BuzzMachine

One way to reset the relationship of government and the public — from constant complaint — is to make it collaborative — thus constructive. In my pollyanna way, I imagine a day when citizens could take over some tasks of government to save money and do them better. How about this as a small pilot: Politico...
Read more »

I asked Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, whether his paper should have started Wikileaks. I wondered whether the Guardian was looking at WIkileaks the way it looked at HuffPo when it started (that is, ‘darn, we should have thought of that, so we will’ … and it started CommentIsFree). Is Wikileaks a tool...
Read more »

Is no secret safe? That’s the moral to the Wikileaks war log story: you never know what might be leaked. Of course, that itself is nothing new: Whenever we reveal information to even one person, we risk it being spread. The ethic of confidentiality (and privacy) rests with the recipient of that information. So what’s...
Read more »

There are those in the press and government who don’t like or trust the public they serve. It is an unliberal attitude–which can come from Liberals, by the way–for it doesn’t buy the core belief of liberal democracy that the people properly rule. Two classic examples: Here we have a German government official saying that...
Read more »

Condé Nast is a house built on smoke and mirrors — that is, to say, on brand advertising. So it is astonishing to hear its CEO, Chuck Townsend, essentially toss the company’s business model out the window of the Death Star in what The Times frames as “a fundamental overhaul of the advertising-based business...
Read more »

I’ve been looking for a classic example of so-called, self-appointed “privacy advocates” gathered by the press going off the deep-end (if you have any, please send them to me). And then this dropped in my lap: a reputed outcry by these putative privacy advocates against Wal-Mart putting RFID tags on pants. What could possibly...
Read more »

I agree with Devin Coldewey at CrunchGear that Andrew Wylie’s deal to publish big authors’ backlists exclusively on the Amazon Kindle is bad for readers (and for authors and for the industry). Fragmenting content such that one has to buy one device to read one author and another to read another is blind to...
Read more »

Google just issued a response to the Federal Trade commission’s staff discussion draft on potential recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism . (here was my reaction). It’s a wonderful document that takes the FTC — and the news industry — to school on the First Amendment, copyright, fair use, antitrust,...
Read more »

Three examples of back-handed positive coverage for Facebook: * bNet praises the anticipated Facebook Stories campaign about the service’s 500 million friends: Stories of communities using Facebook to come together to help a family in need; stories of finding a long-lost love on Facebook; of finally being able to easily share photos with grandpa, and...
Read more »

One of my great joys researching Public Parts, my book about the benefits of publicness, is finding parallels between today and the early modern period of the 16th and 17th centuries (aka the renaissance) with the introduction of tools — the press, the stage, music, art, maps, markets — that enabled people to create...
Read more »