Saturday, September 06, 2003
What else is news?
You'll need a subscription to Foreign Affairs or you'll have to buy the hard copy but his looks like a neat read:
Foreign Affairs - The New Foreign Correspondence - John Maxwell Hamilton & Eric Jenner: " Summary: From news services to 'blogs,' the Internet has revolutionized the international news market--opening it up to a broader and more active audience. Such technological innovations are rapidly changing the way people produce and consume news, making the traditional model of foreign correspondence obsolete."
Errata
" I never thought the day would come when the United States would be feared by those it has neither the intention nor the cause to harm." Madeleine Albright writing in Foreign Affairs - "Bridges, Bombs, or Bluster?"
Nano news
I had never before heard of the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center or one of its journals The New Atlantis until an article in the journal was cited by Ray Kurzweil's newsletter. The article is one of the best roundups of the "issue" of nanotechnology I've read. What I mean by "the issue" is that the article's author, Adam Keiper, takes a look at the scientific politics of what has become a loaded term and then puts that debate in a public policy text. (Read the hyperlinked version for some great links to follow-up articles and reading).
The Ethics and Public Policy Center exists, as it says at its site " to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues." I must confess that I normally give think thanks with a religious-based mission short shrift if only because I find many of their policy recommendations to be based on the whatever scripture is central to the given religion and, as a result, their representatives and their policies tend to be rigid, dogmatic and frequently intolerant.
Now, I don't know a lot about the Ethics and Public Policy Center but, based on the one issue of the journal The New Atlantis, which it publishes, and a quick tour of its Web site I'm mightily impressed with its lack of cant and relatively independent thought.
Monday, September 01, 2003
Canada Top 5 for Press Freedom
Reporters Without Borders has published its first Worldwide Press Freedom Index.
Canada ranks 5th, best among the G-8; the U.S. Ranks 17th, behind Costa Rica.
"Rich countries have no monopoly of press freedom", RWB said.
Topping the list is, in order, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Netherlands and Canada.
Italy, where PM Berlusconi owns pretty much every TV outlet, ranks worse than Benin.
Here's the big surprise: The United Kingdom tied with Benin and Uruguay in the 21st spot.
The worst places in the world for press freedom are all in Asia. Worst is North Korea. 2nd worst is China.
"The index was drawn up by asking journalists, researchers and legal experts to answer 50 questions about the whole range of press freedom violations (such as murders or arrests of journalists, censorship, pressure, state monopolies in various fields, punishment of press law offences and regulation of the media). The final list includes 139 countries," the RWB said.
Don't Look At Me!
Barbara Streisand is suing to have a picture of the coastline that her California home is perched on taken off the Web. The picture is one 12,700 pictures that form a photographic record of the California coast. The record is part of a remarkable project -- the California Coastal Records Project, in which a retired dot-com enterpreneur photographed, from his helicopter, every mile of the of the often spectacular California coastline from Oregon to Mexico.
One of the first posts to this blog was about this project.
For the record, Streisand has quite a place. (I'm betting hers is the one with the pool.)
PR shenanigans
Even though I make extensive use of electronic press release distribution services like Canada Newsire, I really don't know much about the business relationship between the service and its clients. Now, I do know that the client pays the service a fee for each press release distributed on the service. But I wonder if the client saves money by having it distributed at off-peak times.
How else to explain the decision by Atlas Cold Storage Income Trust to release two press releases just after 1 a.m. EDT on the Saturday morning of a holiday weekend? I'm sure that the odd timing had nothing to do with the fact that Atlas was forced to admit that it appears as if its management misstated financial results to make it appear as if it was more profitable. Because if Atlas had any control over the timing of the release of this important news, surely it would want to come clean and let all of its investors know about it by putting out a release when everyone was at work and not up at the cottage.
As it stands, Atlas -- which also released its second quarter financial results at the same time -- appears to be trying to sweep all this under the rug, to squeeze one by the press and others so that we wouldn't pay too much attention. The company concedes it may have been less than forthright in telling investors what was going on with its books. If the company wants to appear more forthright, whisper its bad news in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend isn't definitely not the way to go.
And if it was trying to put one by us, Atlas' failed miserably as it was the top story * in The Globe and Mail this morning.
Atlas isn't the only company to have ever put these press releases out at an odd time of day, as if journalists might not be watching and miss, oh, I don't know, the news that Microsoft invested in Corel. That's right. When it happened a few years ago, neither Corel nor Microsoft told anyone but mentioned this remarkable fact in the middle of a thick regulatory filing released Friday evening around 6:30 pm, after Corel, perhaps, thought that everyone had gone home. A handful of diligent journalists went through this filing and wrote it up -- but with comments like "Corel executives could not be reached for comment", after all, they'd all gone home.
Sunday, August 31, 2003
This thing called a blog
Gary Price, research librarian extraordinaire, responded to a post of mine on a CAJ listserv about the OED's blog definition with this tremendously helpful post:
As I have pointed out on several ocassions, many public libraries (university libraries too!) offer FREE remote access to subscription databases like the OED. In other words, free access to expensive "stuff" from home. All you need to do is enter your library card number.
One of the public libraries I have access to offers the OED. In addition to the definition, OED also offers etymologies for terms.
Blog:
1999 www.bradlands.com (weblog diary) 23 May, Cam points out lemonyellow.com and PeterMe decides the proper way to say Śweblog‚ is Śwee'- blog‚ (Tee-hee!).]
1999 P. MERHOLZ in peterme.com (weblog diary) 28 May, For those keeping score on blog commentary from outside the blog community.
1999 Scotsman (Nexis) 30 Aug., Many of the early 'blogs link to one another and have built quite a community of webloggersthe authors who maintain them.
2002 Salina Jrnl. 21 Apr. B6/3 Blogs..contain daily musings about news, dating, marriage, divorce, children, politics in the Middle East..or millions of other things or nothing at all.
Weblog:
1997 J. BARGER Lively New Webpage in alt.culture.www (Usenet newsgroup) 23 Dec., I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis:..www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html. This will cover any and everything that interests me, from net culture to politics to
literature etc.
1998 Village Voice (N.Y.) 8 Sept. 33/3 Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom WebLog..might not be pretty, but it's one of the best collections of news and musings culled from the Weband updated daily.
2000 Independent 23 Oct. II. 9/1 A weblog is simply a site where you post your thoughts whenever the muse strikes.
2002 Times (Electronic ed.) 14 Jan., There is a way to be stupendously well informed... Scour the highlights in..weblogs.
Note: The weblog entry under discussion is actually the 2nd definition of weblog. The first is, "A file storing a detailed record of requests handled (and sometimes also errors generated) by a web server." It dates to 1993.
Blog, as a verb, is also included in the OED.
"To write or maintain a weblog. Also: to read or browse through weblogs, esp. habitually."
As are:
1) Blogger: The author of a weblog
2) In form Blogger. A software tool used in the production of weblogs.
It also notes that an earlier for is:
and
Blogging
"The activity of writing or maintaining a weblog".
Btw, OED offers a paragraph or two about the tools they use to find evidence of
new terms.
