Archive - Nov 6, 2009
Final FTC Comment How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/06/2009 - 12:33Today is the last day to submit comments to the FTC for their Public Workshops and Roundtables, “From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”. When I had written about this previously I noted that there were only two comments. As of this morning, there were eleven comments and the response that I received from the submission form indicated that my comment was the nineteenth.
The comments are text comments, with the option of adding attachments. The text is unformatted and can become unreadable for long comments. So, I wrote an abstract which I pasted as the text, and the provided the details of my comments as a PDF file.
If my comment gets processed and the system behaves as it has for previous commenters, my comment should be at 544505-00019.pdf. However, as of yet, the most recent eight comments have not appeared.
That said, I would like to highlight a couple comments that struck me is particularly noteworthy. Mark MacCarthy, whom I believe to be an adjunct professor of Communications, Culture and Technology at Georgetown has a long interesting comment about increasing federal funding for public service media. I’ve only scanned it briefly, but hope to find more time to read it in detail before the workshops.
Mark Nadel, of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, has a very interesting comment on
Limor Peer from Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy studies, together with Pablo Boczkowski from the Department of Communications Studies at Northwestern share a thirty seven page working paper, The Choice Gap: The Divergent Online News Preferences of Journalists and Consumers. It looks like fascinating research that I hope to delve into in much more detail.
All of this dwarves my brief three page comment. Yet I hope I’ll have added something to the discussion. If you can’t read the final draft of my comment at the FTC website, it isn’t substantially different than my earlier draft.
I look forward to reading other comments and perhaps even getting a good online discussion going before the roundtables. Let me know what you think.
Update: The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has posted SPJ’s DMC FTC Statement statement on their blog. It is another long and interesting comment.
Looking for Google Wave Invites?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/06/2009 - 09:17It seems like everywhere I turn, there is someone looking for a Google Wave Invite. On the other hand, I now have Wave accounts on so many different machines, it is hard to keep track of them. How is this so? Simple, I’m testing lots of different new features for Waves.
With that, let me talk about where you can set up a Wave account. First, there is my own machine, Orient Lodge. You need to have ssh access on your machine to access it. If you use Windows, you can download Cygwin or Putty and get ssh access that way. If you use Mac or Linux, you should be able to go to a terminal window and enter the ssh command. If you want an account on my machine, send me a message and I’ll give you an account and details on how to use it. It is worth noting that it is a text based client that is in test mode, primarily for testing federation. Waves and blips may disappear when I perform updates, which is fairly frequent, and the interface, well, let’s just say it needs a lot of work.
A few other people have connected to my Wave server, mostly to test federation as well as to consider how federation might work with other systems like Second Life, Opensim, or statusnet.
Another site that I really like is Danopia’s Ruby on Sails. This is a Ruby on Rails implementation of a Google Wave client. It seems to be down more than it is up. However, it is a nice client, and Ruby on Rails seems to be a great platform. They are busy trying to get federation up and running. When that happens, my server will federate with Ruby on Sails. I may also try to add the Ruby on Sails client on my machine at some point.
The other site that anyone can use that looks really promising is PyGowave. This is a Python client for Google Wave. Like Ruby on Sails, anyone can connect and create waves. Unlike Ruby on Sails, this server seems to remain up constantly. However, it does not appear to do anything with federation, and from what I’ve read so far, federation does not seem to be supported and adding federation support may be a challenge. So, you won’t be able to connect to it from my server of Danopia’s server.
Wave seems to be changing very rapidly as we speak, so this information could well be out of date before you know it. Are you experimenting with Wave? How’s it going? Got any fun clients? Want to federate? Let me know.
