The AP and News Corp: Time to call their bluff and mean it

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Posted 1314 days ago

The other day I wrote over at The Inquisitr about Tom Curley getting all self-righteous at a media summit in Beijing about how it was time to start making all those evil news aggregators pay up. Dennis Yang over Techdirt suggested today that this is just a negotiation tactic and that the search engines should call the AP and News Corp bluff.

However, perhaps this is all merely negotiation brinksmanship — threatening to charge for access to their free content to see if anyone cares enough to pay. The problem is, if the search engines call their bluff and remove their content from their services, then the news organizations actually risk losing much more.

I couldn’t agree more with Dennis but I would suggest that rather than just talking about it companies like Google and Microsoft should actually do it.

Here’s the plan.

Both search engines should for a period of one week remove from their indexes anyone and everyone who is talking smack about the search engines making all the money and talking up the returning of their content behind paywalls.

Let’s not be kind here. If these companies truly feel that the search engines are “stealing” their content and are the reason for the news industry going tits up then take them out of the equation. Remove all of AP content from the search indexes. Clear out all of News Corps content from the search indexes.

For one week.

Hell even if every single blogger stopped linking to them for a month it would have an effect I would be willing to bet.

Quit talking about it and actually do it and shut up these dinosaurs once and for all.

Call their bluff.

Sometimes the conversation does need some rules – and respect

Category: Odds & Ends
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Posted 1315 days ago

boxing As I was reading Thomas Hawk’s post earlier about a real problem he is having with one of the Flickr forums where he is an administrator I found myself relating to what he was having to deal with.

It turns out that there is a forum member who is being nothing short of a real asshole. Not your run of the mill kind of asshole as they are rather easy to deal with but the kind of asshole who thinks it just fine to threaten physical harm to whoever has pissed them off. In this case the asshole is a putz by the name of James Rhodes and he thinks it just fine to suggest to Thomas how easy it would have been to mug him at a recent convention

“Must be the Sicilian in me, just can’t let things go…. still have yet to pay a visit to EA, and TH doesn’t know how close he came at the dream machines event at that airport on the coast…. and TH never really did anything… I just wanted to make an example of him… good thing I realized that he never said or did anything… I would have felt horrible afterwords….”

well to be clear I never threatened you, I just watched you from a distance. You never knew I was there, and you would have never know why someone would have “mugged” you in the parking lot…..it would have all been a strange coincidence…

An office I can really say is my own – with help from my wife

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Posted 1316 days ago

When we first moved into the apartment building we currently live in almost eight years ago now we lived on the third but as my wife’s physical problems got worse we knew at some point we would either have to try and get an apartment on the ground floor or move somewhere totally new. Luckily for us about a year and half a ground floor apartment came available with the added bonus of being a two bedroom which meant I could actually have an office.

That was almost seven years ago now and while it was nice to think that I had an office it more often than not felt like a crowed corner as it seem to become a drop zone for ‘crap’ that had no other place to go. Not to mention the fact that it hadn’t been painted in I don’t know how long which when combined with year’s of cigarette smoke made the atmosphere less than conducive for working.

The Old

Here’s a few pictures to give you an idea of what it looked like before Kim said it was time to make it a real office (God bless her ). Pardon the quality of the pictures but they were taken with my LG phone during the day.

If you feel like punishing yourself you can click on the images for a slightly better view.

The New

One day a couple of months ago I was sitting in my office trying to work when Kim came and sat and had a coffee with me and our discussion turned to how I felt about my ‘office’. Once our coffee’s were done and she went off to watch some television I figured that was the end of the discussion – except it turns out it wasn’t. About an hour later she came back in and told me that is was time to redecorate my office.

So with her help in putting together a kind of an idea of what I would want we went off to start getting all the pieces. It took the better part of two months because I figured this was a kind of luxury so I got the things we needed at the beginning of each month as the spare money allowed. Then we got down to brass tacks and I now call this my office (again apologies for the quality of the pictures – cameras in phones aren’t the best)

after1

after2

after3

after4

We’re still adding stuff to the walls as we fine just the right things but for now I am a happier camper.

Steve Gillmor, Ray Ozzie: Real-time infrastructure

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Posted 1316 days ago

I may not be the biggest fan of Steve Gillmor but I am of Ray Ozzie so I started reading Gillmor’s interview with Ozzie with a little bit of trepidation. However that didn’t last long and it turned out to be one of the better interviews with Ozzie that I have read – so kudos to Steve for that.

If you are interested in the whole real-time conversation at all then this interview is well worth taking the time to read.

Ray Ozzie:

I would say that I have a higher degree of confidence that real time technologies are going to broadly impact systems. It may not be in the form of a Twitter or something like that, because that blends real time and a communication tool, and it is the pioneer and we’re all kind of looking at it trying to understand what’s going to be sustainable and what’s not. But I do believe real time notifications, real time infrastructure for delivering events as an adjunct mechanism to help improve the experiences within our communication tools, it’s going to be very important. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to pan out within the context of each of these tools, but I think in the enterprise and for consumers it’s going to be pretty important.

Interestingly enough Azure was only mentioned a couple of times and mostly as an aside type of mention. Other than that there was no “Microsoft-speak” in the interview.

CobWEBs Daily Edition podcast – Where we’d talk about sex with midgets but not Snuggy sex

Category: Podcasts
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Posted 1318 days ago

Rather than make our listeners endure yet another day of talk about the FTC Sean P. Aune and myself catch up on some of the other things that are going on out there. Among the subjects we look at is the news that Twitter is going to possibly let Google and Microsoft hook up to their firehose of information. As well we spend some time talking about Kindle’s expansion to the rest of the world (except Canada) and how word is that Barnes & Noble may be launching an Android based e-reader.

Enjoy

Screw love – write about something you hate

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Posted 1318 days ago

hyde If there are three keywords that can be used to get you all pumped up about being the next great blogger they would have to be:

passion
knowledgeable
write about something you love

Now normally I would let this kind of repetitive crap go sliding on by however seeing Kyle Lacy wax poetically once more about love and sweetness making you a great blogger I just couldn’t control my gag reflex anymore.

What is this warm and fuzzy crap about loving what you are writing about. What are we, a bunch of pansies that we have to always be in love about what we are writing about?

I say to hell with that.

Write about something you hate.

There I said it .. screw the lovie-dovie crap. Let’s get serious about it after all we can’t love something all of the time. Let’s cut to the bone here and nail that sucker to the cross for the world to see.

After all can’t we be passionate about the things we hate?

I passionately hate broccoli to the point I can puke at the sight of it. I can passionately hate all those puffy ego idiots who think they are better than the rest of us.

As for being knowledgeable about the things you hate well you had better be or you are just another poser hater – did I mention that I passionately hate poser haters?

Come on folks let out that inner hate you know is just struggling to reach out through your words and rip someone a new asshole. It’s not so bad and a hellva lot more fun than an enema you gotta admit.

Be proud about writing knowledgeably and passionately about stuff you hate. Stand tall as you proclaim to the world on your blog that you’ve had it with being all lovie-dovie and the time has come to let out that inner beast like some Mr. Hyde in contrast to all those lily white pantywaist Dr. Jekyll that have saturated the blogosphere with nothing but do-gooder gag inducing pabulum.

note: I like Kyle Lacy and think he writes a great blog and this post was meant in total humor. As for the FTC there is nothing to disclose here so piss off.