How do you get your news these days?

I agree with the young people. I want news via mobile. I want to be able to multi-task and get news. I suspect loads of people who work in the news business do not actually consume news via electronic devices, except for the TV news at regularly scheduled times. Hmmm. Not the way we do it nowadays.

clipped from recoveringjournalist.typepad.com Recovering Journalist Mark Potts is a consultant and entrepreneur. These are his thoughts on the media, the Internet, Web 2.0 and changes in how we create, receive and interact with news, information and advertising clipped from recoveringjournalist.typepad.com One of the reasons AP is taking some heat, frankly, is because it's been especially aggressive and innovative in embracing online media. Once incredibly stodgy, AP's leadership now seems to be on the cutting edge in how it thinks about the new world of journalism. Go figure. The latest example of that is a fascinating research report released recently by the news cooperative. "A New Model For News" slipped out of the AP a few weeks ago and has gotten very little coverage in the industry media. But it reads like a roadmap for what news organizations–and especially newspapers–should be doing to regain their competitiveness, especially with young readers.

RFID Tags Not Good for your Security

Image via Wikipedia

Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate, has written an article in September's Scientific American, which is devoted to "Privacy,"detailing how the RFID chip in your clothes (or credit card, or passport) can be detrimental to your privacy.

This is a theme currentbuzz has touched on for many years. From cute "dog-tags" and bracelets in elementary school in Celebration, Fl, that let kids move from room to room without logging onto school computers each time, to casinos that watch for pilferage by money-counting employees, to the retailer who just might use the ubiquitous RFID tag to target sales to you, instead of simply using the tag for inventory control, each use of the tag without consideration of the power of these chips and the ease with which information can be read from them, puts us, the public, at risk.

"the risk: anyone with a readily available reader device—unscrupulous marketers, government agents, stalkers, thieves and just plain snoops—can also access the data on the licenses to remotely track people without their knowledge or consent. What is more, once the tag’s ID number is associated with an individual’s identity—for example, when the person carrying the license makes a credit-card transaction—the radio tag becomes a proxy for that individual. And the driver’s licenses are just the latest addition to a growing array of “tagged” items that consumers might be wearing or carrying around, such as transit and toll passes, office key cards, school IDs, “contactless” credit cards, clothing, phones and even groceries."

clipped from www.sciam.com Radio-frequency identi­fication (RFID) tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents. Because the tags were designed to be powerful tracking devices and they typically incorporate little security, people wearing or carrying them are vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance and profiling.

Digital For Profit Education

Howard Tullman never sleeps.

"Connectors" Not Managers are Key as "Reality Mining" Takes Shape

This is a very important line of research. We do not live in an industrial world where our physical presence is required. We don't always need to move our "meat" selves around to be productive. BUT productive collaborations differ in cyberspace from those when we are face to face. Those hormones, smells, little physical cues are very powerful, aren't they?

clipped from www.wired.com Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends' Waber, a PhD student in MIT's Human Dynamics Group, studies the way groups interact socially — based on who's talking to whom. But unlike most social scientists, who simply ask people about their behavior, Waber and his colleagues measure it. They outfit employees with special badges that work with base stations to log all conversations between employees, including location and duration. With this data, Waber's team can plot exactly how information flows inside a firm. This type of research has evolved into a new field called reality mining. By tracking people using location-aware devices like mobile phones or electronic badges, scientists are revolutionizing our understanding of how social networks function.

Did 60 Minutes Kill Journalism?

This is very thought provoking. Read the whole piece, not just what I clipped. After talking about the connection of big M media journalism and the profit motive, he brings up government censorship issues which the MSM are totally ignoring. Why are photos from the carnage in Iraq, "not news" and in fact, why can't we see them?:
"
This is the crisis in journalism. It's not about budgets. It's about our willingness to let the Government specifically define what they think is the appropriate way to cover a story like Iraq. Is this images disturbing? Absolutely. But why isn't the public seeing a full picture of the war? That's the question we should be asking."


Posted by Steve Rosenbaum at Aug 09, 08 05:27 PM

clipped from alwayson.goingon.com Is Google Killing Journalism? There is no doubt that Journalism, as we know it,  is facing massive change.  The good old days of Journalism may have been back when big government and big journalism were able to keep each other in check.  But that model is falling apart. So while Schmidt is right to worry that Google and Craig's List  and other low cost advertising alternatives have eroded the revenues of major media companies,  the death of Journalism began when Journalism was expected to begin to earn a profit. Or maybe we're witnessing the birth of Journalism. Once you separate the idea of Journalism from the business of journalism - you're able to look at things in a whole new way.   If the idea of journalism is that people can question authority,  debate issues and ideas,   and expose wrongdoing and misdeeds - then the emergence of blogging,  micro-blogging,  podcasting,  vlogging, and lifestreaming all begins to look like a new golden age of journalism.

Advertising Overload Virtually Everywhere

The ad clutter follows us into "inworld" in SL

clipped from www.mediapost.com Second Mid-Life Crisis Posted August 8th, 2008 by Shankar Gupta Big changes are coming to the favorite virtual world of marketing trade pubs, according to a recent post on Jack Linden’s blog. Second Life, which allows users an extremely high level of freedom compared to competing virtual worlds, is heading towards becoming more regulated. “Ad farms” have sprouted up in all areas of the virtual world, plots of land that serve no purpose other than to sell advertising space to networks, which have caused virtual property devaluations throughout the Second Life mainland, much like excessive advertising on the Web or in real-world cities.

RIP Isaac Hayes

so it goes, Isaac Hayes