Ahead of its official launch after next week’s pre-budget speech (12.30, Wednesday 6 December, economy fans) the BBC is reporting that the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property will recommend that copyright terms on sound recordings should not be extended.
Boingboing may be reporting this as a victory, but the battle isn’t over yet. The government will [...]
Categories: business, freeculture, media, music, newstatesman, politics
Two reasons to drop in on openDemocracy this week. The first is a pilot podcast, 20 minutes of audio journalism that takes in Sidney Blumenthal’s view on the Democrats’ victory in the states, Alain de Botton’s view on architecture, and prospects for an independent South Ossetia, as well as vox pops from the oD team. [...]
Categories: development, media, opendemocracy, ubuntu
This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is on the fate of “professional journalism” in the new media age. Since newspapers generally devote forest-loads of copy to their own fate at the hands of the internet, this is a topic I’ve steered clear of for a number of years. But here’s my tuppence worth.
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Categories: advertising, business, freeculture, law, media
openDemocracy’s Deputy Editor, David Hayes, points me to this excellent article from The Nation, which predicts that media megacorps will use the new web 2.0 environment to pollute our mental space in ways we cannot yet imagine:
“Advertisers are harnessing technology that targets and follows Internet users on their journeys through cyberspace, collecting data and tracking [...]
Categories: advertising, business, media, networks
This week’s column in the New Statesman reviews the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s recent survey of prominent futurologists:
“Sometimes writing about the internet can seem like a cop-out. Imagining the impact that new technology will have on human life, in all its social, political and linguistic forms, is fun, exciting and much easier than, [...]
Categories: media, newstatesman, surveillance
Yesterday was the official launch of a website I helped create earlier this year, ChinaDialogue (Pictures from the launch here). ChinaDialogue is the world’s first truly bilingual interactive publishing platform (I’m not really allowed to call it a blog), as not only do articles appear in English and Chinese, but so do the comments underneath [...]
Categories: censorship, design, media
This week’s column in the New Statesman is a little dance around the grave of the music industry:
“Speaking as a reformed music journalist, it’s been fun watching the industry gasp its last breaths. First it sent peer-to-peer file-sharing underground with the closure of Napster in 2001. Now, it is suing its own fans. The music [...]
Categories: media, music, newstatesman
Well, not quite. But this week’s New Statesman column is a response to a post Guido Fawkes wrote criticising openDemocracy after the New Media Awards last week (which we won, by the way). I admit it was a bit mean of me to pull him up on his misspelling of smorgasbord:
“When I was a little [...]
Categories: blogging, media, newstatesman
(originally published on openDemocracy)
The pioneering Global Voices initiative hosted bloggers from Algeria to Zambia at a conference in London. An impressed Becky Hogge reflects on the challenges it may soon face.
Christmas came early for Joshua Schachter this year. On Friday 9 December his web-based social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us, which lets users share their favourite links [...]
Categories: blogging, development, media