Clueless

 San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarous proposes trying to extract licensing fees from sites that link to newspaper stories.

If newspapers aren't going to collectively reach into the pockets of online readers, they should at least focus their attention on other Internet players that are profiting from newspapers' content.

First off, there are the aggregators, sites like the Drudge Report and Huffington Post that pull together stories from a wide array of media sources (and charge advertisers a fee to appear beside links to content that they had nothing to do with creating).

This is not only impractical -- hyperlinking isn't just a feature of the Web, but its very structure -- it's business suicide. Why would you purposely drive away all the potential advertising?

Newspapers need to get over the idea that people are going to pay for content online. With a few notable exceptions -- The Wall Street Journal and maybe The New York Times -- they just aren't. Sad but true. Instead, newspapers need to focus their energies on getting advertisers online.

Google, which in many ways is far more useful than the typical local newspaper, doesn't charge subscription fees and somehow manages to rake in the dough. Why can't newspapers?

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

There is hope...

It appears that reading -- as in books, not text messaging or blogs -- is on the rebound. Better still, says this story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the writing quality is improving, too, at least for teen lit.

Like a lot of teens, Leslie Cornaby has a crowded schedule -- her days crammed with homework, hobbies and an array of techno diversions. When she's not checking e-mail, she's cruising YouTube or scrolling her iPod to tunes by Pink or Christina Aguilera.

She's also reading -- just for the glorious fun of it -- and says, "Most of my friends are readers, too."

The Shorecrest High School sophomore may not realize it, but she's enjoying the fruits of one of the most fertile periods in the history of young adult literature.

Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Exactly

Duncan Black, responding to this piece from Joe Klein, hammers home an argument I've tried to make before against citing a rude lefty blog posts or nameless antiwar protesters when making the argument that Democrats are "just as bad" as Republicans.

To be sure, Democrats have their issues (see this shady lobbyist-sponsored trip for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer for an example), but party spokesmen != some random person with a Web site.

Anyway, as his commenters try to explain to him over and over again, the point is that to the extent that the people Klein was trying to caricature with his list of left wing extremist characteristics actually exist (stipulating for sake of discussion at the moment that they do), they aren't members of congress, they don't have prominent positions in the Democratic party, they don't have columns in Time magazine, they don't get invited to discuss the issues on CNN or NPR, they don't write Op-Eds for the New York Times and, most relevant for this discussion, they aren't even prominent dirty ... hippie bloggers.

On the flip side, the caricature he offers up of right wing extremists are members of Congress, prominent members of the Bush administration, run the Republican party, have columns in Time magazine, regularly come on CNN to discuss the issues, and pretty much define the right wing blogosphere.

Source: Eschaton

A case of euthanasia?

Police are investigating whether a Kaiser Permanente transplant surgeon attempted to hasten the death last February of a 26-year-old San Luis Obispo man on life support in order to harvest his organs more quickly.

...

When the patient didn't die, Roozrokh allegedly told nurses: "Let's just give him some more candy," according to a person who was briefed on what took place but spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigations.

If these allegations are true, this is murder, plain and simple -- not to mention a public-relations disaster for the organ-transplant industry. It's hard enough getting people to donate their organs when doctors aren't trying to kill them.

Link to Police probe death in organ donation case - Los Angeles Times

In case you needed any more evidence I'm a geek...

From 2007_02_23

I got this in the mail today. It's my long-awaited Xbox Live Diamond card! The chicks will dig it.

Actually, there is a practical benefitto having this. Supposedly, I get all manner of discounts at non-geeky places such as Carl's Jr., TigerDirect and GameStop. Oh, wait...

Future-of-Journalism story roundup

• Slate's Jack Shafer argues that the 20% profit margins to which newspaper publishers have become accustomed are a historical anomaly. He contends newspapers have a choice: 1) Lower profit expectations to 10% or so and invest anything above that back into the product. 2) Buoy margins with cost cuts that end up killing the golden goose.
• Jeff Jarvis says running newswire copy and maintaining costly non-local news bureaus don't make sense in an age of hyperlinks. In discussions with my wife -- a newspaper graphics artist making the transition to the Web -- I've come to the same conclusion.
• Cnet reports that bloggers think Microsoft's new Reader software (not to be confused with this Microsoft Reader) is dead on arrival. When I first wrote about this software several months ago, I praised its ability to prioritize stories and highlight photos and graphics with a newspaper-like layout. But I also wondered whether users would have to download a separate application for each publication they wanted to to read. Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Apparently no one at Microsoft or any of its publishing partners realize that most people prefer a single application to read everything: it's called a Web browser. As I said in my initial review, Microsoft's Reader should be a browser plug-in that can work with any specially formatted site, not a standalone application -- and certainly not a set of them.

Narrowing the Religion Gap?

An interesting piece in last week's New York Times magazine about the odd political pole reversal in the 2008 race. That is, the Democratic frontrunners seem more "religious" than their Republican counterparts.

Try a quick political thought experiment. First, form a mental picture of the Democratic front-runners for president — Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now do the same for the leading Republican contenders — John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Next (and this is the key step), imagine each of them in church, sitting in a pew, head bowed, or better still, at the pulpit, delivering a homily or leading the congregation in worship.

Of course, the article doesn't mention Republican Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon, or Democrat Joe Biden, who doesn't seem very religious at all. But then again, those two aren't the leading 2008 contenders in their party.

Source: New York Times

Scientist Bush

First the flight suit, now this. If you ask me, I think he's a little too old to be dressing up in costume.

Adventures In Editing

The strongest drive is not to love or hate. It is one person's need to change modify revise alter rewrite amend chop to pieces change another's copy.

I've always found this little truism (featured in Arthur Plotnik's The Elements Of Editing among other works) funny, but never before today had I appreciated how true it is.

While editing a reporter's story this morning, I was driving myself batty trying to find a better way to say "glossy." After about 15 minutes of branching through various synonyms -- and synonyms-of-synonyms -- I finally stumbled on the exact word I was looking for. So I went back to the original sentence to replace it. Chagrined, I realized that my masterstroke was the reporter's original word: "glossy."

Some post-Valentine's Day humor

The U.S. Central Command's war plan for invading Iraq postulated in August 2002 that the U.S. would have only 5,000 troops left in Iraq as of December 2006, according to the Command's PowerPoint briefing slides, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and are posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org)

Too bad it's not supposed to be a joke.

Source: National Security Archive

Gadget addiction

Some words of wisdom from a former tech (blog) writer:

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.

I'm better about not buying stuff than I used to be, but maybe I should impose a mandatory 1-year waiting period on myself for most technology-related purchases.

Source: Gizmodo

Windows Mobile Roundup

ActiveSync 4.5 is official, but if you've already migrated to Vista, you'll want to use Windows Mobile Device Center instead. And don't forget this Daylight Savings Time update. The page has DST updates for Outlook and Windows, too. The usual Windows update should take care of the issue from a Windows perspective, but I don't know whether Office automatically updates.

And while I'm on the topic of Windows Mobile, here are a couple of potentially useful map/search applications: Google Maps and Windows Live Search.

Jobs: Abolish FairPlay

Steve Jobs speaks out against digital rights/restrictions management. I agree wholeheartedly with his last point.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Source: Apple - Thoughts on Music

Xbox 360's Seriously Flawed DVD Playback

Maybe it's a good thing that I didn't throw out my standalone DVD player and make my Xbox 360 an all-in-one media hub. As ExtremeTech reports: 

Frankly, the Xbox 360 is a terrible DVD player. Yeah, we know it's primarily a game console. We know DVD movie playback is essentially a "free" feature. But it is a feature nonetheless, and an important one. After all, many of our TVs only have so many inputs, and we only have so much room for boxes in our TV cabinets or stands. If you have an Xbox 360, you have no reason to believe that you shouldn't be able to use it as your primary DVD player. Except that you can't, because it's awful. Honestly, we have seen sub-$100 DVD players and PC graphics cards perform better than this.

Link

Running Vista on a Mac

Funnily enough, Macs are great machines for running Vista. They're new, they're fast and they exceed Vista’s demanding specs. They can even run OS X and Windows at the same time.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been running Vista on a quad-Xeon Mac Pro. Click the link to see how it’s working out.

The Mac Pro is a very fast and capable OS X machine, but it’s an even faster Windows Vista machine.

Vista really flies on this beast, and feels like it’s faster than OS X – it boots faster, folders burst open and apps launch instantly.

(The Mac Pro has two dual-core 2.66GHz Xeon chips; 3GBs of RAM; and a medium-range NVidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card)

I’m especially delighted with Vista’s “glass” Aero interface, which works in all its glory on this machine.

Source: WIRED Blogs: Cult of Mac

The House That Mac Built

This guy loves his computers, not to mention the Apple Store.

Via Lifehacker.

Bye Bye, Partition Magic

From Lifehacker:

Windows Vista has built-in hard drive partition management with the ability to shrink, create and format new partitions without the dreaded fdisk, third-party software, or even rebooting your PC.

Link

Xbox no longer a financial black hole

 The most recent financials are in.

Microsoft reported a drop in profit for its fiscal second quarter Thursday, but sales and earnings beat analyst expectations thanks to strong sales of its Xbox 360 game console during the holidays.

Link to CNN/Money

Photosynth now available in Firefox!

Trust me, it's cool. 

Link

What part of "shall not be suspended" does he not understand?

Just when you think you've heard everything from this administration, it finds another way to demonstrate its utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution. And these people have the nerve to label Iraq war opponents traitors.

One of the Bush administration's most far-reaching assertions of government power was revealed quietly last week when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified that habeas corpus -- the right to go to federal court and challenge one's imprisonment -- is not protected by the Constitution.

"The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas,'' Gonzales told Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Jan. 17.

Gonzales acknowledged that the Constitution declares "habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless ... in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.'' But he insisted that "there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution."

Chilling.