As several outlets are reporting, HBO plans to launch a trial project called HBO On Broadband, in which subscribers can watch the channel’s programs — such as the highly acclaimed series The Wire — on their computers for several weeks after they air. Of course, the programs can’t be downloaded or transferred to another device, and they eventually expire, but it’s still a step forward, if only a limited one.
As the Hollywood Reporter notes, however, an interesting twist to this particular offering is that HBO is a subsidiary of Time Warner, the media giant that has confirmed its cable subsidiary is rolling out metered Internet access. In other words, one part of the TW empire is giving you more content to watch — content that sucks up the gigabytes — and the other is planning to charge you by the gigabyte.
That may fly with the boys in finance, but if I were a Time Warner cable subscriber and an HBO fan, I would feel like I was getting squeezed between a rock and a hard place. Cynthia Brumfield of IPDemocracy doesn’t think it’s really that big a deal, but I think it’s a sign of the conflicting pressures that media conglomerates like TW find themselves under. Steve Bryant of Reel Pop has more on the HBO deal.
I’m a big fan of the Mashable blog by Pete Cashmore. They cover technology and the Web like no other blog, and they have some great writers — like Adam Ostrow, Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, Kristen Nicole and others — but something has always kind of bothered me about the site, and I’m glad that Louis Gray finally wrote about it: Mashable often isn’t that great at giving credit to the blogs and writers who found an item first.
In his post, Louis is quite rightly upset about a couple of scoops he got, involving the site Readburner and another similar site called Shared Reader. In the first case, Mashable wrote about the site and gave him no credit whatsoever — not even a link. In the second case, Louis says that Mashable wrote an item and put a small “via” link at the bottom, something they often do. While this is a link, Louis is right that it’s not very prominent and is easily missed. But at least it’s a link.
The other example he uses is pretty outrageous, however: Louis says a quote he got from Robert Scoble was lifted from his post and used in a Mashable post without any link or attribution whatsoever. I think everyone would agree that taking quotes is pretty offside. Pete has responded in the comments to Louis’s post, and says he is reviewing the site’s linking policies, but he doesn’t say anything about the quote (although the post has been updated with attribution).
Attribution is something that has been — and is still — a long-running debate in traditional media as well. Television stations “rip and read” newspaper stories, but newspapers themselves routinely take articles from wire services like Reuters or Associated Press and use virtually the entire thing, but put their own writer’s byline on it. Sometimes they put a small “with files from” at the end of the story.
The fact that you can link on the Internet is one of the most powerful forces there is. A link from Mashable can help people find new blogs such as Louis’s, and they shouldn’t be stingy with their attribution — and they definitely shouldn’t be lifting quotes holus-bolus. I hope Pete and his team can set a good example for others.
Harry Shearer isn’t just a comedic actor — having appeared in many of Christopher Guest’s movies, as well as playing bassist Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap — but is also a blogger at The Huffington Post, and appears on other sites as well. One of the places he posts things is on My Damn Channel, a video site similar in many ways to Will Farrell’s FunnyorDie.com, and one of his recent “found items” was a video clip of ABC News anchor Katie Couric during her off-air moments at the primaries in New Hampshire.
There’s not much in the clip really, apart from Couric fiddling with her mike, making fun of herself for getting nervous — “I say oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” she laughs — and talking about how bad she looks on one of the monitors. She talks about how John McCain’s wife has eyes that are a piercing light blue colour, and jokes that she probably thought Couric was weird. She makes fun of her husky voice, and complains about the quality of the mikes, and some other miscellaneous banter.
The thing I find really interesting is the comments that the video clip has gotten, not just on My Damn Channel’s site, but on other sites as well. There have to be close to 300 comments on the My Damn Channel site alone, and they are a fascinating mix. On one end of the spectrum, there are lots of “Boy, is she dumb for not knowing more about the candidates — look what idiots the media are” remarks, but at the other end there are lots of comments about how the outtakes actually make her seem a lot more warm and human than many people seemed to think she was.
Plenty of people seem to feel that the video clip could hurt Couric, who is fighting low ratings for her news show, because it makes her look ditzy or uninformed. But just as many or more say they may actually watch her now because she seems a lot more human. Fascinating.
Without going into too much detail, I’ve taken some lumps for supporting Gizmodo during the whole CES affair (see past posts too numerous to mention), and I admit that my defence of their prank with the TV-B-Gone remotes was somewhat less enthusiastic than it could have been — if only because the sophomoric nature of the situation didn’t really jibe with the great post on a free press and unfettered inquiry that Brian Lam of Gizmodo wrote after the fuss died down.
That kind of sums up a lot of my thoughts about Gawker and its overlord Nick Denton: sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s really not. Two recent items written by Denton — and described by Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider — summarize this dilemma, since they come from pretty much the opposite ends of the spectrum. One has gotten him in hot water with Scientology, and the other in hot water with Facebook.
The first item was a post about Tom Cruise, and included a video clip in which the actor talks about Scientology and how it is the only solution to the world’s problems, how he deals with SPs (i.e., “suppressive persons” — cult jargon for those who are negative on the church) and other topics, using that really determined voice and piercing gaze that I associate with his crazy motivational speaker character in Magnolia.
The clip was removed, but Denton found another copy and posted that, and says he will continue to do so despite any attempts by Scientology to force the site to take it down. Denton is also posting copies of the correspondence between Gawker and the church, in which the site claims it is justified in using the footage because it is reporting on a news event. In this one I am 100 per cent behind Denton, even if he is doing it primarily for the traffic. So in this particular case, Denton = good.
And the second item — the other end of the Gawker spectrum? A post about Emily Brill, the daughter of media mogul Steve Brill. The item seemed primarily designed to make fun of the girl for going on a vacation with her friends and for losing some weight, and used screenshots from her profile on Facebook. That breaches the site’s terms of use, of course — but that’s not the part I really care about. It just seems like an invasion of someone’s privacy for no real purpose. So she went to Cabo or whatever with her rich friends — so what. Denton = evil. See my problem?
Dave “DigiDave” Cohn, the one-man editing and assignment desk behind several NewAssignment.net projects — including Off The Bus (a joint venture in “crowdsourced” political reporting with The Huffington Post) and Assignment Zero (a joint effort with Jeff Howe of Wired magazine) — has a great overview of all the different projects that Jay Rosen’s brainchild is or has been involved in, including:
BeatBlogging.org: Reporters with thirteen news organizations have agreed to try using the Internet — including tools such as blogs and wikis — to build a network of sources that can help them become smarter about their beat.
OffTheBus.Net: In which motivated individuals agree to keep tabs on an election campaign and file reports to The Huffington Post and NewAssignment.
ReadableLaws.com: A lab experiment aimed at using a wiki to turn legal jargon into plain English.
Assignment Zero: The project with Wired looked at the phenomenon of “crowdsourcing” through interviews and feature stories, and while it wasn’t a big success it was a learning experience according to Dave and Jay.
Polling Place Photo Project: A lab experiment that saw people from all over the U.S. track what their polling place looked like on Super Tuesday, and this year was copied by the New York Times.
Some great ideas from Jay and Dave and the rest of the NewAssignment team — and plenty to look forward to in 2008.
I'm a technology writer with The Globe and Mail in Toronto, and this is where I blog about the collision between media and the Web. I also have a Globe blog, which is here. Send me email at mathew (at) mathewingram.com, or for more info, click the picture.
