fringe topics fast approaching from the grey fog behind you. In our first conversation Martin Bosworth and Gavin Chait discuss the nature of Open-source vs Open-standards and the way in which Web 2.0 is not so much re-inventing the web as in [...]

FCC wireless auction: Google wins, AT&T wins, Americans lose

Today the FCC set its guidelines for how the newly available wireless spectrum frequencies are to be auctioned. In a nutshell, the FCC agreed that networks built on the new spectrum should enable any device to connect to services built on those networks–which is a win for anyone tired of paying hundreds of dollars for [...]

The Internet is dead! Long live … television?

So says Mark Cuban. Now, I’m typically a big Cuban fan. But I’m looking at an AdAge report on his remarks from yesterday’s Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit, and I’m a little puzzled.
Speaking at the Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit in Washington yesterday, Mr. Cuban declared “the Internet is dead” in [...]

Basic principles for building America’s Internet future

Crossposted at Open Left.
Senator Dick Durbin has begun a several-night series of conversations with the blogosphere on how to build a set of principles for improving American broadband and Internet development. This is a watershed moment and a fantastic (if long overdue) chance to make the people’s voices heard on this most important [...]

When titans clash: Google vs. AT&T for America’s Internet future

The Federal Communications Commission recently announced plans to auction off portions of the wireless spectrum in order to raise money for the government. Although supporters of net neutrality and broadband access wanted the spectrum to remain open in order to build a national wireless broadband network, it was generally expected that incumbent telecoms like AT&T [...]