raving lunacy - oxymorons for the 21st century

Fast food has a long and expensive history in marketing. They also provide some of the dumbest moments in marketing.
Here is one.

Ya gotta wonder who the genius was who thought this was a good idea, and who the morons were that signed off on this.

Congress passes $60K Law School Loan Forgiveness Program
Are they fucking kidding? LAWYERS? Like we need more lawyers.

H.R. 4137 amends the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to direct the attorney general to assume the obligation to repay student loans for borrowers who agree to remain employed, for at least three years, as state or local criminal prosecutors; or state, local, or federal public defenders in criminal cases.
Source: National Law Journal

Yeah that’s right, and we get hooked for the bill. If you believe that they will be even handed between prosecutors and defenders, I will shit in your hand now.

What about Teachers? Nurses? Child Protection Investigators? You know, folks that are semi useful.
Are they fucking kidding? LAWYERS? Like we need more lawyers.

In the latest race to the bottom of reasons to vote comes the AP-Yahoo! News poll - ”Pet owners prefer McCain” that pet ownership is a significant criteria when voting.

While bloggers without clues wait with baited breath for AP to issue Fair Use Guidelines,(something they have no legal authority to do, and little if any understanding of the web’s linking culture), they are still on the job generating news. Teamed with Yahoo! News, another organization whose future is in doubt comes the latest data to help you select a president. I would normally not link to the AP, but this one is just too good to pass up.

In the interest of fairness and to allow you to get your voice heard you can take the Poll Here. However be advised, “your response will not change the results”

Data Data Data….
Folks want it, folks want to hide it, Folks get shocked other folks have it.

One of the inconvenient truths about internet life is to get data from point A to point B, both of them have to be defined. Your computer needs an address to receive it, their computer needs an address to send it. How it gets from A to B is another story, involving other computers, routers, and wires. Folks count this stuff.

In the beginning these things were counted strictly to be sure that you got what you were looking for, and the computers that were pitching and catching were working. Then folks discovered that you could add things to web pages(cookies, clear gifs, webbugs) to get more data that you could sell to other folks, who are waiting with checkbooks and engorged flesh.

Data Data Data….
Some folks were not content with merely using other folks data, but began to build whole sites under various guises(friends networks, social networks, ‘blah’ spaces and ‘brrt’ books, Sharecroppers and Social Gillnetters) to deliberately mine this information, under the meme of User Generated Content, to sell things. !!Connect with your Friends while we shove ads up your nose!!

Google is the latest data baron to have the villagers with their pitchforks and torches storming the gates, screaming about their data. It is not yours, get over it. Because if you are crying about it, your vision is too blurry to do anything about it.

A large part of the perception problem is that the majority of us are self funded, by spending our own money and time to put out our thoughts, and are happy when folks stop by, whereas there are lot of sites that are built strictly with other peoples money, who understand what whoredom is about, or are refugees from ad supported media companies and have been institutionalized by it, and willingly flash their wares.

There are whole categories of sites dedicated to becoming pixel bitches, usually revolving around buying the “Secrets” guidebooks from the pimps of these sites. (note:I am a whore too, not a very good one however, the sidebars contain ads and other things, neither of them producing enough revenue to buy that gold lame’ frock that you are desperately waiting for me to model:) Plus I try not to talk about stuff I know nothing about. It irritates my 5 readers)

Data Data Data….
The past few weeks has had folks crying for data from various government organizations. Some are beating the transparency drum, some have been bleating about the legislative process needing a sunlight bath, and some just want to wallow in the underbelly of the data sewers.
As if government information is anymore reliable despite the fact we are footing the bill.

But in the interest of promoting the availability of data for all those folks, I present;
The Federal Reserve Board News Feeds Page
You can watch the US Banking System crash and burn from the convenience of your computer.
hat tip to Paul Kedrosky for finding this jewel.

Google Closing Dallas, Denver Office

-snip- This reorganization is designed to ensure we are serving the needs of our customers, stakeholders and Googlers [Google employees]-snip-

In english this means that Google is getting pressure from it’s ad buyers, the stockholders are whining and they can get new employees.

Today’s head lemur tech tip:
Anytime a company makes a statement like this, putting the employees dead last , is a company who has become internally bankrupt. Customers will always try for a better deal, especially if they are not being served, and the company employees cannot show value.
Think cell phone and cable companies for the worst of these traits.
Stakeholders/stockholders do not give a shit about either the company or the employees, but are folks leading the management around by the dick, hoping to squeeze a few more pennies out of the stock, before they sell it off.

Any company who does not put their employees first, will fuck them raw and dispose of them at the first sign of independent thought.

Dear Jim,
Let me call you Jim as we are kind of informal out here. You can call me alan. We are just folks out here.

(Be advised that my comments and opinions are here are mine, and are directed to you as the Vice President; Director of Strategic Planning, and are not personal attacks.)

The internet lives by the hyperlink. Think about that for a moment. Every bit of information available on the web in any format that you can see on your computer or hand held device has a hyperlinkable address. Without the hyperlink, we would not be having this discussion. That fact alone should let you know that once information hits the web, you no longer have any sort of control over its usage..

I am one of the many people who feel that you are wrong in your use of the DMCA. I thought that I had covered my thoughts sufficiently in my two previous postings.

The Death Rattle of the Associated Press
The Associated Press, Fair Use, Copyright, and the rest of us.

However a story at the New York Times website has compelled my to write again. We will get to that in a few moments. First some background.

Recent events have catapulted you and the organization you work for, the Associated Press, into a highly visible position on the world wide web. Right now this is not a good thing. You have become the news. As your members will tell you, becoming the news compromises your ability to represent the news.

At issue is your organization’s filing a DMCA notice against Rodgers Cadenhead and the Drudge Retort website for Copyright Infringement. This is like using a thermonuclear weapon to clean leaves off your driveway.

The funniest thing here is the way it was done. They cut and pasted, (which may be either scrupulous attention to detail, lazy, or a gigantic infringment as most corporations, most notably in the news and entertainment industries would have the world believe) headlines and excerpts of the articles, providing a Hyperlink to the original story, which gives credit to the source, does provide an accurate, true, and correct quote of the source material.
You should be happy. Everybody else likes links.
These conventions such as Quote, Attribution, Credit and Byline, have been adopted from the news business because they are an elegant and fair method of establishing authorship, exchanging information, giving credit, and work to eliminate confusion between what was said, and what is being debated, or commented upon. So not every thing the news business is doing is bad.

This is pretty much the way most folks point to material for commentary. Also, in the case of weblogs, allows readers to read the materials we used to form our opinions and either agree with us or tell us we are full of crap.There really is no malice or a gigantic conspiracy on the part of the millions of folks who publish on the web. It is hard to get any group of any size moving in the same direction. Herding cats is easier.
You have succeeded however.
As you are discovering, folks out here are opposed to your action. The backlash that you are currently feeling is only the tip of the electronic iceberg. What the folks on the Drudge Retort site did was Fair Use as I have come to understand and use it.
Attempting to tell millions of bloggers how and what they can do especially regarding Fair Use and Freedom of Speech is doomed.

I don’t feel that you are fully understanding the arena that you are playing in. While you were using teletypes to broadcast your ‘content’ to your 1500 members, we were building a network unlike anything the world has seen, with over 100 Million members worldwide. I may be low on the figure on our end. Maybe you should have stuck with the teletypes.

The internet is an expanding series of computers, using open protocols, to exchange information. The visible portion you are seeing is the world wide web. It is a messy place filled with words, sounds, pictures and video. We are no longer passive consumers of filtered, homogenized, spoonfed, broadcasted information. We are creators, producers, and commenter’s of information, news, and opinion.
The internet is not just a cheap pipe for you to service your membership with your output.

You have two problems to overcome.

The first problem is your business model. You collect news and information, from individual reporters, homogenize it, stripping individual credit, rewriting it, and then sell it back to your members requiring your AP byline. Which in the days before the web was a cost effective model for smaller newspapers to inform their readers about world and local events.

However with the vast amount of individual reporting on events that can be uploaded to the web in moments, the ability to hyperlink that information, so that reader/viewership numbers far outstrip any dead tree or broadcast numbers you could possibly hope for, makes your relevance problematical. The most significant fact to understand is the vast majority is created on those computers by individuals. This material is known in the news industry by the pejorative term “user generated content.”
It is not a question of veracity or professionalism, it is a question of speed, and depth.

The second problem is attempting to control its dissemination once it shows up on the web. The current boycott postings should give you an inkling of just how fast folks can spread the word.

As you can see by the postings that are the subject of this lunacy, the speed at which things can be linked and discussed should make your nose bleed and your head hurt. Right now these folks are just boycotting AP Bylined stories. What should strike terror into your heart is when they expand it to include your 1500 members. Your members are already gasping for air, as their revenue streams are drying up, circulation is diminishing, and folks are getting their news from thousand of alternative news outlets. As more and more newspapers on the web open themselves up to reader contributions, your role will diminish.
Cheaper too, as most of us do not count ‘value’ in dollars and cents.

Now to your latest faux pas.
In a story on the New York Times website titled:
The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs
there were number of quotes that you made that require commentary:

According to the story:

After that, however, the news association convened a meeting of its executives at which it decided to suspend its efforts to challenge blogs until it creates a more thoughtful standard.
“We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Gee Jim! that horse has not only left the barn but has traveled around the world. Any ’standard’ you create is going to be problematic as your organization has no business or right to define Fair Use, for anyone you do not have a contractual relationship with, whom if I am close to correct, has the ability to post the entire thing, which is what you are selling. That being said, your thinking that you are going to release ‘thoughtful standards’ that will apply to the individuals on the web is disengeous, arrogant, and doomed to failure.

Right now like the movie Untraceable, you are hanging upside down above the roto tiller, but there is no pole to save you as more and more folks log on and the cable continues its inexorable downward path.

You then went on to say:

“As content creators, we firmly believe that everything we create, from video footage all the way down to a structured headline, is creative content that has value,” he said.

Since you are charging for it, it had better. Your job depends on that. And getting your members to believe that and keep those checks coming. However, that value is not measured in dollars and cents
out here. Today it may be ‘hot news’, but tomorrow it will line bird cages or wrap fish.
Also from the story is this:

One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner.

You have already been paid for it at least once. It will be real hard to make a case for financial harm on that basis alone, irregardless of what percentage of a piece turns out to cross the Fair Use threshold, which at this point in time is decided on a case by case basis, requiring court action. Good Luck with that.

The final comment in the story attributed to you:

“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Mr. Kennedy said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”

Actually, Jim you are. At the very least you are implying that we are thieves with your current interpretation of Fair Use, just like the RIAA and the MPAA.

So you can either step back and re-examine your policy, or you can hire a bunch of lawyers. Because we will hold bake sales, yard sales and tip jars, to fight this.

Your electronic pen pal
alan herrell - the head lemur

P.S. You need to double Irene Keselman’s salary, because anybody who can pull a rabbit like “Hot News Missapropriation” out of a hat, will get snatched up by some Intellectual Property Law Firm inside of 6 months tops.

In yet another Main Stream Media Meltdown is the story of the AP filing DMCA takedown notices against Rogers Cadenhead and his community site Drudge Retort.

The Associated Press is an news organization whose function in life was to take original reporting from its members, homogenize it, (not unlike the production of Kopi Luwak, a coffee bean that is processed by running it through the digestive tract of an Indonisian marsupial, harvested from the resulting dung, and then offered for sale at a premium price as being unique) and offer it back to its members to fill in the spaces in local newspapers, whose own management think that news from elsewhere, having been stripped of origination credits, and ‘claimed’ to be accurate because it is the AP, is a good idea. I say ‘claimed’ as there is no link or credits to the original reports, which on the internet is silly, and is at the heart of this nonsense.

At one time back in the dark ages before the Internet, this was a good idea, as it gave local newspapers access to world events and reporting it could otherwise not afford. However with the Internet, the plethora of publishing tools, worldwide availability and the hyperlink, the AP is another business whose foundation is crumbling in the flood waters of websites, personal publishing, and the hyperlink.

According to this posting Rogers received this nugget:

AP feels otherwise. In a June 3 letter, AP’s Intellectual Property Governance Coordinator Irene Keselman told me:

… you purport that the Drudge Retort’s users reproduce and display AP headlines and leads under a fair use defense. Please note that contrary to your assertion, AP considers that the Drudge Retort users’ use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use. The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of "fair use." AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes "hot news" misappropriation.

There are a couple of things wrong here. First this is an opinion by AP, (opinions being like assholes, everyone has one and some of them stink, you decide) based on the theory that Fair Use does not apply to the AP. Everything that is published in the United States is covered by copyright, and is also available for Fair Use. There is still no definite answer as to which percentage of an item consists of Fair Use, as some items cannot be easily chopped up into discrete bits such a photos, but a portion of a textual piece has been for many years even before the internet, has been used for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

“hot news misappropriation”

The second thing that AP asserts is “hot news misappropriation” What the fuck is that? Is this like calling a shopping mall a Regional Lifestyle Center?
My opinion, is that this is a bullshit semantic device to try to prop up the argument that the AP is not subject to the same Fair Use rules as every other organization or person in the United States. The French news agency AFP tried this with Google some time back, and it didn’t work.

Quoting a portion of a work is explicitly covered under the Section 107 Fair Use Provision of US Copyright Law. The bonus of the Internet is the ability to hyperlink to the original work. This lets you know that someone has done their homework, allowing you to decide whether or not the criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research, is true in as much as can be presented.
Let me give you an example. Here is US Copyright website Fair Use Statement.

Section 107 Fair Use Provision of US Copyright Law.

One of the rights accorded to the owner of copyright is the right to reproduce or to authorize others to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. This right is subject to certain limitations found in sections 107 through 118 of the Copyright Act (title 17, U. S. Code). One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of “fair use.” Although fair use was not mentioned in the previous copyright law, the doctrine has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years. This doctrine has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

1.

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2.

the nature of the copyrighted work;
3.

amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The distinction between “fair use” and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.
Source: US Copyright Office Website

News by its very nature is nothing more than a record of events, as told by people who have experienced it on site. News used to be the bailiwick of journalists, whose desire to report events was their calling. With the rise of aggregating news organizations like the AP, UPI, Reuters and even AFP, there was a period of trust in these organizations in giving us the whole story.

The internet has changed this. We are not confined to single sources for news and information. Here are some other thoughts on this
Jeff Jarvis, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Scott Rosenburg, Mathew Ingram

Organizations like the Associated Press need to change, or they will become a quaint exhibit in the Newseum
(Update Hot News Misappropriation is a legal concept) Hat tip to Matt Ingram. I still think is is a bullshit term.

One of the virtues of being an old fart on the web is being able to watch folks scramble to proclaim that they have discovered the latest communication medium that will transform the world into the Technicolor world of kittens, butterflies and rainbows. Envision Whirled Peas and all that.
Same Old, Shiny New Wrapper. NOW WITH AJAX!!

For example, Dick and Jane Twitteriffic will have you believe that all problems can be solved in 140 characters. “I cum therefore I sleep”, ” i has can writers block” “i has to pee, BRB” while significant, declaratory, perhaps even sanitary in nature, is more suited to the advertising and PR industries whose worlds are crumpled around their knees, while the waters of user generated content are rising above their chins. There are a lot of things that can be said in 140 characters, but most of them have lifetimes just a little bit shorter than your laboratory bred elements.

With the invention of ‘Social Media’, which as far as I can see, merely means having a sort of conversation in your browser, with weblogs, posting and commenting, relieving some folks of the burden of remembering that email serves the same purpose.

The Social Media crowd which consists of Ad Men, PR Flacks, and Internet Consultants, want you to join in the conversation. However, they would like to be able to generate some fees before you open up that blog. (Just because millions of folks have blogs, doesn’t mean that you know what to do with one, and need professional help)

Hell, everybody who knows anything, knows that PR is the most important career in the universe. Just ask Steve Rubel, or his boss, Big Dick Edelman. And just so you don’t think that BIG PR is the only solution, stop by Brian Solis,(the new energizer bunny of PR 2.0 Social Media) or Todd Defren, (the birthmother of the Social Media Press Release)

The politicians have grasped the bit of the Interweb jackass of danger and are moving swiftly to shut off those troubling tubes of child pornography, (once again disguising ‘motion as activity’ in going after the symptom rather than the disease), while grasping for every bit of loose change they can get funneled through their websites. Too bad they staff out those sites.

The expository bulimics like Nick Carr and Andrew Keen would have you believe that anything shorter than say 5000 words means that your are a shallow, ignorant child of the 3 minute media fix, and cannot grapple with anything more complex than a simple bass line. As an added bonus they use the very medium aka, the Internet to put forth their arguments that the Internet is the demonic lovechild of MTV and the cathode ray tube, while providing Amazon links to their latest books. And of course Google is the root of all evil.

Some of the folks who actually get the circle of ends nature of the net, are getting sidetracked into Vendor Relationship Management, which is an upscale version of Money for Stuff. That you are allowing yourself to be tracked, categorized, packaged, and sold to the next advertiser with a checkbook, is a personal problem, and does not scale. Until you cut off their access to yourself, expect more money saving coupons to show up in your browser.

I could go on, but I must take my Economic Stimulus Check over to my local Regional Lifestyle Center,(aka The Mall) and buy more cheap shiny shit, to let all my peeps know that I am supporting a lifestyle and culture that is bankrupt, and just doesn’t have the sense to lie down and die.

Rage Boy is Right…

Conspiracy theory, my ass. Schools and teachers, the motor vehicle bureau, the IRS, the military, the line at the bank, the television set, the newspapers at the checkout stand, the news on your radio, the billboards along the highway, and now a hundred thousand cold-comfort Web sites. All are tuned to your brain at the deepest level and you have lined up for the coolest, latest-model implant. The carrier wave has been tuned at huge cost to deliver a single message: you are not free, you desire nothing but the products we produce, you have no world but the world we give you.

If you’re OK with this, then eat it up. There’s a bulimic’s dream-feast of killer kontent on the way. But if it already makes you want to puke, get angry. Write it, code it, paint it, play it – rattle the cage however you can. Stay hungry. Stay free. And believe it: win, lose, or draw, we’re here to stay. Armed only with imagination, we’re gonna rip the fucking lid off.

There’s your market.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

161 characters

My relationship with a higher power has been fractured at the best of times and nonexistent for the remainder. I am going to Hell.

For those of you in thrall of the terror of divine retribution, or those of you who think that you will end up in the clouds, due to your tithing or strident proclamations of purity, when the Rapture comes, you can let us know.

You’ve Been Left Behind. com will let you email us to let us know that you are gone. The introductory rate of only $40.00 is a steal!!

I will be breathlessly waiting for you email