The Associated Press has decided that they’re going to charge bloggers who quote more than five words in a row from an AP story, with a minimum charge of $12.50 for a 5-to-12-word quote. Be sure to read Cory Doctorow’s little screed in that BoingBoing link, because he nails it cold.
Meanwhile, in it’s announcement, the AP said it was meeting with some group called the “Media Bloggers Association”, but, as Teresa Nielsen-Hayden discovered, there is no such organization. There’s just some pathetic right-wing blogturd named Robert Cox who passes himself off as a “representative” of bloggers and has put up a site called “Media Bloggers Association” to justify his lame hornblowing. She dissects his shtick pretty thoroughly, so I hope the brain surgeons at the AP have a chance to read about who they’re dealing with before they think they’re going to start collecting any money from anyone.
Why is it that “old media” people have been so utterly unable to understand the mechanics of the “new media”? Thing like this, or the New York Times’ ill-advised “Times Select” paywall, do nothing but shriek out loud the complete cluelessness of the people who run these businesses. Even the television people are finally beginning to not fuck up every single thing they try, but the “dead tree” folks seem to think its still 1919 and William Randolph Hearst runs the world.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s [...]
