As I mentioned, MoveOn.org has a campaign to “Save the Internet,” designed to support net neutrality regulations. Jeff Pulver has a viral marketing contest to “Save The Internet.” He wants folks in favor of net neutrality to send in creative ideas that help advance the ball.
Send us short, creative ideas — videos and other Internet-based gimmicks — that you think might effectively communicate to government that they must write rules to enable us the Internet innovators to transform the Internet and communications experience.
Meanwhile, it looks like a completely separate campaign has been launched by FreePress to “Save the Internet.” Like MoveOn.org’s initiative, FreePress is asking people to sign a petition. The group claims it has a wide-ranging coalition backing it, including the American Library Association, Consumers Union and Gun Owners of America (huh? how’d they get in there?).
Pundits are already starting to take sides. ZDNet’s Russell Shaw proclaims MoveOn.Org’s campaign “naive” (because the only legislators likely to be influenced by it are those already in favor of net neutrality) and embraces Jeff Pulver’s idea.
I can’t say for sure whether all these groups are pulling together or not…Pulver clearly isn’t working with MoveOn.org or FreePress. MoveOn.org is part of the Free Press coalition, and the petitions by both groups are almost the same.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:02 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Courtesy of JD Lasica, this article from The Washington Times on how the CIA has launched a new open source center that monitors blogs in its efforts to keep track of foreign intelligence. (Note: I believe this is the first occasion I’ve had in many, many years to quote The Washington Times.)
The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin. “A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we’re getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to … people putting information on there that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.
That’s not my favorite part. As a result of its blog monitoring, the CIA now delivers more information to the President than ever before.
“I can’t get into detail of what, but I’ll just say the amount of open source reporting that goes into the president’s daily brief has gone up rather significantly,” Mr. Jardines [Eliot Jardines who has the great title of “assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source”] said. “There has been a real interest at the highest levels of our government, and we’ve been able to consistently deliver products that are on par with the rest of the intelligence community.”
Lasica’s reaction to this
Chill out, my lefty friends, this can only be a good thing. Nobody’s invading any foreign country here based on faulty, outdated, third-hand intelligence.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:38 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Not only are web-based companies coping with ever-shifting business ground-rules, but TV broadcasters, the vanguard of the old-media world, are also making it up as they go along. The New York Times’ Stuart Elliott has this incisive piece today on the annual marketing conference of the Television Bureau of Advertising.
For the first time ever, the conference was focused on “multiplatforms,” which is no doubt a radical concept to TV broadcasters who to date have thought in terms of no more than two platforms: over-the-air and cable. TV stations are trying to navigate the new landscape and are tossing aside the rule books.
“Conventional wisdom, it’s an enemy at a time like this,” said Beth Comstock, president for digital media and market development at NBC Universal, part of General Electric. “In media today, I don’t think there is a single rule that can’t — and frankly, probably shouldn’t — be broken.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:27 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Google yesterday posted on its search page a logo composed of images from Joan Miro’s artwork. I happened to see this when I was Googling something and I must admit it was a very pleasant surprise — how nice it was for Google to illustrate its search page with good art. (My real reaction was to conclude that someone at Google has really good taste.)
Moreover, the image was linked to a page containing many of Miro’s pieces. Today, however, news comes that Miro’s family objected to the unauthorized reproduction of his work.
The family contacted the Artists Rights Society, which in turn contacted Google to take down Miro’s art. Google took it down but said the company was only trying to pay a tribute to the artist, whose birthday was yesterday. Moreover, the logo was a compilation done in the style of Miro and Google felt protected by the copyright laws as a consequence.
I sympathize with the family — copyrights are critical to an artist’s economic well-being and Google’s application of Miro’s work was, well, rank commercialism. Still, it was such a nice thing too. How refreshing it was to be surprised by great art amid a work day filled with thoughts of business and technology. I’m tempted to agree with a commenter who said:
I think Miro’s family have missed a golden opportunity here. Millions of Google users [including me], who have never heard of Joan Miró i Ferrá, would have known the artist through Google and some of them could have probably turned into fans.
Update: So many bloggers have come out against the Miro family for being so fussy about the Google logo. One of my favorite posts is from an artist named Ryan B who gave Google unlimited rights to reproduce his work in whatever format the search engine desires. Ryan notes his birthday is September 15 and hopes Google will honor him on that date with a logo composed of his artwork. Another favorite post is from Brian Oberkirch who goes art historian on us and talks about how surrealism and the school of thought that fed Miro embraced “mash-ups,” so to speak, in the form of montages.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:53 AM | Print | Comments (1)The Wall Street Journal’s Mylene Mangalinda and Robert Guth have an amazing piece fronting the paper today that provides inside detail on how eBay, Microsoft and Yahoo are trying to gang up on Google. eBay, alarmed by the launch of Google Base, is the ring leader, and is willing to open up its millions of auction pages to advertising and throw its online ads to Google’s rivals…if the situation is right.
At the same time, eBay is trying to cut a sweeter deal with Google. While the article breaks no real news, it is a very cool inside look at how the ground rules for competition in the web advertising and ecommerce markets are fluid, hard-to-predict and otherwise made up on a day-to-day basis. It is also more evidence of just how feared Google is, as if anyone needed more evidence on that point.
The article further contains evidence of how worthless those million-dollar, multi-volume McKinsey studies are. eBay apparently wasn’t prepared for Google Base because the McKinsey people told them not to fret.
Few at eBay initially saw reason to fear Google, say people at the company, in part because of a 2003 study it commissioned from McKinsey & Co. McKinsey concluded that Google wouldn’t use its search capabilities to break into e-commerce. That made Google a manageable threat, say people familiar with the study. EBay’s dependence on Google increased as it shifted ad dollars to online ads from traditional media throughout 2004.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:00 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
