Poynter Online – Forums

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The Manaing Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer has sent a memo to all staff. It reads, in part:

Colleagues – Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print. We’ll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we’ll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.

For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson…

This has caused quite a stor in the blogosphere. For example, Jeff Jarvis writes:

Let me make this very clear to Inquirer ownership and management:

You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves…

The lessons of history

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This morning’s Observer column…

Forty years ago this week, a British scientist named Donald Davies unveiled one of the great technological ideas of the 20th century. He called it ‘packet-switching’, which must have sounded odd at the time because it was a way of enabling computers to communicate with one another. But it turned out to be the basis for all modern digital communications and it’s the technological foundation on which the internet is built…

Yawn

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Wall-to-wall Olympics for the next three weeks. Zzzzzz…

Meanwhile Russia and Georgia are going to war while the world’s attention is focussed on these idiotic games. Bah!

No ‘Tibet’ at Hotmail. I wonder why…

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The New York Times Blog has been following up complaints from would-be Hotmail users who have been told that they cannot have a username which includes the letters “tibet”.

Big American tech companies have given us plenty of reasons to be cynical about how far they will go to keep China’s leaders happy and keep their fingers in the Chinese market … And China’s leaders would prefer that everyone just not mention those unruly Tibetans, especially with the Olympics on the way. But would the Chinese regime really feel threatened by the creation of, say, ILoveTibet@hotmail.com? And even if it did, would Microsoft really agree to help perpetuate that insecurity?

A Microsoft spokeswoman had a different explanation. The company blocks usernames that include the names of various financial institutions. This is meant to make life harder for those seeking to impersonate a bank using an official-looking e-mail address in order to steal customers’ passwords. In this case Microsoft is blocking usernames containing “tib,” apparently to protect customers of TIB Bank in Florida.

Ho, ho!

Nudge, nudge…

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Where do the Cameroonians get their ideas from? One source, apparently, is Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. This focuses on the foibles and idiosyncrasies of human behaviour and on how, with a little discreet encouragement, we can usually be ushered in the right direction. Writing in the Guardian, James Harkin is not impressed.

Nudge has been put on a list of 38 books which Tory MPs have been given by Dave as their summer reading. I’ve just looked at the list. It’s got some weird things on it — The Rise of Boris Johnson, for example. The only item I’ve read is Ferdinant Mount’s memoir, Cold Cream. Other books are Tom Wheeler’s book on Abraham Lincoln’s use of the telegraph in the Civil War and Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent. And why the Cameroonians should need David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy is beyond me, given that they are such past masters of the art.

Er, wink, wink.

Location, location, location

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I’m not into geotagging, but if I were this would be useful. The Nikon Coolpix P6000 has a built-in GPS unit which enables the coordinates of each image to be recorded. An Ethernet port built into the camera then lets you connect it to the web and log your picture locations on a Nikon image map service — and, eventually no doubt, on Wikipedia and Google Earth.

US Patent Office thinks again about ‘cloud computing’

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From The Register…

Dell’s grip on a “cloud computing” trademark may not be as solid as it first seemed.

The US Patent Office has canceled its “notice of allowance” on the Round Rock computer vendor’s attempt to master the popular IT buzzword. Passing the “allowance” step in the trademark process had meant that opponents could no longer object to Dell’s claims. But Dell’s trademark application was updated yesterday to show the case has now “returned to examination.”

It would seem someone working for the USPTO was stuck by thunderbolt of rationality…

Not before time.