links for 2009-07-10

  • Kevin: A good old rant about media moguls at an exclusive gathering in Sun Valley Idaho in the US. "Yes, why haven’t you, the kings of the media universe, invented almost anything?

    You just buy, copy and follow.

    Not innovate."

  • Kevin: Mark Glaser interviews freelance technology journalist Cyrus Farivar, EFF's Danny O'Brien, Kenyan-born journalist, writer and humorist Edwin Okong'o, Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg and award-winning producer of over 50 documentaries and television specials Kim Spencer. They discuss free speech online in various countries, from Iran to China to Kenya — and even a mention of the U.S. government's attempts at curtailing speech online over the years.
  • Kevin: Will Sullivan writes: "Beyond new interfaces, augmented reality allows for a new layer of location information that could help fuel more mobile crowdsourcing, collaboration, gaming and more."

    I've written about this for the Guardian, and while I think that these applications are fascinating, like so much bleeding edge technology, one of the key factors limiting or helping mass adoption will be the user experience. The other limiting factor will be that AR applications only work on a small subset of the small subset of high-end smartphones. That will change over time, but we are still in very early days with AR on mobile phones.

  • Kevin: At exclusive US event, Murdoch says: "News Corp. doesn't look to be in the business of developing an e-reader either. Says Murdoch: “I don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world, like Sony and Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or newspapers or for magazines. I think they’re a year or two away being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones, and we’ll be absolutely neutral."
  • Kevin: "The iPhone audience is age-diverse: a device this powerful isn’t just for kids. There are roughly as many iPhone users 55 and older as there are 13-24."
  • Kevin: Afghani presidential candidate Dr Ashraf Ghani launches social media offensive. A leading contender in Afg­hanistan's upcoming presidential election has called in UK social media agency Red Narrative to replicate the digital success of Barack Obama.
  • Kevin: All US states except Wyoming have some form of 'shield law' that allows journalists to protect confidential sources. Courts in the US are extending the laws to apply to bloggers. "But a judge in New Jersey has just made the questionable decision that blogger Shellee Hale isn't covered by that state's reporter's shield law, which allows journalists to protect their confidential sources.

    The judge ruled that Hale shouldn't be considered a journalist because she hadn't shown she was affiliated with a "legitimate" media outlet, according to Law.com."

  • Kevin: Lois Beckett writes: "There were plenty of proposals for collaboration at the summit of nonprofit news organizations that I wrote about on Monday, but one idea is worthy of Rambo: a “mobile strike force” of investigative journalists, ready to deploy at any moment, anywhere in the country, to dig into scandal, cover natural disasters, or otherwise power up a local news outlet."
  • Kevin: Roland Legrand has these five suggestions: 1) Create micro-sites 'focused on a specific topic of interest to our communities'. 2) Streams of content such as a stream of blog posts or Twitter updates 3) Use wikis for context 4) Boost audience interactions, possibly even '2.5-D environments such as Metaplace' 5) Give participants more control.

    He also makes this very interesting comment about print-online integration, which he says that he supports. "There's one major risk to this: that we might end up seeing the web as just another way to distribute newspaper articles rather than a radically new opportunity." It is more than a theoretical risk.