Tag: media

Street View Paranoia

The Drudge Report, that early-warning system for democracy, is now using a screencap of someone peering out of a living room window as his top image. If that didn’t scare you, the banner headline might: SMILE, YOU’RE ON GOOGLE EARTH!

wow, the retards have discovered street view.
2008-04-10:

Google Australia is expected within months to launch an application that will publish highly detailed, street-level photos of much of Australia, in a move that has drawn strong criticism from privacy advocates.

While Google has defended the project, the internet company baulked when The Weekend Australian requested the personal details and addresses of the group’s key figures to allow the paper’s photographers to take pictures of their homes.

it’s luddite season again!
2008-07-30:

The report also includes the distance from the street to the executive’s front door, the most likely driving route the executive would take to Google’s Mountain View headquarters and photos of the stop signs, stoplights and intersections the executive would pass along the way. The Center is publicly releasing the document today to highlight the invasiveness of these Google technologies to individual privacy.

who are these assclowns?

What is it about Europeans that makes them so susceptible to populist arguments in favor of expectations of privacy in a public space? In Europe, Street View is getting a steady onslaught of negative publicity, mainly instigated by populist newspapers, about the evils of taking photography in a public place and publishing it. What a strange concept: Government officials complaining that a company is observing the law, but that they don’t like it anyway.

2010-08-23:

Geht es allerdings um Googles fotografierenden Fuhrpark, klingt Konstantin von Notz plötzlich so, als sei er frisch einer kommunistischen Kaderschmiede entsprungen: Google stelle “monopolartig” den “kompletten öffentlichen Raum” dauerhaft und “aus kommerziellen Interessen” ins Netz, schimpft er dann und fordert “eine Beteiligung der Öffentlichkeit an den Gewinnen”. Hui! Da kommt einfach dieser Internet-Konzern aus einem fernen Land und verdient Geld mit Abbildern des öffentlichen Raums? Ohne zu fragen? Also in etwa so, wie Postkarten- oder Reiseführer-Verlage? Das geht natürlich nicht! Enteignen! Notz ist in bester Gesellschaft, beim Wettbewerb um die höchste Punktzahl auf der nach oben offenen Streetview-Hysterie-Skala.

the real reason germany is so nuts about street view: it exposes the widespread technological illiteracy in europe.

Google Handouts

It stands to reason that Google and corporations like it, who indirectly benefit so enormously from the expensive labor of journalists, should begin to take on greater civic responsibility for journalism’s plight. Is it possible for Google to somehow engage and support the traditional news industry and important local newspapers more fully, for example, to become a vital part of possible solutions to this crisis instead of a part of the problem?

waiting for google handouts is not the future, for sure. if your product did not suck so much it would not suffer as much. get rid of the hacks and watch your fortunes improve

AppleGate

Ryan Block has formally responded to what is now being referred to as “AppleGate” in Silicon Valley. Yesterday Engadget posted that the iPhone was going to be delayed several months, relying on what turned out to be a bogus email for the story. $4B in market cap was wiped off of Apple’s stock price in 6 minutes as the “news” hit the market. Engadget quickly corrected the story and the stock recovered within 20 minutes, but many investors had lost a staggering amount of money in the amount of time it takes to brush your teeth.

the PR profession is dead. things are now moving too quickly for lazy 9-5ers to be useful.

Luddite Larry King

Larry King confessed to Roseanne Barr that he’s never used the Internet. King expressed doubt that the Internet was a viable political medium because “there’s 80 billion things on it.” When Barr said she liked the Internet, King acknowledged that “I’ve never done it, never gone searching.”

i am torn whether that is retro-cool or a reflection of the state of old media

Newspaper Declines

And there will be further ones from their decision to attach themselves to a failing internet advertising company.

Buffeted by an ongoing advertising recession, The New York Times Company and the Gannett Company announced yesterday that their first-quarter profits declined while the Tribune Company reported a loss. The disappointing results underscored the increasingly tough economic times faced by the industry as advertisers continued to shift their focus away from print to the Internet. In particular, areas like real estate and classified, previously rich revenue generators for newspapers, continued to be weak.

2007-05-11: Nothing surprising in here.
2007-08-06: A forecast

Online ads to overtake US newspapers in 2011, which assumes that newspaper spending will not sharply decline. Recent news out of those same sounds very different

2007-08-10: NYT revenue drops by >50%, 50% of employees get fired, and the company still loses money. EBITDA would have dropped from $118M to -$64M. Which means that management would just be getting ready to fire a few 100 more people.
2007-09-01: Good riddance to lazy newspapers who add the same amount of value with their wire service articles as real estate agents: 0.

This is potentially explosive, I think. Whenever I search for a news story in Google News, I get 100s of identical versions of that story from newspapers that picked it up from Associated Press — and I may even click through to the first newspaper that has a copy. But if I can see the story from the wire service itself, before it was edited or shortened or changed, I would probably prefer that.

2008-05-08: The Onion nails it

Dying Newspaper Trend Buys 3 More Weeks. It’s nice to see that the printed word is still, at least for now, the most powerful medium for reporting on the death of the printed word.

2009-03-13: It’s not ignorance, it’s denial.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them. The pragmatists were pointing out that the real world was looking like the unthinkable scenario. The people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

2012-05-10: The reason newspapers are dying is because they are cutting their face to spite their nose. Like making digital only subscriptions more expensive than bundles. Same reason why everyone downloads Game of Thrones: It is impossible to pay for it if you don’t want to burden yourself with cable. You are making your piracy bed, now you have to lie in it.