• Frame grabbing: The art of drawing great photography from video | Nieman Journalism Lab: As the boundary between video and still camera blurs, photojournalists and other people we’d normally consider “photographers” are using video stills in mainstream media.
• How to kill five hours in Parliament House | Crikey Team: The wond’rously snarky Ruth Brown reports on a day in Australia’s Palace of Democracy. Great fun.
• Internet Meme Database | Know Your Meme: I haven’t explored it properly, but it does seem someone has decided to catalog all the stupid “memes” that proliferate online. Also, I hate this degradation of Richard Dawkin’s concept of memetics to mean “a joke we pass on”. Fuckwits.
• Computing in Melbourne: A Historical Tour: The next one’s on Sunday 31 May 2009, running 9.30am to 5pm, with plenty of tram travel and café-snacking along the way.
• Google outage lesson: Don’t get stuck in a cloud | Macworld: When I see stories like this, warning of the peril of relying on an external party for your IT needs, I often react by asking whether such an outage would be more or less likely on your own systems, given your own current contingency plans. But this piece also points out the interdependency of so many systems.
• Critical Mass, The Road, and a new wave of graphic nuke porn | Slate Magazine: Apparently our thrillers are no longer looking at the “before” and “after” of nuclear war, but more directly at what happens when the bomb drops.
• EWN – The Early Warning Network: The Australian Early Warning Network provides free emergency alerts covering everything from tsunamis through to severe weather, via SMS, pagers, phone (text to voice), web, email and their Desktop ALERT™. (I’m not sure how legit it is to trademark something as obvious as “Desktop ALERT” though.)
• Older Australians less likely to participate in the digital economy | ACMA: Nearly three out of four Australians (73%) have a home Internet connection and 87% of the population have used the Internet. In contrast, only 48% of people aged 65 and over have the Internet at home and 44% have never used the internet
• Anal Bleaching— NOT just for women | best of craigslist: When I posted this to Twitter, a disturbingly large number of people didn’t seem to realise that it was satire.
• 1952: London fog clears after days of chaos | BBC ON THIS DAY: Well, the “on this day” bit is for 9 December. Nevertheless, this has the echo of Kevin Rudd’s further delays in actually starting Australia’s response to global warming. In 1952, London's "Great Fog" killed 4000 people. Drastic action was called for. The Clean Air Act was rushed through… in 1956.
• 25 things about twitter that are pissing me off | The Bloggess: I couldn’t agree with her more. Also, she writes the best blog on the planet.
• China's Commercialization of Censorship | Far Eastern Economic Review: China’s government doesn’t have to do all the hard work of censorship itself, it just bullies commercial operators into doing it for them.

Increasingly, I’m getting annoyed with otherwise-intelligent people who simply don’t “get” what is happening as our world becomes hyperconnected and rail against it. The man in the photo is Henry Porter. He doesn’t get it. But a pseudonymous commenter at The Poll Bludger this morning does. And he explains it better than I ever have.

Ah, the contrast!

In a piece for The Observer, Porter’s headline warns that Google is just an amoral menace. The ever-growing empire produces nothing but seems determined to control everything, we’re told.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the Internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs — worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past…

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

It’s worth reading the full rant — because it completely misses the point: I only found Porter’s piece because Google had told me about it.

Google didn’t “steal” his content. It produced a new audience member. And that’s what all media outlets produce: an audience for their advertisers — or, in the case of the ABC and SBS, an audience sufficiently large to justify their existence.

Ever though I think this one piece by Porter is full of shit, I clicked through, read about him, and discovered much better pieces about his concerns for our declining civil liberties and how the decline of one-way TV sets the scene for increased public debate. Porter now has a new reader because of Google.

However that commenter over at The Poll Bludger, yes, he got it right…

Responding to another commenter’s suggestion that Google should set up its own news operations, dolphin-avatar’d The Finnigans said:

Google doesn’t need to. News service is also an old hat. Citizen journalism via blogs, video posting à la YouTube, social networking sites and the latest Twitter-type news sharing. News service will also heading the oblivion path that is the print and classified media are heading.

As someone who was there from the beginning, Mosiac Browser V0.1, Web Server v0,1 and HTML V0.1 on Windows NT for the main streamers. Yes, I know the Unix guys have been hacking away for years, but it did take Mosaic browser to take it to the masses on Windows.

We knew from the beginning that aggregation will be the king. We actually built the first web crawler in Australia that aggregate contents across websites. But we didn’t have the resources to build a proper search engine. So good on Google for making billions because they do build the best search engine there is.

We also knew the Web/Internet will smash the monopoly and democratise the content creation, publishing and distribution. Especially distribution, the print media was supreme because it controls its own distribution channel via the newsagency channel. Any business that has control and monopoly over the distribution network, it’s a very good and profitable business, just ask Telstra.

But now, the distribution networks or channels are commodity, especially with the arrival of the wireless. The mobiles will be king in the next few years. In Japan, Korea, USA and some European countries, 50% of the internet traffic now are coming through the mobiles. It’s still early days for the mobiles, that is why I suggested to William that he should talk to his master at Crikey about putting together a mobile version of PB.

Rupert said people should pay for the contents. I am not prepare to pay for data, information, knowledge any more, they are commodity, they are available everywhere. I will pay for wisdom. Sorry Rupert, your publications do not have any wisdom and you have missed the bus many times and still missing. Adios Amigo.

BTW: I notice Microsoft has stopped selling its encyclopedia Encarta, obviously it has been killed by Wiki, just as it killed Britannica.

Pre-fucking-cisely! I explained this in my piece Journalism in a hyperconnected world, when I discovered I could track the Bangkok riots of 7 October 2008 through Twitter far better than through any “mainstream” news outlet.

Campbell Reid, the Group Managing Director at News Limited, got it right when he told the ABC’s “Quality Journalism” forum that “me-too journalism” is the cancer because it wastes resources.

Why do news editors send someone to cover a media conference which is already being streamed live?

Take a look at the photos of this week’s G20 demonstrations in London. Why is there a pack of photographers at every little violent incident, producing hundreds if not thousands of almost-identical images?

Some news sites have already given up.

Fairfax, for instance, produced Heatwave gets them all aTwitter simply by copying and pasting tweets — spelling mistakes and all — with the journalist doing nothing more than adding some weather data cribbed from AAP and elsewhere.

As Newsphobia points out, Twitter is not a Lazy Journalist’s Replacement for Vox Pop.

Fairfax gets away with this because Twitter users are still a minority. For now. But for those who do use Twitter, who do see the trending topics display and, since the Internet is so handy, to the Bureau of Meteorology‘s weather observations, Fairfax added nothing of value.

Who were these people? Where were they? What were they doing?

Where was the engagement with the community which demonstrated that the Fairfax was producing, as The Finnigans puts it, Wisdom?

• Winners gallery 2009 | World Press Photo: What it says. As always, some very fine photojournalism.
• Twitter is the new cat poo | First Blog on the Moon: Crikey cartoonist First Dog on the Moon has written a brilliant piece about Twitter and what might be called Twitterwhoring. Something he’s rather good at himself.
• Victorian Bushfire Events | Premier of Victoria, Australia: A map of local fundraising events for the Victorian bushfires, the worst natural disaster in Australia’s history, put together with help from a little firm called Google.
• Crisis of Credit : clusterflock: A nice animated film by Jonathan Jarvis showing how we got into the Global Financial Crisis. Some people have called is a “visualisation”. It’s not, as the imagery isn’t a proper mapping of the data, but it does help explain.
• Where Clive Hamilton accuses me of trying to silence him | Websinthe: A bizarre story, this. Clive Hamilton confuses a call for better accountability with an attempt to silence him. It’d be funny, except that Hamilton gets unfettered access to major media in Australia, wrapping himself in a university’s cloak of respectability as he makes his pronouncements, and then proceeds to ignore the valid criticisms put to him.
• ‘Sexting’, teen culture, technology, scandal | Salon Life: “What’s more disturbing — that teens are texting each other naked pictures of themselves, or that it could get them branded as sex offenders for life?” Apart from portraying sexually healthy youths as “hormonally haywire teenagers” and a few other tabloid clichés, this article clearly outlines the problem of current child pornography laws in the context of pervasive digital media.

• The Big Picture | Boston.com: "News stories in photographs", it says. Daily photo-essays of about 15 images, nice and big.
• Earth's Seasons | US Naval Observatory: The times of the Summer and Winter Solstices, Aphelion and Perihelion for every year until 2020.
• Stories We've Seen Too Often | Strange Horizons: A list of story plots and themes which this online publisher has seen far too often. Tr�s amusement.
• The Sassy Uterus: Someone on Twitter said this was the best blog title he'd seen in ages. I visited and found myself reading post after witty post about… childbirth and raising a baby. Like I'd normally care!
• Writing Style for Print vs Web | Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Linear vs. non-linear. Author-driven vs. reader-driven. Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content. Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data. Sentences vs. fragments.
• Graffletopia: A massive collection of stencils (templates) for the OS X diagram/graphics tool OmniGraffle.
• Waiting for the Rapture | IEEE Spectrum: The singularitarians believe that in the next several decades we?ll have computers into which you?ll be able to upload your consciousness: immortality.