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June 14, 2005
Donna Wentworth at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a set of FAQs that address the legal rights of bloggers. Read it before you get your next cease-and-desist order. (And join the EFF already!) [Technorati tags: eff DonnaWentworth]
June 13, 2005
From Rebecca MacKinnon at GlobalVoicesOnline.com:
Microsoft has launched a Chinese-language version of its Spaces blog hosting service, and guess what? Users are banned from using the word “democracy” and other politically sensitive words to label their blogs — although it does appear possible to use those words within blog posts, for now. (As noted in my interview with Isaac Mao, people who set up blogs under this service don’t have to register with the authorities because MSN is already obliging the government by policing their content.)
I understand the argument — Google’s, for example — that it’s better to provide limited access to Web services than no access. Of course, that argument happens to work out in favor of the companies’ commercial interests, so it’s tainted. But there’s also a point at which the compromises turn your software into an instrument of control. I don’t know where that point is but it should be making companies intensely uncomfortable.
Of course, about the control-obsessed, fear-based Chinese government there can be little ambiguity. [Technorati tags: china GlobalVoices microsoft RebeccaMacKinnon]
Here’s Scoble’s take. (And isn’t it most excellent that he’s out there talking for and to Microsoft?) Although he staunchly believes in free speech, he says he has “ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS forcing the Chinese into a position they don’t believe in.”
First, I agree that it’s important to understand the other country’s perspective. I have heard, on my few brief trips to China (I could say “Please,” “Thank you” and “No, I don’t want to buy a DVD,” so I am obviously an expert in Chinese politics) that during this difficult period, the Chinese people can’t afford to allow a few enemies of the people to spread their seductive lies. And I don’t believe free speech is an absolute right: I support laws against slander, perjury and even giving away genuine trade secrets. But I have also had the privilege of meeting Chinese people who have risked death by speaking freely. So, when Scoble talks about “the Chinese,” I want to know which Chinese he’s talking about. Every Chinese person? Or the Chinese government?
Second, if Microsoft had refused to compromise its software, it wouldn’t be forcing the Chinese government to do anything. It would be refusing to enable the Chinese government to impede free speech. (On the other hand, to be honest, I’d like Microsoft to take a stand on this in order to influence China, and influence can be taken as a type of force.)
Personally, I think there are times when we absolutely do not want to enable other governments to do whatever it is that they want to do. I would not have wanted my company to help enable Apartheid, and I won’t even go back to enabling the legitimate government of Germany in the 1930s. My point is not that the Chinese government should be compared to this or that other regime but that I do not agree with Scoble’s idea that companies have no right to take moral stances against the policies of other governments. Whether this is one of those cases is a separate point; in fact, it’s point #1 above.
So, I agree with Scoble that we don’t want to go around thinking our values are the only values, forcing the rest of the world to act the way we think they ought. Excellent point. I even agree that there are times and places where free speech isn’t the highest value. And I don’t think it’s totally obvious what Microsoft ought to do in cases such as this. But I disagree with Scoble’s reasoning that takes the moral issue off the table. Instead, I think there needs to be vigorous, practical debate about whether this particular software compromise is acceptable. Reasonable people (like Scoble) may disagree on this question. But it is, for me, a question.
June 7, 2005
I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but Halley’s interview of Megnut sounds like a good ‘un.
June 5, 2005
Chuck Olsen made a good documentary called “Blogumentary.” Now someone is trying to bully him out of the name. Not being a lawyer, I don’t know who has legal rights to the name, but now that I’ve seen how this new guy responds to a civil inquiry, I have asked him to drop me from his list of interviewees.
June 4, 2005
The conference to which my tiny, content-free post referred was a get-together of Big Co marketing communication VPs. I was on a panel on blogging with Rebecca Blood, Alan Nelson of CommandPost (who chaired it), and John Hinderaker of Powerline. This panel was the first time in the group’s history that they’ve allowed any proceedings to be on the record.
The discussion went well. Rebecca explained what blogs are and aren’t. John gave examples — e.g., Rathergate — of how blogs have beat the mainstream media at their own game. I tried to preempt some of the obvious marketers’ misunderstandings by saying that it’s a mistake to think that only the high-traffic blogs count, that blogs are conversations, and that trying to manipulate weblog conversations is a very bad idea.
I’m not doing the session justice, of course, but it seemed to go well. And it was great to be on a panel with those folks. [Technorati tags: RebeccaBlood Powerline]
I don’t know what sort of schmuck leaves his computer behind when he heads for the airport but — oh, yeah, now I remember: It’s a schmuck exactly like me. But Mara, the woman driving Rebecca, Alan and me to the airport, stuck with me for 15 minutes, tracking down my computer and then arranging for a competitive car service to bring it to me on their next next trip out.
Thank you, Mara, of Dolphin Transportation in Naples, Florida. She saved my veggie bacon and was incredibly sweet about it. She wouldn’t even let me tip her. If you need a car service in Naples, you can reach Dolphin at (239) 530 0100.
May 27, 2005
Bill Koslosky wonders why the blogosphere isn’t jumping on the stem cell topic. ” The Republicans sitting on the fence are just waiting to hear the roar of grassroots activism.”
I haven’t much about it because I’ve got absolutely nothing interesting to say about it, where “interesting” = “something you are not certain to have come across somewhere else.” Further, I know people like Bill are doing an excellent job of tracking the issue and aggregating links.
Since I’m not the only thinking this way, it seems that blog numbers are particularly bad indicators of blog public opinion.
May 20, 2005
There’s just a whole bunch o’ goodness over at AKMA’s these days, including comments on why anyone would take the Star Wars twaddle seriously, a way not to take Star Wars seriously, a discussion of the difference between narratives and narrative theology, and a new drawing by Pippa. What a terrific blog. [Technorati tag: akma]
Dan Bricklin has started podcasting a series explaining software licensing issues, especially Open Source. I haven’t heard it yet, but obviously Dan knows this stuff. Sounds like a good way to get your pointy-haired boss up to speed on “All this open sauce malarky.”
May 10, 2005
Michael O’Connor Clarke has started up his blog about PR again. Yay! The new entry is the first in a series called “The Seven Deadly Agency Types.”
And on the topic of PR blogs, I checked in with Richard Edelman‘s only to find out that last week he blogged a conversation he and I had. That’d be perfectly ok, of course, even if (disclosure statement!) I weren’t on retainer to Edelman PR, but I feel bad that I fled the country immediately afterwards and thus missed the interesting discussion of the post.
I argued that PR needs to get out of the way, connecting passionate clients with the public. That’s always been what the best PR people do: They find the right person in the organization for you to be speaking with, which is not necessarily someone in marketing. Richard puts forward other ethical and valuable roles for PR agencies, and I do appreciate the role a PR agency can play in actively pulling together interested parties, and sometimes even as a content creator.
I like Richard’s phrase that PR is about building public relationships. I continue to believe that in most cases that relationship should be between the client and the public. If the PR agency is in the middle, it will usually be assumed that that’s because the client can’t be trusted to speak for itself. That’s one reason why blogs are so important: They are public relationships.
April 21, 2005
Confusability is scraping bloglines and noticing how people are categorizing feeds. Great idea. First results: A list of the 100 most popular categories. It shows the gap between the categories we use for ourselves and those we use for others. I have a category called “Web” for entries in this blog because within the confines of my blog, it’s a useful way of sorting posts. But tagging a post “web” for retrieval within the wide world of resources would be pointless. We’re either going to get more sophisticated in how we tag, or our computers are going to have to get ever more clever about reading lots of implicit and metadata to help us find what we’re looking for. Or both.
April 13, 2005
Miles Wolbe of TinyApps.org has stumbled across a site, StarGeek, that re-posts contents from blogs, larded up with with irrelevant ads. For example, here’s a page that “repurposes” one of my posts.
The site says:
projectGrok is a beta portal CMS written in PHP and driven by RSS content. Using MYSQL tables to store headlines and text from a bank of RSS url’s from your target niche, projectGrok automatically clusters entries of relavant and timely content.
Or possibly it uses other people’s content to try to get ads in articles returned by searches at Google. Hard to tell, but their article on “Keyword Research” is about search page optimization. So I’m suspicious enough to use the “nofollow” attribute when linking to them. If I’m misjudging these folks, let me know and I’ll post a correction immediately below.
BTW, the latest entry in the weblog on their home page is dated 7/13/04 [Technorati tag: spam]
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