Tag: Media
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Universal Didn't Ignore Digital, Just Did It Wrong
Techies have been chortling all week about comments made by Universal Music CEO Doug Morris to Wired’s Seth Mnookin. Morris, despite being in what is now a technology-based industry, professed extreme ignorance about the digital world. Here’s the money quote: Morris insists there wasn’t a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. “There’s…
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Online Symposium: Future of Scholarly Communication
Today we’re kicking off an online symposium on The Future of Scholarly Communication, run by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. An “online symposium” is a kind of short-term group blog, focusing on a specific topic. Panelists (besides me) include Ira Fuchs, Paul DiMaggio, Peter Suber, Stan Katz, and David Robinson. (See the…
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Fact check: The New Yorker versus Wikipedia
In July—when The New Yorker ran a long and relatively positive piece about Wikipedia—I argued that the old-media method of laboriously checking each fact was superior to the wiki model, where assertions have to be judged based on their plausibility. I claimed that personal experience as a journalist gave me special insight into such matters,…
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Sharecropping 2.0? Not Likely
Nick Carr has an interesting post arguing that sites like MySpace and Facebook are essentially high-tech sharecropping, exploiting the labor of the many to enrich the few. He’s wrong, I think, but in an instructive way. Here’s the core of his argument: What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value…
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YouTube and Copyright
YouTube has been much in the news lately. Around the time it was bought by Google for $1.65 billion, YouTube signed copyright licensing deals with CBS television and two record companies (UMG and Sony BMG). Meanwhile, its smaller rivals Bolt and Grouper were sued by the record industry for infringement. The copyright deals are interesting.…
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Tinkering with personal media
Did everyone here catch the Editorial Observer item in Sunday’s New York Times?: A New Magazine’s Rebellious Credo: Void the Warranty! The article recounted the launch of Make Magazine, a throwback quarterly that celebrates the almost-forgotten idea of the creative impulse inside us all. Make, its makers will tell you, is part of a grass-roots…
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A 'Darknet' backgrounder
OK, time to dive in here from my hotel room. A little while ago I posted a guest entry on the Berkman blog that offers a few details about how Darknet and Ourmedia came to be. It’s hard to summarize a book’s major themes in a paragraph or two, but the basic thrust is: -…
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Measure It, and They Will Come
The technology for measuring TV and radio audiences is about to change in important ways, according to a long and interesting article, in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, by Jon Gertner. This will have implications for websites, online media, and public life as well. Standard audience-measurement technology, as used in the past by Nielsen and…
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Sony Plans to Emulate Apple, in a Non-Apple-Like Way
Sony says it wants to create a system that does for movies what Apple’s iTunes does for music, according to a CNET story by Stefanie Olsen. Unfortunately Sony doesn’t seem to understand what Apple did: “We want to set business models, pricing models, distribution models like (Apple Computer CEO Steve) Jobs did for music, but…
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How Competitive is the Record Industry? A Natural Experiment
Derek Slater, responding to the recent Cato paper on DRM technologies, raises an important question: How competitive is the record industry? The Cato paper argues that market competition will blunt the possible negative effects of DRM on consumers. The theory is that a variety of competing DRM systems will emerge for online music. These systems…