internet

A court in the US has handed down an interesting decision that says a blogger is not a journalist. I say interesting because though I haven’t yet seen the Law Commission report into the “taming if the wild west” of blogging, I would suggest that the Law Commission may well be making recommendations exactly the opposite of the US court decision:

A United States federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a Montana woman sued for defamation was not a journalist when she posted online that an Oregon lawyer acted criminally during a bankruptcy case, a decision with implications for bloggers around the country.

Crystal L Cox, a blogger from Eureka, Montana, was sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick when she posted online that he was a thug and a thief during the handling of bankruptcy proceedings by him and Obsidian Finance Group LLC.

US District Judge Marco Hernandez found last week that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.

I will reserve my comments about where I think we are headed until the Law Commission releases their report. Meanwhile it is an interesting discussion to be had about whether bloggers could conceivably be called journalists.

I certainly think it is valid in some but not all instances, and the some who could would be very few in number.

Apparently most people go online….for no particular reason.

A report from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that about 53% of young adults ages 18 to 29 go online on any given day for no particular reason except for a diversion or just for fun. About 81% of people in this demographic said they have done so at least occasionally.

The study — conducted among 2,260 adults ages 18 and over on landlines and cellphones — has a margin of error of 3.7%.

But it’s not just young web users that turn to the Internet during their down time — about 58% of all adults or 74% of online adults said they use the Internet this way, up from 45% of adults who said they did so in a Pew survey conducted in 2006. Pew noted that the growth of people using the Internet as a “destination for fun” coincides with the rise of broadband connections, social networking and video.

Tom Pullar-Strecker reckons bloggers are waiting nervously:

Bloggers are nervously waiting for the publication of the Law Commission’s report on “new media” next Monday.

Former Commerce Minister Simon Power raised their blood pressure when he ordered the review in October last year, commenting that there was a “wild west out there in cyberspace”.

InternetNZ chief executive Vikram Kumar said at the time that if that was what Power really believed, “we’ve got reasons to be very, very worried”.

Power was concerned about breaches of suppression orders, libel on the internet, and whether bloggers and online publications should be subject to oversight by the Press Council or Broadcasting Standards Authority.

Uhmmm…no we aren’t waiting nervously. Most of us don’t care what the Law Commission has to say or even knew the report was due. I was a contributor to the report and I didn’t know it was coming out.

All credit to the Law Commission though for seeking out the opinions of bloggers for their report,  I spent a half day with them in Wellington giving them some details about how I work, how I operate and my opinions on the Press Council and BSA. I am mildly interested in what suggestions of mine the Law Commission includes but I am far from nervous.

via Mashable

50 Grams is how much the internet weighs:

Daryll Kerrigan needs to have a chat with the Church of England:

The Church of England may withdraw the millions it has invested in internet companies unless they take action to curb internet pornography.

Senior officials are conducting a wide-ranging review of the Church’s holdings in Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which are worth tens of millions.

A Church spokesman told The Daily Telegraph that its Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG) was considering new guidelines on pornography, which address the ease in which hardcore sexual images can be viewed through modern media.

The review, which is expected to be concluded in the coming months, will recommend how part of the Church’s £5.3 billion portfolio should be invested in relation to internet companies.

The Church refuses to invest in firms that fuel problems against which Christians campaign.

According to Church documents, the criteria for investing in media companies is that they have a “positive influence on society by educating, entertaining and uplifting individual experience”.

It says that companies should be avoided whose “major part” of their business is “engaged in the production, transmission, publication or distribution of pornography”.

It warns that some companies can “equally” be prurient, invasive and promote lifestyles inconsistent with the Christian message.

It is attitudes like this that really tick me off. They are just putting their fingers in their ears and shouting lalalalalala. Their action won’t make a blind bit of difference.

Instead of putting up walls and fencing off the Anglican Church they should be seeking out sinners. People who are already saved don’t need saving more. It is sinners that need saving and where better to find them?

from Miles Lennon

The home run scenario for blogging is incredibly alluring — thousands of ravenous fans fawning over your next thought-provoking or comedic masterpiece — but time and time again I fail to meet these expectations or manage them more appropriately. I enter the same cycle each time:

Blog Lifecycle

1) Euphoric moment of inspiration
2) Pseudo-maniacal and self-indulgent perusing of domains
3) Careful consideration of theme and design
4) The inaugural post – “Hello world!”
5) The 2-4 post honeymoon phase
6) Waning and changing interests
7) Feelings of desperation and apathy from low engagement
Inevitable abandonment

It turns out that this cycle may not be uncommon. Surveys have shown that 95% of blogs are abandoned within 120 days and 60-80% of them abandoned within the first month. I’m not 100% certain if these statistics are still valid today, but I have a hunch they are or perhaps even worse. Many of us simply don’t have the time, energy, passion and stamina it takes to build an online audience. Worse still, we’ve entered an age of conspicuousness in which blogs gone unnoticed are blogs worth abandoning. Put those two together and you find yourself stuck with massive inertia.

This hasn’t been my experience and certainly as time has gone on I ind I want to post more and more. Sure there have been days where it has been a real struggle to write anything, or even cut and paste something from somewhere else. Most of the time however I find blogging energising, rewarding and mostly fun.

Some interesting statistics on working from home are coming out of the US:

Between 1980 and 2000, the number of home-based workers doubled to 4.2 million. That reflects a pace of growth that is three-times the rate of the general workforce. A research paper by Gerald S. Oettinger cites two big reasons. First, as women’s share of the labor force grew, some found home-based work arrangements more agreeable to their lifestyle. Second, the Internet, mobile phones, and teleconferencing software made it easier to connect from the home office.

Home work is growing not only by population but also by duration. The average hours of work at home grew to 3 hours from 2.5 hours between 2003 and 2010, and it grew most for upper-middle class workers with a bachelor’s degree.

There’s every reason to expect the trend to accelerate, especially within Pabilonia’s second category — the telecommuting worker staying home in a big city with crowded transportation. In New York City, for example, self-employment and freelance work accounted for two thirds of the job growth between 1975 and 2007, according to the Chicago Fed. For more people, one should think, the office of the future is the living room of the present.

The new ultra fast broadband network will make it a lot easier to work from home. The world is changing rapidly, so isnt it time to start designing for the future not the past?

I just got an email pretending to be from Kiwibank. It is a phishing scam email.

Dear Customer,

We are making measures monthly to UPDATE our security and secure our online banking customers due to internet banking fraud rampant on internet of late,so please click the link below to UPDATE your account.

Verification Update

***NOTE:ENTER YOUR CORRECT ACCESS NUMBER & PASSWORD & YOUR REGISTERED KEEPSAFE QUESTION & ANSWER (We use our old secure login page)***

Joanne

Internet Banking Team,

Kiwibank – Banking New Zealand.

There was a link on the words Verification Update, holding over the link shows that it goes to mdsultan[dot]com/images/kiwifolder/kiwibank[dot]php

There is no way that this is an email from Kiwibank. Be warned.

TV3 ran a silly and demonstrably wrong article ove the weekend about Claudette Hauiti.

Matt at mydeology gives them a shellacking over their pathetic attack piece.

John Campbell had a wee cry about folks avoiding his well-researched, highly contextual news machine in favour of a gentle wrestle with the walrus on Radio New Zealand’s Mediawatch this morning. But maybe there’s another reason that people avoid TV3: the fact that they just make shit up.

Take this interview with Claudette Hauiti, a National Party candidate standing in Mangere. Ms Hauiti freely admits that, in a past life as a television producer, she signed up to several organisations that most National members would not endorse: Grassroots Labour, the Socialist Union, and a number of groups advocating for the legalisation of cannabis. She said that this was done for the sake of research, which is a difficult claim to dispute. After all, plenty of my dyed in the wool Labour voting friends have “Liked” Facebook pages such as the anti-MMP organisation Vote For Change, and Prime Minister John Key, presumably so they know what these people are saying.

Cue TV3′s slightly more than a teeny little bit misleading story on Hauiti:New Nat candidate: Lesbian, Maori, ex-Labour. Hauiti was never a member of the Labour Party, as she made clear to the person interviewing her, while acknowledging that she was a member of the Grassroots Labour website. The interviewer goes on to twice claim that Hauiti is “profiled on the Grassroots Labour website”, which is not the same thing as creating a profile, but then a good story knows no factual bounds. After having this moronic point pushed, Hauiti says that she has no control over what information internet sites choose to share about her. TV3 then asks for comment from a Labour Party member, who says that the site never creates profiles for people.

I sat beside Claudette in the plane on the way to Wellington. I have previously met her before briefly. We had a very frank chat on the flight, she was a little upset at some of my characterizations of her chances. However she at least talked face to face with me about it rather than skulking and running whispering campaigns like some other cowards in the party, so she is to be commended for that.

She should also be commended for taking one for the team in Mangere. There are few thankless tasks in politics worse than standing in a red seat knwoing you are going to cop a flogging while the buggers muddle in Auckland pats themselves on the back and expends huge resources in Tamaki.

The National party is a broad church. It has left and right and the great thing is that they can all co-exist happily.

What Claudette Hauiti signals though is that Labour cannot and should not expect monopoly rights on the gay vote. National too has poofs and lesbians, but they don’t expect special treatment based on identity politics, and nor does Claudette.

Silly little hatchet jobs from inept repeaters at TV3 thinking they are smarter than the vetters at national HQ just strengthens the party and ridicules the mainstream media yet again. It would be a pretty stupid candidate that thought they could hide their online past so easily.