Current_Events: July 2007 Archive Page

Similar sites have captured the imagination of ordinary users with a so-called "citizen" brand of journalism, but NowPublic is gaining attention for the size of its fast-growing army of 118,000 members who write and post news stories, cellphone camera pictures, and videos from 3,600 cities in over 140 countries.

"Think of us as a new kind of wire service that has eyes and ears all over the world," said CEO and co-founder Leonard Brody in an interview. "When the cyclones broke in Oman a few weeks ago, AP's bureau chief in Saudi Arabia couldn't get there. By the time he left his driveway, we already had eight photos and stories filed." --Joanne Lee-Young --News site secures landmark capital funding (Vancouver Sun)

NowPublic makes money in part by charging mainstream media for access to its citizen reporters. Do we have a scorpion-on-the-back-of-the-tortoise situation here?

First Amendment lawsuits by student journalists at public universities become moot when the plaintiffs graduate, according to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. --Scott Jaschik --Loss for the Student Press (Inside Higher Ed)

That sounds very disturbing.

The power class was buzzing around in the sky, watching the ruination of someone's life way down below - making buckets of cash by broadcasting someone else's tragedy, then - WHAM - the real bursts into their own life, they become the live tragedy - but we're still viewing the whole thing through the lens of a t.v. camera. How tragic and fascinating. --Baby_Balrog

I'm sad for the deceased. I'm sad for their families. I wish someone had used some good judgment at some point to prevent such a tragedy. | I'm also hoping it leads to less of this kind of "content" on the news, but recognise how futile that hope is even as I type it. --batmonkey --''This may be the end of this thing...'' (MetaFilter)

From comments posted on MetaFilter's coverage of today's midair helicopter crash in Phoenix.

"At first I didn't believe a seagull was capable of stealing crisps. But I saw it with my own eyes and I was surprised. He's very good at it." --Seagull becomes crisp shoplifter (BBC)

Very strange. My brother-in-law Robert sent it to me.

An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world's top RPG gamers after one criminal's girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google's social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim's head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for $8,000. And yes, the story gets even better. --Gang Kidnaps Gamer to Get Password Using Fake Orkut Date (Gizmodo)

The story points to a website that appears to be in Portugese, so I can't investigate this story any further. It fulfills so many stereotypes it just doesn't sound credible... the kidnap victim isn't named, for instance. I don't see any coverage of this outside the gamer weblogs and fansites, so I'm leaning towards "PR hoax" on this one. Perhaps time will tell.

It should be a great moment for the publishing industry, which for years has been limping along with flat sales. But amid this avalanche of commerce and pre-publication hype, the book business is ruefully taking note of a startling incongruity: Very few U.S. booksellers will be making big money from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." --Josh Getlin and Martha Groves --Harry Potter and the diminished returns (CalendarLive.com | LA Times)

--Bull Run Victim Photo -- Editing QuibblesYahoo | AP (will expire))

No, Lenahan lies on a hospital bed.

The redundancy of "as shows" and "showing" and "he was gored" and "were gored" also bothers me. And the inconsistency doesn't do much for me, either. The same caption refers to "traditional bullrun" and "morning bull run," and a little later also says "the bulls horn entered beneath his skin."

It's impossible to remove all such mistakes from a stream of copy that goes out around the world, but so many mistakes in one caption suggests something other than carelessness. Where was the editor?

Something about that smug little grin tells me that Mr. Lenahan is unlikely to care.

"You know, they're not that bad, but they were meant to be private. And it is making me feel very vulnerable that the entire country has to see them now because of this situation." --Miss N.J. releases blackmail photos (MSNBC)

Amy Polumbo, the 22-year-old Miss New Jersey, says she had put the photos on a password-protected area of her Facebook profile. The photos, as described in this article, sound pretty tame compared to the kinds of paparazzi photos that routinely show up on celebrity websites, but once again we have an example of a young person who didn't think of the consequences of her actions.

Note the way the reporter creates contrast by juxtaposing the description of a suggestive photo, snapped in what seems to be a public place (and posted onto a website), with Polumbo's rather naive expectation of privacy:

One shows a smiling Polumbo with a man she identified as her boyfriend, his open mouth over her left breast. Polumbo is fully clothed in the photo, which appeared to be snapped at a nightclub.

"This was meant to be private," Polumbo said.

—What People are Doing [US Social Networking Sites] (Businessweek)

An interesting, but not very well-sourced graphic, that shows 70% of youth (ages 18-21) are members of social networks, but only 37% create content on those sites. (I’m not sure what the researchers count as “creating content” — there’s a separate column for “Critics” who comment on and rank the content others create, so presumably, according to this chart, leaving a message on someone’s wall doesn’t count as content creation.)

Found via Reeves Library.

Born July 24, 1914, Mirvish took over his father's grocery store at 15 and eventually came to amass an enterprise that includes Mirvish Village, the Princess of Wales Theatre, the Royal Alexandra Theatre and the Old Vic Theatre in London. --Entrepreneur and theatre impresario Mirvish dead at 92 (Canada.com)

Honest Ed's was a Toronto landmark, well worth the walk from the University of Toronto. His store was tackier than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, but he invested hugely in the local theatre district, and had a self-deprecating "regular guy" image.

It isn't clear whether Linden Lab simply took the Woodbury island offline, or actually destroyed the software behind it. Dori Littell-Herrick, an assistant professor and chairwoman of the animation department, said she believed it was the latter. If so, the university would need to build another island if it re-established a presence in Second Life.

Ms. Littell-Herrick suggested that Woodbury's island could have attracted unruly avatars because it was more open to outsiders than other college sites in Second Life. And while the island is gone, no Woodbury faculty or student avatars appear to have been barred.

"We need to see what went wrong because obviously getting shut down was not the result we were looking for," she said.

Edward Clift, an associate professor and chairman of Woodbury's communications department, who is responsible for the creation of Woodbury's island, railed against Linden Lab's action in an interview with the Second Life Herald.

"The destruction of the Woodbury 2.0 campus is, in my view, an egregious shot across the bow of academia," he said. --Andrea L. Foster and Dan Carnevale --The Death of a Virtual Campus Illustrates How Real-World Problems Can Disrupt Online Islands (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

The Goldmans own the copyright, media rights and movie rights. They also acquired Simpson's name, likeness, life story and right of publicity in connection with the book, according to court documents.

The Goldmans want to rename the book "Confessions of a Double Murderer" and plan to shop it around, Cook said. --Victim's family buys rights to O.J. Simpson book (CNN | AP)

An interesting twist in the story. This is the book that had been titled If I Did It.

The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.

Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack. --Ben Clerkin --Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey (Daily Mail)

Among other tactics, middlemen for the countries misrepresented themselves to gain access to the Defense Department's surplus sales or bought sensitive surplus from U.S. companies that had acquired it from Pentagon auctions and weren't supposed to allow its export. --Sharon Theimer --Jets shredded, kept away from 'bad guys' (Yahoo! | AP (will expire))

My kids were watching an episode of Batman from the 60s. In it, Batman calls up a naval officer and asks whether Uncle Sam has recently sold any top-secret submarines. An officer looks in an index card file and says yes, in fact they recently sold a submarine to a Mr. "P. N. Gwynn," who left a post office box for an address. Upon hearing Batman's curt response, the officer looks like a chastened puppydog and says something like, "Was that bad?"

The story notes that the government changed the way it handles sensitive surplus equipment after the AP reported how unfriendly forces were getting their hands on sensitive surplus equipment. Noting the chronology is not the same thing as explicitly claiming a cause/effect relationship, but the implication is clear.

Here's a great quote that helps create a mental picture:

The shearing machine, which uses pincers to rip apart the planes, weighs 100,000 pounds. The shredder is 120,000 pounds. An F-14 weighs about 40,000 pounds.