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Tuesday, October 19, 2004 |
Military dress code gets tech upgrade. The dress code for the U.S. Navy has gotten a little update to bring it into the 21st century. [CNET News.com]
Last week, the Navy announced it has revamped its official dress code to be more compatible with modern technology and fashion trends. Among the changes is a special provision that allows sailors to carry cell phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and pagers on their belts.
. . .
"Nobody really uses pagers and beepers anymore," said Lisa Mikoliczyk, a spokeswoman for Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Terry Scott. "People are using cell phones and PDAs. Basically, the uniform regulations were updated to get rid of the obsolete terminology, so that it accommodates all communication devices."
9:55:27 PM 
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The continuing death of TV As Usual.
Jon Stewart vs. Crossfire fallout, cont'd: Everything You Think You Know About The Daily Show is Wrong. Sez Rick Ellis,
For many of us, the current model of political spin is not just intellectually unsatisfying, but frustrating. Most of what passes for TV news reporting is nothing but a very bad talk show, filled with party flacks and tired hosts endlessly regurgitating the current "buzz."
When viewers say they have learned something from "The Daily Show," it's not because they confuse the concept of TV news and satire. It's because the satire is done in a way that it provides a wider spectrum of opinions and viewpoints than you'll find on most news programs.
Watching the frail and cranky Novak rail about Stewart is a reminder to many of us that the news channels still have not figured out a way to consistently engage viewers under 40.
We don't believe that endless roundtables about the Swift Boat Vets and Dick Cheney's gay daughter provide any illumination about a Presidential election that promises to be the most important one in a generation.
We want to hear about the real issues. We're not too stupid or too easily bored to discuss more serious matters. The news channels are just doing it wrong. If you're CNN or Fox or MSNBC, and your numbers go up when you're discussing Laci Peterson or whether John Kerry was really in Cambodia, than the fault is yours.
I like this criticism because it shows how the news networks go for the easy money. They haven't yet learned how to zig while the others zag. Or, more importanly, how to involve an audience that isn't just an audience anymore. They're producing. A lot more every day. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
9:53:04 PM
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Copyright Takedown Experiment Reveals Horrible ISP Policies (Jason Schultz).
Doom9 sez:
Dutch civil rights organization Bits of Freedom has run an interesting experiment: They put up a text by a famous Dutch author, written in 1871 to accounts with 10 different ISPs. Then they made up an imaginary society that is supposed to be the copyright holder of the author in question, and sent copyright infringement takedown notices to those 10 ISP via email (using a Hotmail account). 7 out of 10 ISPs took down the material, sometimes within hours and without even informing the account holder. One ISP doubted the legitimacy of the claim and asked for some proof that the alleged plaintiff was in fact the copyright holder. Yet another ISP actually realized that copyright had long since run out on the work. That's real scary, don't you think? Made up society, Hotmail addresses and a website is gone.
BOF's paper is available here (PDF) [Copyfight]
5:29:38 PM
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Kottke: "Out of Technorati's top 100 most-linked weblogs, only 16 don't feature advertising or are otherwise noncommercial." [Scripting News]
5:21:44 PM
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TV explodes (Jon Stewart & Crossfire).
What's fascinating about the Jon Stewart takedown of Crossfire is not just what he said but how his message got distributed.
Terry Heaton reports that there have been almost 400,000 downloads of the segment at iFilm (which is how I saw it) ... in addition to countless (literally, countless) BitTorrent downloads. This was a flood of viral distribution that came from viral promotion.
Welcome to the future of TV!
In old TV, a moment like this came and if you missed it, you missed it. Tough luck. In new TV, you don't need to worry about watching it live -- live is so yesterday -- because thousands of peers will be keeping an eye out for you to let you know what you should watch (we call that metadata now) and they'll record it and distribute it.
The really stupid thing is that CNN didn't do this themselves: Hey, we had a red-hot segment with tsunami star Jon Stewart strangling our guys with a bow tie; you should watch; here, please, look at this free download because it will promote our bow-tie boy and our brand and our show and give us a little of that Stewart hip heat. That's what CNN should have done. Instead, they'll charge you to deliver a videotape (what's that?) the next day.
(Continued at BuzzMachine)
(Also check out:The Future of Television: Crossfire Downloads Exceed Broadcast Audience for more stats. thx revgeorge!) [unmediated]
6:22:40 AM
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OhMyNews International starts training citizen-reporters.
OhMyNews International reports on their efforts to export their We Media model, which has proved to be so successful in Korea.
Eight budding citizen reporters came to OhmyNews' Gwanghwamun office in downtown Seoul for a seminar on participatory journalism, Saturday afternoon.
Hailing from Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States, the group heard two one-hour lectures on OhmyNews International (OMNI), citizen journalism and the basics of journalistic writing.
The topics discussed included how the OhmyNews model of reporting complements "professional" journalism, how to tailor a reporting style to a particular story and the kinds of common pitfalls new reporters should avoid.
The group attending Saturday's seminar is the first wave of foreign citizen reporters in Korea writing English-language news stories and features. The next seminar is planned for early November.
OMNI went online Feb. 22 with the aim of duplicating on a global scale the success of the Korean edition, which started with 727 citizen reporters nearly five years ago. OhmyNews now has 36,000 reporters submitting about 200 stories a day.
[unmediated]
6:22:02 AM
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Four from Wired News:
- E-Voting Still a Florida Bugaboo. Early voters in the Sunshine State begin casting electronic ballots Monday, and it doesn't take long for the first problems to surface.
- Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark. Tired of blaring TV sets at shops, bars and waiting rooms? A new universal remote called the TV-B-Gone lets users turn off virtually any set. A trial run in the streets of San Francisco shows the device to be quite effective. By Steven Bodzin.
- California Pumps Up Stem Cells. Gov. Schwarzenegger takes a political risk and endorses a $3 billion California bond measure that would fund embryonic stem-cell research.
- Candidate Has Platform for Geeks. A former game programmer is running for the U.S. House of Representatives with a platform forcefully addressing tech industry issues like digital copyright protection. But he still lags far behind his opponent in the fund-raising department. By Jacob Ogles.
6:18:49 AM
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Secret Papers About China Are Released by the C.I.A.. The rich trove of documents include the National Intelligence Estimates issued over the 30-year period of Mao Zedong's rule. By By DOUGLAS JEHL. [The New York Times > International]
From the CIA site:
TRACKING THE DRAGON: SELECTED NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES ON CHINA, 1948-1976
This collection of declassified National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) is the first such release of analytical products exclusively on China. The inspiration for this undertaking came from National Intelligence Council (NIC) Chairman Ambassador Robert Hutchings and Herb Briick of CIA's Information Management Services (IMS). Upon reviewing outstanding requests for NIC documents received through Freedom of Information and Executive Order channels, both noted a critical mass of requests on China. The 71 documents in this collection—37 are available on this site as selected NIEs and all 71 are on a companion compact disk in their entirety—also include some Estimates which have been previously declassified and released either to individual requesters or as part of periodic voluntary releases undertaken by CIA's Historical Review Group.
. . .
The editors' aim was to include Estimates that tracked the general trends of China's internal politics, foreign relations, national economy, and the growth of its military establishment. They also sought to cover the drama of the final stages of the Chinese civil war and the establishment of Communist rule in 1949, the new regime's first Five Year Plan of 1953-1957, Mao's principal ideological campaigns—the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—and the Sino-Soviet split. Aside from those on the Communist Bloc, only the most redundant or tactical Estimates or those on issues peripheral to China itself were not included.
See the Government Printing Office's Online Bookstore which will soon offer "Tracking the Dragon: Selected National Intelligence Estimates on China, 1948-1976" (including the companion CD) for sale.
(GPO stock number 041-015-00239-2)
Visit the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) Web site - China Collection for the full text of the 71 declassified China NIEs.
6:15:56 AM
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how to be creative in pdf format. "How To Be Creative" is now available in PDF format. Free download is here. Thanks to to Amit Gupta, Seth Godin and all the groovy cats at ChangeThis for putting it together.... [gapingvoid]
6:09:03 AM
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